Augustine's Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees and On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis: An Unfinished Book represent the first two of five explanations of the beginning of the Book of Genesis that he undertook between 388 and 418. In the first, a commentary on Genesis 1-3, Augustine counters the ignorant and impious attacks against Scripture by the Manichees, with whom he was a ""hearer"" for nine years. The second would have been a hexaemeron, a commentary on the six days of creation, but, as Augustine admits, his inexperience in scriptural exegesis collapsed under the weight of...

To Know God and the Soul presents a collection of essays on Augustine of Hippo written over the past twenty-five years by renowned philosopher Roland Teske. They reveal Teske's principal interests in Augustine, especially Augustine's discovery of a spiritualist metaphysics in the philosophy of Plotinus that allowed him to break away from Manichean and Stoic corporealism so that he could conceive of God as incorporeal and non-temporal and of the soul as incorporeal. Augustine's assimilation of Plotinian thought as a means of understanding Catholic Christianity provided key answers to some of...