Early in his life, Augustine was a literalist when it came to the scriptures. He took them at face value, a very natural think to do when presented with a story. After all, this is what the story said happened. There are two clear examples of this, the first being the image of God. Early in Genesis where God is crafting Adam and Eve later on, God says that He is creating mankind in His image. Taking this literally into understanding, one need only look at the image of a human. It is this image, of a bipedal body, that Augustine attached to God. There is evidence of this in the sixth book, fourth section. As a result of this view he also took the law and the prophets to be absurd and offensive (book 6, section 8). In wanting everything to be explained rationally like the Manicheans purported that everything could be, Augustine found the mysteries of the bible to be repugnant and was a large part of his rejection of Christianity.

He was finally set free of this assumption by the teaching of Ambrose, from which he learned that, “the letter kills, the spirit gives life.” The lesson being that one needs to look at the spirit of the text for the truth of what it is saying, not in a literalistic interpretation of the scriptures. He also found the Catholic Church did not demand that everything be rationally explained and took things on faith that were beyond reason. This seemed much more intellectually honest than the wares the Manicheans pedaled and was in line with the skepticism of certain knowledge that Cicero and elements of the Academy fostered. With this new look at scripture Augustine was able to see that many of the things that kept him from Christianity simply did not exist, they were products not of the Church’s teaching, but of what he thought the Church taught. This newfound view enabled him to accept the scriptures and the Church’s teaching of them.