Faithlife publishes Logos Bible Software in a wide range of flavors and packages. Quite a while back they were putting out a free book of the month for Verbum, a version of Logos targeting Catholics. This month the have revived the Verbum free book of the month with Saint Augustine: On Genesis: Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees; and, on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book (2001). The is book 84 in the Fathers of the Church Patristic Series from The Catholic University of America Press.
This is the first two of five explanations of the beginning of the Book of Genesis Augustine wrote between 388 and 418. The first book is a commentary on Genesis 1-3 attacking Manichees, a sub-Christian cult in which Augustine worshiped for nine years.
From the blurb:
Although Augustine agrees that many things in Scripture may seem absurd to the unlearned, he holds that they can produce great pleasures once they have been explained. It was this tenet, realized in his spiritual rather than corporeal interpretation of Scripture, that led him to counter the impious attacks the Manichees used to attract those who sought a more intellectual understanding of God over and against an anthropomorphic view. Augustine’s brilliant assimilation of Christian revelation and the intellectual faith of the Neoplatonic circle around Ambrose in Milan gave rise to his “spiritual” interpretation of Genesis 1-3 in the Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees.
The third part of this book is On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis. The book provides “fascinating and invaluable examples of Augustine’s developing thought on significant philosophical and theological issues in the interpretation of Genesis.”
John the Evangelist was an eagle, soaring high in the sky into the sun; Augustine was the Lord’s trumpet, proclaiming the gospel and blaring forth its meaning. John’s Gospel is a profound theological study of Christ’s divinity; Augustine’s In Ioannis Evangelium Tractatus CXXIV are a prolonged pastoral investigation of that profundity. In them, Augustine, the world-renowned bishop of Hippo Regius, the humble pastor of souls, seeks to peer into the depths of Johannine theology and rise to the heights of Johannine illumination, that the shepherd might reveal to his sheep, as far as God granted, the meaning of John’s Gospel. For Augustine, however, preaching, and the scriptural exegesis that was a necessary part of preaching, were the truly important theological activities, more important, perhaps, than the more formal treatises.
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