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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
How might premodern exegesis of Genesis inform Christian debates about creation today? Imagine a table with three people in dialogue: a young-earth creationist, an old-earth creationist, and an evolutionary creationist. Into the room walks Augustine of Hippo, one of the most significant theologians in the history of the church. In what ways will his reading of Scripture and his doctrine of creation inform, deepen, and shape the conversation? Pastor and theologian Gavin Ortlund explores just such a scenario by retrieving Augustine's reading of Genesis 1-3 and considering how his premodern understanding of creation can help Christians today. Ortlund contends that while Augustine's hermeneutical approach and theological questions might differ from those of today, this church father's humility before Scripture and his theological conclusions can shed light on matters such as evolution, animal death, and the historical Adam and Eve. Have a seat. Join the conversation.
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RETRIEVING AUGUSTINE’S DOCTRINEof CREATION
Ancient Wisdom for Current Controversy
FOR ERIC, KRISTA, AND DANE,
each of whom I admire
and whose friendship brightens
and enlarges life
Contents
Note on Citations
CITATIONS OF AUGUSTINE’S WORKS are generally drawn from the critical edition of Augustine’s Latin text in Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Tempsk, 1894–1900) and are listed as follows: CSEL, volume:part, page number. When a particular work is not included in CSEL, I have occasionally referenced it in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina (Paris: 1844–1855) and listed as PL volume:column. Unless otherwise cited, for Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis I have relied on the translations of Edmund Hill in the relevant volumes in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City, used with permission); for the Confessiones, I have used those of R. S. Pine-Coffin in Saint Augustine, Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1961); for De civitate Dei, I have used those of Marcus Dods in Saint Augustine, The City of God (Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2014, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45304.); and for De libero arbitrio, I have used those of Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff in On Free Choice of the Will (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964). Any exceptions to this practice are cited in the footnotes, as are references to Augustine’s other works, letters, and sermons.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WAS COMPLETED during my resident fellowship during the 2017–2018 school year at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, through a generous grant provided by the Templeton Religious Trust, as a part of The Creation Project overseen by the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding. I am very grateful to the Templeton Religious Trust for their generosity and vision, and to the Henry Center for their hospitality and support.
Our year in Chicago was a very fruitful season of learning, and over the course of the fellowship I benefited from interacting with a wide variety of people involved in the Creation Project. I enjoyed a weekly lunch discussion with the Henry Center staff and other fellows, including Tom McCall, Geoff Fulkerson, Joel Chopp, Dick Averbeck, Marc Cortez, Daniel Houck, Stephen Williams, and Nathan Chambers. In March 2018 we discussed an earlier draft of chapter 4, during which I received helpful feedback. At Dabar Conferences I especially benefited from interacting with William Lane Craig, J. Richard Middleton, Bill Kynes, A. J. Roberts, Fuz Rana, John Walton, John Hilbur, Jim Stump, and Paul Copan.
Starting during my years at Covenant Seminary and continuing through my time at the Creation Project, Jack Collins has contributed significantly to my understanding of the book of Genesis, and biblical hermeneutics more generally. I am grateful for his encouragement and all he has taught me. Matthew Levering was a great source of encouragement during this project, and went out of his way to give counsel and feedback about my work. During my time in Chicago I became friends with Todd Wilson, and my involvement with the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians has been an encouragement to me in my scholarship. Before and after our season in Chicago I spent time at Reasons to Believe as a visiting scholar, and I benefited much from my interactions there. I’m particularly grateful to Hugh Ross for his friendship and support.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was read as a part of the Colloquium on Creation and the Problem of Evil under the leadership of the Chicago Theological Institute, held at Wheaton College, March 23–24, 2018. Several paragraphs in the introduction and chapters one through three appeared earlier in a more popular-level form in the online periodical Sapientia.1 The following friends were gracious enough to review and comment on an earlier draft of several chapters: Scott Manetsch, Daniel Houck, Austin Freeman, Dave Lauer, and Eric Ortlund. Scott Manetsch was a help and encouragement to me in my effort to publish the book. I enjoyed working with everyone at IVP, and in particular I am indebted to David McNutt for his openness to considering this project and his helpful collaboration along the way.
My wife Esther deserves thanks most of all—for being willing to take a break from pastoral ministry in Southern California to have an adventure in the Midwest, embrace a snowy Chicago winter, and parent several young children (one of whom arrived during the fellowship), and through it all never wavering in her friendship, support, and commitment. One thing is for sure: I am blessed beyond what I deserve.
Introduction
Can Creation Debates Find their Rest in Augustine?
Observe the beauty of the world, and praise the plan of the creator. Observe what he made, love the one who made it. Hold on to this maxim above all; love the one who made it, because he also made you, his lover, in his own image.
IMAGINE A YOUNG MAN in his late teen years. He has recently moved to the city to go to school. In the course of his study, he becomes convinced that the Genesis creation account is inconsistent with the most sophisticated intellectual trends of the day. He rejects the Christian faith in which he was raised, giving his twenties to youthful sins and worldly ambition.
Eventually, he encounters Christians who hold to a different interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, and his intellectual critique of Christianity is undermined. He enters into a time of indecision and deep angst. His mother continues to pray for him. Finally, after much personal struggle, he has a dramatic conversion experience.
This is the testimony of St. Augustine (354–430), who is arguably the greatest of the church fathers and the most influential Christian theologian in the history of the church.1 But, in its broad outline, it is a story that seems to replay itself again and again today. The details are different, of course. For instance, our threat today comes from naturalism, while Augustine’s came from Manichaeism.2 But the overall scenario is only too familiar to us—particularly because today, stories likes this often lack a happy ending.
CREATION WAS AT THE HEART OF AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY AND LIFE
Many people are unaware of the role that Genesis played in Augustine’s conversion, and most would not identify the doctrine of creation as the high point in his theology. When we think of Augustine, we tend to think of his emphasis on divine grace, or his high doctrine of the church, or his penetrating insights into the Trinity.
But in many ways, the doctrine of creation is at the very heart of Augustine’s Christian faith, his pastoral vocation, and the overall shape of his theology. Had Augustine not heard St. Ambrose preach allegorically on Genesis 1 in 384, he might never have come to fight Donatism or Pelagianism. More significantly, Augustine continued to wrestle with the doctrine of creation throughout his life, and it became an integral part of his theology. Not only did he write three distinct commentaries on Genesis, but the doctrine of creation comes up at pivotal moments throughout his other important works. For instance, the Confessions climax into an exegesis of Genesis 1, and The City of God grounds its vision of the two cities in a lengthy treatment of the doctrine of creation, particularly the Genesis account.3
In all of this, Augustine wrestled with the doctrine of creation at a profoundly existential level. At the risk of overstatement, I might suggest that creation was to Augustine what justification was to Luther, or divine transcendence was to Barth—the area of theology that, because of a theologian’s own personal journey, comes to an especially vigorous expression and is visible in almost everything they wrote.
Because it was forged in the context of apologetic dispute, Augustine’s doctrine of creation has a kind of philosophical flair, rather than being strictly exegetically or pastorally driven. Even his exegetical works devote considerable space and energy to digressions concerning the origin of the soul, or the nature of memory, or various Manichaean views. Thus, in engaging Augustine’s doctrine of creation we gather a sense of how Christianity as a whole made sense to him—how it was better than its rival intellectual and religious systems at providing an explanation for the complexity of the world, the intensity of the contest between good and evil, and the strange longings of the human soul.
Augustine’s doctrine of creation was recognized as authoritative in his own lifetime. When Jerome was asked a question about the origins of the soul, his response enumerated five possible answers—but he ultimately commended his reader to go to the “holy and learned man, bishop Augustine, who could teach you viva voce, as they say, and explain his own view and, in fact, our view by himself.”4 Jerome’s own occasional differences with Augustine on this point make his deference to him in this context all the more revealing. In the modern era as well, interpreters of Augustine have detected the relevance of his work to science-faith issues. Galileo Galilei, for instance, quoted from Augustine’s commentary on Genesis over ten times in defense of his theories.5
Nonetheless, for all its significance, the doctrine of creation is not one of the better-known aspects of Augustine’s theology. As N. Joseph Torchia notes, “Despite the seeming inexhaustiveness of investigations into the life and work of St. Augustine of Hippo, his theology of creation remains a relatively neglected area of his thought.”6 Moreover, when Augustine’s doctrine of creation is engaged, it is often pressed into the service of a particular contemporary concern or ideology.7 Occasionally this leads to a certain distortion of Augustine’s views, such that one can find his name simultaneously called down on opposite sides of various debates. Already in the 1920s Henry Woods could lament the association of Augustine’s conception of rationes seminales with Darwin’s theory of biological evolution,8 and in recent years Alister McGrath has appropriated Augustine’s thought to provide a theological framework for engaging modern science, especially evolutionary theory.9 In the other direction, young-earth creationists balk at any association of Augustine with the earth being millions of years old,10 and are eager to claim his legacy as their own.11
In addition to these difficulties there stands the more general challenge of the persistence of certain unfavorable representations of Augustine’s thought and personality in popular impression, and occasionally in academic portrait. Perhaps because his influence on Christianity and Western culture has been so far reaching, he is sometimes read through the lens of that (real or perceived) influence. His reputation has been accordingly controversial. Rowan Williams, for instance, references the wide array of “clichés about Augustine’s alleged responsibility for Western Christianity’s supposed obsession with the evils of bodily existence or sexuality, or its detachment from the world of public ethics, or its excessively philosophical understanding of God’s unity, or whatever else is seen as the root of all theological evils.”12 Some of these views will be addressed throughout this book as they impinge materially on the topics covered, especially those that tend to border on caricature—for instance, Colin Gunton’s critique of Augustine as the progenitor of all the dreadful monisms that have deteriorated modern Western civilization. For the greater part, I hope that simply making fresh contact with Augustine will weaken or overturn many of the various unhappy “Augustinianisms” that continuously crop up in historical texts. For those who have only encountered Augustine indirectly, the mere experience of a careful reading of his actual writings is often enough to temper the popular image of a hardened defender of orthodoxy with the realization of a generous, expansive thinker of immense feeling.
RETRIEVING PREMODERN SOURCES FOR MODERN STRUGGLES
But why should we engage Augustine in the first place? The fact that Augustine cared deeply about creation need not entail that we who are interested in creation should care about him. Indeed, is it not an exercise in academic nostalgia to suppose that a figure from the fourth and fifth century can help us address challenges that are largely related to scientific discoveries of the last few centuries?
To be sure, we must recognize Augustine as a man of his times. I, for one, am dismayed at his views on women and sex, amused and perplexed at his speculations about dragons and incubi, and baffled by his theories of time and the soul. Any “retrieval” of Augustine that screens out the oddities of his thought and age will doubtless be artificial.
Nonetheless, I believe that precisely because of their alien feel, premodern theological resources can often serve as a helpful stimulus in contemporary theological work. Quite often, contemporary theology takes its shape in response to essentially modern challenges like higher critical theory, or scientific discovery, or secularization. In the case of the doctrine of creation, the table is often set by issues such as how old the world is, whether God created through de novo or evolutionary processes, and current environmental and ecological concerns. Because Augustine approached the doctrine of creation prior to the challenges of modernity, his writings can helpfully reframe issues and reorient us to a broader range of concerns. This is one way to locate avenues of thought that might move us beyond the polarization that characterizes much contemporary reflection on the doctrine of creation.
Moreover, we modern Christians must be careful not to assume that we have nothing to learn from the wisdom of the ages. We must guard against the hubris that all knowledge comes through the iPhone. This is what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”13 Augustine is a staggeringly deep thinker, and we can benefit from his wisdom, insight, and sincerity. We may even find Augustine to be a helpful corrective against some of the characteristic blind spots of our own age—a kind of palliative or tonic against those eccentricities of modern thought that are invisible to us precisely because they are so close to us.
That is the spirit and motive of this book. It is not a work of historical theology proper; it is a work of theological retrieval, which concerns bringing historical theology into the realm of contemporary constructive theology. It attempts to resource current evangelical reflection on the doctrine of creation by retrieving Augustine’s vision of creation. To this end, my engagement with Augustine will at times focus on description more than evaluation—not because I endorse everything Augustine says, but because I am seeking to let his voice echo into current controversies.
So picture a long table in a conference room. There are, let us say, three people dialoguing at the table, each representing one of the major creation views today: an evolutionary creationist (or theistic evolutionist, as some prefer to be called) from BioLogos, and old-earth creationist from Reasons to Believe, and a young-earth creationist from Answers in Genesis.14 Now enters a fourth party: Augustine. The question energizing this book is this: What would Augustine’s presence add to the discussion? What would Augustine say that might flavor, deepen, inform, arbitrate, conciliate, or redirect the discussion already being had by people like Francis Collins, Hugh Ross, and Ken Ham?
There are obvious dangers in this approach. Retrieval efforts can easily feel or become contrived. But I have felt that Augustine is too great a teacher, and our need for learning too dire, not to make the attempt. In his recent introduction to Augustine’s theology, Matthew Levering suggests that engaging Augustine is not only essential to understand current Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, but also the drift of Western civilization into its “present intellectual impasse,” arguing that “Augustine speaks as powerfully today as he did sixteen hundred years ago.”15 If Karl Barth was right to assert that in doing theology “as a member of the church, as belonging to the congregatio fidelium, one must not speak without having heard,”16 this book is, most basically, an attempt to hear, and help others hear, a voice from within that congregatio that must not be ignored.
A presupposition of this effort is that his voice is not always easy to hear. Augustine speaks with a different accent than we do. Understanding him, therefore, requires effort, humility, and patience. But to press the point: Augustine can be valuable to us precisely where he is different from us. Elsewhere I have described travel to a foreign country as a metaphor for theological retrieval.17 Becoming immersed in a different culture is a profoundly educational experience, and it provides opportunity for self-perspective—one comes to know the peculiarities of one’s own culture best in the context of learning about other cultures. No generous-minded person would regard a disinclination to learn from that which is foreign as a sign of progress; rather, it is a sign of narrowness.
Another metaphor for theological retrieval, very much to the same point, is having a conversation. Having a conversation is a qualitatively different experience from private meditation or reflection. Since it involves another person, it contains the possibility for particular kinds of learning that usually are not had by going off alone into the woods and thinking. Of course, private reflection has its place as well. But there is a particular kind of joy and stimulus found in genuinely seeking to understand another person’s way of thinking. There is much we can learn from other minds that we would never find searching throughout our own.
Some object to the usage of history in favor of a supposed more neutral historical knowledge. If we approach the past primarily to learn from it, it is felt, we run the risk of distorting it. Of course, this is always a danger. But I would argue that an interest in some kind of “retrieval” or usage of the past is compatible with the best methods of historical research, and to some extent is an inherent part of all historical inquiry. As Marc Bloch famously argued, the best historian is generally one who searches the annals of the past with an alert eye to the present scene as well.18 R. A. Markus described this in his own engagement with Augustine:
Any sustained historical enquiry ought to do something to the mind of the historian who undertakes it. It should force him to scrutinize his own assumptions, to question some of his own values, to challenge some of the stock responses of his own age. Prolonged contact with a mind of the stature of Augustine’s is inevitably a two-way commerce between the past and the present.19
Nonetheless we must attempt, to the best of our ability, to let Augustine’s own voice come through without constraining or reshaping his views to fit contemporary concerns. The polarized nature of creation debates today makes it all the more important to attempt a careful and evenhanded engagement with Augustine, allowing him to speak for himself and taking pains not to squeeze him into the mold of a current ideology or agenda. To the extent that Augustine’s contribution, as summarized here, is not wholly aligned with any contemporary “camp,” this goal is more likely to have been met.
OUR PATH FORWARD
In chapter 1, we will explore the significance of creation throughout Augustine’s theology with a view to how the breadth of Augustine’s vision can broaden, shore up, and redirect evangelical engagement with this doctrine. In chapter 2, we will explore the humility Augustine modeled in thinking about creation with a view to its implications for current reflection on the relationship between Scripture and science. The rest of the book then brings Augustine’s views into dialogue with particular topics of current dispute—the days of Genesis 1 (chapter 3), animal death (chapter 4), and Adam and Eve (chapter 5).
You will see that I have not attempted to be exhaustive in my engagement with Augustine’s doctrine of creation. There are significant strands of his thought that come into the discussion more tangentially here, particularly when they are less involved in some of the contemporary issues on which I am focused. For instance, I have focused less on Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, though it impinges on topics addressed in chapter 5. This is obviously an important area of both current dispute and Augustine’s legacy. Indeed, for many moderns, original sin is as much associated with Augustine as predestination is with John Calvin and hellfire preaching is with Jonathan Edwards (though such associations, of course, often amount to caricature).
Nonetheless, I have focused less on original sin here for several reasons. First, much has already been written about Augustine and original sin,20 while other areas of Augustine’s doctrine of creation are more commonly neglected. My goal for this project is to focus on some of the issues that have received less treatment but that I believe are no less pressingly relevant to contemporary discussion. Second, in some respects the field of hamartiology (including within its purview the doctrine of original sin) is downstream from creation proper, and thus materially out of scope from many of the topics in view here. Finally, for all the emphasis on Augustine’s role in formulating the doctrine of original sin (stemming, as often claimed, from his use of Jerome’s mistranslation of Romans 5:12 as “in whom all sinned” instead of “because all sinned”),21 Augustine’s overall anthropology bears many essential continuities with the tradition he inherits, including Tertullian, Cyprian, and Paul himself.22 As Alan Jacobs suggests, what has made Augustine so notorious is not so much his doctrine of original sin itself but some of the concomitant elements of Augustine’s formulation of the doctrine, such as his views on concupiscence and infant damnation: “The whole doctrine of original sin, in Western Christianity anyway, got inextricably tangled with revulsion toward sexuality and images of tormented infants. And there has never been a full and complete disentangling.”23 But many of the pressing areas of concern today relating to original sin are not unique to Augustine, and the basic idea that all are born with a sinful nature because of Adam and Eve’s first act of disobedience is hardly an Augustinian “invention.”
In addition, despite its importance, I have spent less time addressing the imago Dei; Gerald Boersma has recently provided a penetrating study of Augustine’s thought in this area.24 I have also said relatively little about Augustine’s theological anthropology,25 and have made little attempt to defend Augustine from secular critique.26
My research for this project has pulled me into three distinct orbits: Augustine’s own writings, modern Augustine scholarship, and contemporary literature on the doctrine of creation (with a particular focus on current areas of dispute among evangelicals). Because of the interests driving this book, however, I have leaned more heavily toward the first and third of these fields, engaging and deploying the second (Augustine scholarship) in a more ad hoc manner as it facilitates the conversation I want to nurture between Augustine and the current issues. At any rate, Augustine is such a juggernaut (and the scholarship surrounding him such a thick forest) that it would be difficult to avoid a level of selectiveness even in a strictly historical study as opposed to a retrieval work. In the footnotes, I attempt to at least gesture toward the relevant conversations within Augustine scholarship when I do not pursue them here.
In terms of Augustine’s writings, I have drawn from a wide array of published works as well as sermons and letters, with a more systematic emphasis on the five works I regard as most significant for his doctrine of creation:
On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichaeans (De Genesi contra Manichaeos), written around 388–389
The Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram liber unus imperfectus), written around 393–395
Confessions (Confessiones), written around 397–401
The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), written around 401–416
The City of God (De civitate Dei), written around 413–426
My engagement with the contemporary literature surfaces throughout, and is particularly the burden of chapter 5.
My hope is that this book will be a resource for the study of the doctrine of creation, will contribute to Augustine scholarship, and will encourage humility, carefulness, and conviction in the church today.
To whet your appetite for moving forward, hear again Augustine’s testimony, this time as he recounts it himself in his famous Confessions:
So I came to Milan, to the bishop and devout servant of God, Ambrose. . . . That man of God received me as a father, and as bishop welcomed my coming. I came to love him, not at first as a teacher of the truth, which I had utterly despaired of finding in Your Church, but for his kindness towards me. I attended carefully when he preached to the people. . . .
I began to see that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said in the face of the Manichaean objections, could be maintained on reasonable grounds: this especially after I had heard explained figuratively several passages of the Old Testament which had been a cause of death for me when taken literally. Many passages of these books were expounded in a spiritual sense and I came to blame my own hopeless folly in believing that the law and the prophets could not stand against those who hated and mocked at them.27
Chapter One
What We Forget About Creation
How Augustine Can Broaden our Horizon of Concerns
Let me hear and understand the meaning of the words: In the Beginning you made heaven and earth. Moses wrote these words. . . . If he were here, I would lay hold of him and in your name I would beg and beseech him to explain those words to me. I would be all ears to catch the sounds that fell from his lips.
CREATION IS A FREQUENTLY UNDERDEVELOPED, atrophied doctrine. John Webster has spoken of the “cramping effects” that modernity imposes on theology, identifying two particular loci where the damage can be seen: the Trinity and the doctrine of creation.1 Often Christians treat the doctrine of creation as a kind of prolegomenon to theology rather than a theological topic in its own right. Creation is important, it is thought, primarily insofar as it sets the stage for the weightier matters of theology—those issues involved in the doctrine of redemption.
When we do engage the theology of creation more directly, interest is often narrowly focused on questions springing from science-faith dialogue: What is the nature of the days in Genesis 1? Are the Adam and Eve of Genesis 2–3 historical figures? Was there a historical fall, and how do we understand this event in relation to the claims of evolutionary science?2
These are obviously vital questions. However, if we engage Genesis 1–3 as more than a mere preamble or preface to the biblical story, we will find that the material contribution of these chapters to Christian theology is far from exhausted by such concerns. This portion of Scripture offers a holistic framework for how to live as God’s creatures in God’s world, helping us integrate every aspect of our existence—relationships, work, art, laughter, music, play—under our calling as God’s image-bearers.
In the church, we have often emphasized the Christian life without reference to life as a human being.3 But the categories of sin and salvation are only comprehensible in light of the prior category of creation—the assertion “I am a sinner” is a further specification from the assertion “I am a creature.” Furthermore, if redemption involves not a repudiation of our original creaturely mandate but rather a reorientation toward it (e.g., Col 3:10; Eph 4:24), then the doctrine of creation not only precedes and undergirds the doctrine of redemption, but informs it. We are not just saved from something (sin), but saved to something (imaging God).
In this chapter, we suggest that retrieving Augustine’s doctrine of creation is one way to broaden our horizon of concerns in this area. Now, there are many aspects of the doctrine of creation that could be happily welcomed into a more prominent position within evangelical consciousness and dialogue—say, providence, or angelology, or the contingency of creation, or the goodness of creation, or ecological concern, or trinitarian agency in creation. Some of these topics are engaged more by evangelical academics than evangelical laity (perhaps, e.g., contingency); some tend to be altogether underworked (perhaps, e.g., angels); in all of them, arguably, Augustine could be useful.
But here we will focus on one issue: the ontological shape of Augustine’s doctrine of creation and its implication for human happiness. Augustine’s treatment of creation emphasized a thick distinction between God and his creation (what we will call divine priority), with a consequent radical dependence of the world upon God (what we will call creaturely contingency), and there is a sense in which this ontological framework drives everything else in Augustine’s theology. Engaging this aspect of Augustine’s thought, even where we do not finally agree with him, may helpfully draw attention to the pervasive significance of the doctrine of creation throughout Christian theology. Here we will emphasize in particular how creation was, for Augustine, the clue to unraveling the deepest longings of the human heart.
We start in this way so that we will not immediately demand that Augustine give us answers, but first give him an opportunity to reshape and reformulate our questions, perhaps pulling us into new directions and broadening our horizon of interest. As an entry point, we can make the issue more pressing by drawing attention to the often-neglected significance of the doctrine of creation in Augustine’s most famous work, the Confessions.
CONFESSIONS OF HEART AND UNIVERSE
Interpreters of Augustine’s Confessions have often puzzled over the book’s ending. After nine chapters of intensely personal autobiography, why does Augustine then conclude with more abstract accounts of memory (book 10) and creation (books 11–13)? Or, more typically, how does Augustine move from himself (books 1–10) to Genesis (books 11–13)? The transition feels somewhat abrupt, both in tone and content. Indeed, according to Jared Ortiz, the scholarly “consensus” over the last century or so is that “the Confessions does not have a singular meaning and that it does not hold together.”4 Thus, John J. O’Meara claims that it is “a commonplace of Augustinian scholarship to say that Augustine was not able to plan a book.”5 Not surprisingly, this critical view of the Confessions’ literary and structural integrity often results in more scattered and piecemeal engagements with its content.6 A book so badly written, after all, need not be read too carefully.
But there are reasons to doubt that Augustine would have perceived such a tension between the abstract and emotional qualities of his book. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle has drawn attention to Cicero’s influence on Augustine’s style of rhetoric and argument, suggesting that the Confessions is “composed quite classically according to the ordinary Ciceronian rules for the invention of argument which Augustine habitually practiced as rhetor, then preacher.”7 With respect to the book’s development of thought, Robin Lane Fox argues that though these final chapters seem to be on a higher plane, they are not “additions to an ‘autobiographical’ work,” but rather “the culmination of the entire work,” since Augustine’s meditation on time and creation in books 10–13 represents the fulfillment of his longing for worship, the great pursuit of books 1–9.8
Similarly, Ortiz suggests that Augustine’s doctrine of creation is actually the key to the whole book by situating Augustine’s story in relation to his larger vision of reality. In ancient thought, with the exception of Christians and Platonists, God tended to be conceived as one part of the world, rather than transcendent over it.9 The Christian notion of creation ex nihilo signaled a fundamentally different structure to reality: it meant that “for anything to be, it has to be drawn back to God so it can share in his being in some way. Only by becoming like God can things be.”10 By its very nature, an ex nihilo, contingent creation can only be and become what it is through a continual turning to the One who made it and sustains it. This broader ontology helps illumine why Augustine had to “confess” his personal salvation and his view of the universe together. As Henry Chadwick puts it:
Augustine understood his own story as a microcosm of the entire story of creation, the fall into the abyss of chaos and formlessness, the “conversion” of the creaturely order to the love of God as it experiences griping pains of homesickness. What the first nine books [of the Confessions] illustrate in his personal exploration of the experience of the prodigal son is given its cosmic dimension in the concluding parts of the work.11
In this way of thinking, the Confessions has a profoundly coherent internal unity, from the initial famous declaration of its opening paragraph (“You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”12) to the concluding focus of book 13 on divine rest in Genesis 1 as the end of creaturely restlessness (“When our work in this life is done, we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life”13).
But how do these personal and cosmic dimensions relate more precisely? What was the vision of creation that enabled Augustine to correlate his own soul’s “restlessness” with the creaturely tilt of the entire created order, from the plainest pebble to the brightest angel?
In what follows we will briefly trace this motif of creaturely happiness (“rest”), particularly as seen in his famous Confessions. We will then situate it in relation to Augustine’s broader ontological framework for creation, focusing on five principles: divine priority, creaturely contingency, trinitarian agency in creation, sin as privation, and redemption as deification. Finally, we derive three specific conclusions for how Augustine’s views in this area might help broaden evangelical reflection on the doctrine of creation today.
CREATURELY “RESTLESSNESS” THROUGHOUT THE CONFESSIONS
The motif of creaturely “rest” is not limited to Augustine’s Confessions. For instance, in his finished commentary of Genesis, Augustine describes creatures as good yet imperfect, in need of sharing in God’s “quiet rest.” He insists that the perfection of each created thing occurs not in the whole of which it is a part, but rather in him from whom it derives its being.14 He describes each created thing “finally coming to rest” in God as the attainment of “the goal of its own momentum.” The “momentum” he has in view here is generated by creatureliness—the inherent tilt of all creatures toward God. Thus, Augustine continues:
The whole universe of creation . . . has one terminus in its own nature, another in the goal which it has in God. . . . It can come to no stable and properly established rest, except in the quiet rest of the one who does not have to make any effort to get anything beyond himself to find rest in it. And for this reason, while God abides in himself, he swings everything whatever that comes from him back to himself, like a boomerang, so that every creature might find in him the final terminus and goal for its nature, not to be what he is, but to find in him the place of rest in which to preserve what by nature it is in itself.15
Here Augustine distinguishes between two different termini or goals of creatures: one in their own nature, and one that final state of entering God’s rest. He emphasizes the incompleteness of creatures’ own terminus, claiming they lack any “stable and properly established rest,” and contrasts this with God’s self-sufficiency as the one who has rest in himself, the one who does not need anything beyond himself in order to find rest. Moreover, strikingly, Augustine depicts God as continually at work in relation to this ontological divide, swinging everything he has created back to himself to find rest in himself. Although the translator, Edmund Hill, has added the boomerang imagery here, it captures something of Augustine’s meaning: God creates imperfect creatures with an inherent need for him, and subsequently “swings” them back to himself. Thus, creation must return to its source in order to find itself. Every creature must return to its Creator, like a boomerang, to preserve its own nature.
Now, when did this rest begin, and when does it conclude? Augustine does regard creation to have begun this activity of sharing the Creator’s rest after the evening of the sixth day, but he also holds that it will continue to develop until it finds a secure and final rest in him. In this final state, all of creation will abide forever, since anything that has existence only has it through participation in God: “Since what the whole created universe is going to be, whatever mutations it has gone through, will certainly not be nothing, the whole created universe will, for that reason, always abide in its creator.”16
Consider an analogy for this way of thinking about creation: Suppose an artist is constructing a piece of pottery. He completes the work, but it has not yet gone through the firing and glazing stages, which transform it from being a soft, breakable artifact into durable, usable ceramic. In one sense, it is complete; in another sense, it is not. It has been fully shaped, but it has not yet come into its proper goal. Augustine thinks the entire universe is like this: incomplete in a crucial sense, tilted forward toward its final goal. Only the artisan can complete it; the pottery cannot fire and glaze itself. So our world has no “rest” in itself.
This language of “restlessness” calls to mind, of course, Augustine’s famous prayer at the start of the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”17 For all its quotability, this statement is one way to sum up Augustine’s entire framework for creation, in which God’s work of creation (“you have made us for yourself”) imbues an inherent need (“our hearts are restless”) for a further union with God (“until they rest in you”). It may be useful to reflect a bit on how this justifiably famous quotation coheres with themes that run throughout the rest of the Confessions.
To begin with, it is worth noting that this statement comes at the very beginning of the Confessions, closely following Augustine’s reference to human death as a “sign” and “reminder” of human sin.18 In context, Augustine appears to be attempting to diagnose the human heart in its current, postlapsarian setting. Yet Augustine also sees the impulse in the human heart to worship as a consequence of our creatureliness, not our fallenness: “Man is one of your creatures, and his instinct is to praise you;”19 “Since he is a part of your creation, he wishes to praise you.”20 In the subsequent paragraphs of the opening of the Confessions, Augustine somewhat problematizes this creaturely instinct toward praise, wondering aloud whether he should begin with supplication for praise or with praise itself. This dilemma is generated by God’s unknowability: “If (a man) does not know you, how can he pray to you?”21 It is also the implication of creaturely finitude: “What place is there in me in which my God can come? Where can God come into me—God, who made heaven and earth?”22 To be sure, Augustine knows that God is within him; if he were not, Augustine could not exist: “I should be null and void and could not exist at all, if you, my God, were not in me.”23 Yet God is, at the same time, infinitely distant—he is both “the most hidden and most present.”24
Augustine stacks up paradoxes implicit in the God-world relation to emphasize the dilemma of his situation: God is the essence of creaturely happiness, and simultaneously beyond creaturely capacity. We were made for God, but cannot hold him. He alone can fill us, but we cannot contain him. Thus, as Augustine sees it, creatureliness has an inherent unsettledness to it: the very thing for which we have been created is beyond our grasp, and nothing else can fill its void. Moreover, this unsettledness is equally characteristic of every particular creature as it is for the entire creation. Hence Augustine will revert back and forth throughout these passages between the “restlessness” of his own soul and that of all heaven and earth.
This paradox of God’s simultaneous necessity and impossibility is the tension that drives the Confessions, and ultimately stipulates the prayerful method Augustine employs throughout: “I shall look for you, Lord, by praying to you and as I pray I shall believe in you.”25 The famous prayerful genre of the Confessions should therefore not be considered a mere literary consideration for Augustine, but rather a theologically informed choice occasioned by this challenge of God’s simultaneous importance and distance. Prayer is Augustine’s tool to look for the invisible, yet ever-near, God.
Now, those who see the Confessions as little more than an autobiography will doubtless be perplexed by its later chapters. But if we consider Augustine’s own personal testimony in books 1–9 as merely one step in the larger effort of his pursuit of creaturely praise and “rest,” what might we find in books 10–13 that coheres with this theme? After his account of his conversion in book 8, Augustine passes through his subsequent stay at Cassiacum and his baptism in Milan relatively rapidly, reflecting much on his mother, Monica, in book 9, then proceeding to his discussion of memory in book 10. At this point the strictly narrative parts of the Confessions end, and Augustine transitions from confessing his past sins to confessing who he is in the present:
“I know what profit I gain by confessing my past, and this I have declared. But many people . . . wish to hear what I am now, at this moment, as I set down my confessions.”26
“I go on to confess, not what I was, but what I am.”27
“I shall therefore confess both what I know of myself and what I do not know.”28
The reason that Augustine then takes up a lengthy discussion of the topic of memory throughout the subsequent parts of book 10 is that the memory is a faculty of the soul, and it is through the soul that God must be approached: “If I am to reach him, it must be through my soul.”29 This rationale for exploring his memory, together with the fervent expressions of love for God and confession of his present sins throughout book 10 (especially the later parts), suggest that in book 10 Augustine has not taken leave from the concerns driving the earlier portions of the book. Rather, Augustine searches within himself, in his memory and soul, precisely to look for God. As he stipulates, “I shall go beyond this force that is in me, this force which we call memory, so that I may come to you, my Sweetness and my Light.”30 Thus, the structural transition occurring in book 10 indicates that Augustine is now looking within himself in the present rather than looking back on his life—but nonetheless, both movements share the same overall goal. It is the soul’s search for rest in God that motivates Augustine’s interest in his memory, five senses, and present sins, no less than his interest in looking back at his conversion.
Books 11–13, then, dealing with the Genesis creation account, represent the culmination of these interests. As Augustine opens 11.1, he looks back on what he has achieved thus far with a sense of completion: “To the best of my power and the best of my will I have laid this long account before you, because you first willed that I should confess to you, O Lord my God.”31 Yet Augustine is not done. After a long petition for divine help in meditating on God’s law (11.2), he initiates a new question at the start of 11.3:
Let me hear and understand the meaning of the words: In the Beginning you made heaven and earth. Moses wrote these words. He wrote them and passed on into your presence, leaving this world where you spoke to him. He is no longer here and I cannot see him. But if he were here, I would lay hold of him and in your name I would beg and beseech him to explain those words to me. I would be all ears to catch the sounds that fell from his lips.32
It is striking that here, in this final segment of the Confessions, Augustine turns his gaze on (of all things) Genesis 1:1. Careful attention to how he proceeds, however, suggests that this is not a turn away from the book’s deeper themes, but Augustine’s pathway to enter more deeply into them. For instance, throughout book 11 Augustine pursues the nature of time, particularly in relation to Manichaean objections such as the question of what God was doing before creation. Yet time is interesting to him not as an abstract problem, but in relation to his desire to enter into God’s eternal rest. This helps explain why his discussion throughout book 11, even while pursuing complex philosophical questions, retains the same emotional urgency that characterizes the rest of the Confessions. Thus we hear Augustine declaring that his mind is burning with curiosity to understand the nature of time,33 bewailing the sorry state of his ignorance,34 and calling for resoluteness of soul to pursue the answer.35 Similarly, when he engages Genesis 1:1-2 in book 12, he describes it as a passage that has “set my heart throbbing.”36
Why is the nature of time such a personally affecting doctrine for Augustine? For Augustine, creaturely happiness consists of entering into God’s eternal rest. Temporality entails mutability, and mutability entails continually falling away from the immutable God who is the source of all goodness. The supreme goal of every creature is therefore to enter into God’s eternal, unchanging rest, and thus share (in a sense) in God’s immutability. This is what the spiritual/intellectual creation—i.e., the realm of angels, which Augustine terms the “heaven of heaven”37—already possesses in its constant clinging to God.38 It is this participation in God’s immutability that is the ground of angelic happiness: “How happy must this creature be, if such it is, constantly intent upon your beatitude, forever possessed by you, forever bathed in your light!”39 Augustine insists that the spiritual creation is not coeternal with God and possesses a derived, not an inherent, immutability. Thus, although it does not change, “Mutability is inherent in it, and it would grow dark and cold unless, by clinging to you with all the strength of its love, it drew warmth and light from you like a noon that never wanes.”40 For Augustine, the brightest seraphim in the Heaven of Heavens and the lowest worm in the earth are, for all their differences, equally contingent creatures: they grow dark and cold, and ultimately veer off into nothingness, if they do not continually cling to God.
It is this interest in the creaturely happiness that comes by sharing in divine rest that drives books 11–13 of the Confessions. Augustine describes two distinct kinds of temporality available to creatures: the spiritual creation, which is “mutable but without mutation” because “it is constant in its enjoyment of your eternity and absolute immutability,” and the lower creation, which Augustine associates with the “formlessness” from Genesis 1:2 because it is mutable.41 Augustine, as a man, belongs to this lower, physical order marked by mutability, but what his soul longs for is to pass over into God’s immutable rest:
Thou, O Lord, my eternal Father, art my only solace; but I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts and the deepest places of my soul are torn with every kind of tumult until the day when I shall be purified and melted in the fire of Thy love and wholly joined to Thee.42
Here Augustine envisions ultimate creaturely happiness as a kind of fusion with God, passing from a mutable state into sharing in divine immutability. At an important section of The City of God, at the very beginning of his development of the doctrine of two cities, Augustine describes a similar goal: “It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its mutability, to pass beyond it, and, by the continued soaring of his mind, to attain to the unchangeable substance of God.”43
In Augustine’s vision of creation, it is not only his soul but all of creation that longs to enter into God’s eternal, immutable happiness. This is why book 13 of the Confessions climaxes in an allegorical reading of Genesis 1, with God’s rest on the seventh day of creation representing the eternal joy of heaven into which creatures may enter: “You rested on the seventh day. And in your Book we read this as a presage that when our work in this life is done, we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life.”44 As we have noted, this suggests the incompleteness of physical creation—Augustine regards it as good, but it stands in need of a further act to enter into God’s immutability with the spiritual creation and attain its goal. All creaturely existence is oriented toward the eternal divine Sabbath.
This is the great arc that energizes the Confessions: from the “we are restless until we find our rest in you” at its beginning to the “we too shall rest in you in the Sabbath of eternal life” of its conclusion. This is why the doctrine of creation is so foundational for Augustine’s theology, and why Genesis 1 is a passage that sets his heart throbbing.
DIVINE PRIORITY
What was the broader view of creation in which this notion of creaturely restlessness functioned for Augustine? In the first place, it was a derivation of his conviction of God’s ontological priority. Divine ontological priority simply means that God’s being is qualitatively prior to all else, which entails a thick ontological distinction between God and creation. Thus reality breaks down, at the most fundamental level, as twofold rather than one, legion, or indeterminate. There are essentially two kinds of being: God and everything else.45 Moreover, these two kinds of being are utterly distinct. The distance between them is infinite.46 Whatever the differences are between two creatures, the ontological gulf between both of them and God is infinitely greater. The most significant fact about anything, therefore, is whether or not it is God.
As basic as this point may seem, it is decisive for Augustine’s theological outlook. First and foremost, divine priority was bound up with Augustine’s articulation of creation ex nihilo.47 This doctrine was not a constructive tool that Augustine invented in the abstract. Rather, ex nihilo was developed as an alternative to rival views of creation offered in, for instance, the Manichaean, Parmenidean, and Platonic systems.48 For instance, in Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge shapes the world from matter existing previously in some inchoate form and, constrained to avoid envy, must build the best possible world.49 In contrast, Augustine insisted that God creates the world ex nihilo, from the freedom and overflow of love rather than the avoidance of envy, and that God makes it good but not perfect.50 Similarly, Augustine articulated creation ex nihilo in contrast to the speculations of Aristotle and Parmenides about what God was doing before he created the world, and he affirmed God’s freedom to choose to create over and against the influence of Plotinus’s theory of emanation.51
Above all, Augustine drew on creation ex nihilo to emphasize God’s transcendence over the world and to combat various Manichaean errors. In his allegorical commentary on Genesis, Augustine repeatedly emphasized the necessity of creation ex nihilo for divine omnipotence. Contrasting God’s creative work with the potter who works with preexistent clay and the carpenter who builds with preexistent wood, he claimed:
The carpenter doesn’t make wood, but makes something out of wood; and so with all other such craftsmen. But Almighty God did not need the help of any kind of thing at all which he himself had not made, in order to carry out what he wished. If, you see, for making the things he wished, he was being assisted by some actual thing which he had not made himself, then he was not almighty; and to think that is sacrilege.52
There is thus a broader body of discussion concerning the God-world relationship that served as a backdrop to Augustine’s emphasis on creation ex nihilo—just as today the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is often a linchpin upon which broader philosophical issues turn.53(Of course, Augustine’s relationship to these alternative systems was not wholly negative; he borrowed certain elements, particularly from Platonic views.54)
Nonetheless, however it may have been polemically occasioned, creation ex nihilo (and the ontological priority of God it entailed) came to function constructively for Augustine’s own theology. In the first place, Augustine’s emphasis on God as the fount of all being entailed that creation is itself an act of divine generosity. No need compelled God to create, nor did creation fill a “gap” that previously existed. The motive of creation is sheer divine love. This point comes up again and again for Augustine—for example, in his exposition of the creed in the Enchiridion, where Augustine emphasizes that the cause of creation is the overflow of divine goodness;55 or at the end of De vera religione, where Augustine affirms that nothing would have been created if God were not “so good that he is not jealous of any nature’s being able to derive its goodness from him.”56 Or as Augustine puts it in the Confessions, “You created, not because you had need, but out of the abundance (ex plenitudine) of your own goodness. You molded your creation and gave it form, but not because you would find your happiness increased by it.”57 Existence is therefore, for anything other than God, wholly superfluous, a kind of mysterious gift. As Vladimir Lossky puts it, “We might say that by creation ex nihilo God ‘makes room’ for something that is wholly outside of Himself; that, indeed, He sets up the ‘outside’ or nothingness alongside of His plenitude.”58
Another consequence of God’s ontological priority for Augustine’s theology concerns the Creator-creation relationship. Specifically, divine priority grounded Augustine’s paradoxical claim that God is both infinitely near to, and infinitely far from, every creature. For Augustine, the ontological gulf between God and creation does not entail that creation is cut off from the knowledge of God; just the opposite. Following the thought of the apostle Paul in Romans 1:20, Augustine understood creation’s contingent status as an act of revelation. As he puts it in the Confessions, “I asked the whole mass of the universe about my God, and it replied, ‘I am not God. God is he who made me.’”59 And later: “Earth and the heavens also proclaim that they did not create themselves. ‘We exist,’ they tell us, ‘because we were made. And this is proof that we did not make ourselves. For to make ourselves, we should have had to exist before our existence began.’”60 Thus, God’s fundamental otherness does not enshroud him in darkness, but instead is the principle by which he is undeniably known. As Ortiz puts it, “The ontological distinction between God and the world is a kind of light or epiphany which illumines all things. Creation is a revelation.”61
Similarly, for Augustine, the ontological gulf that separates God and creatures is paradoxically that which allows him to be “with” his creatures in the preexistent state of his perfect foreknowledge. Augustine argues that all things exist in the mind of God before they are created, and are “better” and “truer” there, since his knowledge of them is eternal and unchangeable. They are, in a sense, with God in this preexistent state, and thus “alive.”62
