Talk 10

The subject of the present talk will be, brothers, the creation of the heavenly luminaries, which followed on the fourth day of creation, and how they fulfill their appointed task in relation to the earth, and also their size and their distance from the earth.

Let us hear how the holy Narrator Moses speaks of the creation of the luminaries in his book of the genesis of heaven and earth. Here is how he speaks of it: «and God said: let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, to give light upon the earth and to divide between the day and the night: and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years. And let them be for illumination in the firmament of heaven, so as to shine upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide between the light and the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the fourth day»132. And so, the sun, the moon, and the stars were created 1) to give light to the earth; 2) so that they might produce upon the earth days and nights and the seasons of the year, and so that people might keep by them their earthly reckonings of time; and 3) so that they might serve as signs or tokens for knowing fair or foul weather, wind and storm, one’s location on land or at sea. Such is the appointed task of the luminaries with respect to the earth: no other task has been revealed to us. And how beautifully and unchangingly it is fulfilled!

And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. What a brilliant luminary is this sun! What a multitude of light comes from it, and how wondrously it shines upon the earth! For several thousand versts in every direction it lights everything up at once, and so brightly that on the earth one can make out every grain of sand, every blade of grass: the whole earth is, as it were, flooded with a sea of light. But since light is a substance, judge, brothers, how great the luminary must be that sends out from itself so much light upon the earth. Evidently it is very great and incomparably larger than the earth, because, were it equal to or smaller than the earth, then the light over the whole earth would be incomparably scantier. But now take into account both the lavishness of the illumination and the extent of this illumination, equal to the whole earthly hemisphere, and also this circumstance—in what measure the light of a candle grows weaker and weaker when we, for example, gradually move a book away from it—and then judge how great the sun must be, which shines equally brightly, so that the enormous distance, which makes it appear a small disk, means, as it were, nothing for the earth. From this anyone may easily conclude that it is exceedingly great. It has been ascertained that the sun is several hundred thousand times larger than the earth. And if it appears such a small disk, this is, as we said, because of the astonishing height at which it burns above the earth. It is removed from the earth by 144 million versts133. This has been ascertained by the learned. What are our earthly distances in comparison with this distance? What, then, must the Creator be, by whose will such luminaries move across the sky, and at such a distance? Evidently He must be omnipresent and all-powerful; for Him every distance, every magnitude, is as nothing. But in us too, brothers, there is a likeness of the omnipresent Godhead: for our thought there are no such distances as there are for the body or for the senses; human thought can in an instant fly around immeasurable distances; and the more a person strives to live virtuously and in holiness, the freer his thought becomes, the more he detaches himself from the narrow bonds of the earth; whereas, on the contrary, the vicious, passionate person is, in his thought and in his whole being, as though chained to the earth: on the earth are all his hopes and all his happiness. Very bright is the sun, brothers, so bright that we have seen nothing brighter than it, and it beholds the whole earth at once. But the eyes of the Lord are ten thousand times brighter than the sun134, and they see the whole universe at once, all that is hidden and secret in people: there is no place where one could hide from them. In general the sun, moon, and stars are beautiful; but their Creator is more beautiful still. «If the heaven is beautiful,» says one of our own native Hierarchs, «and in the heaven the visible sun, moon, and stars—oh, how much more beautiful is He who created these beautiful things135!»

But why is it, brothers, that the sun sets below the earth and leaves it in darkness, and then rises again over the earth? Why are there this dawn, morning and evening, and these gold-glowing clouds at dawn? This too happens by the all-powerful word, or by the laws, of the Creator, who made the earth round like a sphere and commanded it to revolve about itself and about the sun. Earlier we said simply, without proofs, that the earth is a sphere; but now the rising and setting of the sun, the morning and evening dawn, and the gold-glowing clouds at dawn will prove to us that our earth is in fact an enormous sphere, like the heavenly spheres. You often see, brothers, that the Lord Almighty is depicted on the icons for the most part with a sphere, on top of which is a cross. This sphere signifies the terrestrial sphere and is called the orb—because in antiquity the Roman emperors had the custom of holding it in the hand on solemn occasions136. Our Lord Jesus Christ holds in His hand the terrestrial sphere, as the King of heaven and earth, as the Almighty. We say this in order to show you that our earth is round, like a sphere. But how is the roundness of the earth proved by the phenomena at the rising and setting of the sun? In the following way: if the earth were not round but flat, then the sun would at once hide beneath the earth, or come out from under it, and would immediately leave us either in the full shadow of the earth, or light us with full light. But now, since the earth is round, we make use of the remnants of light from the sun even when it is lighting the sloping side of the earth, when the sun is, so to speak, beneath the hill and produces for us the dawn, like the glow of an enormous fire. This dawn comes about because the rays of the set or rising sun, lighting the sloping side of the earth, at the same time light also the air around the earth, which surrounds it like water, and thus make the light of the dawn. Observing the dawn, we see, from the gradual diminishing of the light—from how it gradually turns from bright rose paler and paler—that the earth is indeed round, and that the sun, as it were, glides step by step, evenly, along a circle. And it is known that this phenomenon comes from the wheel-like turning of the earth, from its roundness. Looking at the clouds, at the setting of the sun, we see the same; often there are several rows of them: one higher, the others lower. Look: the sun has set, and we no longer see it; only the tops of the buildings still take upon themselves its last rays; meanwhile the lower clouds are still crimson, and the upper ones also; and now the lower ones have gone out, like red-hot iron taken from the fire, but the upper clouds are still gold-glowing; for them the sun has not yet set: with us it is already twilight, but there, on high, is full light. But now, at last, these lofty, gold-glowing clouds have also grown dark—that is, they too have come into the shadow of the earth; the sun has sunk low beneath the earth. How evident from this that the earth is round! But why do I strive to prove to you that the earth is a sphere? In order to set before you the omnipotence of God in the most striking form. The earth is a sphere. But why did God make it spherical? So that it might revolve about itself and about the sun. And so the earth revolves in the air—in enormous spaces—and, in the words of the church hymn, hangs upon nothing. What power must hold it in the air upon nothing! What power must carry it around the sun like a light ball! How insignificant for the Lord God is our earth! How true and faithful are the words of the Lord: «heaven is My throne, and the earth is the footstool of My feet»137—only a footstool! Such is the earth, and so it is made. But by the same laws the heavenly luminaries too were created: and they are all likewise hung upon nothing, upon no thing at all. How Your works are magnified, O Lord! You have made them all in wisdom138. But most of all this radiant luminary amazes us. You lit a single lamp, O God, for the whole earth, and its light is enough for all; no one has any need to ask that it be moved nearer to himself so that the light might be brighter: everywhere and for everyone it shines equally bright—for king and subject, rich and poor, strong and weak, righteous and sinner. And it is not enough that it shines: it also warms and gives life to all and to everything; the gift is given to all alike: no one is wronged. In the sun, brothers, one can see a likeness of the one and all-good Lord and of the one Church. The sun alone shines for the whole earth; and the spiritual Sun—the Lord God—is likewise one for the whole world, in all parts of the world; there is one Gospel of the Lord in all the world; there is one Church of the Lord, or one fold of the Lord’s rational sheep; there is one Chief Shepherd, Jesus Christ. Further—the sun is a likeness of the all-good God, who makes His sun shine on the evil and the good. A wondrous spectacle of God’s goodness! What does one or another of us not sometimes do? What sins, what evil deeds are there not among people, committed both openly and in secret? Sometimes people live in complete forgetfulness of God. But the heavenly Father commands His sun to shine equally on all: His sun will never forget, in its time, to rise over us. We are often still asleep, while it, like a bridegroom from his chamber, has long since come out upon our horizon and pours down with all lavishness its dazzling rays, gladdening every animate creature, lighting and quickening everything. Let us too, brothers, imitate the heavenly Father, each according to his strength, shining upon others with the light of our good deeds and warming with our compassion the hearts of those who are in need of compassion.

When the sun hides behind the earth, for the most part another luminary at once appears in its place—a lesser one—and shines upon the earth all night long. What an exact order in the changes! What solicitude for our dark earth! So that it should not be very dark upon it during the sun’s withdrawal from us into the other hemisphere, the moon, at once upon the setting of the sun, takes upon itself the office of a luminary, though with far from such light as the sun. Its light, as learned people have ascertained, is 100,000 times weaker than an overcast day, while, compared with the light of a sunny day, the very clearest moonlit night is 300,000 times darker139. It too lights up a great deal of space at once—not merely a thousand versts; and therefore it must likewise be concluded that it is both large and very far from us; it is, however, much smaller not only than the sun, but even than the earth, and it stands off from the earth by only 300,000 versts. By the light of the moon we usually see in the sky a countless multitude of stars, of which some are larger and others smaller. Many of you, brothers, do not know the mystery of the starry heaven, and there is no special need for all to know it; but it is there that all the infinite power of the Creator is disclosed. On the earth too, out of all God’s creatures, His omnipotence is visible; but the earth is only a single grain of sand in comparison with the boundlessness of the sky. All the stars, each one separately, are larger than our earth, and the greater part, perhaps, are larger even than the sun itself, and it is not millions of versts that separate our earth from them, but whole billions—such numbers as are rarely even used among us. Beautiful are these stars; quiet and pleasant is their light. On our earth people know no better means of setting forth outwardly the glorious deeds of some man who has rendered many services to his country than the shining of a star, made in imitation and hung upon such a man’s breast.

All these round spheres appeared out of shapeless substance, brothers, by a single word of the Lord, already on the second day140. Only then they were dark; but on this day light was given to them and they became bright. This we understand both of the stars, and of the moon, and of the sun. «In the beginning God created,—says St. Gregory the Theologian,—not this sunlight, but light not enclosed in a body and in the sun, and only afterward given to the sun to light the whole universe»141. From this one may conclude that the body of the sun existed before light was given to it; likewise the body of the moon and of the stars. Looking at the starry world, one involuntarily thinks: what an abyss of the omnipotence and wisdom of God! What is our earth in comparison with the sky? What are we, people? Who will not say with the holy Psalmist David: «when I behold the heavens, the works of Your hands, the moon and the stars, which You have founded: what is man, that You are mindful of him, or the son of man, that You visit him»142?

Holy Scripture has not revealed to us any other appointed task of the heavenly luminaries than their task for the earth. This task, as we indicated earlier, consists in this: 1) to give light to the earth—and we all see that they do indeed fulfill this task, especially the sun and the moon; 2) so that people might keep by them the count of time: let them be, it is said, for seasons, and for days, and for years. Let us now speak in more detail about this second task. By seasons here are meant the seasons of the year: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. And so days and nights and the seasons of the year on the earth come from the heavenly luminaries, namely from the sun and the moon. Days and nights come from the wheel-like turning of the earth about itself. When the side of the earth on which we live turns downward, and the side beneath us upward, then below with us it is night, and above it is day; and when we again rise upward, and those beneath us go downward, then with us it is day, and with them night. The seasons of the year come about thus: when the earth is in such a position toward the sun that it casts its rays upon it straight down, as rain falls from the clouds, or at least not very obliquely, then it is very warm on the earth—that is, it is summer; as the slant in the fall of the sun’s rays increases, the earth becomes colder and colder: autumn sets in; at this time, from the uneven cooling of the earth, the water, and the air surrounding them, a multitude of vapor rises into the air out of the seas, lakes, rivers, and marshes: hence the almost incessant, heavy rains in autumn. Finally the sun’s rays, deviating from the earth more and more, as it were only glide along the earth, barely touching it: hence severe frosts set in, the days become short and the nights long. Among the inhabitants of the other earthly hemisphere at this time the days gradually lengthen and the nights shorten, and the heat reaches its highest degree. After this the sun again begins to rise higher and higher over our hemisphere; its rays begin to fall upon us more and more directly: the thaw begins, spring comes. All these changes take place during the earth’s revolution about the sun, and this revolution is completed over a whole year. In this way it becomes with us both dark and cold when the sun lights us little; and, on the contrary, light and warm when the sun’s rays fall straight upon the earth. In just the same way, brothers, it is also with the soul of a Christian. When the source of spiritual light and life-giving warmth—Jesus Christ and the Life-giving Spirit—withdraw from it, then there are in it spiritual gloom and cold; but when they draw near to it and act upon it with their grace, then suddenly light and warmth are established in it, and it tastes a wondrous peace and heavenly joy.

There is yet a third appointed task of the luminaries: that they should be signs or tokens of various states and changes of the air, and also of the position of travelers on the earth. Thus mariners usually judge, by a certain color of the rising or setting sun, of stormy weather or of calm; and by the stars they often discover their position at sea—and even on the dry way, people walking in a deep, dense forest learn by the sun and the stars in what quarter they are and where they need to come out. But, beyond expectation, our talk has dragged on too long, and it is now time to bring it to an end. And so, having rendered glory to God, wondrous in His works, let us here bring our talk to an end. Amen.