Literal Commentary on Genesis

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.13 · 1.14–2.4 · 2.5–2.14 · 2.15–3.10 · 3.11–3.23 · 3.24–4.11 · 4.12–4.24 · 4.25–5.2 · 5.3–5.13 · 5.14–6.4 · 6.5–6.16 · 6.17–7.8 · 7.9–7.26 · 7.27–8.7 · 8.8–8.20 · 8.21–9.8 · 9.9–9.19 · 10.1–10.12 · 10.13–10.24 · 10.25–11.14 · 11.15–11.30 · 11.31–12.2 · 12.3–12.13 · 12.14–12.23 · 12.24–12.35 · 12.36–12.37

1. 1.1Augustine sets out the questions raised by Genesis 1:1–2 when it is read as a record of events and not only figuratively.
2. 1.2Augustine asks how God said “Let there be light” and concludes that God speaks in his eternal Word, not by a sounding voice.
3. 1.3Augustine asks whether the light of Genesis 1:3 is spiritual and why “God said” is not used of heaven and earth in 1:1.
4. 1.4Augustine explains that “in the beginning” names the Son as Beginning of still-formless creation, while “God said” names him as the Word who forms it by turning it to himself.
5. 1.5Augustine contrasts the Son’s life, which is wisdom itself, with the creature’s life, which is formless until it turns to Wisdom.
6. 1.6Augustine finds the Trinity in the opening of Genesis: the Father in “God,” the Son in “Beginning” and “said,” and the Holy Spirit in the Spirit borne over the waters and in God’s seeing that it was good.
7. 1.7Augustine explains that the Spirit is mentioned after the unformed earth so that his being “borne over” it shows God’s love as abundance, not need.
8. 1.8God loves his creation so that it may exist and abide, and Genesis signals both by the Spirit borne over the waters and by God’s seeing that it was good.
9. 1.9Augustine rules out a sounding voice before light and proposes that “Let there be light” was spoken in the eternal Word and impressed on the spiritual creation, possibly itself the light.
10. 1.10Augustine raises the difficulty of evening and morning on the first day, before the sun, given that day and night always coexist on different sides of the round earth.
11. 1.11Augustine asks why the sun was needed if day already existed, and weighs suggestions about the first light.
12. 1.12Augustine explores how day and night could alternate before the sun and where the waters were gathered on the third day.
13. 1.13Augustine asks when the visible forms of earth and water were created, since no day of creation records it.
14. 1.14Augustine argues that the formless matter God created is what Genesis 1:1–2 describes in simple words before the days begin.
15. 1.15Augustine explains that formless matter is prior to formed things in origin, not in time; Scripture narrates in sequence what God made at once.
16. 1.16If Genesis 1:2 describes formless matter, there was no formed mass to cast night’s shadow, and Augustine finds no model for light alternately sent out and drawn in.
17. 1.17Augustine proposes that the first light may be the spiritual creation enlightened by Wisdom, sets aside an allegorical reading of evening and morning, and explains them as the end of one work and the sign of the next.
18. 1.18Augustine reports a Syriac reading of Genesis 1:2 (“brooded over”) and warns against headlong assertion in obscure questions where the faith allows several opinions.
19. 1.19Augustine sets out how to weigh rival readings against certain knowledge and warns that Christians who speak ignorantly about nature, claiming Scripture’s support, bring Scripture into contempt with unbelievers.
20. 1.20Augustine explains why he has offered several interpretations and rebukes both learned critics of Scripture and weak believers who are overawed by them.
21. 1.21Augustine states his rule: what is demonstrated about nature is not contrary to Scripture, what contradicts the faith is false, and the reader should seek first the author’s own meaning, then a meaning consistent with the context and with sound faith.
22. 2.1On the second day, Augustine sets out the natural-philosophical objection to waters above the heavens and warns against using Psalm 136:6 against what is known of the weights of the elements.
23. 2.2Augustine shows by experiments with vessels that air naturally rises above water.
24. 2.3Augustine reports the view that the heaven is pure fire above the air, so that neither air nor water could stay above it.
25. 2.4Augustine praises one writer’s explanation of the waters above the firmament as clouds above the air and adds that infinitely divisible water could also rest as vapour above the highest heaven.
26. 2.5Augustine reports an argument that the coldness of Saturn shows waters above the heavens and affirms that, whatever their nature, the waters are there on Scripture’s authority.
27. 2.6Augustine rejects a reading that splits “God said” and “God made” between Father and Son and explains each formula as referring to the eternal Word, the creature’s bounds, and the Spirit’s goodness.
28. 2.7Augustine notes that the pattern of repetition differs from day to day, so it cannot be explained by distinguishing Father and Son.
29. 2.8Augustine proposes that each work exists first in the Word, then in the knowledge of the angels (the first light), and then in its own kind, which explains the threefold formula “God said,” “so it was done,” “God made.”
30. 2.9Augustine says the biblical authors knew the truth about the shape of the heaven but the Spirit did not teach such matters, and he shows how “skin” and “vault” can be reconciled with a spherical heaven.
31. 2.10Augustine declines to settle whether the heaven moves, noting that “firmament” need not mean it stands still and that either view fits the observed motions of the stars.
32. 2.11Augustine explains why earth and water are not said to be made by “Let there be” but only separated on the third day: Genesis 1:2 had already named their formless matter.
33. 2.12Plants are treated as a distinct work from earth and water but placed on the same day because they are rooted in the earth.
34. 2.13Augustine asks why the lights come on the fourth day and proposes that the first day is the spiritual creation, days two and three heaven and earth, and days four to six the moving parts that fill them.
35. 2.14Augustine asks how three days could pass before the lights made “for times,” suggests non-temporal meanings for day, night, evening and morning, and explains the signs and times as useful seasonal signs, not astrology.
36. 2.15Augustine declines to say whether the moon was created new or full, holding that God made it perfect either way, and explains “beginning of night” as “rule of the night.”
37. 2.16Augustine sets aside speculation about the size and distance of the stars, rebukes astrologers’ claims about the sun, and holds to Scripture’s statement that the sun and moon are the two great lights.
38. 2.17Augustine rejects astrological fatalism, citing plants, animals and twins such as Jacob and Esau, and attributes true predictions to deceiving spirits, warning Christians to avoid astrologers.
39. 2.18Augustine leaves open whether the heavenly bodies have ruling spirits and warns against rash belief in obscure matters.
40. 3.1On the fifth day Augustine notes that the air, nearest to heaven, is also called “heaven” and “heavens.”
41. 3.2Augustine interprets 2 Peter’s statement that the heavens perished in the flood as referring to the lower air, and explains why water creatures and birds come first.
42. 3.3Augustine explains that air is not omitted from Genesis: its upper part belongs with heaven and its lower, moist part with earth and water, from which the birds were brought forth.
43. 3.4Augustine reports a theory matching the five senses to the four elements.
44. 3.5Augustine explains that sensing belongs to the soul, which works through the subtler elements of the body in each of the senses.
45. 3.6Augustine argues that the Genesis order of lights, water creatures and land creatures reflects the order of the elements, the higher air counting as heaven and the lower, moist air as earth.
46. 3.7Augustine explains that birds come from the waters because the air they fly in is moist, and that they fly “along” the firmament, not in it.
47. 3.8Augustine explains the phrase “creeping things of living souls” and refutes, from his own observation of fish at Bulla, the claim that fish have no memory.
48. 3.9Augustine criticizes the philosophers’ scheme assigning creatures to the elements, including demons to the air and gods to the heaven.
49. 3.10Augustine reconciles the philosophers’ view of demons as airy beings with Genesis, and suggests the fallen angels were thrust down into the murky lower air as a prison until the judgment.
50. 3.11On the sixth day Augustine distinguishes the four-footed animals, creeping things, beasts and cattle of Genesis 1:24–25.
51. 3.12Augustine asks what “according to its kind” means and why it is not said of man, linking it to propagation and noting that one man was made, from whom the woman came.
52. 3.13Augustine asks why the water creatures and humans alone are blessed with “increase and multiply” and says it is repeated for humans to show that begetting children is no sin.
53. 3.14Augustine asks whether tiny creatures born from decay were created in the six days and suggests that the beginnings of those born from bodies were present in those bodies from the start.
54. 3.15Augustine suggests that harmful creatures were created harmless and harm human beings only to punish vice or to test and perfect virtue, citing Paul and Daniel.
55. 3.16Augustine explains that animals preying on one another belongs to the ordered beauty of creation and teaches human beings to strive for eternal salvation.
56. 3.17Augustine says it does not matter if animals devour the dead, since God will re-form the body, and Christians should not fear any manner of death.
57. 3.18Augustine explains that “fruit” includes every benefit and that thorns and thistles may have existed before the fall but became a burden to man afterward.
58. 3.19Augustine reads “Let us make man in our image” as showing the plurality of persons and “in the image of God” as showing the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
59. 3.20Augustine locates the image of God in the rational mind and explains why “and so it was done” is omitted for the creation of man, as for the first light.
60. 3.21Augustine finds it hard to reconcile man’s original immortality with God’s gift of food, and suggests that procreation might have occurred differently in immortal bodies.
61. 3.22Augustine rejects the view that only the soul was made on the sixth day, and holds that the woman, having the same rational mind, was also made in the image of God, though Paul calls only the man the image of God in a figurative sense.
62. 3.23Augustine argues that “and so it was done” on the sixth day refers to man’s knowledge of the gift of food, not to the fulfilment of “increase and multiply.”
63. 3.24Augustine suggests that man is not called good separately because God foreknew his sin, though with all creation he is “very good,” since God orders even sinners within a beautiful whole.
64. 4.1Augustine opens his treatment of the seventh day by asking whether the six days passed away or remain in the created things themselves, and turns to the perfection of the number six.
65. 4.2Augustine explains why six is the first perfect number (equal to the sum of its divisors 1, 2, 3) and relates its parts to the order of the works of the six days.
66. 4.3From Wisdom 11:20 Augustine asks where measure, number, and weight existed before creation, and suggests that in their highest sense God himself is measure, number, and weight.
67. 4.4Measure, number, and weight exist also in actions, souls, and loves, and point to a measure, number, and weight without measure that is not itself created.
68. 4.5Even if Wisdom 11:20 means only that things were made to have measure, number, and weight, their reasons were in God's Wisdom, and his counsel does not change as they do.
69. 4.6God saw the things he arranged neither outside himself nor as images in a mind, but in a way proper to him alone, which mortals cannot know as he knows himself.
70. 4.7The mind sees the perfection of six by reason, not by images; God perfected his works in six days because six is perfect, not the reverse.
71. 4.8God's rest on the seventh day does not mean he was tired; he is said to rest when he gives the rational creature rest in himself, as he is said to know when he makes us know.
72. 4.9The Spirit is said to be grieved, and God to know, when the saints grieve or come to know through his gift (Eph 4:30; Gal 4:9).
73. 4.10Before taking God's rest as a figure of ours, Augustine insists that it must first be understood as God's own rest after the works that were really his.
74. 4.11Augustine sets God's rest on the seventh day beside Christ's words “My Father is working until now,” and reads the Sabbath as a shadow fulfilled in Christ's rest in the tomb.
75. 4.12God rested in that he established no new kinds of creature, but he never ceases to govern and sustain what he made; otherwise it would collapse at once.
76. 4.13The Sabbath, kept carnally by the Jews, is removed in the time of grace; the believer keeps a perpetual Sabbath, resting from former works through baptism.
77. 4.14God sanctified only the day of his rest, not any day of work, which suggests that rest counts for more than work, as with Mary and Martha.
78. 4.15By sanctifying the day of his rest God showed that he did not need his works nor gain blessedness from them; he who is always at rest showed his rest to us on the seventh day.
79. 4.16God's rest is that he needs no good besides himself, not even the good things he made; it is set forth on the seventh day, after the perfection of six, so that we may long to rest in him.
80. 4.17Our true rest is not in ourselves or our works but in God, after good works that are his gift; God sanctified the day of rest because he is blessed in himself, not in his works.
81. 4.18The seventh day has a morning but no evening because creation, once perfected, begins to rest in God's rest and will never cease to remain in him; the first six days were not ordinary solar days.
82. 4.19A second explanation: God's rest itself has no beginning, but his rest from his works, by not needing them, began when they were perfected and has no end.
83. 4.20Augustine asks what the seventh day is, since God created nothing on it, and proposes that it is the seventh repetition of the one day God created when he made light.
84. 4.21Rather than contradict Scripture, Augustine prefers to admit ignorance of how the first light made day and night, and holds that the seventh day is the seventh repetition of the day God made.
85. 4.22Augustine proposes that if the first light is spiritual, evening is its knowledge of creatures in their own nature and morning its turning to praise God and to know in the Word the next creature to be made.
86. 4.23Knowledge of things in the Word of God is day, knowledge of them in their own nature is evening; so too the life of the faithful is day compared with unbelief but night compared with the vision of God.
87. 4.24The angels know all creation first in the Word of God (day) and then in itself (evening), and at once refer it to God's praise (morning); were they to turn to themselves, they would fall like the devil.
88. 4.25Night is never named in the six days because the angels refer their knowledge of creatures in themselves to the praise of God; they are “the day which the Lord has made.”
89. 4.26The one day God made is repeated through the six days by the angels' spiritual knowledge, not by the sun's circuit; the day of Genesis 1:4–5 differs from the solar day of Genesis 1:14.
90. 4.27Our ordinary seven-day week is a kind of counterpart to the days of creation but very unlike them, and judgment about those days should not be rash.
91. 4.28Augustine argues that his account of evening and morning as angelic knowledge is a proper, not merely allegorical, sense, while leaving room for a better interpretation.
92. 4.29Even if the angels know all at once, they still contemplate the Creator, know creation, and praise God, and so have day, evening, and morning together.
93. 4.30The whole world has day, night, evening, and morning at once in different places; so in the heavenly homeland there is always day, evening, and morning together.
94. 4.31Augustine asks whether, during the creation itself, the angels knew things successively, day by day, as Scripture narrates.
95. 4.32Even without intervals of time, angelic knowledge follows an order of causes: things are known first in the Word, then made in their nature and known in themselves, then referred to God's praise.
96. 4.33God created all things at once through his Wisdom, implanting seminal reasons that unfold over time; the six days are narrated in order for those who cannot grasp simultaneous creation.
97. 4.34All things were made both at once and in an order of earlier and later, as the eye's gaze reaches the sun instantly yet passes first through nearer spaces; both Scriptures are true.
98. 4.35Augustine concludes Book 4: the first day is the angelic creation, present to all God's works in an order of knowledge, and the seventh day means that God, before his angels, rests in himself, needing none of his works.
99. 5.1Opening Book 5 with Genesis 2:4–6, Augustine argues that “when the day was made, God made heaven and earth and every green thing” confirms that God made one day, repeated as the seven days.
100. 5.2“Every green thing of the field,” made on the third day before the sun, shows that the day of Genesis 2:4 is not the solar day.
101. 5.3The unusual wording of Genesis 2:4 brings all creation back to one day, confirming from the neighboring page that God made all things at once, while Scripture walks slowly with the weak.
102. 5.4Plants were made “before they sprang up” causally, as the earth received the power to bring them forth; God now works in time from what already exists, as when he planted paradise.
103. 5.5Time began with the motions of creatures; God made all things at once in a causal, not temporal, order, the earth and waters receiving their creatures potentially, to unfold over time.
104. 5.6“God had not rained… and there was no man to work the earth” means that God first made plants not as now, through rain and human work over time, but all at once by his word.
105. 5.7The spring that watered the whole earth marks the beginning of creation's unfolding over time; Augustine offers conjectures about how it relates to the four rivers of paradise.
106. 5.8Scripture records only what the Spirit judged sufficient; Augustine's conjectures aim only to show that it contains nothing absurd that would keep a reader from faith.
107. 5.9Whoever finds Augustine's conjectures impossible should seek another that shows Scripture true, for it is true even if not shown so; he then takes up an objection about the spring watering the mountains.
108. 5.10The spring could have watered the whole earth by alternating floods, or as the hidden waters of the abyss feeding many streams, or “spring” may be a singular used for many springs.
109. 5.11Genesis 2:4–5 closes the account of God's simultaneous first works; from the spring of 2:6 onward Scripture narrates his works through time.
110. 5.12Of the reasons in the Word, the first works, and God's present works, only the last is known by the senses; the other two must first be believed on divine authority.
111. 5.13The eternal reasons of creatures are in the Word of God, who knew all things before they were made; rational minds have the Word as their true light.
112. 5.14Augustine argues for reading John 1:3–4 as “What was made, in him is (or was) life,” meaning that created things existed in the Word as life before they were made.
113. 5.15Whatever the reading of John 1:4, created things existed beforehand as life in God's knowledge, as Job 28 also shows; God did not make what he did not know.
114. 5.16God, who is “I am who am,” is ineffable, yet nearer to us than many created things; it is better to perceive him even a little than to comprehend all creatures.
115. 5.17Augustine turns to the works God made all at once, the world made through the Word “from formless matter,” finished in six days yet made “when the day was made.”
116. 5.18Before they were made, creatures existed in God's knowledge but not in their own nature; the angels know them both ways, but God knows them made as he knew them before.
117. 5.19God needs no messengers to know; the angels, who are the first day, knew the mystery of Christ hidden from the ages, and God is said to know when he makes things known.
118. 5.20God still works in creation, not by making new kinds, which were all established at the first, but by moving and governing all things so that they unfold the ages folded into them.
119. 5.21Against those who limit providence to the upper heavens, Augustine cites Psalm 148 and Christ's words on sparrows and grass to show that even the lowest things are ruled by God.
120. 5.22The wonderful order in the bodies of living creatures shows that providence governs even the lowest things and human affairs, though its order there is often hidden from us.
121. 5.23As a whole tree is contained causally in its seed, so the world, created all at once, contained causally all that water and earth would later bring forth in time.
122. 6.1Opening Book 6 on Genesis 2:7, Augustine asks whether man's formation from dust recapitulates the sixth day or whether man was first made hidden in causes and later formed visibly.
123. 6.2If Adam and Eve were formed visibly on the sixth day, the planting of paradise, Adam's sleep, and the naming would all fall on that day, but these require time and so were not made with the simultaneous creation.
124. 6.3Since speech and the events of Genesis 2 require time, the forming of Adam from clay and of Eve from his side belong to God's work in time, not to the simultaneous creation.
125. 6.4“He brought forth further” shows that the trees of paradise grew visibly in time from what had been made causally on the third day; no kind of creature was left out of the six days.
126. 6.5Because the animals were “formed further” from the earth when Adam named them, Adam and Eve were formed visibly in ordinary solar days, while both had been made causally, as seeds, on the sixth day.
127. 6.6Augustine explains that on the sixth day man existed not as a living person or even a visible seed but invisibly and causally, and was later formed visibly from clay, Eve from his rib.
128. 6.7Augustine rejects the idea that only the souls of the first humans were made on the sixth day, since sex and bodily food imply bodies.
129. 6.8God's words to the first humans on the sixth day were not sounds in time but the Word inserting into creation the causes of things to come, including man to be formed in his time.
130. 6.9God knew Jeremiah before forming him, but no one acts well or badly before birth; Adam, existing only causally in the first creation, had no merit or sin until he lived in his own time.
131. 6.10Augustine distinguishes four modes in which creatures exist: eternally in the Word, causally in the world's elements, visibly in their own time, and again in seeds that carry the power of generation.
132. 6.11God's first works were both completed (nothing new would be created) and begun (they were seeds to unfold); so Adam was created in his own time, visibly in body and invisibly in soul.
133. 6.12God did not form Adam with bodily hands; his “hands” are his power. Man excels not because God made him personally but because he was made to God's image in mind; his upright body befits this.
134. 6.13Whether Adam was made at full age or grew as in the womb, God is not bound by the numbers of time he gave to creation, as the water made wine and the rod made serpent show.
135. 6.14The causal reasons were created fit both for ordinary gradual growth and for sudden, wonderful works, as God pleases.
136. 6.15Adam was formed from clay as the first causes held; whether those causes fixed the manner of his forming or only its possibility, God's will decided it, and his will is the necessity of things.
137. 6.16We can know what is possible in a thing's nature, like a young man's aging, but not whether it will happen, which depends on God's will.
138. 6.17What God wills and foreknows necessarily comes about, though lower causes may point otherwise, as when Hezekiah, granted fifteen more years, died when God had foreknown.
139. 6.18Adam, most probably made in full manhood, was formed as the first causes held; causes God kept in his own will cannot contradict those he placed in creation.
140. 6.19Was Adam's first body animal or spiritual? Paul (1 Cor 15:44–49) cites Genesis 2:7 to show the first body was animal; the spiritual body comes at the resurrection.
141. 6.20If Adam had an animal body, how do we recover the immortality he lost? Some therefore held that Adam's body was changed into a spiritual one in paradise.
142. 6.21If Adam's body was spiritual in paradise, its trees and fruit could not be literal; and if he would not have died without sin, how could his animal body be mortal?
143. 6.22Against those who say Adam would have died bodily even without sin, Paul (Rom 8:10–11) shows that bodily death too comes from sin.
144. 6.23Adam's body could have been animal in paradise and, had he not sinned, been changed into a spiritual body later without death; so paradise need not be taken figuratively.
145. 6.24We recover the righteousness Adam lost, renewed in mind after God's image, but our body will be renewed into something better, a spiritual body, which Adam did not yet have.
146. 6.25Adam's body was mortal by nature but able not to die by the gift of the tree of life; through sin it became not mortal (as it was) but dead.
147. 6.26Our body is called “dead” because the necessity of dying passed from Adam's sin to his offspring; what Adam lost was righteousness and holiness, which we recover in the new man.
148. 6.27We recover in the mind the image of God that Adam lost; the spiritual body is something better that Adam never had, and he “lost” it only in failing to attain it.
149. 6.28On this view Adam had an animal body but a spiritual mind in God's image, which he lost by sin; spiritual men can still sin, as Paul shows. Augustine holds the view provisionally.
150. 6.29Augustine closes Book 6 by admitting that the question of the soul's origin is very difficult and unresolved for him, and defers it to Book 7.
151. 7.1Augustine turns to the human soul, states his rule of neither rashly affirming nor rashly denying what is doubtful, and notes that the Greek verb means “breathed upon.”
152. 7.2Augustine rejects the view that the soul is part of God's substance, since God is unchangeable and the soul changes.
153. 7.3As a man makes breath from his body and not from his soul, so God's breathing means he made the soul from something subject to him, not from his own substance; Isa 57:16–17 calls the soul God's breath.
154. 7.4Since God is not the soul of the world but above all creation, he did not make the soul by breathing from himself or from bodily elements.
155. 7.5Augustine asks whether God made the first soul from nothing or from some spiritual material created in the six days, as the body was made from earth.
156. 7.6Augustine considers whether, as the body had earth for its material, the soul might have had a spiritual material of its own kind, while noting that earth already had a place in the world.
157. 7.7Augustine questions what such a spiritual material could be: living or not, rational or not, perhaps rational in possibility as an infant's soul is.
158. 7.8If the soul came from a happy life it would be a decline, not a forming; even so, its merits would begin only when it began its own life in the body.
159. 7.9An irrational soul cannot be the material of the rational soul, both because body would then be the soul's material and because it would imply transmigration, which the catholic faith rejects.
160. 7.10Men become like beasts by their conduct in this life; the philosophers' argument from likeness of character cannot support transmigration, which they probably meant figuratively.
161. 7.11Memories of former animal lives are false or demonic; the Manichees are worse than the philosophers, since they make the changeable soul God's own substance.
162. 7.12The soul was not made from earth, water, air, or heavenly fire, since no body can become a bodiless soul.
163. 7.13Augustine summarizes the physicians' account of air and fire in the body and of the brain as the center from which the senses are directed.
164. 7.14The soul uses the bodily senses as messengers but, in understanding God and itself, turns from them, so it cannot be of their bodily kind.
165. 7.15The soul is not made of any element, but governs the grosser parts of the body through the finer ones, light and air.
166. 7.16“Living soul” means that man began to have sensation and spontaneous movement, not merely the inner motion of growth that plants have.
167. 7.17God breathed into the face because the senses are centered in the front of the head, and sensation leads movement.
168. 7.18Augustine reports the physicians' three ventricles of the brain for sensation, memory, and movement, and insists that the soul uses them as organs but is none of them.
169. 7.19The soul surpasses all bodies and governs the body through light and air, which serve it as messengers and servants; when they fail, the soul departs.
170. 7.20Deep thought can make the soul stop walking or forget where it is going, which shows that the soul is distinct from its bodily instruments.
171. 7.21The soul is not a fifth kind of body, since it knows itself directly and holds images of bodies without being one; it is neither body nor God, and whatever its origin, it was made by God.
172. 7.22If the soul did not yet exist, Augustine asks in what creature its causal reason could have been placed on the sixth day, and finds the idea of an unmentioned spiritual “parent” of souls hard to accept.
173. 7.23Placing the soul's causal reason in the angelic “day” would make angels the parents of souls, which is hard to say, and placing it in a bodily creature is harder still.
174. 7.24Augustine considers, as more acceptable, that the first soul itself was created in the six days and kept hidden until God breathed it into the body.
175. 7.25If the soul pre-existed, why was it sent into the body? Augustine weighs whether it inclined to the body by its own will or came at God's bidding, in light of Rom 9:11.
176. 7.26The soul was not created with foreknowledge of its future sins; God is praised for making a creature with free choice that can live justly by faith and is justly punished for sin.
177. 7.27A soul made to be sent into a body would will it by nature; if made in the first works, it was made either from nothing or from formable spiritual material prior in origin, not time.
178. 7.28Augustine shows the difficulties of holding the soul made only when breathed into the body, restates his view that God created all things together, and affirms only that the soul is from God, not God's substance, bodiless, made from nothing, and immortal in its own way.
179. 8.1Augustine adopts the view that paradise was both a real bodily place and figurative, and argues that Genesis is historical narrative, not figurative speech like the Song of Songs.
180. 8.2Augustine recalls that his early books against the Manichees interpreted Genesis figuratively, quotes his earlier hope for a literal reading, and now attempts it.
181. 8.3The trees of paradise were brought forth in time from the power given the earth on the third day; God's words on the sixth day were spoken by his eternal Word and told to men in temporal sounds.
182. 8.4The tree of life was a real tree and also a sacrament signifying Wisdom, as the rock was real and signified Christ; such events differ from parables, which need not have happened.
183. 8.5The tree of life was a real tree signifying Christ as Wisdom, and also strengthened the body in lasting health; Augustine leaves open whether souls after death are in bodily places.
184. 8.6The tree of knowledge was a real and harmless tree, named for the knowledge of good and evil that disobedience to God's command would bring by experience of punishment.
185. 8.7The four rivers of paradise are real rivers (Augustine identifies Geon with the Nile and Phison with the Ganges), which shows that the account of paradise is to be taken first literally.
186. 8.8Adam was placed in paradise to work it, not with the toil of punishment but with the delight of farming, which shows that God gives the growth.
187. 8.9Providence works in the world naturally through God's hidden governance and voluntarily through angels and men; Adam's farming in paradise was an innocent and thoughtful pleasure.
188. 8.10Augustine weighs senses of “to work and to keep”: man keeping paradise by obedience, or, preferably, God working and keeping man so that he may be just and happy.
189. 8.11Scripture first calls God “Lord God” when he places man in paradise, to teach man that it benefits him to live under God's dominion, since God needs nothing from us.
190. 8.12Man is justified and enlightened only as long as he remains turned to God, as air is bright only while light is present; we are God's handiwork, saved by grace.
191. 8.13The forbidden tree was not evil in itself; the prohibition showed the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience as such, since sin sought escape from God's dominion.
192. 8.14Adam learned good and evil by the experience of disobedience; evil is the loss of good, and Christ alone chose the good without experience of evil, the singular example of obedience.
193. 8.15The tree was rightly named for the knowledge of good and evil even before anyone ate from it, as a tree could be named for the fullness it would give.
194. 8.16Adam could understand the words “evil” and “death” from their opposites, life and good, as we understand “nothing,” “empty,” or “resurrection.”
195. 8.17Augustine notes the shift from singular to plural in the command and suggests that God's command was meant to reach the woman through the man, as Paul instructs.
196. 8.18God probably spoke to Adam not only inwardly but in some bodily form, as later to Abraham and Moses, since Adam and Eve heard his voice walking in paradise.
197. 8.19Augustine introduces the twofold work of providence by affirming that the one God, the Trinity, is contained by no place and changed by no time.
198. 8.20God, unmoved by time or place, moves the spiritual creation through time and the bodily creation through time and place.
199. 8.21To understand how God moves creation, one should see how the soul, not moving in place, moves the body through fixed joints, its will not being moved through place.
200. 8.22Even if one doubts that the soul is not moved in place, one must believe that God's substance is moved neither in time nor place, or one does not hold him unchangeable.
201. 8.23The unchangeable Trinity orders all natures and wills: natures without will are subject to those with will, in an order of subordination, and evil wills are punished by their own wickedness.
202. 8.24The holy angels, contemplating God's unchanging truth, carry out his commands in time among lower things; God's providence governs natures and wills.
203. 8.25Bodies are helped from within by God and from without by bodily means; angels are helped only inwardly by God's truth and love, but they help other creatures outwardly through visions and bodies.
204. 8.26When God acts in time and place through his providence, his own substance does not change; he is more inward and more outward than all things, older and newer than all.
205. 8.27God speaks through his own substance only in creating and enlightening; to others he speaks through creatures, as in Adam's case; Augustine rejects the heretical view that the Son was visible in his own substance before the incarnation.
206. 9.1Augustine quotes Gen 2:18–24 and explains “besides” by his doctrine of causal creation, and the birds “from the earth” by the wide sense of “earth.”
207. 9.2However God said that man should have a helper, he did not speak through his own substance; what matters is what was said, which is contained in eternal Truth.
208. 9.3Woman was made as a helper for the procreation of children; Augustine sees no reason why there could not have been honorable marriage and childbearing in paradise without lust or pain, leading to a change into spiritual bodies without death.
209. 9.4Adam and Eve did not come together in paradise either because they sinned soon after the woman's creation or because God had not yet commanded it.
210. 9.5Augustine argues that work and companionship cannot be why woman was made, since a male would serve better; only procreation explains it.
211. 9.6Had they not sinned, Adam and Eve, after having children, could have been taken to a better state without death, as Enoch and Elijah were.
212. 9.7Woman was made for procreation; marriage is good and a remedy for incontinence, and its threefold good is fidelity, offspring, and sacrament, which forbids separation and remarriage after dismissal.
213. 9.8Those who deny intercourse in paradise may think all intercourse sinful, running from one vice to its opposite and condemning even marital intercourse for procreation.
214. 9.9Procreation was not only for succeeding the dying; the earth was to be filled from one pair, whereas angels and the risen saints do not marry.
215. 9.10Before sin, bodies were animal but not doomed to die, and the first couple could have begotten children by will without lust; through sin death and the law in the members entered, which marriage orders and continence restrains.
216. 9.11The woman was a real woman made from the man, mother of all; she was made for offspring, procreated without the law of sin had there been no fall; Augustine leaves open whether souls come from parents or otherwise.
217. 9.12The bringing of the animals to Adam really happened, but for a prophetic signification; Augustine's aim is to defend the literal history, not to expound the figures.
218. 9.13The details of the woman's formation from Adam's rib during sleep, and the word “built,” were done to signify something to come.
219. 9.14God brought the animals to Adam not as hunters drive game or by a voice, but through angels who move animals by sights and appetites, as he commanded the whale and the worm in Jonah.
220. 9.15Only God, the Trinity, creates natures; angels may have served in Adam's sleep and the removal of the rib, as farmers and physicians serve nature, but the woman herself was made by God alone.
221. 9.16That the woman was made from the man without intercourse is as credible as that Christ was born of a woman without intercourse; we lack a likeness only because we do not know how angels serve God's creating.
222. 9.17Created things have seminal reasons for their natural course; God can make from them what exceeds that course, as with Aaron's rod, Sarah's child, and Balaam's donkey, but only what he made possible in them.
223. 9.18Some causes, including grace and the manner of the woman's formation, are hidden in God and not in created things; wonders foretelling Christ were done through angels, but God alone creates and restores.
224. 9.19Adam's sleep was an ecstasy in which he shared angelic understanding, so that on waking he spoke prophetically of marriage, words Christ attributes to God.
225. 10.1Augustine opens the question of the origin of the soul, rebutting the inference that Eve's soul came from Adam's because Scripture does not say God breathed into her, while leaving the question unresolved.
226. 10.2Augustine recalls his earlier conclusion that the first man's soul was made in the six days while his body's reason was made in the world as in a seed, avoiding harsher alternatives.
227. 10.3Augustine sets out three possible views of the origin of souls, shows that none contradicts the six-day creation, and undertakes to examine them without rash affirmation.
228. 10.4The soul is a creature of God, not body, beast, or God; if not from these, it is from nothing or from some rational spiritual creature, and the question should be settled from Scripture rather than conjecture.
229. 10.5No Scripture says souls come from angels or elements; Ezekiel's spirit from the four winds is a figure of resurrection, as Christ's breath signified the Holy Spirit without being his substance.
230. 10.6Texts such as Isa 57:16, Ps 33:15, and Zech 12:1 fit either the propagation of souls from Adam or the creation of each soul, and may refer rather to renewal by grace.
231. 10.7Wis 8:19–20 seems to favor souls coming from above, but it cannot mean that souls are sent into bodies for prior merits, which contradicts Rom 9:11; some refer it to Christ's soul.
232. 10.8Ps 104:29–30 fits either view of the soul's origin, but is better understood of grace, by which the proud are humbled and renewed by God's Spirit.
233. 10.9Eccl 12:7 supports neither view against the other, but shows that the first soul was made from nothing and returns to God, not to a created source.
234. 10.10Augustine knows no text as clear as those on the first soul that would settle whether later souls come from parents; even a text about Eve would not settle the case of offspring.
235. 10.11Traducianists argue from Rom 5:12–19 and from the church's practice of baptizing infants that the soul too must come from Adam, otherwise an infant's soul would be innocent and need no grace.
236. 10.12Carnal desire arises from soul and flesh together; the flesh “desires” as the soul desires through it, a result of the first sin, which the faithful under grace must keep from reigning.
237. 10.13This view avoids both absurdity and Manichaeism; the question concerns infants, not older children, who sin in many ways, nor the sins of parents, which do not harm children.
238. 10.14Those who hold that God gives new souls answer that souls joined to the flesh of sin are weighed down and need grace; infants need the sacrament of baptism, by which the penalty of original sin is loosed.
239. 10.15If an infant dies unbaptized, those who hold that new souls are given seem unable to explain its loss; Augustine suggests they might appeal to God's foreknowledge, but finds the cause hidden and decisive for neither side.
240. 10.16The creationist answer that God provides baptism for infants whose future piety he foresees would make salvation depend on unlived lives; the traducianists' appeal to Rom 5 and infant baptism stands unless refuted by clear reason or Scripture.
241. 10.17Wis 8:19–20 seems at first to favor souls sent from above, but its “good soul by lot” fits poorly with that view and can be read in favor of transmission from the parents.
242. 10.18If Wis 8:19–20 is applied to Christ, his soul did not come by transmission from Adam, and his flesh, conceived of a virgin without the law of sin, was the likeness of sinful flesh; Augustine would say his soul came from where Adam's came.
243. 10.19From Heb 7:4–10 Augustine argues that Christ, unlike Levi, was not tithed in Abraham, and so his soul did not come by transmission from Adam.
244. 10.20Traducianists may answer that Levi was in Abraham by seminal reason through concupiscence, Christ only by bodily substance; Augustine, still undecided, holds that both sides agree Christ's soul is not transmitted from Adam.
245. 10.21Augustine concludes that Christ's soul either came by transmission without the stain of sin or did not come by transmission; for other souls he still wavers, holding only that the soul is not a body or a bodily harmony.
246. 10.22John 3:6 is claimed by those who hold souls come from above, but traducianists read it their way, and in any case it concerns spiritual rebirth.
247. 10.23The arguments are nearly balanced except that infant baptism weighs in favor of the transmission of souls; the church's custom of baptizing infants is an apostolic tradition not to be despised.
248. 10.24Augustine warns traducianists not to think the soul a body, since that leads to thinking God a body; justice and wisdom too are bodiless.
249. 10.25Augustine criticizes Tertullian's view that the soul and God are bodies, noting his admission that every body is passible, and rejects his airy, limbed soul as based on dream images.
250. 10.26Augustine refutes Tertullian's comparison of the soul's growth to beaten gold, since a body cannot spread without thinning, and closes the book with his doubt on the soul's origin unresolved.
251. 11.1Augustine quotes Genesis 2:25–3:24, restates his rule of defending the literal narrative, and explains why the first couple's nakedness caused no shame before sin.
252. 11.2Augustine explains that the serpent is called “most wise” in a transferred sense, its cunning coming from the devil who filled it.
253. 11.3The devil did not choose the serpent; he could act only through the animal God permitted, since all power comes from God.
254. 11.4Augustine confesses he cannot fathom why God allowed the temptation, but suggests that a virtue never tested would win little praise, and that God rightly uses even evil wills.
255. 11.5A hidden pride in the man's soul preceded the temptation, and the fall taught by experience that no creature fares well apart from God.
256. 11.6Temptation is permitted because tested virtue is more glorious, and the wicked serve to exercise and warn the good.
257. 11.7A nature able not to sin is good, though one that never wills sin is better; God rightly made both, and the wicked too have their place.
258. 11.8To demand that all creatures be of the higher kind is to abolish the lower kind; God creates even the foreknown wicked to display both wrath and mercy.
259. 11.9God foreknew but did not cause the evil will of the wicked; he made them knowing what good he would bring out of their evil.
260. 11.10God could have turned every evil will to good but did not will to; his reason is his own, though it preserves the kind of creature that learns from others' punishment.
261. 11.11The punishment of some corrects many, as everyone sees in his own household; God, not the author of evil, creates the wicked for the benefit of the good.
262. 11.12The serpent was used because providence permitted it and for the sake of what it would signify; irrational animals are subject to rational creatures, as when Christ let demons enter swine.
263. 11.13Against heretics who give the devil a separate evil principle, Augustine holds that his nature is good as God's creature and that he fell by proud and envious will.
264. 11.14Augustine asks whether the devil ever lived in happiness with the angels, and argues that pride came before envy, not envy before pride.
265. 11.15Pride, a general avarice for one's own excellence, is the beginning of all sin; the two loves, holy and private, first divided the angels and now form the two cities of the just and the wicked.
266. 11.16Scripture does not say when the devil fell, but it may be that he fell from the very beginning of his creation, in keeping with John 8:44.
267. 11.17If the devil once lived happily among the angels, why did he not foreknow his fall? Augustine weighs the view that he belonged to a lower order of angels in the world.
268. 11.18The first man, though he did not foreknow his sin, could be happy in paradise in a lesser way, rejoicing in hope of the change to come.
269. 11.19Augustine finds no scriptural ground for two classes of good angels and leans to the view that the devil fell from the first moment of his creation.
270. 11.20Some hold, from Job 40 and Psalm 104, that the devil was created evil rather than corrupted by his own will.
271. 11.21The view that the devil was created evil contradicts the goodness of creation and divine justice; it is his own will, not his nature, that is punished.
272. 11.22Job's “beginning of the Lord's fashioning” refers not to an evil nature but to God's providence, which makes the devil's malice serve the saints.
273. 11.23The devil fell from the beginning not because he was made evil but because, as soon as he was made, he turned from the truth and so never received the happiness offered him.
274. 11.24Isaiah's fall of Lucifer, spoken against the devil under the figure of the king of Babylon, fits mostly his body: apostates from Christ and the church.
275. 11.25Ezekiel's lament over the prince of Tyre, fallen from God's paradise, is applied to the devil's body: heretics and backsliders who fall from the church.
276. 11.26Augustine leaves the time and manner of the devil's fall open but holds firmly that the fallen angels are kept for judgment and that the eternal life of the holy angels, and ours, is certain.
277. 11.27The devil spoke through the serpent as an instrument and worked inwardly on the woman, but only as far as God permitted.
278. 11.28The serpent did not understand the words spoken through it, just as the possessed do not understand what demons say through them; snake-charming testifies to the old link between demons and serpents.
279. 11.29The serpent is called cunning because of the devil who used it, as a pen is called lying; it spoke as Balaam's ass did, without becoming rational.
280. 11.30The woman's answer shows she remembered the command, making her transgression inexcusable; she believed the serpent only because pride was already in her mind.
281. 11.31“Their eyes were opened” does not mean they had been blind, but that after sin they noticed their members with a new desire; the phrase is a transferred word in a literal narrative, as at Emmaus.
282. 11.32On the day of the sin they lost the condition sustained by the tree of life; their bodies became mortal and subject to bestial desire, at which the soul blushed and covered itself.
283. 11.33God's voice “walking” in paradise was produced visibly through a creature, not by the invisible divine substance moving in place; the couple hid as people troubled when God turns away his face.
284. 11.34God questions Adam first because the command came through him; the couple, now ashamed, tried to hide from God, who probably appeared to them in human form through a creature.
285. 11.35Adam and Eve, questioned, blame God and the serpent instead of confessing; their pride is contrasted with the psalmist's “I have sinned against you.”
286. 11.36The curse on the serpent is figurative, describing the devil as tempter of the human race; only the fact that it was spoken must be taken literally.
287. 11.37The pains of childbirth are a literal punishment; the husband's rule existed before sin, but the servile form of that rule, like slavery itself, arose from sin.
288. 11.38The toils laid on Adam are literally true of human life, though a prophetic meaning is also intended; Adam named his wife “Life” by a wonderful prompting.
289. 11.39The garments of skin were a real deed with a meaning; “one of us” refers to the Trinity, and the words turn the serpent's promise back on proud Adam as a warning.
290. 11.40Adam had to be separated from the tree of life, which either sustained his body or was a sacrament of wisdom, as the excommunicated are kept from the altar; the expulsion and the cherubim are real events with a spiritual meaning.
291. 11.41Augustine reports and rejects two views: that the sin was a premature grasp at knowledge, and that it was intercourse before marriage, the latter as ridiculous and contrary to the literal sense.
292. 11.42Adam, being spiritual in mind, was not deceived by the serpent as the woman was; like Solomon with his wives, he sinned out of affection, unwilling to grieve his companion.
293. 12.1Augustine opens Book 12 with the question of Paul's rapture to the third heaven and paradise (2 Cor 12), noting that Paul himself did not know whether he was in the body.
294. 12.2Images seen in sleep or ecstasy are not distinguished from bodies until one returns to the senses; Augustine gives examples from his own dreams and a countryman's ecstasy, and compares the visions of Peter, John, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
295. 12.3Augustine distinguishes bodies, images of bodies, and incorporeal realities seen by the mind, and insists that Paul knew for certain he was caught up to the third heaven, doubting only whether in the body.
296. 12.4What Paul saw was truly the third heaven, not a bodily sign or a dream image, for he carefully distinguishes what he knows from what he does not know.
297. 12.5Paul saw the third heaven itself, not an image; what he did not know was whether his soul remained in his living body or left it as in death during the vision.
298. 12.6Reading “Love your neighbour as yourself” illustrates three kinds of vision: bodily (the letters), spiritual (the image of the absent neighbour), and intellectual (love itself understood).
299. 12.7Augustine names the three kinds of vision bodily, spiritual, and intellectual, and surveys the senses in which Scripture uses “bodily” and “spirit.”
300. 12.8Augustine takes his term “spiritual” vision from 1 Corinthians 14, where spirit, which receives signs and images, is distinguished from mind, which understands them.
301. 12.9Prophecy belongs chiefly to the mind that understands; Joseph was more a prophet than Pharaoh who saw the dream, and Daniel, who both saw and understood, most of all.
302. 12.10Augustine treats “intellectual” and “intelligible” as synonyms, setting aside the question whether anything is understood without itself understanding.
303. 12.11Bodily vision reports to spiritual vision and spiritual to intellectual, as shown by Belshazzar's writing on the wall, interpreted by Daniel, and Peter's vision of the sheet, understood when Cornelius's men arrived.
304. 12.12Spiritual vision is distinguished from bodily vision while awake, but in fever, intense thought, ecstasy, or through the influence of another spirit its images can seem like bodies; meaningful images must be shown by some spirit.
305. 12.13Augustine leaves open how the soul comes to see prophetic images, but holds that images shown by a good spirit are God's gift, while a deceiving spirit can be discerned only by the gift of discernment of spirits.
306. 12.14Bodily and spiritual vision can be deceived, but intellectual vision cannot; mistaking images for bodies, as Peter did, does no harm so long as faith and understanding are not led astray.
307. 12.15Sexual images in dreams, and the bodily results that follow, are not sins, since the dreamer cannot distinguish image from body; yet a good disposition of soul can show itself even in sleep, as Solomon asked for wisdom in a dream.
308. 12.16The five senses arise from light mixed with the elements; the spirit, superior to every body, forms the images of bodies in itself, which makes memory, speech, song, and planned action possible.
309. 12.17Augustine reports cases known to him: demons revealing thoughts and distant events, a delirious man who foretold a presbyter's coming and a woman's death, and a boy in pain who saw visions of the blessed and the damned.
310. 12.18Augustine confesses ignorance of the causes of visions and divinations, compares them to dreams, and notes that people marvel at rare things while ignoring equally wonderful everyday ones.
311. 12.19Visions, like bodily changes, may arise from the body (sleep, fever, illness) or from a spirit; an evil spirit makes demoniacs and false prophets, a good spirit true prophets.
312. 12.20When visions arise from the body, the body does not form them; a hindrance in the brain turns the soul's attention inward so that it forms or beholds images it cannot distinguish from bodies, unlike a hindrance in the eyes, as the blind show.
313. 12.21Whether a vision arises from the body or from a spirit, its content is of the same spiritual nature; Scripture shows that God works through dreams as well as waking visions.
314. 12.22Images shown by a good spirit always signify something; even people joking—fake astrologers and a dancer mimicking the possessed—have foretold true events; how angels communicate such images is hard to know.
315. 12.23Augustine lists the many ways in which likenesses of bodies are formed in the spiritual part of the soul: perception, memory, imagination, planning, speech, dreams, illness, and rapture.
316. 12.24The three kinds of vision form an order: bodily vision depends on spiritual, spiritual is judged by intellectual, and spiritual vision stands in the middle between the other two.
317. 12.25The soul is deceived in bodily and spiritual vision by mistaking likenesses for the things they resemble, but in intellectual vision it either understands truly or does not understand at all.
318. 12.26Beyond spiritual visions, the soul may be raised to intellectual vision, where truth is seen without images, virtue is simply to love what one sees, and God's glory is seen “mouth to mouth,” as with Moses.
319. 12.27Moses desired to see God not through a bodily appearance but in his very substance; Numbers 12 shows that he was granted to see God “mouth to mouth,” which no one does while living in the bodily senses.
320. 12.28If the third heaven is intellectual vision, there God's glory is seen face to face by the pure in heart; Paul may have been shown the eternal life to come, which may also be called paradise.
321. 12.29Whatever the number of heavens others propose, Augustine knows only three kinds of vision—bodily, spiritual, intellectual—and confesses ignorance of the degrees within each.
322. 12.30Within spiritual vision there are excellent, divine images shown by angels, compared with which ordinary dream images are as earth to heaven.
323. 12.31Within intellectual vision the soul sees the virtues in itself, but above itself sees the light that is God, by which it understands all it understands.
324. 12.32After death souls are carried, not to bodily places, but to spiritual places resembling bodily ones, of punishment or of rest; these are real, and the underworld exists, though its substance is spiritual.
325. 12.33The underworld is real and receives souls after death; Christ descended to free some from its pains; but Augustine finds no place where Scripture calls the rest of the righteous, Abraham's bosom, the underworld.
326. 12.34Paradise may mean any place where souls fare well—a good conscience, the church, Abraham's bosom; the underworld is pictured as “below” because it is the place of sorrow; the third heaven, the vision of God by the mind, may be the paradise of paradises.
327. 12.35Souls need their bodies at the resurrection because a natural appetite to govern a body holds them back from the full vision of God; the spiritual body will be no burden but a glory.
328. 12.36In the resurrection all three kinds of vision will remain, free of error; even Paul lacked the angels' full knowledge, which the saints will have when the mortal puts on immortality.
329. 12.37Augustine notes that earlier catholic interpreters read the third heaven as bodily, animal, and spiritual levels, explains that his terms differ only in name, and closes the twelve books.