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Book 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Confessions, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Faith and Conversion
Sin and Salvation
Interpreting the Bible
God, Goodness, and Being
Time, Eternity, and the Mind
Summary
Analysis
[3] Augustine considers the “formless matter” that existed before God created the earth. [6] He has long struggled to grasp what this phrase could mean—he used to picture hideous shapes because he couldn’t imagine something existing that lacked form. Eventually, he gave up on such images and instead considered mutability, or the vehicle for all the changing forms in the world. [7] But even the state of mutability could only have been made by God; and nothing can have been made of God’s own substance without, like Jesus, being equal to him. So, Augustine concludes that God created the heavens and the earth from nothing.
Genesis 1:2 describes the earth, newly created by God, as “without form and void.” Readers might guess by now that when Augustine lingers over the idea of “formless matter,” he is primarily concerned about the Manichean and Platonic interpretations current at the time. In particular, the idea of formlessness as implying some sort of primitive chaos, as many creation myths conceived of the universe’s original material, would be offensive to him, since for Augustine, the very idea of “being”—with God as ultimate “Being”—implies order and meaning, not meaningless disorder. So Augustine instead conceives of formlessness as implying changeableness, or a potential for order and structure.
Themes
[8] Augustine continues to meditate on the days of creation as described in Genesis—how God first made light (the first day), the sky (the second day), and the earth and sea (the third day), rendering the formless matter into something visible. [9] The “Heaven of Heavens,” in which God dwells, must be “some kind of intellectual creature” because it partakes in a sense of God’s eternity, yet unlike all created matter, it does not change. [10] Augustine keeps praying that God will speak to him, for although Augustine has faith in the Bible, it’s a difficult book to understand.
Moving through the days of creation as described in Genesis 1, Augustine builds on this idea of the world being rendered from mutability into an intelligible structure. The idea of God’s dwelling place being an “intellectual creature” is difficult and may reflect a Platonic concept of a world-soul that’s created but constantly contemplates the divine. Augustine continues to model a humble approach to interpreting difficult passages.
Themes
[11] In his heart, Augustine perceives God’s voice telling him a number of things, such as that God does not change, that God has created all things that are, and that God is Being. [13] Having considered all this, Augustine interprets the opening words of Genesis to refer to the “Heaven of heavens” and the formless earth that existed before the creation days began, because if the earth had then had form, it would inevitably have changed, and change always involves the passage of time.
While the details Augustine focuses on might seem like minor sticking points, or at least not the details a modern reader would find most salient when encountering Genesis 1, for Augustine they’re foundational to his understanding of God’s eternality and immutability—issues he saw being attacked in the day’s rival cosmologies. Recall that Augustine believes that change only occurs within time, so when Genesis 1:1 states that God created the heaven and the earth before the first “day” of creation, it must refer to entities other than the created forms listed in subsequent verses.
Themes
[15] Augustine now makes his case not to enemies of God’s word, but to those who disagree with his interpretation of it. He argues that God’s substance and his will are both eternal and consequently do not change. This means that God doesn’t will things over and over again or will different things at different times. So, he didn’t create the world by a new act of will, either. He knows that his opponents don’t deny these things. He further expands on the idea that the Heaven of heavens is mutable, because it is other than God and not co-eternal with him, and yet it never undergoes change, because it never turns away from God, clinging to God by love and “[drawing] warmth and light from [God] like a noon that never wanes.” He knows his opponents will grant that all this, too, is true.
Here, Augustine isn’t primarily concerned about Manichees or other non-Christian critics, but fellow Catholics who disagree with his views of Genesis 1. He doesn’t identify precisely who those critics are or what their objections were, but he begins by establishing those points with which his critics definitely agreed with him—such as that God cannot change, and that while God’s dwelling-place, the Heaven of heavens, can change, it is so constantly and uninterruptedly sustained by God’s light that it does not change (so, it is subject to change like other creatures, but unlike them, it never changes).
Themes
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[16] Again, Augustine doesn’t address those who deny the truth of the Bible; rather, he seeks to reason with those who, like him, regard Scripture as authoritative. God alone can judge between him and them. [17] Some of these opponents, Augustine says, claim that when Moses wrote the opening words of Genesis, he was referring to the entire visible world, then going on to explain the day-by-day creation of the world. Others claim that “heaven and earth” in Genesis refers to the formless void out of which everything was subsequently made. Still others maintain that it refers to the whole of visible or invisible creation, not yet formed, or to some rudimentary beginning of things.
Augustine runs through some competing interpretations of the opening of Genesis, again making it clear that he’s addressing fellow Catholic interpreters who uphold the Scriptures as God’s word, not heretical interpreters, like the Manichees, who denigrate parts of the Scriptures. While these distinctions appear to be quite minor, their existence shows that during this period, arguments over God’s nature, the creation of the world, and how to interpret the Bible were thought to have many downstream effects that interpreters needed to handle wisely.
Themes
[18] Augustine duly considers all these possibilities and concludes that, given the two greatest commandments (to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbor as oneself), and assuming that all who read the Bible faithfully are doing their best to understand what the writer meant, it won’t actually hurt him to understand the Bible’s words, in this instance, in a different sense than others do. Indeed, God can show readers a different meaning than the meaning (itself a true one) that the biblical writers originally had in mind.
The two greatest commandments come from Matthew 22, where Jesus sums up God’s law. Augustine argues that sincere Christian interpreters who follow those commandments can and will disagree with one another, and that’s okay. This argument underscores the fact that for Augustine, the Bible is God’s word and his Holy Spirit operates through it, applying that word to readers’ minds and hearts as he sees fit.
Themes
[19] After all, Augustine concludes as he summarizes the arguments he has just presented, the main point here is that God indeed created heaven and earth. [20] Every reader who believes the words that Moses wrote simply chooses one of these explanations to account for the words, “In the Beginning God made heaven and earth.” [21-22] The same applies to the verse, “The earth was invisible and without form, and darkness reigned over the deep,” about which well-meaning readers might hold a variety of different opinions, such as that this formlessness refers to what God made heaven and earth out of—formless matter that God surely made, even though Scripture doesn’t indicate when, any more than it indicates when God made the cherubim and seraphim, or the waters above the earth.
Augustine returns to the central point that all Catholic interpreters would maintain against their Manichean and other opponents, which is that God created everything and created it wholly good. In making this point, he also reminds his fellow interpreters that the Bible doesn’t explain everything—for example, the Bible attests that there are different kinds of angelic beings, but it doesn’t indicate when or how those beings were made. Augustine implies that the Bible includes those details that God, in his providence, wants human beings to wrestle with and remains silent on points that aren’t necessary for them to know.
Themes
Augustine imagines those who disagrees with his particular interpretations of these verses saying that even if Genesis doesn’t specifically record that God created something, neither faith nor reason should lead a person to doubt that he did, in fact, make it.
Again, Augustine establishes that even fellow Catholic interpreters who disagree with him on certain points agree with him on this and all the previous points—in other words, that they agree on a great deal.
Themes
[23] Thinking over such potential disagreements, Augustine observes that two kinds of disagreement might arise over a message given in words—disagreement over the message’s truth itself or over the messenger’s meaning. Augustine isn’t interested in dealing with those who would fall within the first category; but he prays that he might live in harmony “with those who feed upon your truth in the fullness of charity.” [24] With confidence, he can say that God created all things, visible and invisible; yet he can’t with equal confidence say that he knows precisely what was in Moses’s mind when he wrote a given verse. He is simply certain that Moses saw and wrote the truth.
Augustine comments on the nature of biblical interpretation—that is, what kinds of problems are likely to arise when different people interpret a written document. Again, those who would disagree with him on the nature of the Bible (whether or not it’s divine scripture and thus truthful) aren’t his concern, but those who, like him, rely on God’s word as their spiritual sustenance (“feed upon your truth”) and must live together within a united church. Importantly, he is not arguing for an interpretive free-for-all—that the text’s meaning is relative—but for a proper humility about what can be known for sure.
Themes
[25] Augustine prays that God will give him patience with those who insist that only their interpretation of Moses’s words is correct and fail to see that multiple interpretations can be consistent with the truth. When people do this, it’s not because they have some special insight, but simply because they are proud. God’s truth cannot be monopolized by any one person, and it is foolish to dispute over it.
Again, Augustine doesn’t make it clear if he has specific prideful interpreters in mind here, but his bigger point is that Christians shouldn’t fight over relatively minor points in the Bible, which they cherish in common. Charity—love for one another as fellow members of Christ—as a guiding rule of biblical interpretation should circumvent pride.
Themes
[26] Augustine knows that if he had been in Moses’s position, he could not have expressed God’s truth any more clearly. [27] He likens Moses’s writing to a spring whose waters “are carried by a maze of channels over a wider area,” brief yet supplying “a host of preachers” who pronounce its truth “in more prolix and roundabout phrases.” Some people read Scripture simplistically—for example, when Genesis says that God said, “Let there be light,” they imagine audible speech that began and ended. But Scripture’s simplicity cradles such “children” like a mother, and these naïve readers may safely remain in the “nest.”
Augustine uses the image of a spring of water supplying a vast area to describe how the words of Genesis nourish preachers with truth, which they may then expound upon in more or less complex ways to their hearers. (While some modern critical scholars dispute Moses’s authorship of the first five books of the Bible, it would simply have been taken for granted in the early church.) He also emphasizes that it isn’t unfaithful to take a more naïve interpretation of these verses, a view that sets him apart from the Manichees of his youth (who would have disdained such readers).
Themes
[28] For other readers, however, Scripture is more like an orchard through which they can joyfully fly, feeding on its fruit. Such readers understand God’s unchanging being and will and accept one of a few different legitimate interpretations of “In the Beginning,” which Augustine runs through again.
This section is reminiscent of Augustine’s earlier observation that while the Bible is simple enough for children to understand, it contains depths to challenge the wisest readers. The latter readers are the ones Augustine has been addressing throughout this section, and he compares them to birds with the freedom to explore and feed more widely than those who must remain safely in the “nest.”
Themes
[29] Augustine raises some of the interpretive problems that these different views pose. One of the difficulties is that the concept of priority doesn’t always refer to priority in time. For example, in terms of origin, sound has priority over song—but a singer does not emit formless sounds which are only then shaped into song. Rather, the sounds that are heard are song. Augustine says this is similar to the way we should understand how God made heaven and earth “in the beginning”—first, he made the formless matter of which heaven and earth were made, but since there is only time where there is form, this is another case where priority must be understood in terms of origin, not temporality.
Again addressing those interpreters who are free to explore more obscure points, Augustine introduces a way of looking at the idea of “formless matter”—in terms of priority and not of time as such. That is, just as sound has priority over song, formless matter should be understood as having priority over the heaven and earth, but not in the sense of coming before it in time. Though readers might not agree that this interpretation makes sense (or is worth the space Augustine has devoted to it!), Augustine finds it important for the coherence of the biblical creation account.
Themes
[30] Augustine again prays that these various opinions may be held by people in such a way as to serve “charity.” Let those who explain Moses’s words in different ways love one another and love God, the words’ Source. [31] There is only one God, and God enabled Moses to write Genesis in the way he did, suited to many different minds. [32] Augustine prays that God will make clear whatever meaning it pleases him to reveal. From now on, Augustine will try to keep his comments on the Scriptures more concise.
Augustine reiterates that Christian readers must interpret the Bible in a way that promotes their love for one another, trusting God as the ultimate author and interpreter of scripture. More than the specific debates over the meaning of the opening verses of Genesis, this charitable stance is the most important takeaway from Book XII.
Themes
