The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine : On Genesis [Hardcover]

Saint, Bishop of Hippo Augustine (Author), Roland J. Teske (Translator)

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Latin

Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Catholic Univ of Amer Pr (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813200849
• ISBN-13: 978-0813200842
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,648,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First-time translations of two early works of Augustine, March 21, 2002

By 

Bowen Simmons (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine : On Genesis (Hardcover)

This book contains a pair of unfinished works by Augustine on the Book of Genesis. The table of contents is as follows:

Introduction (Roland J. Teske)

Entries from "The Retractions" on the two works

"Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees"

"On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book"

General Index

Index of Holy Scripture

Augustine regarded the interpretation of Genesis as important to Christian belief, but also found it difficult. These works were his two first attempts at writing interpretations of it, but he thought them only partly successful and did not see fit to complete them. Neither work is to be confused with Augustine's "The Literal Meaning of Genesis", which is a later and much longer work on the same subject that he successfully completed (that work is available in two volumes from Paulist Press).

Augustine's special interest in Genesis had two roots: apologetic and theological. His apologetic interest was a response to frequent attacks on Genesis by non-Christians and what he felt were inept defenses of it by uneducated Christians. His theological interest sprang from the critical importance of the Fall to Augustine's theology.

The first work, "Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees", was primarily apologetic. It was written not long after Augustine left the Manichees to return to the Church, and was intended as a rebuttal to the Manichee attacks on Genesis. In this context, Augustine discussed Creation, Eden, and the Fall, but the work ended there - Augustine felt that he had not yet learned enough to complete the task he had undertaken successfully. The section on Creation was largely literal - reading it as a record of events that had occurred, but the section on Eden and the Fall was largely allegorical, reading it for the spiritual truth within the literal account. The chief interest I found in the work was that the description of the Eden and the Fall shows the strong influence on Augustine of classical virtue ethics, but none of the theology of Original Sin that is of such importance in his later writings.

The second work "On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book", was aporetic in character: in it, Augustine deepens the reader's understanding of the text by raising questions about it rather than by giving answers. This work was written not long after the previous one, and again Augustine found himself ultimately unequal to the task he had set. This work is even shorter than the previous one, and gets less far into Genesis, ending after the Creation days. I found the work pleasant to read; the aporetic style provides a sense of intimacy - that the author is sharing not only his answers with the reader, but also his questions, even if he doesn't have an answer to give.

The supporting material in the book is quite good - the only fault I would find is that the introduction generally refers to works by the abbreviations of their Latin names, which made me break from reading the text to his table of abbreviations (about 30 in all) far too often, a fault compounded by the fact that English translations for the titles in that table were not provided. Still, this is a pretty minor quibble.

As a final note, thanks are due to Teske and CUA Press for providing the first translation of these works into English.