existence, hellish things came into existence on earth. Hell consists of peo-
ple who turned away from God and became devils and satans after death.
But talking about horrible things began to hurt our ears, so we
turned our thoughts away from them and recalled again what we had
seen in the heavens.
The fourth memorable occurrence.Once when I was thinking about 79
the creation of the universe, some spirits from the Christian world came
up to me. Among philosophers of their day, they had been some of the
most famous and were esteemed the wisest of all.
“We noticed that you were thinking about creation,” they said. “Tell
us what your thinking is about that.”
But I replied, “Tell me first what yourthinking is.”
One of them said, “My thinking is that creation comes from nature.
Nature created itself. It existed from eternity, since there is no such thing
as a vacuum—a vacuum is impossible. What else except nature do we see
with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our noses, or breathe with
our chests? Because nature is outside us it is also inside us.”
[ 2 ] When another philosopher heard this he said, “You mention
nature and you make it the creator of the universe, but you don’t know
how nature produced the universe. I’ll tell you. It rolled itself into vor-
tices. They collided with each other much the way clouds do, or the way
houses do when they collapse in an earthquake. As a result of that colli-
sion, denser substances gathered together to form the earth while more
fluid substances separated from the denser material and came together
to form oceans. Lighter substances separated out from the oceans to
become ether and air, and the lightest of these was the sun. Haven’t you
noticed that when you mix oil, water, and dirt together they sponta-
neously separate and form layers one above the other?”
[ 3 ] On hearing this, another philosopher said, “You made that up!
Everyone knows that the real origin of all things was a chaos that filled a
quarter of the universe. In the middle of the chaos there was fire; around
the fire was ether; around the ether was matter. The chaos developed
cracks, and fire erupted through them like Etna and Vesuvius. This
resulted in the sun. Then the ether rolled out and poured all around.
This resulted in the atmosphere. Finally the remaining matter formed a
ball. This resulted in the earth.
“As for the stars, they are just light sources in the expanse of the uni-
verse. They arose from the sun and its fire and light. At first, you see, the
§79 god the creator & creation 109