How Confessions drew on Genesis
A documented line of influence: Augustine of Hippo demonstrably engaged Moses’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Genesis
Moses · c. 550 BCE
BibleThe influenced
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · c. 398
Ancient RomeRelevance
8/10
On Confessions’s page
- The famous part is the conversion — but the last three books turn into a line-by-line meditation on Genesis 1
- Augustine reads the creation account verse by verse, Book 13 unfolding each day of creation as allegory, partly to answer the Manichaeans who dismissed it
- Read Genesis first and you'll feel the full strangeness of what Augustine does with "In the beginning" — a single phrase mined for pages on time, eternity, and what it means for the world to begin
On Genesis’s page
- The first verses of Genesis become Augustine's final subject — Confessions doesn't end with his conversion, it ends inside Genesis 1
- Books 11-13 are a sustained verse-by-verse exegesis of the creation account, with Book 13 reading each day allegorically
- Augustine pushes against the Manichaeans who dismissed Genesis, and in defending it he wrestles for pages with what "In the beginning" reveals about time, eternity, and creation