16. Jo. ev. tr. 15.1 (BA 71:756); trans. Rettig, FOTC 78:78.
The Exegete 159 these should be added Confessions, Books 11–13, and City of God, Books 11–16, which offer lengthy analyses of and meditations on Genesis' first three chapters, its stories of creation and fall. Exegesis of Genesis was an apt vehicle for Augustine the ex-Manichee to affirm in depth and detail his faith in a God who, unlike the God of the Manichees, was understood to have created the earth and the visible cosmos and declared them "good." Genesis also helped Augustine focus his search for and meditation upon the origin and nature of evil. His investigations would crystallize around a distinctive understanding of original sin and its massive consequences for world history. We will defer examining his Genesis commentaries until later chapters on the Manichees, on the City of God, and on the Pelagians.
The second was the Psalms. At Augustine's baptism, the "sweet singing" of the Psalms had left him drenched in tears. Their music continued to cast a spell over him. Nearly every page of Confessions quotes or echoes the Psalms. The Psalms, he came to believe, touched the "ears of the heart," drawing in hearers with the "sweet sound of someone softly strumming an instrument."12 Augustine read the book more as a sort of fifth Gospel than as Old Testament. Its lyrics, he believed, were sung by the voice of Christ—by turns, the voice of the Risen Lord and the voice of His body, the Church on earth: "It is His voice in all the psalms: now strumming gently, now moaning, now rejoicing in hope for what will come, now sighing about things as they are."13 Augustine became convinced of the Psalms' therapeutic power and called on his congregation to lay claim to the Psalms' emotional repertoire as a way to repair and renew their own damaged hearts. By career's end, he had commented on all 150 psalms, mostly in sermons delivered before a live audience.14 These were collected in his Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), a massive work twice the length of City of God.
The third was the Gospel of John. Augustine commented on the entire Gospel via 124 sermons ("tractates"), many delivered before a live audience, others dictated to stenographers. Augustine loved John's Gospel for its sublimity.15 "The evangelist John," he once told his congregation, "soars to greater heights like an eagle; he transcends the murky darkness of earth; he looks upon the light of truth with a steadier gaze."16 What John the apostle gazed
12. En. Ps. 41.9 (CCL 38:467); my trans. 13. En. Ps. 42.1 (CCL 38:474); my trans. Cf. en. Ps. 96.2 14. One exception was his commentary on Psalm 118 [119], which, because of its length, Augustine dictated to scribes. Much of his commentary on Psalms 1–32, among his earliest exegeses, are notes prepared for a sermon rather than a transcription of the actual live performance—and thus unlike the bulk of the Enarrationes.
15. On this, see Marie-François Berrouard, Introduction aux Homélies de saint Augustin sur l'Évangile de saint Jean, CEASA 170 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 2004), esp. 39–44.
16. Jo. ev. tr. 15.1 (BA 71:756); trans. Rettig, FOTC 78:78.