Hexameron

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The Hexameron — from the Greek hexaēmeron, “the six days” — is the body of Christian commentary devoted to the six days of creation narrated in the first chapter of Genesis. The word names both the biblical episode and the interpretive genre that grew up around it: a sustained effort to read the opening lines of scripture as a coherent account of how the world was made, and to square that account with what the ancient world thought it knew about nature.

The genre’s founding text is a set of nine homilies preached by Basil of Caesarea in the fourth century, delivered to a congregation and only afterward collected. Basil took the bare Genesis sequence — light, the firmament, the gathering of the waters, the lights of heaven, the creatures of sea and air, the beasts and humankind — and expounded each day in turn, folding in the natural science of his age: the elements, the motions of the heavens, the habits of animals. The work was widely read and quickly imitated. Ambrose of Milan produced a Latin Hexameron that drew heavily on Basil; Augustine returned to the six days repeatedly, most searchingly in his commentaries on Genesis, where he argued that the days might be read not as ordinary time but as the order in which created things stand before God. The form persisted for a millennium, taken up by Bede, by the Latin schoolmen, and, in the thirteenth century, by Robert Grosseteste, who used it to integrate the new Aristotelian physics into a Christian cosmology.

What unified these writers was a shared assumption rather than a shared conclusion. They held that Genesis described real events, and that the natural world, rightly understood, would confirm rather than contradict the text. Their disagreements were correspondingly sharp: whether the six days were literal twenty-four-hour periods or a figure for an instantaneous creation; whether the “waters above the firmament” were physical water or something else; how the account related to the cosmologies the Greeks had built. The Hexameron was, in effect, the arena in which late-antique and medieval Christianity negotiated between revelation and the philosophy of nature it had inherited.

That inheritance was substantial. The genre’s deep model is not only Genesis but the cosmogony of Plato’s Timaeus, in which a divine craftsman shapes a disordered matter into an ordered cosmos — a text whose influence on Christian accounts of creation ran through the Neoplatonist channels that carried so much of late-antique thought. The resemblance is real and was felt at the time; the commentators worked hard to mark where the biblical maker differed from the Platonic one, above all in creating from nothing rather than ordering what already was. Read across its long history, the Hexameron is less a single doctrine than a recurring question: what it means to say that a world had a beginning, and that the beginning can be told.

→ In the library: Plato — Timaeus (Jowett, 1892)

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