The world's beginning implies its end

“For the form of this world passes away” (1 Corinthians 7:31), and “Heaven and earth will pass away” (Matthew 24:35). These are advance announcements of the teachings about the consummation and about the transformation of the world, delivered now in brief as part of the elementary teaching of the inspired Scripture. “In the beginning God made.” Whatever begins from time must of necessity also be completed in time. If it has a beginning in time, do not doubt about its end. For geometry and arithmetic methods, and the treatises about solid bodies, and the much-talked-about astronomy, the much-busied vanity—to what end do they lead? If those who have devoted themselves to these things have conceived that this visible world is co-eternal with God the Creator of all things, bringing what is circumscribed and has a material body to the same glory as the incomprehensible and invisible nature, not even being able to conceive this much: that what has parts subject to corruption and alteration must of necessity one day undergo the same sufferings as its own parts. But they became vain in their reasonings, and their foolish heart was darkened, and claiming to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1:21-22), so much so that some declared that heaven exists together with God from eternity, while others declared that it is itself God, without beginning and without end, and the cause of the particular ordering of things. Surely their abundance of worldly wisdom will one day bring them an increase of their harsh condemnation, because seeing so sharply into vain things, they were willingly blinded to the understanding of the truth. But those who measure the distances of the stars, and catalogue the ever-visible ones and those near the Bear, and all that lie around the southern pole—visible to some, but unknown to us—and who divide the northern latitude and the zodiacal circle into countless intervals, and who observe with precision the risings of stars, their stations, their declinations, and the forward motion of all of them, and how much time each of the wandering stars takes to complete its own circuit—they have not discovered one single device among all these for conceiving of God as the maker of the universe and a just judge who brings to each the worthy recompense for the life he has lived. Nor have they been able, by the teaching about judgment, to recognize the thought of the consummation that follows from it: that the world must of necessity be transformed, if the condition of souls is also to change to another kind of life. For just as the present life has a nature akin to this world, so also the future existence of our souls will receive an end suited to its condition. But they are so far from attending to these truths that they pour out loud laughter at us when we proclaim the consummation of this world and the regeneration of the age. Since the beginning is by nature set before the things that come from it, when he spoke about the things that have their being from time, he necessarily set this word before all others, saying, “In the beginning God made.” For there was something, it seems, even before this world, which is contemplable by our mind but was left unrecorded, because it was unsuitable for those still being introduced and still infants in knowledge. There was a condition older than the birth of the world, befitting the supercosmic powers, the one above time, the eternal, the everlasting.