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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
In Confessions 13, Augustine discusses the right interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis. His exegesis is allegorical, relating spiritual truth to its expression in the physical world. This physical expression was needed because Adam fell:
All things are beautiful because you make them, and you who made all things are inexpressibly more beautiful. If Adam had not fallen from you, there would not have come forth from his womb [utero eius] that salt sea-water the human race, profoundly curious, stormily swelling, unstable and in flux, and so there would have been no need for your agents, in many waters, to perform mystic actions and sayings in the corporeal and perceptible mode.
1 I am much indebted to Gerald Bonner for his prompt and helpful comments on this paper. I am of course responsible for errors or misinterpretations.
2 Confessions, XIII, xx, 28: ‘et pulchra sunt omnia faciente te, et ecce tu inenarrabiliter pulchrior, qui fecisti omnia, a quo si non esset lapsus Adam, non diffunderetur ex utero eius salsugo maris, genus humanum profunde curiosum et procellose tumidum et instabiliter fluidum, atque ita non opus esset ut in aquis multis corporaliter et sensibiliter operarentur dispensatores tui mystica facta et dieta.’
3 CETEDOC makes it possible to trace Augustine’s use of uterus and alternative words. For other senses of uterus, and other Latin words for ‘womb’, see Adams, J. N., The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London, 1982), pp. 100–9 Google Scholar, and André, J., Le vocabulaire latin de l’anatomie (Paris, 1991), pp. 188–93 Google Scholar. I have yet to find a translation of Conf., XIII, xx, 28 which has ‘womb’.
4 See on this aspect Clark, G., ‘Adam’s womb and the salty sea’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 42 (1996), pp. 89–105 Google Scholar.
5 A good example is Bird, Phyllis A., ‘Male and female he created them: Genesis 1.27b in the context of the priestly account of creation’, HThR, 74 (1981), pp. 129–59 Google Scholar.
6 This is a close translation of the text probably read by Augustine in the Vetus Latina, as reconstructed by O’Donnell, James, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols (Oxford, 1992), 3, p. 345 Google Scholar: ‘et dixit deus, “faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, et dominetur piscium maris et volatilium caeli et omnium pecorum et omnis terrae et omnium repentium quae repunt super terram.” et fecit deus hominem ad imaginem dei: masculum et feminam fecit eos. et benedixit eos deus dicens, “crescite et multiplicamini et inplete terram et dominamini eius.”’ In the translation [him] is bracketed because there is no pronoun in the Latin (or the Greek).
7 Horowitz, Maryanne Cline, ‘The image of God in man – is woman excluded?’, HThR, 72 (1979), pp. 175–206 Google Scholar, discusses a range of patristic interpretations.
8 Augustine comments on the difficulty in De Genesi contra Manichaeos, II, xiii, and Jerome discusses it in Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, II, xxiii: he suggests vir/virago (a forced usage, because virago usually means a fierce warrior-woman), and remarks that the translator Symmachus used a Greek word andris to parallel andros, the genitive of anêr. See Hayward, C. T. R., Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Oxford, 1995), pp. 32, 113 Google Scholar.
9 See on this question Lakoff, George, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholars.
10 Basil, , De hominis structura, I, xxii Google Scholar (also recognized as Homily 10 on the Hexaemeron), PC 30, col. 33. The work has sometimes been ascribed to his brother Gregory, and Migne therefore prints it also in PC 44, cols 257–98.
11 De civitate Dei xxii, xviii.
12 This is the explanation suggested by J. Gibb and W. Montgomery in their commentary, The Confessions of Augustine (Cambridge, 1908); they also observe that this passage is a remarkable instance of ‘catachresis’, the extended use of words. James O’Donnell, Augustine, 3, p. 388, gives some endorsement to their suggestion, but emphasises the oddity.
13 De civitate Dei, XV, xvii.
14 De civitate Dei XII, xxii.
15 For the importance of etymology in exegesis of this period, see Hayward, , Jerome’s Hebrew Questions, pp. 93–4 Google Scholar.
16 See Bonner, further G., ‘Adam’, in Mayer, C. et al, eds, Augustinus-Lexikon, 1 (Basle, 1994). pp. 63–87 Google Scholar.
17 Retractationes, I, ix and I, xvii.
18 See the introduction by Teske, Roland J. to his translation, St Augustine on Genesis, Fathers of the Church, 44 (Washington, DC, 1991), esp. pp. 17, 27-31 Google Scholar; and Markus, R. A., Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool, 1996)Google Scholar, ch. 1.
19 Retractationes, I, ix, 2.
20 These controversies have been extensively discussed: see especially Clark, Elizabeth A., ‘Adam’s only companion; Augustine and the early Christian debate on marriage’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 21 (1986), pp. 139–62 Google Scholar, and, for their effect on exegesis, Augustine’s, eadem, , ‘Heresy, asceticism, Adam and Eve: interpretations of Genesis 1–3 in the later Latin fathers’, in her Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith (Lewiston, NY, 1986), pp. 353–86 Google Scholar. See also Hunter, David G., ‘Helvidius, Jovinian and the Virginity of Mary in late fourth-century Rome’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1 (1993), pp. 47–71 Google Scholar. with references to his earlier articles.
21 For the dating, see Clark, , ‘Adam’s only companion’, pp. 370–1 Google Scholar. She points to Augustine’s, comment in De Genesi ad litteram, IX, vii, 12 Google Scholar that he has ‘recently’ written De bono nuptiarum (401).
22 De Cenai ad litteram, IX, x; De civitate Dei XIV, xxii-xxiii, on which see further Clark, G., ‘The bright frontier of friendship: Augustine and the Christian body in late antiquity’, in Mathisen, R. and Sivan, H., eds, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 212–23 Google Scholar.
23 De civitate Dei XIII, xx, says that it was to prevent any distress from hunger and thirst.
24 See further Horowitz, , ‘Image of God in man’, pp. 191–2 Google Scholar, 199–200.
25 See further McGovan, R. J., ‘Augustine and spiritual equality: the allegory of man and woman with regard to imago Dei’, Revue des études Augustiniennes, 33 (1987), pp. 255–64 Google Scholar, and the careful discussion by Power, Kim, Veiled Desire: Augustine’s Writing on Women (London, 1995), pp. 131–68 Google Scholar, of the mistaken charge that Augustine said women are not in God’s image.
26 Philo might have been interpreted as thinking that the anthrõpos of Gen. 1.27 was androgyne: Horowitz, ‘Image of God in man’, p. 191.
27 Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum, II, clxxviii.
28 Notably in Ad Simplicianum, I (written in 396, just before the Confessions): see Frederiksen, further Paula, ‘Excaecati occulta justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 3 (1995), pp. 299–324, especially pp. 299–313 Google Scholar.
29 This is the suggestion of Miles, Margaret, Desire and Delight: a New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York, 1992), pp. 114–15 Google Scholar.
30 On the importance of modus, limit’ or ‘defining form’, for Augustine, see O’Donnell, , Augustine, 2, pp. 47–8 Google Scholar.