AUGUSTINE'S ONTOLOGY OF GENESIS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Davin Unger

THE101: Lordship I: Knowing God and the Creator

September 7, 2023

 

 

 

 

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Abstract

 

This exploration of Saint Augustine's treatment of Genesis 1:1-2 in Confessions Book XII, will begin by clearly laying out the main ideas and arguments that the author derives from the text, these being the nature of Heaven and all that dwells in it, of formlessness, of the created world, and of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It will look at how Augustine illuminates the reader's understanding of heaven and argues for it's timelessness in spite of it's being a created thing. It will examine how he wrestles with the paradoxical nature of formlessness because of his philosophical background as well as how that background shapes his broader conception of existence. It will look at the different interpretations for how creation emergences out of formless matter and how Augustine accounts for it's presence in time. Lastly, it will discuss Augustine's foundational beliefs about the eternal nature in which God exists and the variations of that nature between his three persons. Moreover, Augustine's aim in writing Book XII is to establish a biblically sound ontological framework of reality, in order to explain the various ways in which all things have their being in relation to God.

 

 

 

 

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            This analysis of Saint Augustine's interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2 in Confessions Book XII, will focus on how the author derives an understanding of existence based on first words of scripture. Augustine will unravel the mystery of God and his act of creation, of heaven's heaven, of wisdom, of formlessness matter, and of the observable universe. Moreover, Augustine's aim in writing Book XII is to establish a biblically sound ontological framework of reality, in order to explain the various ways in which created things have their being in relation to God.

            Much could be said about Augustine's doctrine of the Triune God, but for the sake of time it is necessary to highlight only the major points. As it relates to ontology (which, as it will be used here, is defined as: a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being (M.W.)) Augustine sees God as as the source of being itself, (Augustine 288) a title that echoes the words of the Apostle Paul who said "in Him all things consist." (Col 1:17) He is the author of existence for two reasons, firstly, because he made all things: "All things that are, but are not you, are things you made" (290) and secondly because he continually upholds the work of his hands. Therefore, according to Augustine, God is the starting point of ontology because he causes and upholds all being. The author argues that God is eternal in that he is the self-existent being who precedes all beings (conf. 290), again mirroring the words of scripture: "He is before all things."(Col 1:17) He also highlights the fact that God changelessness and therefore timeless because, as will be explained later on, time can only exist where there are changes in state. 

            When God created the heavens and the earth, he made something altogether separate from himself, Augustine juxtaposes this kind of "making" with the way in which God "generated" his only begotten Son from his divine essence. At a glance, this might seem like a 

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trivial distinction, but there is a very good reason for it. If it was said that God generated his creation, this creation could be reasonably assumed to have equal standing with Him just as Christ is equal with the Father. (Augustine 294) By preserving this distinction, Augustine avoids the errors of the divinizing creation as well as of lowering Christ to the statues of creature. (Gerald 415) Looking closer then at this act of making, the author holds that God created the heavens and the earth through his Son also referred to as his "wisdom," a view consistent with John 1:3 that says "All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made." 

            At the start of book XII Augustine ponders the nature "Heaven's Heaven" by which he refers to God's celestial dwelling. Augustine describes heaven as a "lofty" or "intellectual" kind of creature (294), an entity that, although not coeternal with God, approaches his eternity because it finds it's sole delight in him, and through this unwavering adoration it is suspended in time alongside it's glorious maker. Moreover, the writer of Book XII states that heaven is made not from physical substance but is, on the contrary, immaterial, a mode of existence that clashed with many of Augustine's opponents as will be shown later. 

            Another entity that should be noted alongside Heaven is God's wisdom. Augustine says in the third chapter of Book XII: (speaking of heaven) "There was no time before its creation, since 'created before all things is wisdom.' This is not a reference to that Wisdom who is your Son" ... "the Wisdom through 'whom all things were created'" ... "No, this other wisdom is created, an intellectual entity that becomes light by contemplation of the light. Though created it is called wisdom." (Augustine 294-95) From the little that Augustine says in Book XII this wisdom can be understood firstly as a created thing, in fact, the first of all created things, and is 

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likely detached from time and matter (assuming it is immaterial and unchanging). Note that Augustine calls it an "intellectual entity" not unlike Heaven's Heaven, it should come as no surprise then to learn that it is closely tied to God's dwelling in the text of Book XII.

            When Augustine addresses the topic if matter without form, his sole reference is the passage in Genesis 1 that says "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep." Harnessing all of his intellectual faculties, the author attempts to give light to the cryptic concept of being on the verge of not being, of a nature that exists just short of non-existence. (Augustine 292) The first distinction He makes is that formless matter does not have intellectual form in the way that ideas like geometry or justice do, nor yet does it have physical form like the earth and heaven that it would eventually become. (287) For much of his life prior to conversion, Augustine struggled to comprehend, among other things, how an entity could exist in an immaterial state, which obviously presents difficulties when considering formless matter. These holes in Augustine's immature thought can almost certainly be attributed to the heretical philosophies that poisoned his concept of existence, the foremost of these being Manicheanism, a heretical sect that lasted from the third to at least the seventeenth century. The Manichean's took Christian symbols and ideas such as God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, light, darkness, and Satan, and twisted them into a bizarre dualistic cosmology. (Coyle 521-22) (Harrison 99) One way in which this effected Augustine's understanding of formlessness is in the aspect of darkness, the Manichean's held that darkness had a form of it's own and that it waged war against light but Augustine argues, that it is a mere absence of light, in the same way that silence is the absence of sound. Returning to formless matter, Augustine expounds on the faulty ideas of his youth saying "I did not think of it (formless matter) as formless but as deformed in many 

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grotesque ways. My mind played with foul and disgusting forms, jumbling all categories. I called these formless, not because they lacked form but as if they had a form which, could I see it, would confound my senses with it's unimaginable absurdity and overwhelm my human weakness." (Augustine 287) Note again the his inability to perceive being in a negative sense. Having at the time of the writing of Confessions overcome his false doctrines, Augustine determines that as with heaven, time cannot be applied to formless matter because "There is no time without the motion of forms, and the formless has no form." (Jordan 405) Therefore, heaven is outside of time because it experiences no motion while formless matter is outside of time because it has no perceivable form that could experience motion. Augustine argues that this might explain why the writer of Genesis omits a day of creation to mark the origin of heaven and earth, because to do so with no reference point would be arbitrary. 

            Having understood the ontological rudiments of formless matter it becomes necessary to turn to it's culmination: corporeal reality. Augustine describes the transition from formlessness to cosmos in the second Chapter of Book XII "from nothing you made an almost nothing, and from that you made great things for 'the sons of men' to marvel at" the principal he highlights is that "prime matter precedes formed matter," he likens this formation to singing, in that "the body produces sound that the singer's intelligence shapes into song." (308) This creation includes the earth and the heavens (not Heaven's Heaven), earth as the physical planet and heaven as in the higher waters spoken of later Genesis, Augustine describes it thusly in Book XII: "Marvelous indeed is the physical heaven, the canopy between the higher and lower waters, that you spread on the second day, after light was provided, saying: 'let it be a canopy,' and it was. This canopy you called heaven, though it was only heaven to land and sea." Along with the formation of 

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physical reality comes the constraints of time and space. Time because when God united this matter with a form, it's state suddenly became changeable, the principal therefore is this: time only applies to creation when matter is united with form in such a way as to produce observable change. As an aside, time could then be defined within the context of Augustine's thought (at least in one sense) as: a measure of change. (Barr) Another aspect of being unique to the physical universe is space, or the physical relationships between material objects, a constraint that does not apply to God who Augustine praises as omnipresent when he declares "you are not at this or that point, in this way or that way, but yourself-in-yourself, yourself-in-yourself, yourself-in-yourself, 'holy, holy, holy,' Lord, the God all-powerful." This passage also gives the reader some idea of the fearful wonder with which the author undertakes to explain the miracles of ontology. Augustine draws a sharp distinction between the way in which God formed creation and the way in which he generates the Son from his divine nature, in order to counter the error that Christ is part of the creation. (Teske) This is important because, as he argues elsewhere, anything that God generates is equal with him, thus he keeps his readers from the error that Christ is to be numbered among created things or that creation is of equal standing with God. (Harrison 99) Therefore, creation is a physical construct made from formless matter in God's Wisdom, it exists within the confines of space and time and is upheld by God's power. So then, the physical universe is a distinctly material realm existing within the constraints of both space (the physical relationship between objects in the observable universe) and time (the chronological measure of changes in state), it arose from formless mater was made distinct from it's creator as opposed to being generated from His divine essence. 

 

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            The Twelfth Book of Saint Augustine's Confessions explores the meaning Genesis 1:1-2 within the context of what it is to exist. The author considers Heaven's heaven, the immaterial and intellectual creature that suspends the passage of time by finding it's fullness in God. He ponders the paradox of formlessness, a state neither physical nor intellectual, on the edge of not being, a state in which darkness reigns and time is absent. It was from this primary matter that God formed cosmos that would become the corporal world, a physical reality upheld by God's word, and contained within time and space. Therefore, through his writings in Book XII, Augustine gives light to every state of being described in the text of Genesis 1:1-2 successfully creating a framework of reality, in which created things whether in time or out of time, material or immaterial, visible and invisible begin and end with God. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Boersma, Gerald. “The Rationes Seminales in Augustine’s Theology of Creation,” Nova et Vetera, 2020.

 

Barr, Stephen "St. Augustine's Relativistic Theory of Time." University of Notre Dame. Church Life Journal February 07, 2020. Accessed Sep 7, 2023. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/augustines-push-against-the-limits-of-time/. web page.

 

Coyle, J. Kevin. "Mani, Manicheism." In Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, 379-381. Michigan: Grand Rapids, 1999. https://archive.org/details/augustinethrough0000unse/page/n11/mode/2up. e-book.

 

Christian, William Armistead. "Augustine on the Creation of the World." HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 46, no. 1 (January, 1953): 1-3. Accessed August 31, 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1508839. web page. 

 

Harrison, Carol. Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992.

 

Jordan, Robert "Time and Contingency in St. Augustine." THE REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS 8, No. 3 (Mar., 1955): 405. accessed September 7, 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20123450. web page.

 

McKeough, Michael John. The meaning of the rationes seminales in St. Augustine. Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1926. https://archive.org/details/meaningofratione00mcke/mode/2up. e-book.

 

Merriam-Webster, s.v. "ontology (n.), accessed September 7, 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ontology. web page.

 

Saint Augustine. Confessions. Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England: Penguin Books Ltd,

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Teske, Ronald J. "Genesis Accounts of Creation." In Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, 379-381. Michigan: Grand Rapids, 1999. https://archive.org/details/augustinethrough0000unse/page/n11/mode/2up. e-book.