this volume.
Book 1 59
A spiritual interpretation of the authority given them over all the animals
20, 31. And as regards their being told: Have authority over thefishes of the sea and theflying things ofheaven, and of all crawling things which crawl over the earth (Gn 1 :28): granted that it is by intelligence and reason that we clearly lord it over all these animals, this text can still also be properly understood in a spiritual sense, to mean that we should keep in subjection all the feelings and emotions of the spirit which we have in common with these animals, and should lord it over them by self-restraint and moderation. When these emotions, you see, are not strictly controlled, they break out and lead to the filthiest habits, and drag us offthrough a variety ofpernicious pleasures, and make us like every kind of animal. When on the other hand they are controlled and brought into submis sion, they grow completely tame and live with us in a friendly association.
The emotions of the spirit, after all, are not something alien to us. They also browse together with us on the knowledge of the best ideas and moral principles and of eternal life, as it were on seed-bearing grasses and fruit trees and green plants.26 And this is what gives us a happy and tranquil life, when all our emotions are in tune with reason and truth, and we call them joys and loves that are holy and chaste and good. lfhowever they are out of tune, while nonetheless being heedlessly played on, they tear the spirit to pieces and scatter the frag ments and make life utterly miserable; and then we call them disturbances, and lusts, and evil desires. About these we are now instructed to make every possible effort to crucify them in ourselves until death is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor
15:54). The apostle, you see, has this to say: But those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified theirflesh, with its disturbances and desires (Gal 5:24).
This at least, you see, ought to warn anybody offthinking that these words are to be understood in a purely literal, material sense: that green grass and fruit trees are given as food in Genesis to every kind of wild animal and to all flying things and all snakes, though we can see that lions and hawks and kites and eagles only feed on flesh, by preying on other animals; I believe the same is true of several kinds of snake which live in sandy deserts, where no trees or grass can grow.27
26. See Gn 1 :29-30, where the first human beings are told that they will have the same vegetarian diet as all animals, the analogues of our emotions. Augustine, we must remember, is all the time talking, especially in an early work like this, in the Neoplatonic vein, in which the self, the "1" and "We," isjust the human spirit or mind. But he is also stressing here, against the Manichees, that the body and its feelings and passions and emotions are not something totally alien to the real inner self, and hostile to it, an emphasis that will get more and more pronounced the older he gets and the more directly his pastoral responsibilities as a bishop put him in touch with the total, in-the-round humanity of his flock—and of himself. 27. See his comment on this in the passage from the Revisions, section 2, put at the beginning of this volume.
60 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees
God saw that all things together were very good
21, 32. We must certainly not casually pass over the text: And God saw all things whatsoever that he had made to be very good (Gn 1:31). When it was dealing with them one by one, you see, it just said, "God saw that it was good"; but when it came to talking about them all, it was not enough to say "good" unless "very" was also added. God's individual works are found by sensible people who consider them to display, each in its own kind, admirable measures and numbers and orders (Wis 1 1 :20); how much more must this be so with all things together (Sir 18:1), that is, with the universe itself, which is completed by all these individual things being brought together into one whole?
Every beauty, after all, that consists of parts is much more admirable in its totality than in any of its parts. Take the human body, for example; if we admire the eyes alone or the nose alone or the cheeks alone or the head alone, or the hands or the feet alone, and if we admire all the other parts one by one and alone, how much more the whole body on which all its parts, each beautiful by itself, confer their particular beauties? lf by contrast a beautiful hand, which in the body was admired even on its own, is separated from the body, not only does the hand itself forfeit its own proper grace, but the other parts also are rendered unsightly without it. Such is the force and power of completeness and unity, that many things, all good in themselves, are only found satisfying when they come together and fit into one universal whole. The universal, the universe, of course takes its name from unity.
If the Manichees would only consider this truth, they would praise God the author and founder of the whole universe, and they would fit any particular part that distresses them because of our mortal condition into the beauty of the universal whole, and thus would see how God made all things not only good, but also very good. Thus if in some elaborate and well-turned speech we were to consider the single syllables, not to mention the single letters, which vanish the moment they are pronounced, we would find nothing in them to delight us and win our admiration. The whole speech, you see, gets its beauty, not from single syllables or letters, but from them taken all together.
Manichee mockery of the notion of God resting on the seventh day
22. 33. And now let us take a look at the text which they are in the habit of making fun of, with more impudence even than ignorance, where it says that God, on finishing heaven and earth and all that he had made, rested on the seventh dayfrom all his works, and blessed the seventh day and consecrated it, because he restedfrom all his works (Gn 2:2-3). You see, what they say is: "What need did God have for resting? Was he perhaps worn out and tired by the