1997) 121.
1ntroduction
Origin and intention lt is a known fact that in his search for truth and wisdom the nineteen-year-old Augustine took up the Bible but was soon disillusioned with it and laid it aside.1 It rnay well have been the reading ofGenesis that sapped the enthusiasm of the young student in the very first pages of the Old Testament. It is certain, in any case, that the attacks of the Manichees on the book of Genesis and especially on the story of creation were not the least of the reasons why he joined that sect around 373.2
The opening chapters ofGenesis were the main focus ofcontroversy between Manichees and Christians because faith in a single creator of the world was in direct opposition to the Manichean dualistic cosmogony. Manichean critics of Genesis 1 , 1—2, 4 tried to prove that the biblical text was untenable. The anthro pomorphic picture of God given there was absurd, and the question of the origin of evil was unanswerable on the assumption of a single, good creator God. The Manichees expressly rejected a figurative-allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament,3 because only in light of this rejection did the strangeness and diffi culty of the Old Testament text become really clear. The Manichees intended by their criticism to undermine the credibility of a Church that took this question able text as a document of revelation, and thereby to dispose the faithful for an acceptance of the Manichean message. In the case of Augustine, this maneuver was completely successful in the beginning. As a young student he rejected both the text of the Old Testament and the authority of the Catholic Church.
At the same time, however, it was the Manichean cosmogony that caused Augustine to study more carefully the origin of the universe, for, as he wrote later on in the Confessions: "Their books are full of interminable myths concerning sky, stars, sun and moon."4 On the basis of the demand for reason
1. See Confessions 111, 5, 9 (CCL 27, 30f.). 2. See E. Feldmann, Der Einfluss des Hortensius and des Manichdismus aufdas Denken des jungen Augustinus von 373 (Dissertation; Miinster. 1975) 568-588. 3. See Evodius, Defide contra Manichaeos 38 (CSEL 25/2, 968). On Manichean criticism of the Bible see K. Pollmann, Doctrina christiana. Untersuchungen zu den Anfdngen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berilcksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana (Paradosis 41 ; Fribourg, 1996) 11-21. 4. Confessions V, 7, 12 (CCL 27, 63); trans. M. Boulding, The Confessions (Hyde Park, NY, 1997) 121.