Saint Augustine on Genesis: Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees and on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis : An Unfinished Book (The Fathers of the Church, 84). Este artículo no está disponible.Saint Augustine on Genesis: Two Books on Genesis Against the Manichees and on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis : An Unfinished Book (The Fathers of the Church, 84)

No other part of the Hebrew Scriptures, aside from the Psalter and sections of the prophet Isaiah, captured the interest and aroused the attention of the early Church as did the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. Augustine of Hippo, the early Latin Church's profoundest scholar, devoted three treatises to these chapters. The first two ― On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees and his Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis ― are early works. The third and longest ― The Literal Meaning of Genesis ― was produced at the height of Augustine's maturity and has been ranked with his Confessions, The Trinity, and The City of God. The range, depth and genius of Augustine's thought, which begin to appear in the two earlier writings, are on full display in the third. This volume brings these three works together for the first time in English and provides a valuable and comprehensive introduction to each one.

Augustine's Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book represent the first two of five explanations of the beginning of the Book of Genesis that he undertook between 388 and 418. In the first, a commentary on Genesis 1-3, Augustine counters the ignorant and impious attacks against Scripture by the Manichees, with whom he was a ""hearer"" for nine years. The second would have been a hexaemeron, a commentary on the six days of creation, but, as Augustine admits, his inexperience in scriptural exegesis collapsed under the weight of the burden, ""and before I finished one book, I gave up the labor that I could not sustain."" Although Augustine agrees that many things in Scripture may seem absurd to the unlearned, he holds that they can produce great pleasures once they have been explained. It was this tenet, realized in his spiritual rather than corporeal interpretation of Scripture, that led him to counter the impious attacks the Manichees used to attract those who sought a more intellectual understanding of God over and against an anthropomorphic view. Augustine's brilliant assimilation of Christian revelation and the intellectual faith of the Neoplatonic circle around Ambrose in Milan gave rise to his ""spiritual"" interpretation of Genesis 1-3 in the Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees. In On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book, Augustine succeeds in presenting an ad litteram interpretation for twenty-five verses before arriving at the difficult verse on man's having been made to God's image and likeness. At this point he breaks off because, in the words of John O'Meara, ""it either tended to blasphemy or could not be reconciled with the Catholic faith."" Perhaps because he later writes that he considers his literal attempt to interpret Genesis a failure, the texts herein translated have become today, in light of modern scriptural studies, fascinating and invaluable examples of Augustine's developing thought on significant philosophical and theological issues in the interpretation of Genesis.