For the past three years, I have taught Genesis 1-3 to first-year undergraduate students at Villanova University as part of its Augustine and Culture Seminar Program. Some students are familiar with this story of creation (though not as familiar with the details they are always surprised to find out). Some are reading this text for the first time. Typically they want to rush through the content of the text itself to discuss its larger meanings and implications or parrot (sometimes challenge) what they have learned about the text in other settings. It is work to get them to slow down, put aside their preconceptions, and start at the beginning.

To do this, I try to encourage the students to ask the sort of questions that Augustine asks in the Confessions. What kind of act is creation? What does it mean to be created? What were we created for?

At first, my first-year students resist asking such questions because they perceive them to be overly basic, even childlike. They want to demonstrate their sophistication, not their naïveté. My first-years have been trained to think that asking simple questions is bad; questions must be complicated to be academic. Augustine when he was their age probably would have agreed with them.

As he writes in book 3 of the Confessions, his first impression of scripture was that it seemed “unworthy” in comparison to the dignity of Cicero’s prose (conf. 3.5.9; tr. Boulding). He was too proud, as a young adult, to “be a little child”; it was only later in life that he realized that “scripture is a reality that grows along with little children” (3.5.9).

But if we are not too proud to be childlike, we can ask the questions that matter most. In book 13 of the Confessions, Augustine asks an obvious question—one that is so obvious we might not even think to ask it. Why was there creation at all—if God had no need for us?

“What, then, would have been lacking to that Good which is your [God’s] very self, even if these things had never come to be at all, or had remained in their unformed state? It was no need on your part that drove you to make them. Out of your sheer goodness you controlled them and converted them to their form; it was not as though your own happiness stood in need of completion by them.” (13.4.5)

If God needs nothing, it was neither utility nor profit that motivated His creation. Instead, He created entirely on account of His “abundant goodness,” for He “did not want so good a thing to be missing” (13.2.2).

As the calendar year 2024 comes to a close, I think it is worth dwelling on that in our lives which is so good we would not want to miss it — and how we can regain our childlike wonder of creation, such that we can be always curious in our questions and never too proud to assume we have all the answers.

This essay concludes our series on Augustine’s Confessions. Our editorial team will be taking time to rest at the start of the new year.

We would like to thank all of our contributors who shared their thoughts and reflections on this text. We have learned much from them and are grateful for their time and good will. We would also like to thank our readers for following along.

In the spring, we will begin a new series “Augustine Among the Moderns,” which will include essays on modern figures and their Augustinian connections (whether intended or not). We look forward to sharing these essays with you soon!