Augustine in His Own Words
and wild animals and all the earth and all reptiles which creep upon the earth. For when God said, "Let us make man to our image and likeness," he immediately added, "And let him have power over the fish of the sea and the birds of heaven" (Gn 1:27–28) and the rest, so that we might understand that the human being is said to have been made to the image of God, not on account of his body, but on account of that power by which he surpasses the cattle. For all the other animals are subject to us, not by reason of the body, but by reason of the intellect, which we have and they do not. Even our body has been made so that it reveals that we are better than the beasts and, for that reason, like God. For the bodies of all the animals which live either in the waters or on the earth, or which fly in the air, are turned toward the earth and are not erect as is the human body. This signifies that our mind ought to be raised up toward those things above it, that is, to eternal spiritual things. It is especially by reason of the mind that we understand that the human person was made to the image and likeness of God, as even the erect form of the body testifies.32
The Goodness of Creation
In the opening chapter of Genesis, God is said to affirm repeatedly that what He had made on each day was "good" and that at the creation's completion, it was all "very good." At the close of Confessions, Augustine meditates on Genesis and its affirmation of the goodness of creation. This section is important because it alerts us that Confessions is not simply autobiography. It is what its title says it is: a confession of faith. Here Augustine the ex-Manichee affirms what he had once denied. From Confessions, Book 13:
(28.43) And You saw, O God, all the things that You had made, and, behold, "they were very good" (Gn 1:31). We too see them, and, behold, they are all very good. For each kind of Your works, when You had said that they were to be made and they were made, You saw that each in turn is good. I have counted seven times where it is written that You did see that what you had made is good; and this is the eighth, that You did see all things that You had made, and behold, they are not merely good, but very good when taken all together. For the individual things are merely good, but all together they are both good and very much so. All beautiful bodies express the same truth, for a body is far more beautiful in the fact that it is constituted out of parts which are all beautiful than are these parts taken individually; for the whole is perfected by the most orderly gathering of these parts—even though they are also beautiful when considered individually. . . .
32. De Genesi adversus Manichaeos 1.17.27–17.28 (BA 50:218–22); trans. Teske, FOTC 84:74–76.