Danny ChaiOK, so I just finished the 2nd volume of The Literal Meaning of Genesis by St. Augustine and it’s utterly fascinating, I have thoughts, though I doubt anyone will be interested.
First of all, it continues to amaze me how deep a thinker St. Augustine and other ancient Christian writers were. There’s this presumption that religion caught on basically due to ignorance, and once we progressed both in science and in reason we saw how primitive and unthoughtful religion was. Man, if you read Augustine you see how far that is from the truth. His level of thinking is incredible – he’s considered one of the great philosophers in history and it’s true. The depth to which he thinks things through is remarkable. This is the type of book that spends 20 pages discussing a single verse (specifically Genesis 2:7). I actually think the presumption is reversed – I think Christian leaders were much more thoughtful, considered, and knowledgeable in the past than they are now.
I also love Augustine’s approach to Scripture and science. He strongly believes both to be true. Scripture is the revealed word of God, and science reveals the truth of God’s creation. So he doesn’t fear either, or see how they could be opposed. Any apparent contradiction between the two is not that, but something to be figured out using reason, logic, and faith. That’s his approach to understanding Genesis, and I love that. It’s an approach I think we should keep in modern times, but we frequently do not.
It’s really striking what Augustine considers “literal” – in short, it’s nothing like how Christians use the word (as applied to Genesis) today. For him, “literal” means what the author intended. But that intention does not mean a modern type of literal sense. So Augustine’s “literal” interpretation of Genesis means he thinks all of creation in Genesis 1 was done simultaneously, where the days are indicative of facets of creation, not time periods. “Light” to Augustine means rationality, not actual light, as embodied by heavenly creatures / angels. So when God says “let there be light”, Augustine believes that’s God creating angels. There’s more but you get the idea – this is not a view contemporary Christians would call literal at all, but Augustine believed it to be so. What’s especially interesting is you can detect the conversation Augustine is having with other Christian ideas, and it’s clear that other early Christians (e.g. Origen in the 3rd century) took an even more allegorical view of Genesis than Augustine did. Jews did also – Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived during the time of Jesus, also took an allegorical view. In my opinion, taking the sort of hyperliteral interpretation of Genesis, the kind that people ridicule today, where the days of creation are 24 hours and so forth, is really a modern (past 200 years) invention, and does not do service to the historical Christian view or the intent of the authors of Genesis.
All that said, I think I kind of take Genesis more literally than Augustine, because of the principle he espouses – trust the science as much as you can. Like, I personally think the Big Bang Theory (the actual theory, not the TV show) aligns with Genesis to a surprising degree. I once heard an interview were some celeb said Genesis 1 makes no sense because you have light before the creation of sun or stars, and how can that be? But that’s what the Big Bang Theory (at least as I received it in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time) theorizes. The beginning of time is marked by a huge flash of light. It’s the first event in time, and stars come much later. In fact, modern cosmological theory suggests that the early universe had unequal areas of gas density, some of which were lighter, some darker, all before stars. So if you quibble with light being created before stars, take it up with modern physics. Even though I think the order doesn’t actually matter in terms of faith. All a side note.
The second volume is less about creation and more about the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, so there’s a lot less discussion of science, much more philosophy and theology. Which is good – the first volume’s largest weakness is that his science is based on Aristotelian physics, and his Scripture is based on Latin translations of the Old Testament (not the Hebrew), and inaccuracies in both lead to some odd conclusions. This second feels more like philosophy and theology, and it’s fascinating because it gives a view into what the ancients cared about.
For example, a huge part of the book deals with the origin of souls. Most everyone accepts that our bodies come from our parents; their physical stuff sprouts our physical stuff. Augustine spends a lot of time wondering: is that true of the soul? Our parents souls sprout ours? How would that work? So then are we all just pieces of Adam’s original soul (since presumably this would mean Eve’s soul came from Adam’s as well)? Or is it rather that souls somehow pre-exist our bodies, residing in some place, and they get implanted into bodies? (There’s some Scriptural evidence for this, although mostly in the Apocrypha.) In any case, how does that work with Jesus’s soul, assuming he has one? This gets into issues like original sin – it’s assumed that’s passed on by the flesh, but if the soul does not come from our parents, if it pre-existed, how is it right to put an innocent soul into sinful flesh? Augustine actually doesn’t have a conclusive answer, but his ideas are fascinating. Do people spend time thinking about this today? I feel like not, we’re shallower, these types of questions never even come up.
The last section of the book is also fascinating, although it has very little to do with Genesis, basically dealing with what heaven is, specifically the 3rd heaven Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 12, and how that relates to Eden. What does it mean to be taken up by the body? Or without the body? How does perception work without a body? If we can see outside of the body, is that like what we see when we dream? If there’s actual physical perception, how is that possible without a physical body? What is perception anyway? All interesting stuff. As a side note, Augustine discusses his experience of lucid dreaming, which is also interesting. He says he has sometimes become aware while he’s asleep that he’s dreaming, and tries to convince the people in his dreams that they are in a dream, and is unable to, which is funny.
All this to say, Augustine has amazing thoughts, and I find if profitable to read him. I’m not sure I’d recommend this particular book for everyone – it’s pretty dense. I recommended it to my boss and he said he found it difficult to get through. I myself had to read it in absolute silence and concentration to follow it. But if dense ideas are your thing, great read.