And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
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Bede
AD 735
Hitherto it may have sufficed to speak literally of the origins of the growing world. It is pleasing, however, to intimate in a few words that order of those six or seven days in which the world was made correspond to its ages - which are of the same number. For the first day, on the which God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light’, corresponds with the first age in whose beginning that same world was made and man was set in the pleasurable delights of paradise, where he enjoyed the presence of his maker’s grace, free, and innocent of all evil. But that day already began to decline towards evening when the first people lost, by sinning, the happiness of the heavenly homeland and were sent into this vale of tears; that also signified the hour of that time when Adam, after the sin of transgression, heard the Lord walking away in paradise in the hour after noon. Indeed, the Lord walked away in the garden so that he might signify that he was going away from man, in whose heart calm had dwelt; and this happened ‘in the hour after noon’, so that man might recognise that the light of divine understanding and the fervour of divine love were diminished in him. However, the full evening of this day came when the whole earth was corrupted before the face of God, by the growing vices of the human race, and it was filled with iniquity, to such an extent that all flesh deserved to be destroyed in the flood, except those in the ark.
