Reading Augustine’s Confessions, Book XIII: Creation as Imago Dei – Discourses on Minerva
The Confessions is a slogging and difficult book to read for many who are unfamiliar with the art of hermeneutics, a knowledge of philosophy, and a basic familiarity with traditional Christianity (e.g. the Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation). As we continue our explorations into St. Augustine’s philosophy, we will turn explicitly to understanding Confessions XIII, Chapters 1-10, as well as Chapter 22. It is in my view that, when reading Augustine, one should start at the end as the beginning – after all, the end of the Confessions is the beginning of the creation, so it is, in a sense, the rightful place to start.
Book XIII of the Confessions is Augustine’s allegorical and philosophical (and anthropological reading) of Genesis 1. He later produced a fuller commentary called De Genesi ad Litteram. It is important to understand the beginnings of Augustine’s explanations of Genesis in Confessions because it gives insights into how he understands the creation, what it means to be human (and especially as it relates to being imago Dei), and it may help to illuminate the more difficult parts of Confessions. We have already explored Augustine’s anthropology here, so you can reread that if you haven’t read it already. In the briefest summary possible, Augustine’s anthropology begins with the harmony of reason and desire (imago Dei), but we subsequently “fell” from this harmonious internal composition to where concupiscence reigns over rationality – but not because we elevated desire but because we suppressed rationality. (E.g. we rejected Logos – the voice of reason within us – because we felt that if we did this, and only followed pure desire, we would achieve greater happiness than what we have with the harmony of reason with desire.) It is important to keep this in mind since all Christian philosophy is rooted in this foundational anthropology.
Chapters 1-2: Cosmological Anthropology
The first two chapters of Book XIII outline some of Augustine’s anthropology. When he calls upon God (and God is principally Love, Wisdom, and Truth), he cries for God to “come into [his] soul.” It is important to remember that, unlike in the post-Cartesian epoch in the Anglosphere, “soul” carries with it the Greek understanding – mind. As Augustine says in De Trinitate, the soul is the seat of the rational intellect – the soul is “the rational and intellect.” In Catholicism, the soul is the substantive part of the mind that is rational and can come to know truth and has reason which is how one knows God (because God is Logos). Thus, Augustine is calling God (Wisdom) to come into his mind and order his rationality and desires back to the source from which it came.
Augustine also notes that all things subsist in the goodness of wisdom. This is mandated by Christianity’s cosmological metaphysics: creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). Augustine goes through some cosmological theology and anthropology here, noting that “It is from the abundance of your goodness that your creation subsists, for you do not withhold existence from good which neither benefits you nor is of your own substance and therefore equal to you, but exists simply because it can derive its being from you.” What Augustine means is that God, as Wisdom, brings creation into being through Wisdom. There is no reason that Wisdom had to do this. And this is part of the existential problem of existence in Christianity. Yet, Wisdom did bring the world into existence and, as a result, all things that do exist in the (natural) world exist for an end that can derive that end from Wisdom itself. Wisdom, then, brings into being and gives form to being because it loves; it desires to do so (in Catholicism, God is also love, is desire itself; along with being Reason). This is crucially importantly for Augustine, insofar that he links phenomenological desire back to the realm of the Transcendent and grants its to Wisdom itself.
Highlighting either influence from Aristotle, or having just naturally thought out his own form of hylomorphism, Augustine states that the spiritual and corporeal natures were both made in Wisdom. Thus, they exist together in harmony much like in Aristotle’s claim that human nature (and world existence) is a combination of matter and form. Augustine, using slightly different language, is arguing the same thing. Augustine dwells as to why God would unite spiritual and corporeal things together, and ultimately concludes that Wisdom brings order and structure to the formless (i.e. the abstract or the purely spiritual – this is why angels and demons do not have bodies), and to bring goodness and life to the corporeal (i.e. the material). Thus this combination of spiritual abstraction and corporeal substance did not earn any right to exist, but they do exist because Wisdom desired their being together to give form (structure) and life (knowledge) to creation.
This is who we are, fundamentally, to Augustine – rational animals with a recollection of the things Transcendent (beauty, wisdom, goodness, etc.). And this was all fundamentally good, and are signs of the majestic sublimity of Wisdom (Logos). This is why Christianity affirms humans as rational animals, our rationality is the transcendent and our animal form is corporeal and ripe with desire. In sum, life exists in wisdom for wisdom, in beauty for beauty, and in plurality for plurality. (Augustine will further explain our ontological pluralism in Chapter 11.)
Chapters 3-4: The “Light” on the “First Day”
Augustine does not believe in a literal seven day creation story. And neither did most of the early Church Fathers (especially Origen, who did have influence over Augustine’s developed hermeneutic). As Augustine recalls, “At the beginning of creation you said, ‘Let there be light; and the light began.’” Augustine immediately knows this cannot be the light of the stars and moons, for the luminaries came afterward in the Genesis narrative. Thus, as he states, this light is “properly to be understood to refer to the spiritual creation.” The spiritual creation is the light of the mind and intellect – for spiritual beings (angels) are purely rational creatures. This is why angels appear in Biblical stories as luminaries of light, wisdom, and reason. Thus, light is primarily the brilliance of reason and wisdom at the beginning of creation which permeates through all crevices of the creation itself.
(On this note, Augustine is reading Genesis 1 completely and entirely allegorically. Genesis 1, for Augustine, who subsequently informed Catholic hermeneutical tradition, is to be read as an account of anthropology imparting deep philosophical insight to us rather than to be read as a book concerning “scientific creation.”)
Light also has connotations of the goodness we have just been discussing in Chapters 1-2, this is because Wisdom creates out of goodness. As Augustine continues, “You created, not because you had need, but out of the abundance of your own goodness. You molded your creation and gave it form, but not because you find your own happiness by it.” Wisdom doesn’t need anything from us, but Wisdom gave us a nature and an end (happiness) and gave us the intellectual capacities to achieve this. At the end of Chapter 4 Augustine writes, “To gain happiness it must still be turned from that state (of darkness) towards God, its Creator. It must live ever close to the Fountain of Life. In his light it must see the light in him it must be given perfection, splendor, and bliss (happiness).”
Thus, Augustine claims that happiness is the wisdom, goodness, and loving tenderness of God. This is also the “light” we read about on the first day of creation. Light is the brilliance of truth shining down upon beauty and illuminating our minds to see this beauty through an understanding of truth. Through light, as an emanation of love, wisdom, and truth, beauty emerges. These are, minimally, the four first principles to creation in Christianity: the world is ordered and brought into being through love, reason, and beauty, all of which can be known (truth). Thus, we have a rationally ordered Cosmos which is beautiful and we have access to this truth principally through coming to understand wisdom, beauty, and love.
Chapters 5-10: The Spirit that Moves (or Calls) over the Deep, Participation with Wisdom, Truth, and Beauty
In one of the most remarkable, and difficult, moments in the Confessions, Augustine now turns to trying to understand what it means when he reads the “Spirit of God moving over the face of the Deep.” (This is also the most explicitly neo-Platonic elements to Augustine’s philosophy contained in the Confessions, and the next 20 or so chapters are deeply Plotinian with a Hebraic theology coat.) He immediately notes that he catches a glimpse of the Trinity. The Father is already co-eternal with the Son (Logos), and that the Logos is “your Wisdom, born of you, equal to you, and co-eternal with you – that is, in your Son.” It is important to remember that the Trinity, for Augustine, is principally a relations of love, but that the Father is Truth, the Son is Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is Love. (Remember this in the context of what follows.)
So why is the Spirit moving, or borne over, the deep? For Augustine, this is the call to participate with creative Wisdom itself – to bring life and light, order and happiness, form and structure, to the creation. This is why the Spirit is revealed to creation – it calls creation to participate with what Plotinus called Primal Beauty and Goodness. Beauty, in its Wisdom and Goodness, calls creation to participate with it and bring forth ever greater gradations of beauty and life.
Augustine leans on the Apostle Paul to understand this, how coming to know the Truth is what allows one to understand themselves, the world, act in charity towards other and the creation, and to love Christ (to love Wisdom). It is the call to participate and grow in wisdom and truth. It is the participatio Trinitatis (participation with the Trinity), the participation with Logos, that raises up our concupiscence to God. The Spirit moving over the Deep is the calling of one’s soul (rational intellect) to participate in the higher calling of Wisdom. “They are our passions, our loves, the unclean learnings of our own spirits, which drag us downward in our love of the world and its cares; but in your love of that life where all care is banished, the holiness of your Spirit raises us aloft, so that we may lift up our hearts to you, to the place where your Spirit moved over the waters; and when we have ventured our lives on the flood of sin, which cannot bear them up, we may come to that peace which is high above all things.” The Spirit calls us to participate in truth, and this is occurring at the beginning of creation – thus signalling to all creation to participate in truth, beauty, and life. In essence, love is what allows us to understand. Love of truth. Love of goodness. Love of beauty, etc., is what propels us to higher levels of consciousness.
It is important to see that Augustine associates the depravity of sin, which is the total giving over of one’s life to one’s own desires, to the result of unclean learning. That is to say, improper reasoning or rationality – the lack of knowledge (or wisdom) – is what leads to the soul’s descent into the world of pure phenomenology (the abyss of the deep). The soul, which is the mind, should be directed upward to the transcendent – the Spirit which calls our desires and satisfies our knowledge from which new order, beauty, and life spring from. The want for truth and wisdom is what we need to be seeking. Truth, love, and wisdom calls us to participate with it. Again we see the heavy debt to Plotinus here, but also the subtle rejection of them and the inclusion of Aristotle: participation is not merely intellectual in Augustine’s Christianity. It has concrete consequences for the body. The end result of participation will include “body and spirit” instead of just spirit (Plotinus) or just body (phenomenological and mechanical philosophy).
Augustine continues to explain in Chapter 8 how light and darkness are elements of the mind (the soul). Fallen spirits are fallen minds. These are the minds that rebelled and turned away from the radiant beauty of light and rationality. “When spirits fall, their darkness is revealed, for they are stripped of the garment of your light ([e.g. light of wisdom]). By the misery and restlessness which they then suffer you make clear to us how noble a being is your rational creation, for nothing less than yourself suffices to give it rest and happiness.” The analogy to the fallen spirits, or fallen angels, is a warning of what happens to us when we turn away from light. We become miserable, restless, and alienated from ourselves, because we sink into the depths of pure structure instead of bringing up the body to participate with the light of reason. Descending into darkness is the result of the suppression of rationality, where reason no longer orders primal and good desires from which we sink ever lower into the depths of chaos and confusion, alienation, and misery – and as Augustine says, only union with light brings us contentment and happy rest. That is, we must reach back up to participate with Supreme Good, which is chiefly Wisdom (among other things). This is why Augustine subsequently writes, “The darkness would have closed over your heavenly city, unless every obedient mind/intelligence in it had adhered to you and remained at rest in your Spirit.”
We cannot escape thought, since thought is fundamentally part of who we are. Thus, darkness is the darkness of the mind that clouds us from seeing the light of beauty and goodness calling us to participate with it in bringing new life, new light, and new creation to the world. The struggle, here, between light and darkness in the early chapters of Genesis is over the struggle of the mind. But we are called to the light, as it were.
This is also why the ascent to light, which is the ascent to wisdom, is a happy ascendancy. “To whatever place I go, I am drawn to it by love. By your Gift, the Holy Spirit, we are set aflame and borne aloft, and the fire within us carries us upward. Our hearts are set on an upward journey, as wing sing the songs of ascent.” The call of the Spirit is the call to truth, but it is also the call to beauty and to participate in beauty and truth, which produces happiness. “Let there be light” and “the Spirit moved over the Deep” is about the wisdom, truth, and happiness that derive from participating in the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is the end for existence – the “plan” that God has for us. As Augustine states in Chapter 10, “How happy must that creature be, the Heaven of Heavens, which has known no other state than this! [(The state of pure love, wisdom, truth, and beauty.)] And yet it would have been other than it is, if your Gift, who moves over all that changes, had not raised it up in the very moment of its creation, before any time had elapsed, when you summoned it to yourself with the words, ‘Let there be light’ and it became light. In our case there is an interval of time, for we were darkness and one day we shall be made light.”
Again, the call to wisdom, and the participation with wisdom and beauty is the calling of the Spirit moving over the Deep and directing our attention upward to it. “They must ask you for the gift of understanding,” Augustine famously closes after spending five chapters discussing what the nature of light is and what light’s relationship is to the Spirit that was borne over the waters. And this coming to understanding is why the Spirit is the embodiment of truth. Not only does knowledge result from this, participation with Wisdom is the next process. Again, knowledge has ramifications for concrete actions and results. In Chapters 11-21, Augustine goes full neo-Platonic and we will examine these chapters in another post in light of what we just covered in this post.
Chapter 22: Imago Dei, the Renewal of the Mind
Skipping over to Chapter 22 is probably a good idea at this point just to see how important mind is and mind’s role in coming to know light and participating with all the beauties of the world. The notion that imago Dei is principally rooted in the “renewal of the mind” is not Augustinian. Origen spoke of the imago Dei being about the participatory intellect in First Principles. The Apostle Paul talks about the same thing in Romans 12, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Philo of Alexandria also talks about how the Logos that orders the world is also inside every rational animal calling it to itself. But Augustine, moreover than Paul or Origen, was the man who systematized imago Dei as being linked to the thinking mind participating with the truth, goodness, and beauty that is God. (This is especially true in Books VII, XII-XV of De Trinitate.) Augustine is aware of this, and even quotes St. Paul in explaining how he understands the passage of the creation of man, “Let us make man in our image.”
To be a bearer of the image of God is to be bearer of light, truth, and creativity, and we have already – by now – explained that this light is principally the light of the intellectual soul coming to participate with truth and wisdom. The renewal of the mind is the renewal of the image, it is also what being made in the image of God means in its most orthodox and traditional understanding. You are, quite literally, the mind of reason – that is to say, the mind of God. Through the Logos embedded in you, which is the “voice of God” or the “Law written in your heart,” this is “how, when we learn to know God, we become new men in the image of our Creator. We gain the spiritual gifts and can scrutinize everything – everything, that is, which it is right for us to judge – without being subject, ourselves to any other man’s scrutiny.” It is precisely because we have the voice of Logos within us, that we can come to know the world, truth, and also speak truth. Socrates speaks of the same notion when he says that humans have “a spark of divinity” within them. The innate ideas of Plato are much in the same tradition of Christianity’s imago Dei. You are reason, and reason participates with beauty and produces life. This is the happiness that humans seek according to Augustine.
Thus, in Augustine, we begin to see the heart of Christian philosophy and anthropology as one that is the struggle for reason, or the struggle to attain reason so that reason can order our lives. (This is why Nietzsche holds Augustine in ironic esteem, Augustine’s anthropology has elements of Nietzsche’s idea of self-overcoming.) It is the struggle to elevate reason to order desire to its ultimate end. Augustine was tremendously influential, not just in psychology for trying to understand the battle of reason and desire in the mind (soul) of the human, but through his hermeneutical theology, was also influential over the development of what became known as natural theology in Christianity. (Continental philosophy, as most know: German Idealism and Romanticism, dialectical philosophy, Phenomenology, and Existentialism, all have roots in Augustine’s philosophy and anthropology.)
For Augustine, rational inquiry and the struggle to have reason guide us to the truth which requires one to “rema[k]e his mind and see and understand your truth.” The struggle over light and darkness is, in fact, spiritual – it is the soulful struggle between reason seeking to harmonize with desire, or the descent of reason into darkness, where nothing but disordered desire runs amok. But when this is achieved, the true flourishing of the soul, desire, and the passions participate in and with wisdom, bringing new life and new beauty into the world. This is what gives passion, emotion, and desire its fullest expression and fulfillment. And this is why the soul also carries with it, from Augustine, the constitutive elements of beauty, passion, emotion, and erotica, because the soul is that which brings forth life when it is married to participatory wisdom and reason.
Augustine’s influence over the formation of Catholic doctrine has been very sharp and pronounced. Catholic dogma, largely owing to Augustine, maintains that humanity “has a natural desire for happiness” and that humans “never stop searching for truth and happiness” (until they have found that truth and happiness and participate with truth and happiness). From Augustine Catholic doctrine, perhaps surprisingly for many, proclaims that “human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God.” (Because Reason is God and God is Reason therefore our ability to reason can lead us to a knowledge of ultimate Reason which is what Christianity understands to be God.) All the talk of participating with beauty and wisdom, and coming to know truth and happiness, is the ultimate crux for how to achieve happiness, “The moral law presupposes the rational order, established among creatures for their good and to serve their final end, by power, wisdom, and goodness.” For Augustine, beauty, wisdom, and truth are calling humans to participate with it for ever greater beauty, wisdom, and life – the end to which happiness is found. In this we flourish as humans and become like god as St. Athanasius famously said. This “becoming like god” is called Divinization in Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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