Critical Musings on Dixon's Augustine: Augustine and the Confessions (original) (raw)

I have been working extensively with Augustine since 1993, focusing especially on his lifelong preoccupation with the interpretation of Genesis 1-3. One could argue that, in essence, Augustine wrote five commentaries on that text. Shortly after his conversion, he wrote a commentary on Genesis, Against the Manichees in Two Books. Then, he attempted a socalled "literal" commentary that remains incomplete. Several books of the City of God comprise yet another commentary on Genesis, as Augustine articulated a Christian political philosophy, with parallels to Plato's Republic, in response to the fall of Rome in 410 CE. Toward the end of his life, he returned to the notion of rendering a literal commentary on Genesis 1-3. This time he produced a work running 1,100 pages in Latin. And, of course, there is the commentary of Confessions, especially Books 12 and 13. For my own work, I hope to document how Augustine's exegesis evolves from work to work and to note how the questions he posed to the text changed and how the results he obtained differ. [2] Needless to say, as I read Sandra Lee Dixon's Augustine: The Scattered and Gathered Self, I was anxious to see how her methodology would shape her reading of the end of Confessions. In other words, I could barely wait to get to Chapter 8: "Augustine and Confessions 10-13." Given my interests, I will confine my response to issues raised in that chapter, with the hope that they will nevertheless engage the book as a whole.