The purpose of God's spoken word and the question of multiple heavens

What is gained by labor is received with great joy and guarded with diligence, while what comes easily is held cheaply. For this reason Scripture leads us forward by a kind of path and order toward the knowledge of the only Son. And yet the incorporeal nature had no need of spoken words even so, since the very things conceived could be communicated directly to the co-worker. What need would there be for speech among those who can share their counsels with one another from the thought itself? For voice exists for hearing, and hearing for voice. But where there is no air, no tongue, no ear, no winding passage carrying sounds up to the perception in the head, there is no need of words either; the intention is communicated, one might say, from the very thoughts in the heart. So, as I said, this form of discourse has been wisely and skillfully employed in order to rouse our minds to search for the person to whom the words are addressed.

The second question to examine is whether this firmament, which was itself also called heaven, is different from the heaven made in the beginning, and whether there are in fact two heavens. The philosophers of heaven would sooner surrender their tongues than accept this as true. They posit one heaven, and say it has no nature capable of admitting a second, or third, or many more, since all the substance of the heavenly body was used up, as they think, in the constitution of the one. For they say there is one revolving body, and it is finite; and if this was completely fitted together with the first heaven, nothing is left over for the generation of a second or third. These are the imaginings of those who introduce unbegotten matter to the Creator, carried from their first myth-making into the falsehood that follows from it. But we ask the wise men of the Greeks not to mock us before they settle their disputes with one another. For among them there are some who say the heavens and worlds are infinite; and when those who use weightier proofs refute their implausibility and establish by geometric necessities that no other heaven can by nature come into being besides the one, then we will laugh all the more at their geometric and artful nonsense—if, seeing bubbles produced by the same cause, one and many alike, they still doubt about multiple heavens, whether the creative power suffices to bring them into being. When we look to the surpassing power of God, we consider the strength and magnitude of these heavens to differ in no way from the hollow moisture blown up in fountains. So their argument from impossibility is laughable. We, however, are so far from disbelieving in the second that we seek also the third, the vision of which the blessed Paul was counted worthy to receive. And the psalm, naming the heavens of heavens (Psalm 148:4), has given us the idea of still more. Surely these things are no more extraordinary than the seven circles, on which nearly all agree the seven stars are carried, and which they say are fitted one into another, like the image of jars set inside one another. These, moving in a direction opposite to the whole, while the ether is parted by them, produce a clear and harmonious sound, surpassing every pleasure found in melodies.