Reading Augustine’s Confessions, Book XIII: The Literal Meaning of Genesis – Discourses on Minerva
The first half of Book XIII of the Confessions is a longwinded philosophical commentary over human anthropology, epistemology, Beauty, Wisdom, and our ability to take on form, knowledge, and direct our desire for happiness through participation. The second half of the book takes a turn to crystalizing what the doctrine of imago Dei is (Chapter 22), from which St. Augustine then turns his focus to the social order and humanity’s place therein. We begin to move away from the dense philosophical commentary and into a more practical and social philosophy – taking what we have just established and explored and now applying it into action within the order Wisdom has created.
Chapter 22: Imago Dei, the Renewal of the Mind
Imago Dei means “image of God,” this is the Christian idea that humanity has a direct connection to Divinity – that connection being our rationality. Since God is Reason and Wisdom, the Logos, this is imparted to us according to Augustine. Humanity’s capacity for reason, its capacity to know (which is one of the three constitutive components of what it means to be human as we read from Chapter 11), and from this capacity for reason which leads us to knowledge is how humans come to possess truth and dignify themselves as their being, knowledge, and will are all wrapped up together on that joyful ascent upward.
“We must live good lives so that the living soul may come to life in us. We must obey in full message which you gave us through your apostle when you said: ‘Do not fall in with the manners of this world.’” What Augustine is saying here is linked back to his claim that we must not fall entirely over in love with the things of the world. Like Plotinus, the ugly soul is the mind who gets lost in the carnal captivity of material beauty without coming to an understanding of what that beauty exists for. The way of the world, again, is the way of the fishes and the crashing seas that he has just explained in the preceding chapters represent humanity’s lustful devouring of each other and disorderly chaos of being which comes from our rejection of reason as we fall completely into phenomenological desire. Desire is not bad; it is, properly speaking, something good. Desire is the parched tongue that seeks wisdom, truth, and beauty – but in this seeking to fulfill desire we must come to know. Again, reason and desire go together in Augustine’s pluralistic composition of what it means to be human. “There must be an inward change, a remaking of your minds.” That remaking of our minds is the orientation of the mind, which is the soul, back to God (the source and fountain of life, beauty, wisdom, joy, order, and love, etc.).
Man’s ability for reason is what sets him apart from the rest of creation. This is also the greatest gift bestowed by God to humanity because, according to Catholicism, reason itself is a gift of grace. It allows us to be who we are – humans: a formed being who knows and desires. Humans are rational animals, part animal with desire, but also part Divine with the gift of reason from which we are able to acquire knowledge. This is called “Divinization” in Catholic and Orthodox theological anthropology – the ascent of the human upward toward God to be like God. This is what St. Athanasius meant in his famous defense of the incarnation of the Logos into the world, “God became man so that man might become like God.” This is not, as certain critics charge, a claim that humans become gods. Humans are like God insofar that they have the capacity for reason and coming to know the order that Wisdom has decreed all around them. It is a fully integral part of what it means to be human. To suppress your rationality and give oneself over to pure desire is to, in effect, be less than human. It is to become a “brute animal” per Cicero.
“The reason for this,” Augustine explains in describing imago Dei, “is that when he has remade his mind [(talking about humans here)] and can see and understand your truth, he has no need of other men to teach him to imitate his kind. You show him and he sees for himself what is your will, the good thing, the desirable thing, the perfect thing.” Only through coming to know truth can humans fully live up to their calling, in other words. We do not imitate other humans, who are often like the fishes and live like fishes, we imitate God – which is to say we imitate the rational order of all creation and participate with Wisdom itself which calls humans to order their lives to the good, the beautiful, and the joyful. This allows us to understand who we are, and our place in the order of creation. “This is how, when we learn to know God, we become new men in the image of our Creator. We gain 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.” This is one of the more confusing passages at first. What Augustine is saying here is that knowledge allows one to know, knowledge allows you to grow in awareness and power, and allows you to see the order for how it was set up – humans are, in fact, the judges of all, but not judge in the relativistic make-it-up as you go sense per Gorgias, but the judge over the rational order because we have been granted stewardship. Humans have been placed at the top of the order of earth because of our reasoning capability. The judgement spoken of here is the judgment to help lift up others from the bottom of the order (the abyss) for acting and living like fishes – we are called to be the stewards of the earth.
Chapters 23: Humanity’s Place in the Natural Order
Because humans have the ability to know, and come into participation with the wisdom and beauty God has decreed, “It is man’s power to judge all things that is symbolized by his rule over the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth and all the creeping things that move on the earth.” So there is a hierarchy to the natural world, of which humans are at top, and all things exist in beauty for some level of happiness for us once we come to understand this (Augustine will explain more about this in the forthcoming chapters). Knowledge leads to power, from this knowledge and power comes to the understanding of the order to the world and our place in it. “He rules them,” Augustine says speaking of man, “by his intelligence, which enables him to take in the thoughts of God’s Spirit [(which is truth)]. If this were not so, man, despite the place of honor that is his, would have no understanding. He would be matched with the brute beasts and no better than they.”
True power comes from knowledge, as Augustine clearly articulates. This knowledge is what allows us to take our place in the rational order. Otherwise, without said understanding, we are brute animals, and the beasts – Augustine reminds us – are better than us, they are stronger, more cunning, and so on. Humans have a choice: to live like the animals, or to live like humans. Living like animals and claiming that this is to live like humans is the ultimate sign of ignorance. It is the man living like the fish claiming that this is what is good and what life is meant to be.
Humans are in a harmony with nature, but only through the hierarchy of nature (humans do not abuse creation, but humans are the last of the creation emerging after the sun, moons, stars, seas, land, insects, and land animals). This is what allows us to know and partake in the joys of wisdom, as well as understand the beauty of the world around us and all that is in it. To whom much is given, much is required. And this is the problem. Reason demands excellence, it calls up the soul and body to higher heights (out of the abyss and toward the light). But we would rather be fishes, wouldn’t we?
But humans are not God, “Man, therefore, whom you created in your own image, has not received power over the lights of heaven, nor over heaven itself, which is hidden from him, nor over day and night, which you made before heaven was created, no over the waters which were gathered together that is the sea. He has been given rule over the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on earth. He judges them, approving what he finds to be right and blaming what he finds to be wrong.” Humans, then, must understand their place in the created order. They are not the authors of light and beauty, Wisdom is, and humans do not have the mastery over nature to augment it per the mechanical philosophers of the Enlightenment. Instead, humans sit atop of the created order of the world and have responsibility for the stewardship of the earth by being in conformity with eternal wisdom. We have our place, and everything else has its place. This is what true harmony is. There is proper place, size, and limit, to all things. Augustine, in De Genesi ad Litteram, along with the other Church Fathers, noted that humans are at the top of creation because they nearest to God in their reasoning ability which allows them to come to know the creation.
Chapter 24: Sex and Sexuality in the Sacramental Economy
Moving into the decree that “You bless men, O Lord, and bid them to increase and multiply and fill the earth,” Augustine unpacks what this means. As Augustine notes, this decree has not been given to trees and plants. This is because they have built in mechanisms through cosmic laws how to reproduce. To be fruitful and multiply is the participating in the beauty and wisdom of creation, it is about bringing new light and life into the world through sex. The end to sex is the participation with life and beauty to bring new life and beauty. This is the true joy of sexuality according to Augustine – not the phenomenological sensation, which would make us more like the fishes and whales which also share in this decree (which represent pure body in Augustine’s reading) – but to grow in understanding and bring forth new life into the world and to participate in life itself which comes about through sexuality and sex.
Sex has a rational end, in other words. Without the rationality of sex, we would all perish if we chased after just phenomenological stimulation. This is the happiness that comes from sex – the participating with beauty and life, coming together with another beautiful creature, to bring forth new life and light to the world. As Augustine writes, the decree is about the uniting of phenomenological desire and rationality, “I therefore understand the reproduction and multiplication of marine creatures to refer to physical signs and manifestations, of which we have need because the flesh which envelops us like the deep sea; and I take the reproduction of human kind to refer to the thoughts which our minds conceive, because reason is fertile and productive. I am convinced that this is what is meant.”
So the decree to be fruitful and multiply to the marine life is a command for the sexuality of the body, and the command to be fruitful and multiply to human kind is a command for the sexuality of the mind – linking body and mind, reason and will, together, to bring forth new life and enjoy the union of bodies and minds together. True sex and sexuality, which is something to be enjoyed, can only be enjoyed in its fullest when it is understood to be about the union of the body and soul. If we seek sexual stimulation through pure bodily sensation, nothing comes from this but temporary physical joy which dissipates soon after. If we rationalize sex and sexuality too much, we probably come to reject it because we find, as many moderns might say, ‘no good reason for sex besides bodily stimulation’ and we might lose the great beauty of the body in its naturality and ability at the same time by rationalizing to no end. In other words, we no longer bring new life into the world, which is the most beautiful aspect of creation itself – the birth of new life. Through their union true sexuality is to be enjoyed.
There is a beauty to sex and sexuality of just the body, which is why Augustine says that they are “physical signs and manifestations” which, are aimed at reminding us, of the intellectual side to sex – the coming to an understanding of the purpose of sex and sexuality. Fertility is the beauty and joy to be found in sex and sexuality. There is nothing, properly speaking, bad about the body or sexual desire – this is an integral part of what makes us human after all. But like all things, there is an end to it. That end to sex and sexuality is still linked with the harmonious ontological portrait of the human: being, knowledge, and desire. Sex without knowledge is in-animate sex and therefore cannot produce enduring satisfaction. Knowledge without sexual desire is equally faulty since this would be a suppression of eros which is natural to our composite human nature. Only through their unity can the pure health and fertility of being come into fruition and enduring joy in sex and sexuality found.
Chapters 25-End: The Sacramental Economy
Chapters 25 to the end, but also including the preceding chapters we just looked at, have been called Augustine’s defense of the “sacramental economy,” the mysteries, joy, and beauties to be found in life and our odyssey toward participating in this sacrament of life. The Sacramental Economy, in Catholic philosophy, is the end to which Wisdom established the world and invites us to participate in. To which sex and sexuality is a part of, but that deserves its own treatment apart from the rest of Augustine’s treatment of the sacramental economy that closes Book XIII.
Augustine ends his commentary on Genesis through a longwinded reflection on the sacramental economy, the “sacred order” that brought all things into being, gave it form, endowed it with beauty, reason, desire, and so on, and what it means for us who live in it. In continuing to understand the allegorical and figurative language, who reads into the fruits that are borne from trees to represent the good works of humans which is necessary for life to continue to flourish on the earth. Thus, we live by work. Without work we will perish. Both physically and spiritually. Thus, Augustine reads works as a call to civilization – it is something that builds, produces, “bears fruit,” and from this building and working magnificent joys prop up all over and nourishes the land. (Unlike certain Protestant groups, however, proper works which bear fruit and new life is a result of the grace of coming into communion with Wisdom itself. True works, in the sense of bringing life and light, rather than destruction, is a form of grace – after all, St. James says faith without works is dead faith. Works are the visible sign of Wisdom’s grace in the world.)
There is still a problem though. “This food nourishes only those who take joy in it, and there is no joy in it for those whose own hungry bellies are the god they worship.” Augustine is saying here that not all want to partake in this works-oriented process of building. They would rather be their own idols. All the works of mercy, art, community-building, plurality of the creation, are of nothing to these people who would rather sink back into the abyss of the sea (which is chaos and disorder) rather than work the land and build the stairway to sing those songs of ascent that Augustine spoke of in Chapter 9. The sacramental economy, like all other things, is an invitation to participate – to grow, to build, to bear fruit, to extend courteous hand to others, and so on. From this the true blossoming fruits of civilization emerge, that happiness we seek becomes manifested, but only if we accept our place in the cosmic order.
This is why the renewal of the mind is so important. Wisdom leads to understanding, from this understanding emerges proper action as a reflection of intellectual virtue which makes life joyful, this is the bearing of fruits. “His nourishment was joy.” Man does not live by bread alone. Toiling away endless just for material consumption does not bring the same level of joy as coming to understand the beauty of the world, helping others, forming families, having children, making art, etc. As Augustine says, “He now rejoices that they have returned to these good works. He is glad because they have borne fruit once more, like a field restored to fertility.” Fertility is joyful. Work is joyful. Beauty is joyful.
The problem, again, is ignorant wretches. “Ignorant men and unbelievers need sacraments of initiation and miraculous portents.” This is important to remember in light of what Augustine said in Chapter 21, “The living soul no longer looks for great miracles since it is not such as must see signs and miracles happen or it will not believe.” The miracle of life and new life is right before you. There are no “miracles” like suspensions of the laws of nature. Miracles are signs of what is directing you to truth and wisdom. People who need “miracles” are themselves foolish for not understanding the great continuous “miracle” of life right before their eyes. The foolish and the unwise, then, are like the fish devouring each other in the sea, constantly twisting and turning back and forth without order – constantly nagging “more, more, more” when they should really just sink in the beauty and majesty of the world, pardon the pun.
From this, all things are very good. As Augustine goes on to state, “The same can be said of every material thing which has beauty. For a thing which consists of several parts, each beautiful in itself, is far more beautiful than the individual parts which, properly combined and arranged, compose the whole, even though each part taken separately, is itself a thing of beauty.” Augustine returns to the notions of beauty in pluralism as being greater than beauty in universality or singularity. This is, yet again, Augustine’s not-so subtle dig against the materialists and monists who are still prevent in Late Antiquity. Everything is good and has beauty to it – which is why no thing, properly speaking, is evil (Augustine treats this subject in some detail in Book VII). There is a hierarchy of beauty, however, the highest beauty found in pluralistic composition which makes a whole and in its wholeness is reflective of the Trinity’s own plurality of Father (Love), Son (Wisdom/Reason), and Spirit (Truth).
Thus, as Augustine claims beginning in Chapter 29, God “speaks” through all the signs of the things he has brought forth into being with beauty, as well as the voice within us (the voice of the Logos) which allows us to come to understanding of the world and our place therein. “It helped me to understand,” as Augustine notes repeatedly. Yet, not all want to participate in this beauty, or come to this understanding of the order to the world and everything contained therein. “The mind hostile” to beauty, to majesty, to fertility, are the claims of the “madmen” as Augustine says. Thus, the madmen are people who do not possess or recognize truth – they only seek to tear down and destroy, to sink in the abyss of the deep and bring everything and everyone down with them.
Augustine’s epistemology comes onto fuller display in the final chapters, we he begins discussing the nature of signs and things which he more fully articulated in De Doctrina Christiana. Again, all things exist, properly understood, as signs of something: beauty, wisdom, compassion, etc., which point back to the ultimate thing to be enjoyed: God. “Thanks be to you, O Lord, for all that we see!” as Augustine proclaims. Here we can see Augustine’s rejection of idealistic monism – the real world is a combination of things and sings, of corporality and spirituality, of things to be observed which then require thoughtful reflection upon to come to understanding. The beauty and goodness of the world proclaims the majesty of Wisdom (God).
When coming to a discussion of the Sabbath – the day of rest, Augustine understands this as the eternal and enduring rest (happiness) that we find in God and God alone. All the beauties, works, and blessings, all the fruit-bearing, artwork, and the building together, all the love, companionship, and all other joys of the earth, all bring us closer to the Author of it all. Thus, we see, the “hope” is not a transformation of the world, a transformation (which would be a revolution) of the natural order, or any such eschatological expectations (Augustine does not even know of that 19th century idea of the “Rapture” which began from Anglo-Irish evangelist John Nelson Darby). It is the goodness and beauty right before us, calling us to participate with it.
CONCLUSION
Having written over 10,000 words on a commentary of just Book XIII of Augustine’s Confessions, and not even remotely touching on all the aspects we could have (entire books and dissertations come from explanations of single chapters), we begin to see how complex the philosophy of Augustine is as well as beginning understand the story of Genesis (he later wrote an entire commentary over the Book of Genesis). It has nothing to do with “creation” per the fundamentalists whatsoever. It has everything to do with coming to understand ourselves and the world around us. It is one giant allegory of anthropology, cosmological anthropology, and epistemology (at least in the foci I have brought forth).
In sum, all things subsist in beauty and wisdom. Wisdom is eternal; it is the light that shines forth day to day, night to night, illuminating the world and Cosmos in all of its beauty. The Spirit that moves over the Deep is the Truth of Wisdom calling all things “below” to rise up and participate in the flourishing of life: the enjoyment of beauty, to bring forth greater beauty, to embrace fertility in all its forms, to direct one’s life to the highest Good which will quench your thirsting soul. It is about the renewal of the mind to come to understanding. That means truth does exist and we have the possibility of knowing it.
Furthermore, in some sense, Augustine reads Genesis 1, from the very beginning, as the story of human growth from being of desire in chaotic torment to taking on form, coming to acquire knowledge, participating with Wisdom, elevating out of the waters and onto the land, and the building of civilization from which happiness flow. This is not really an account of evolution as some people claim, it is Augustine’s account of what Latin philosophy remembers as Rationes seminales (seminal reason). Seminal reason is the process by which life grows from “seed” and develops into being and takes on greater understanding and fertility as it grows. This idea is not unique to Augustine, it is found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus, as well as neo-Platonic Christians of earlier generations like Tertullian, Origen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa. It was retained by the Augustinian tradition in Western Catholicism, especially by people like St. Bonaventure and also St. Thomas Aquinas. That said, Augustine does see an organic growth and taking on of form, so to speak, as we grow from seed to tree in keeping to his imagery and understanding of what those images actually mean for us.
Humans are, in Augustine’s understanding, beings formed by knowledge and desire. Lack of knowledge, or lack of desire, essentially means our being crashes and twists about. We become alienated from our nature, depressed – we lash out, and begin to destroy. At the same time, “knowledge” without desire misses the beauty of the world itself. Desire without knowledge means we live like the fish of the sea. Knowledge (which is to say our capability for reason) and desire (which is to say all phenomenological impulses) are meant to go together. In this harmony we come to understand, in this understanding we “take form” which is our being at happy rest with itself. From this begins our opportunity, then, to participate in the wisdom, beauty, love, and truth of the world. “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient, and Beauty ever new! Late have I loved you!”
The famous dictum “you are what you love” is Augustinian. You become what you love according to Augustine. And this has consequences, far and wide, not just for yourself but everyone and everything around you since we are social animals. St. Irenaeus summed up what Augustine explained in his commentary on Genesis, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” For Augustine, all life is called to the light and to take on the form of beauty and flourishing. And this is the joy to be found in this life.
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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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