Catholic Commentary
The First Day: The Creation of Light
3God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.4God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness.5God called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. There was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:3–5 describes the first act of creation, where God speaks light into existence, evaluates it as good, and separates it from darkness, establishing the foundational pattern that creation occurs through divine speech and sovereign ordering. The passage introduces the daily rhythm of evening and morning, establishes the inherent goodness of creation, and demonstrates God's absolute dominion over all things.
God creates not by struggle or crafting, but by speaking—revealing that reality itself bends to his word.
Verse 3: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."
This verse is among the most celebrated in all of Scripture, and rightly so — it unveils the fundamental mode of divine creation: God creates by speaking. The Hebrew wayyōʾmer ʾĕlōhîm yehî ʾôr wayehî ʾôr possesses a stunning brevity and force. The jussive yehî ("let there be") followed immediately by the declarative wayehî ("and there was") demonstrates that no gap exists between God's will and its realization. There is no struggle, no resistance, no raw material being shaped — only the sovereign utterance and its instantaneous fulfillment. This stands in deliberate contrast to the cosmogonies of Israel's ancient Near Eastern neighbors (the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Egyptian Memphite theology), where creation emerges from conflict among gods or from the manipulation of pre-existing divine matter. Here, God simply speaks, and reality obeys.
The word ʾôr (light) is notably not identified with any luminous body — the sun, moon, and stars will not appear until the fourth day (Gen 1:14–19). This sequence has puzzled commentators since antiquity, but it is theologically deliberate. Light here is presented as a primordial reality, something more fundamental than its physical sources. St. Basil the Great, in his Hexaëmeron (Homily II), insists that this light is a real, created reality — not merely metaphorical — yet it exists prior to and independent of the heavenly bodies, demonstrating that God alone is the source of all illumination. St. Augustine, in De Genesi ad Litteram (I.3–4), speculated that this light might refer to the creation of the angelic intellects — a spiritual illumination accompanying the first moment of creation. While the Church has not dogmatically settled this question, Augustine's reading became enormously influential in the Western tradition and reminds us that the literal sense of Genesis operates on a register deeper than naive literalism.
The theological weight is immense: creation is an act of divine speech, of dabar — the Word. The Catechism of the Catholic Church draws the explicit connection: "God creates by his Word" (CCC 292), and this Word is not an impersonal force but the eternal Logos who "was in the beginning with God" and through whom "all things were made" (Jn 1:1–3). The Prologue of John's Gospel is, in a real sense, a commentary on this verse.
Verse 4: "God saw the light, and saw that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness."
Two distinct divine acts occur here: evaluation and separation. First, God "saw" (wayyarʾ) the light and pronounced it ṭôb — "good." This is not God discovering something unexpected; it is the Creator's authoritative declaration that what he has made corresponds to his intention. The goodness is objective, intrinsic to the created thing itself, not projected onto it. This affirmation — repeated seven times across the chapter, culminating in "very good" at Genesis 1:31 — establishes one of the most foundational principles of Catholic theology: the inherent goodness of creation. The Catechism is emphatic: "Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection… Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God's infinite wisdom and goodness" (CCC 339). Against every form of Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and dualism that would denigrate the material world, this verse stands as a bulwark.
The second act — dividing (wayyabdēl) light from darkness — introduces a central motif of the entire creation account: God creates by separating and ordering. The verb bādal (to separate, divide) appears repeatedly in Genesis 1 (vv. 4, 6, 7, 14, 18) and is the primary mechanism by which the tōhû wābōhû (formless void) of verse 2 is overcome. God does not annihilate darkness; he limits it, assigns it a boundary, and gives it a place within a structured order. St. Ambrose, in his Hexaëmeron (I.9.33), notes that darkness is not called "good" — it serves a function within God's design, but it is not affirmed in the same way light is. This asymmetry carries profound spiritual implications.
Verse 5: "God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.' There was evening and there was morning, the first day."
The act of naming (wayyiqrāʾ) is an act of sovereignty and dominion. In the ancient Near East, to name something was to define its nature and assert authority over it. God names both the light and the darkness — both are under his dominion. Darkness is not an independent, rival power; it exists within the framework God has established. This is a quiet but devastating repudiation of any cosmic dualism.
The formula "there was evening and there was morning" (wayehî ʿereb wayehî bōqer) establishes the liturgical rhythm that will govern the entire creation week. The sequence moves from evening to morning — from darkness toward light — which is why the Jewish liturgical day begins at sundown, a practice inherited in the Christian vigil tradition (the Easter Vigil being its supreme expression). The movement from evening to morning is itself a miniature narrative of hope: creation moves from obscurity toward illumination.
The phrase yôm ʾeḥād — literally "day one" rather than "the first day" — is noteworthy. The use of the cardinal number (ʾeḥād, "one") rather than the ordinal ("first") is unique in this sequence (subsequent days use ordinals: second, third, etc.). Some Fathers, including St. Basil (Hexaëmeron II.8), saw significance in this: "one day" suggests a day that stands apart, a day of absolute beginning, a day that shares in the singularity of God who is One. It is the day that inaugurates time itself, and therefore cannot be numbered among a series that does not yet exist.
The creation of light by divine speech is the foundation upon which the entire Catholic theology of creation rests. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Vatican I (Dei Filius, 1870) both solemnly defined that God created all things ex nihilo — from nothing — freely, by his almighty power, at the beginning of time. Genesis 1:3 is the primal witness to this doctrine. There is no pre-existing matter, no cosmic struggle; there is only God and his Word.
Christologically, the Fathers read this verse as a revelation of the Trinity at work. The Word by which God speaks is the eternal Logos — the Second Person. St. Paul makes the connection explicit: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor 4:6). The physical light of the first day is thus a type of Christ, the "light of the world" (Jn 8:12), and of the baptismal illumination by which believers pass from darkness to light (Eph 5:8). The Easter Vigil liturgy dramatically enacts this typology when the Paschal candle is carried into the darkened church and the deacon chants the Exsultet: "This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness of sin." The first creation and the new creation in Christ are superimposed.
The separation of light from darkness also carries a profound moral and eschatological sense. The Catechism notes that while God's creation is wholly good, the presence of darkness — limited, bounded, named — foreshadows the mystery of evil, which God permits but never allows to escape his sovereign ordering (cf. CCC 309–314). St. Augustine (Confessions XII.9) saw in the interplay of light and darkness a figure of the soul's journey: the formless void illuminated by grace, called from chaos into the order of charity.
Finally, the rhythmic structure of evening and morning, repeated across the days of creation, reveals God as the author of time, of liturgy, and of sacred order. Pope Benedict XVI, in his homilies on creation, emphasized that the seven-day structure is not a scientific chronology but a "liturgical" text: creation itself is ordered toward worship, and the rhythm of days culminates in the Sabbath rest that prefigures humanity's eternal rest in God (cf. Heb 4:1–11; CCC 345–349). The first day, then, is not merely a cosmological datum — it is the opening note of a hymn whose final cadence is the glory of the Eighth Day, the Day of Resurrection, when all things are made new.
This passage invites today's Catholic reader to meditate on the creative and transforming power of God's word. Just as God spoke light into the primordial darkness, the Church teaches that his Word — made flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:14) — continues to bring light into the darkest corners of human experience: doubt, grief, sin, and despair. The simple declaration "Let there be light" reminds us that God does not merely observe our chaos from a distance; he actively speaks into it. In daily life, we are called to welcome that divine light through Scripture, the sacraments, and prayer, trusting that wherever God's word is received, goodness and order follow. This passage also challenges us to name and resist the darkness in our own lives, confident that God has already declared light to be good.
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