Remember That You Are Catholic" (Serm. 52.2) : Augustine On The Unity of The Triune God

Remember That You Are Catholic" (serm. 52.
2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God

Lewis Ayres
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 39-82 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD
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Remember That You Are Catholic (serm. 52.2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God1
LEWIS AYRES
For Robert Markus on his seventy-fth birthday
That Augustines Trinitarian theology begins with the unity of God is a persistent but strongly erroneous perception. In this article I offer an alternative reading of Augustine through seeing his Trinitarianism as embedded in fourth-century Latin pro-Nicene theology and as hence focused around the need to explain the inseparable operation of the triune God. This theme is common to both Greek and Latin pro-Nicene theology. Augustine approaches this task through extensive discussion of the ways in which the Incarnation provides the means for elevating our imaginations to true contemplation of the divine unity and diversity. Augustine is also explicit that there can be no formal analogy for the Godhead. I end by showing how Augustines use of divine simplicity does not mark his theology as necessarily neoplatonic and distinct from his Latin predecessors, but indicates the extent to which his theology may be read as a development of that tradition.
I. INTRODUCTION In a recent paper John Zizioulas speaks with approval of the wellknown textbook thesis that the West began with the unity of God and
1. I am very grateful to audiences at St. Patricks College, Maynooth, and at the University of Durham for the reception of and comments on this paper. I would especially like to thank Andrew Louth, Carol Harrison, and Gerald Bonner for their comments and encouragement, and Michel Barnes and Mike McDermott, S.J., for comments on earlier drafts (see also n. 8). I would also like to thank Mark Weedman for taking time out from his own research to make and then help interpret searches on the Cetedoc system. All abbreviations for Augustines works are from C. P. Mayer, ed., Augustinus Lexicon (Stuttgart and Basle: Schwabe & Co., 1986 ).
Journal of Early Christian Studies 8:1, 3982 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
then moved to the Trinity, while the East followed the opposite course.2 The style and content of this remark is not unique and I cite Zizioulas comment as only one particularly clear statement of an opposition between Eastern and Western theologies of the Trinity that has, in the latter half of this century, become a commonplace assumption. This assertion is often, if not usually, accompanied by another: namely, that the key originator of and exemplar for the Wests style is Augustine. For example, Catherine LaCugna writes: Augustines point of departure in De Trinitate was the unity of the divine essence shared by the three divine persons.3 This account of Augustine is then used as part of a fairly standard East/ West distinction in Trinitarian theology.4 The shape of that fairly standard account can be grasped by noting the two things that LaCugnas statement alleges: rst, Augustine emphasizes or begins with the divine unity to a degree that marks his theology as distinct from Greek theologies; second, Augustine does so by treating the divine unity as a divine essence or substance shared by and prior to the distinctions of the persons. In this account we can also hear echoes of the argument that Augustine represents the beginning of a medieval or scholastic paradigm of thought and the end of characteristically Patristic Trinitarian theology. In this article my aim is to offer an alternative way of reading Augustines account of the Triune unity. In order to offer this alternative account I will attempt to prove that four things are the case: 1. the closest we can come to identifying Augustines point of departure for describing the unity of God is the pro-Nicene5 doctrine of the inseparable operation of the three persons;
2. J. Zizioulas, The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Signicance of the Cappadocian Contribution, in C. Schwbel, ed., Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995), 46. 3. C. M. LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 214. 4. LaCugna, God for Us, 10. 5. I use pro-Nicene to describe theologies which, from about 360 c.e., gradually came to present themselves as upholding the creed of Nicaea over against the theologies of those who had no interest in, or were actively opposed to, Nicaea. It is not appropriate to use the term to designate any clear theological party in the two or three decades immediately following Nicaea, as the particular creed of that council does not appear to have been central to debate. In the West, pro-Nicene reaction to the Council of Ariminum in 359 provides a good point of departure. These theologies of course had allegiances to previous traditions, and also were varied in themselves and underwent signicant development. For an account of the rise of pro-Nicene theologians in the West see D. H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Arian-Nicene Conicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), esp. chap. 1.
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2. Augustine shapes his account of how we grow in understanding of this unity around the epistemological and ontological function of the Incarnation; 3. Augustine consciously argues against any presentation of the Trinity that would envisage a divine essence prior to or in any way separable from the three persons; 4. Augustines doctrine of God is not shaped by a neoplatonic account of Gods simple essence such that it is radically distinct from that of his immediate predecessors, Latin or Greek. Rather, he uses a doctrine of divine simplicity, in ways parallel to his predecesors, to focus attention both on what it means for the Trinitarian persons to be truly inseparable, and on the nature of our task if we are to grow in understanding of the divine unity. Through attempting to argue for these four fairly precise propositions I hope to lay the groundwork for a reading of the Trinitarian unity in Augustines theology which runs counter to the commonplace assertions or, more often, accusationsoutlined above.6 Obviously in one paper I cannot disprove the wider thesis about East and West with which I began, and which is so often interwoven with the standard twentieth-century account of Augustines Trinitarian theology.7 Nevertheless, by showing how that account radically misreads some key Augustinian texts, I hope at least to worry those who want to continue to assert the broader thesis in such simple terms, and to indicate the extent of work that needs to be done on Augustines Trinitarian theology.8
6. It is not often noted in English-language theology that those who seek to originate the focus on unity in Western theology in Augustines synthesis come in two varieties. The most well known are those who do so as an accusation and as a reason for moving to some other source for their own construction. However, there also those, often with something of a semi-Hegelian or at least broadly Idealist tendency, who attribute much the same to Augustine, but do so as part of their own account of the strengths of Western theology. W. Beierwalters or E. Booth might serve as examples: see for example W. Beierwalters, Unity and Trinity in Dionysius and Eriugena, Hermathena 157 (1994): 120; E. Booth, Hegels Conception of SelfKnowledge Seen in Conjunction with Augustines, Augustiniana 30 (1980): 22150. My account is opposed to both groups. In the latter case, however well later western Trinitarian tradition may be read as the forerunner of Idealism, such a perspective does not produce a historically sensitive reading of Augustines Trinitarian theology in immediate historical, and especially doctrinal context. 7. It is important to note the extent to which this version of the East/West paradigm owes to De Rgnon. See M. R. Barnes, De Rgnon Reconsidered, AugSt 26 (1995): 5179. 8. Here see my Augustines Trinitarian Theology, forthcoming; idem, The Discipline of Self-knowledge in Augustines De trinitate Book X, in L. Ayres, ed., The
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However, before any progress can be made with Augustines actual texts, some time needs to be spent considering Zizioulas use of the word began in the quotation with which I opened (and my discussion of this verb should also be transposed to raise similar questions about LaCugnas phrase point of departure). One of the most immediate problems with any statement about where Augustines theology begins is that readers and composers of such statements may be led to envisage the existence of a body of theological works written in a physical order resembling some modern systematic theologies, or perhaps some styles of medieval treatise, from which it would supposedly be evident that a discussion of De Deo Uno physically and logically precedes De Deo Trino. Such a body of material does not exist. One might, perhaps, point to Augustines various expositions of the creed, or to his semicredal summaries of Catholic orthodoxy,9 but this would only demonstrate an order to be found across the Mediterranean and throughout much early Christian theology. Certainly in terms of ordering of topicsas opposed to detailed wording of those topicslittle remarkable is to be found. Of course, interpreting talk of a theology beginning in this way
Passionate Intellect: Essays on the Transformation of Classical Traditions Presented to Professor Ian Kidd. RUSCH VII (Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), 26196; idem, The Christological Context of De trinitate XIII: Towards Relocating Books VIII XV, AugSt 29 (1998): 11139; idem, The Fundamental Grammar of Augustines Trinitarian Theology, in R. Dodaro and G. Lawless, eds., Augustine and His Critics (London: Routledge, 1999); idem, The Signicance of Memoria, Intellegentia and Voluntas in Augustines Trinitarian Theology in L. Ayres, ed., The Mystery of the Trinity in the Fathers of the Church, forthcoming; idem, Divine Simplicity and the Order of Generation in Augustines Trinitarian Theology, SP, forthcoming. Since 1995 my work on Augustine has been conducted in continuous conversation with Michel Barnes and his work on parallel and overlapping themes. Our virtually daily exchange of research and texts via email means that it is difcult to acknowledge all the points at which this detailed conversation has inuenced both our accounts, though I have tried to do so throughout the paper in particularly important cases. For his work on Augustine see M. R. Barnes, Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology, ThS 56 (1995): 23750; idem, De Rgnon Reconsidered; idem, The Arians of Book V, and the Genre of De Trinitate, JTS n.s. 44 (1993): 18595; idem, Exegesis and Polemic in De Trinitate I, AugSt 30 (1999): 4359; idem, Re-reading Augustines Theology of the Trinity, in S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. OCollins, eds., The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Doctrine of the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The last paper in particular was written at the same time as this one and in some aspects overlaps with it, especially in our discussions of ep. 11. Barnes is also currently working on a book-length study provisionally entitled Augustines De Trinitate in Polemical Context. 9. E.g., f. et symb.; serm. 21215; symb. cat.; Ench.
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with a discussion of Gods unity physically preceding Gods pluralityis something of a canard.10 But, if it is, then an account of exactly what is meant by talk of a theology beginning somewhere will need to be given. I suggest that those who talk of Augustines theology beginning with the unity are most likely to mean that the unity is, in a variety of ways, the most fundamental axiom of Augustines theology of the Trinity. If so, then it is beholden upon such writers to offer an account of how this axiomatic status shows itself in different types of text across Augustines career. Such an exercise involves showing the particular terminologies used, the background to those terminologies, and that they occupy a continuing fundamental place in Augustines argumentation. Thus, I suggest that using the term beginning here is actually unhelpful: this usage only serves to hide the necessity of a more precise statement of what is meant and how the signicance ascribed to a particular theme is to be discovered. Indeed, just as easy talk of a theology beginning in a certain place turns out to be problematic, talk of the unity of God also deserves close attention. The phrase unity of God may actually point towards many different discussions, and many different idioms: unity of will; a unity based on notions of shared substance or essence; a unity based on particular notions of transcendent generation or causality; a unity described with reference to that found in one human subjectivity. At the most basic level Augustine has, like all theologians, a particular idiom which evolved as the result of participation in a variety of traditions. Henceas should be clear from the last paragraphone of the key tasks for anyone wishing to accuse Augustine of concentration on unity must be to show Augustines own theological idiom for that unity. Of course, not all scholars offering an opinion on Augustines work will be Augustine specialists. However, if one does not undertake such detailed scholarship oneself then one would need to point to a body of scholarship which carried out such studies. Simply reasserting the general accusation on the basis of other, older summary assertions, without detailed reference to scholarly work on the texts, should be insufcient for the case to be taken with any great seriousness. Surprisinglyat least, I hope, to those who make the accusationno standard treatment of the unity of God in Augustines thought which ts the above criteria is to be found in the existing literature. The main book-length works on Augustines Trinitarian theology, which are now rather dated, do not provide such a
10. And of course, even when such physical preceding does occur its signicance may very easily be misread.
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treatment.11 A few shorter studies exist which comment on the subject and discuss aspects of it, but they do not provide the detailed account that would easily enable the widespread assumption that is made. The argument of this paper should be understood as a contribution to the growing body of scholarship attempting to reconsider Augustines Trinitarian theology.12 However, these newer accounts have not yet clearly solidied into anything like a smooth narrative of Augustines theology, and much remains to be done.
11. M. Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinittslehre des heiligen Augustinus (Mnster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927 [rpt. 1967]) provides little discussion of Augustines actual terminology for the Triune unity. Schmaus helps to hone the argument which is now standard: because Augustine uses psychological analogies from the existential self his account of the Trinity must favor unity above multiplicity. His later restatement, Die Denkform Augustins in seinem Werk de trinitate (Mnchen: Der Bayerischen Akademie, 1962), 15, is, if anything, even stronger: Augustinus ist es primr um die Einheit und erst sekundr um die Dreiheit in Gott zu tun. Diese Stellungnahme wurde von ihm mit groer Konsequenz und mit unabsehbarer Tragweite fr die abendlndische Theologie entwickelt. A. Schindler, Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinittslehre (Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965), in an otherwise quite helpful discussion of Augustines early Trinitarian texts, misses the importance and context of inseparable operations and spends little time discussing the unity as such. O. Du Roy, Lintelligence de la foi en la Trinit selon S. Augustin: Gense de la thologie trinitaire jusquen 391 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1966) asserts the position, but again his detailed reading stops at 391, when Augustine still had the vast majority of his writing career to come. Many of the opinions attributed to Du Roy are taken from the concluding chapter to his book, where Du Roy summarizes in brief how he would read the later books of trin. But here the subtlety of his earlier textual investigations is not repeated. 12. I think particularly of R. Williams, Sapientia and the Trinity: Reections on the De trinitate, in B. Bruning et al., eds., Collectanea Augustiniana: Mlanges T. J. Van Bavel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990) [=Augustiniana 4041 (1990 91)], vol. 1, 31732; F. Bourassa, Thologie trinitaire chez s. Augustin, Greg 58 (1977): 675725; idem, Lintelligence de la foi, Greg 59 (1978): 375432; J. Arnold, Begriff und heilskonomische Bedeutung der gttlichen Sendungen in Augustinus De Trinitate, RecAug 25 (1991): 369; B. Studer, La teologia trinitaria in Agostino dIppona: Continuit della tradizione occidentale? in Cristianesimo e specit regionali nel mediterraneo Latino (sec. IVVI). Studia Ephemerides Augustinianum 46 (Rome: Augustinianum, 1994), 16177; idem, History and Faith in Augustines De Trinitate, AugSt 28 (1997): 750 (this article lists much other relevant Studer work in footnotes); idem, Der Person-Begriff in der frhen kirchenamtlichen Trinitts-Lehre, ThPh 57 (1982): 16177; M. Lhrer, Glaube und Heilsgeschichte in De Trinitate Augustins, Freiburger Zeitschrift fr Philosophie und Theologie 4 (1957): 385419; S. H. Lancaster, Three-Personed Substance: The Relational Essence of the Triune God in Augustines De Trinitate, The Thomist 60 (1996): 12339. One of the most radical recent reconsiderations is J. Milbank, Divine Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul, Modern Theology 14 (1997): 45174. The best treatment currently available in English is that of B. Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christcentrism or Theocentrism, tr. M. J. OConnell (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1997).
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Spending so much time on teasing apart the notions of beginning and unity may seem to be an unnecessary exercise, but, on the contrary, I want to insist that this particular debate over Augustine and his legacy can only be pursued with purpose when there is a little clarity about what counts as serious and attentive argument. In the next two sections of this paper I have tried to make a small contribution to this debate by examining texts from, broadly, two different stages of Augustines career. In both cases I have followed in some detail the arguments of particular texts within which divine unity is discussed in an attempt to make clear the particular arguments and terminology Augustine deploys and the premises on which he works. The more one is aware of the style in which and the level of complexity with which a theologian argues the better one will be able to make judgements about their work as a whole. The texts that I have considered do not bring us in any great depth to the fully mature stage of Augustines career, the period in which he nished the De trinitate, wrote some of the most important Tractates on John, and engaged in debate with the Arian Maximinus (although serm. 117, considered briey towards the end of the paper, does fall in this period). Indeed, some readers will no doubt be surprised by the fact that, with one small exception, I have not discussed the De trinitate in the main text of this paper. I have two reasons for this decision: rst, discussing the arguments deployed by Augustine in ad hoc letters and sermons offers one way of seeing the most basic lines of his teaching and thus providing a context for the more developed and extended reection of trin. Thus, the range of texts considered here provides a fundamental background to the De trinitate and Augustines latest Trinitarian texts. Second, despite the important function these texts may serve in delineating the overall lines of Augustines thought, these texts have rarely received extended treatment in discussion of Augustines Trinitarian theology. II. AUGUSTINES EARLIEST TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY: LETTER 11 Augustines ep. 11 is a good point to begin, not least because it is probably the earliest text in Augustines corpus considering the Trinity in any detail.13 Considering such an early text in detail may seem a little tedious
13. Work on the earliest appearance of Trinitarian discussion in Augustine has for thirty years been shaped almost entirely by the thesis of O. Du Roy, Intelligence de la foi. But despite Du Roys interest in ep. 11, the text has received very little comment since. Treatments of Augustines earliest Trinitarian theology, even when critical of Du Roy, have focused elsewhere: see most recently the very helpful N. Cipriani, Le fonti
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to some readers, but establishing Augustines basic lines of argument in this text will prove to be of signicance in considering later, more wellknown developments. In my examination of this text two things will be of particular interest: Augustines insistence on the inseparable operation of the Trinitarian persons, and the place of Christology in the argument of the letter. The letter was written in response to a request from his friend Nebridius around the year 389 c.e., three years after Augustines conversion. Nebridius request centers around a Christological problem: why does the Son become incarnate, not the Father or the Spirit? Augustine writes in his reply that he is actually surprised at Nebridius question because the Catholic faith teaches the inseparability of the three persons. Augustine presents the doctrine in these terms:
For, according to the Catholic faith, the Trinity is proposed to our belief and believedand even understood by a few saints and holy personsas so inseparable that whatever action is performed by it must be thought to be performed at the same time by the Father and by the Son and by the Holy Spirit . . . the Son does not do anything which the Father and the Holy Spirit do not also do. . . . From this it seems to follow that the whole Trinity became man, for, if the Son took on human nature and the Father and the Spirit did not, they no longer act jointly. Why, then, in our mysteries and sacred rites is the Incarnation celebrated as attributed to the Son? This is a very deep question, and so difcult, and of such great import that it cannot be solved in a sentence, nor can its proof be wholly satisfying.14
Augustines response to Nebridius question takes as a point of departure that which he clearly sees as a fundamental axiom of Trinitarian theology: the three persons work inseparably. He does not argue for this point, but rather states it as an inherited part of tradition. That he would
Cristiane della dottrina Trinitaria nei primi dialoghi di S. Agostino, Aug 34 (1994): 253312. I have been unable to consult G. Folliet, La correspondence entre Augustin et Nbridius, Lopera letteraria di Agostino tra Cassiciacum e Milano: Agostino nelle terre di Ambrogio (14 Ottobre 1986). Testi e Studi 2 (Palermo: Augustiniana, 1987), 191215. 14. ep. 11.2 (CSEL 34:26): Nam ista Catholica de ita inseparabilis commendatur et creditur, ita etiam a paucis sanctis beatisque intellegitur, ut, quicquid ab ea t, simul eri sit existimandum et a Patre et a Filio et ab Spiritu Sancto . . . nec quicquam Filium, quod non et Pater et Spiritus Sanctus. . . . Ex quo uidetur esse consequens, ut hominem Trinitas tota susceperit; nam si Filius suscepit, Pater autem et Spiritus Sanctus non suscepereunt, aliquid praeter inuicem faciunt. Cur ergo in mysteriis et sacris nostris hominis susceptio lio tributa celebratur? Haec est plenissima quaestio ita difcilis et de re tam magna, ut nec sententia hic satis expedita nec eius probatio satis secura esse possit.
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see this principle as fundamental to Catholic Trinitarianism is not surprising given its centrality to the previous generation of Latin anti-Arian, or, more accurately, anti-Homoian theologians.15 The works of some of those theologians Augustine knew well and indeed his own catechesis occurred within that tradition.16 In the prologue to his Commentary on Luke Ambrose offers a similar account of the inseparable operation of the three persons:
Nor should anyone think that we have divided their power or virtue. . . . [Paul] certainly did not divide when he said: there are different graces, but the same Spirit; and there are different ministries but the same Lord; and there are different works, but it is the same God who works all in all (1 Cor 12.46). For the Son also works all in all; as you read elsewhere: Christ is all things and is in all things (Col 3.11). The Holy Spirit also works, because one and the same Spirit works all things, distributing to each person as he wills (1 Cor 12.11). There is no division, no separation in works, then, when in [none] of them, either Father or Son or Holy Spirit, is there a second fullness of virtue.17
I turned here to Ambrose for an example, because he provides perhaps the most immediate context for Augustines earliest postconversion education. However, I could easily have turned to Hilary or to some other of the less well-known Latin pro-Nicene theologians.18 For our purposes
15. In which group I include such gures as Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory of Elvira, Phoebadius of Agen, Eusebius of Vercelli, and Runus. My initial realization that Homoians were without doubt the group in question came from M. R. Barnes, Arians of Book V and from subsequent conversation (see n. 8). For introductions to Homoian theology see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), chap. 18 (although Hansons usefulness is limited because he does not clearly distinguish between Latin and Greek Homoians); the long introduction to R. Gryson, Scolies Ariennes sur le Concile dAquile. SC 267 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1980); M. Meslin, Les Ariens dOccident, 335430 (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1967). D. H. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, 243, provides a useful list of Homoian credal documents. 16. That contemporary catachesis was shaped by immediate polemical needs while still being focused around traditional baptismal creeds is demonstrated with particular reference to Ambrose by D. H. Williams, Constantine and the Fall of the Church, in L. Ayres and G. Jones, ed., Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric, and Community (London: Routledge, 1998), 127ff. 17. Ambrose, Comm. in Luc. prol. 5. For other examples see, e.g., De Sp. Sanct. 1.12.131; 2.10.101. 18. Barnes, Re-reading Augustines Theology of the Trinity makes the same point through reference to Hilary, De trin. 7.1718: . . . what He had done was to be regarded as the work of His Father, because the latter Himself was working in whatever He did . . . all the things that the Father does the Son does in a like manner. This is the understanding of the true birth and the most complete mystery of our faith. . . .
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here, it is also essential that we not think of inseparable operation as a peculiarly Latin phenomena. The inseparable operation of the three irreducible persons is a fundamental axiom of those theologies which provide the context for the Council of Constantinople in 381 c.e. and for the reinterpretation of Nicaea which came to be the foundation of Catholic theology at the end of the fourth century. We should not think of those theologies as all stemming from one source, whether it be Athanasius or the Cappadocians. As so much of the work on the fourth century over the past two or three decades has shown, differing but sometimes overlapping polemical and philosophical contexts seem to have given rise to some common principles and themes at a number of points across the Mediterranean world at roughly the same time. The theologies of the Cappadocians are perhaps the most famous and inuential (although we should be very careful of speaking of a single Cappadocian formulation),19 but it is unlikely that Athanasius writings were in any way fundamental for their particular solutions, and it is very difcult to demonstrate direct and substantive links between the Cappadocian solution and that found in some Western theologians. However, there are some fundamental common themes between these theologies, of which the doctrine of inseparable operation is one. In his On the Holy Trinity Gregory of Nyssa argues as follows:
If . . . we understand that the operation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one, differing or varying in nothing, the oneness of their nature must needs be inferred from the identity of their operation. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit alike give sanctication, and life, and light, and comfort, and all similar graces. And let no one attribute the power of sanctication in an especial sense to the Spirit, when he hears the savior in the Gospel saying to the Father concerning his disciples, Father, sanctify them in thy name. So too all the other gifts are wrought in those who are worthy alike by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: every grace and power, guidance, life, comfort, the change to immortality, and
19. It is the theology within which particular formulae nd their context that is of signicance, not the existence or otherwise of a particular formula. Thus the Cappadocians do not frequently use the three hypostaseis, one ousia formula that is taken to be of such importance to them, although their theologies are of great importance to the development of pro-Nicene orthodoxy. For examples of the ways in which recent scholarship now tells the story of that development see M. R. Barnes, The Fourth Century as Trinitarian Canon, in Ayres and Jones, eds., Christian Origins, 4767; A. de Halleux, Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pres cappadociens, Revue thologique de Louvain 17 (1986): 12955, 26592; J. Lienhard, Ousia and Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement and the Theology of One Hypostasis, in Davis, Kendall, and OCollins, eds., Trinity.
AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD every other boon that exists, which descends to us. As we say that the operation of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one, so we say that the Godhead is one . . . .20
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The statement of inseparability of operation we nd here is as strong as that in Ambrose or that in Augustine, although the philosophical context in which it is offered is different from either of our two Latin examples.21 This shared conception of the inseparable operation of the Trinity results in two consequences, both of which are of relevance for our purpose. First, whatever the Trinitarian persons possess by virtue of being God may be spoken of in the singular: God is, to amalgamate some of the terms we nd across the Greek/Latin linguistic divide, one power, one nature, one virtue, one activity. Second, when one person of the Trinity works, all do. The problems of articulating these principles will concern us throughout the paper, but we should not doubt they are essential to pro-Nicene orthodoxy. Thus, ep. 11 enables us to observe that Augustines earliest understanding of Gods unity is dependent on late fourth-century Latin pro-Nicene theology. Over the course of his career Augustine both evolves in understanding of the tradition he has inherited and develops some particular ways of interpreting that tradition. Nevertheless, through this development Augustine remained faithful to the principles into which he was catechized and returned frequently to the literature in which they were initially defended as a resource for his own theology. Having seen the importance of this doctrine to Augustines account we must now turn back to ep. 11 itself. In commenting on the text I am particularly interested in the way that Augustine uses the doctrine of inseparable operations to structure the argument of his detailed response to Nebridius Christological question.
20. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Holy Trinity. The fundamental signicance of this principle for later orthodox thought is perhaps evident from its signicance in John Damascenes De de orthodoxia 1.8: For there is one essence, one goodness, one virtue, one intent, one operation, one power. . . . See also V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957), 5354. Here Lossky quotes this passage of Damascene to make this very point. One later point of discussion and possible distinction between many Eastern and Western theologians in later centuries concerns the possibility of real relations between people and individual Trinitarian persons. But here too much work remains to be done. These observations are also contra La Cugna, God for Us, 9799. 21. On the argument of Nyssa here, arguing from unity of operation to unity of nature, see M. R. Barnes, The Power of God: Dunamis Theology in Gregory of Nyssas Trinitarian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); idem, Eunomius of Cyzicus and Gregory of Nyssa: Two Traditions of Transcendent Causality, VC 52 (1998): 5987.
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Having set out the principle of inseparable operation, Augustine admits that there is a paradox: this doctrine initially makes it harder to answer Nebridius question, not easier. If our initial assumption as proNicene theologians must be that, in the act of Incarnation, Father, Son, and Spirit remain inseparable in their operations, then, says Augustine, we may turn round Nebridius question and ask not why the Son in particular becomes incarnate, but why we must speak as if the Son alone works in the Incarnation. Augustines new question is a subtle one, leading both to primary dogmatic questions about the structure of Trinitarian faith, and to questions concerning the nature of our speech about that faith. The second aspect of Augustines question concerns both why we should use such language in liturgical contexts (in mysteriis et sacris) and why Scripture itself uses such language.22 I suggest that we read Augustines answer to his reformulation of Nebridius questionwhich takes up the rest of the letteras divided into two sections. First, Augustine picks an analogy to explore the inseparable operation of the three Trinitarian persons. Then, second, Augustine adapts the analogy he has chosen to explore the Christological question that he admits is raised by the axiom. In both halves of the argument he uses the analogy with precision to highlight very particular aspects of Trinitarian theology. First, then, the analogy. Augustine alleges that any nature (natura) shows three things about itself: that it is; that it is this or that; that it remains to be what it is so far as it may. In showing these three aspects each thing shows us its place in the context of creation as a whole: showing us, rst, a connection with the cause of all; showing us, second, that all things are created through or in form (species); and showing us, third, a capacity for persisting, a capacity in which all things are.23 I do not want to comment here on the origins of this analogy, only its use although we should note, as Du Roy himself knew, that one certainly cannot leap to a neoplatonic source for this division.24 Once he has set out this terminology, Augustines argument continues thus: if we understand that all things show these three aspects inseparably, then we should be able to at least imagine the idea of three distinct things being inseparable in their activity. So far the analogy does not work by aligning the
22. ep. 11.2. 23. The Latin here is not obvious, and perhaps rendered more difcult by a possible lacuna in the text. 24. Du Roy, Intelligence de la Foi, 391401, admits the difculty of attributing this division to any clear source. In considering the same passage, and with reference to ep. 14 (also to Nebridius), Barnes, Rethinking Augustines Theology of the Trinity, points especially to possible Stoic origins.
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three persons with individual terms in the analogy: the point to be illustrated is much more formal and concerns only the inseparability of the three things that are also a unity. Augustine then turns to the second aspect of his argument, concerning what we say about the Son. He marks the division between the two halves of the letter by announcing that, whereas he has previously considered the unmovable God, now he wishes to see how that which does not move can move the mind. As we shall see, the shift indicated here is from a consideration of God to a consideration of how God may inculcate knowledge of God in us. Augustine begins by linking the Son with the term species or form, the second of the three in the above triad. The way in which he makes this link deserves note:
(A) Form (species), which is appropriately attributed to the Son, pertains to a discipline and a certain art, if we can rightly use this word in such matters, and also to the understanding by which the mind is formed in its thought about things. (B) Therefore, since it has been brought about by the Incarnation that a certain method of living and example of precept has been conveyed to us under the majesty and clarity of his teachings, it is not without reason that this whole operation is attributed to the Son.25
I suggest that this passage divides into one sentence (A) concerning the Son as Word and then another (B) concerning the Son as incarnate Word. In the rst case, the concept of species or form is best understood by reference to a certain sort of art, discipline, and understanding (that is the structure of understanding). Comparison with De musica 6 indicates that the construction of the understanding in form and the parallel construction of all things in form enables our attention to form itself and hence our focusing of ourselves towards God.26 Because form has this function, and because Augustine assumes a largely traditional account of the Sons role in the creation, then it seems best to attribute it to the Wordwith the proviso that the Word is a form beyond form, and so the vocabulary breaks at this point. The next sentence (B) does not simply repeat the point, but rather moves the argument on by thinking about the Son as incarnate. The function of the Incarnation has been to bring a certain disciplina for living and a set of examples which (and here we
25. ep. 11.4 (CSEL 34:27): species, quae proprie lio tribuitur, ea pertinet etiam ad disciplinam et ad artem quandam, si bene hoc uocabulo in his rebus utimur, et ad intellegentiam, qua ipse animus rerum cogitatione formatur. Itaque quoniam per illam susceptionem hominis id actum est, ut quaedam nobis disciplina uiuendi et exemplum praecepti sub quarundam sententiarum maiestate ac perspicuitate insinuaretur, non sine ratione hoc totum lio tribuitur. 26. Mus. 6.7.198.21.
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must supply that at which the text only hints) enables us to participate truly in the created order which currently is obscure to us through sin.27 Hence, this paragraph concludes, we may appropriately call the incarnate Son form as well. Augustine now returns to the three attributes of natures again, this time focusing not on these three as attributes of things themselves, but on the three types of question (three genus quaestionum) that one may accordingly ask about things because of their tripartite structure. From one point of view to ask one question is to imply them all. For instance, answering a question about what something is will imply answers to (or at least the possibility of asking) questions about whether or not something is and about its degree of persistence. Nevertheless, Augustine argues, we still rightly call them three questions, taking our cue not from their interdependence but from the particular focused intention of the questioner. Thus the three questions are inseparable in terms of their mutual implication, but distinct from the point of view of the questioner. Finally, Augustine draws together what he has said about the Son as form and about the three questions we may ask concerning things. The passage where Augustine offers the core of this nal argument needs quoting at some length, and I will include the prelude I have just discussed (I have divided the passage into three sections):
(A) For in many things . . . although many truths are implied, there is something which stands out and which rightly demands for itself special noticejust as in the example of those three sorts of questions: if one were to ask whether a thing exists, there is implied also the question of what it is . . . and whether it is to be approved or disapproved. . . . Thus, all these arguments are inseparably joined together, but the question does not take its name from all of them, but according to the intention of the questioner. (B) Now there is a certain training necessary for people, by which they might be instructed and formed after a model. And surely we cannot say, about that which is accomplished in people through that rule of life, that it does not exist or that it is not to be desired? But rst we strive to know that it is, through which we grasp what it is, and that we may remain in it. That is why a certain rule and standard of reasoning had rst to be proved. (C) This has been accomplished by the dispensation of the Incarnation, which is properly attributed to the Son, so that there proceeds from the Father himself, as from the single principle from whom are all things, both understanding through the Son and a certain interior and ineffable
27. Again, cf. mus. 6.16.52 and then 6.4.7. Augustine here points to the Incarnation of Gods wisdom as providing a providential (but often incomprehensible) path through which the soul is moved back towards its place in the order of things.
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sweetness and delight in that understanding . . . , which is rightly ascribed to the Holy Spirit.28
The argument of this text rests on a complex (but not particularly clear or elegant) interweaving of Augustines understanding of the Incarnations function and purpose and the principles he takes to have been established by his analogy of the three inseparable questions. The rst section of the passage (A) sets out the argument that I described in the previous paragraph. The three questions we may ask of things are necessarily interconnected, but someone may still intend to ask one question. The next and most complex section of the passage (B) argues that people need to be formed after a model through a process of training, and that concentration on the particular character and nature of the model is essential, although we can of course still speak about the existence and desirability of the model in the abstract. Thus it is necessary, for the purposes of our training, for Christ to act as if alone, although it is still appropriate for us to identify the action of the other two persons as inseparably connected. The third section of the passage (C) tells the story of the Incarnation as the distinct focus of Gods salvic action and yet as only fully comprehensible when understood as the revealing of the Father by the Son and as including the Spirits being sent to shape our desire for that which is revealed through the Son.29 It is also important to note that this passage presents the dispensation of the Incarnation as the basic plot of a divine action or drama in which the Father as the one principle (principium),30 sends the Son to provide
28. ep. 11.4 (CSEL 34:28): sed scire prius intendimus, et per quod coniciamus aliquid et in quo maneamus. Demonstranda igitur prius erat quaedam norma et regula disciplinae. Quod factum est per illam suscepti hominis dispensationem, quae proprie lio tribuenda est, ut esset consequens et ipsius patris, id est unius principii, ex quo sunt omnia, cognitio per lium et quaedam interior et ineffabilis suauitas atque dulcedo in ista cognitione . . . quod donum et munus proprie spiritui sancto tribuitur. 29. We should note here that distinguishing between Christology and Trinitarian theology as separate topics is here revealed as a peculiarly modern division: Augustines Christology and many aspects of what we might term his Trinitarian theology are governed by theological consideration of what it means for the Word, consubstantial with Father and Spirit, to have been present in Christ. 30. Although I have not had space here to consider the place of the Father as principium in the Trinity, sufce it to say that Augustine consistently holds to this position: cf. trin. 15.26.47. That Augustine continues to think that Deus is most properly applied to the Father, while using the term to describe both Father and Trinity is one of the theses of Studer, Grace of Christ, part II, esp. pp. 13544. Further texts are to be found there. See also Deus, Pater et Dominus bei Augustinus von Hippo, in C. P. Bammel and L. Wickham, eds., Christian Faith and Greek
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knowledge or understanding and the Spirit to provide a lasting delight in that understanding.31 These separate operations are shaped as separate and in a certain order or dispensation to educate and move our fallen human minds towards a perception of the inseparable Trinitarian action. From the directly contemporary De moribus ecclesiae Catholicae it is apparent that Augustine already conceives of the basic movement of redemption as conformation to the Son, and hence to the immutable and eternal life of the Triune God. This conformation occurs through the work of the Spirit who enables the formation of virtue and wisdom in us, a formation which takes the form of imitation of and participation in the ever-present Word.32 One might also note the account of the Christological drama of redemption, and of the nal vision of God in De diversis quaestionibus 83, no. 69 (ca. 390 c.e.). There, attention to the incarnate form of the Word provides the foundation for and object of our faith, and, at the same time, it is through that incarnate form that Christ is now present in those he leads to the Father. Similarly, just as faith in the incarnate Christ has at its core faith that Christ is also the consubstantial Word, so the vision with which the just will be rewarded is of the equality of Father and Son.33 It is
Philosophy in Late Antiquity: Essays in Tribute to G. C. Stead (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Ayres, Divine Simplicity. 31. I have alleged that this narrative structure is fundamental to Augustines Christology in a discussion of the exercitatio which Christians undergo from at least the early 390s: see my Christological Context. See e.g., div. qu. 69. Here the basic elements of the drama are apparent, although they are not developed at length. The only work on Augustines Christology which sets out this dramatic perspective at length is E. Franz, Totus Christus: Studien ber Christus und die Kirche bei Augustin, Diss. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitt, Bonn, 1956, though see also M. Reveillaud, Le Christ-Homme, tte de lEglise: Etude decclsiologie selon les Ennarationes in Psalmos dAugustin, RecAug 5 (1968): 6794. 32. Mor. 1.13.2216.18. Some modern theologians, most starkly in English Colin Gunton, have asserted that Augustines neoplatonism renders his notion of Incarnation functionally useless in effecting salvation. It should be said directly that this position nds little if any backing in the scholarship on Augustines Christology since T. J. van Bavels Recherches sur la Christologie de Saint Augustin. Paradosis 10 (Fribourg, 1954), 74ff. See also G. Rmy, Le Christ Mdiateur, 2 vols. (Lille, 1978). Some of the key themes of Rmys account are now available in an updated form as La thologie de la mdiation selon saint Augustin, Revue Thomiste 91 (1991): 580623; the introductory treatment of G. Madec, La patrie et la voie: Le Christ dans la vie et la pense de Saint Augustin (Paris: Descle, 1989); B. Studer, Grace of Christ, part I. For one simple text which renders this position untenable see civ. 9.1516. 33. Div. qu. 69.9. See the more extensive discussion of this text in Barnes, Rethinking Augustines Theology of the Trinity. It is at this point that a number of questions are raised about the increasingly standard assumption that Augustines Trinitarianism is uninterested in the economy of salvation.
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this emphasis on the incarnate Christ as the basis both for faith and as the focus for a reformation of our thinking about God that also forms the background to the Christological observations of ep. 11. Thus, Augustine argues in ep. 11 that coming to understand the purpose of the Incarnation as shaped for leading and drawing fallen humanity enables us to see the appropriateness of speaking in our Scripture and liturgies as if the Son alone were incarnate. My purpose through the course of this analysis has not been to defend Augustines argument as sufcientand in some ways that argument betrays the newness of Augustines conversion and the work he still has to do to achieve the subtlety in argument which is apparent in later work. Rather, I want to use this letter to make two suggestions about the earliest stratum of Augustines conception of the divine unity: 1. Augustines governing concern is to defend and explain the doctrine of the inseparable operation of the three persons. This he has inherited as a fundamental axiom of Catholic Christianity. 2. Comprehending this doctrine is interwoven with comprehending the function of the Incarnation and the nature and purpose of Scripture. Augustine argues that understanding why we speak about the Incarnation as we do is only possible when we see what the Incarnation must accomplish and how it manages to accomplish that task. We need to see that the Incarnation is adapted to our need for differentiated speech and to our need for a form of life that will enable us to grow in knowledge and love of God. Only by participating in this process of reformation will we be able to appreciate both the form of the Incarnation and hence the God who is therein revealed. I have here considered only one early text in Augustines corpus. However, my comments are intended as suggestions that could with further work be established as more adequate than any other currently proposed framework for understanding that period. I want now to move on to texts written some twenty to thirty years later, Augustines Sermons 52 and 117. III. AUGUSTINES MATURING TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY 1: SERMON 52 Augustines serm. 52, on Christs baptism in the Jordan at Matt 3.13ff., was delivered around 410 c.e., possibly a few years before. The sermon is an extremely important document, not least because it anticipates some key aspects of the latter half of the De trinitate. In fact the sermon rehearses or summarizes much of that larger work, and offers a useful way into the central themes of Augustines mature Trinitarian thought.
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Augustine begins his exposition of this text with comment on an obvious paradox. In the descent of the dove onto Jesus and the sounding of the voice from heaven acclaiming Christ (Matt 3.1617) we are presented with a sort of separated Trinity (quasi separabilem Trinitatem). This is not something that can be extracted from the text only with difculty: the narrative clearly accords a different action to each of the three persons. But why is this a paradox? As soon as he has pointed towards this seeming separation of the persons and their activities, Augustine imagines himself open to a charge from an imaginary interlocutor:
But one may say to me: Show the Trinity to be inseparable: remember that you are Catholic and that it is to Catholics that you are speaking.34
Once again the doctrine of inseparable operation is taken as a wellknown and fundamental doctrinal rule of Catholic Christianity. In this respect Augustines point of departure for talking about the unity and diversity of the Trinity here is the same as it was in 389 c.e. This point of departure is itself described as both the witness of the Scriptures and as founded on apostolic faith. Thus, our task in understanding the Trinity and Augustines task in the rest of this sermonmay be described as a task of understanding the traditional Catholic faith in inseparable operation as a reading of Scripture. The doctrine of inseparable operation is then given a gloss which shows how clearly this is a doctrine about the unity of three irreducible persons:
. . . the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are a Trinity inseparable; one God not three Gods. But yet so one God, as that the Son is not the Father, and the Father is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. This ineffable Divinity, abiding ever in itself, making all things new, creating, creating anew, sending, recalling, judging, delivering, this Trinity, I say, we know to be at once ineffable and inseparable.35
Having made this strong statement of the persons inseparable operationa statement with a little more nuance and more insistence on their irreducibility than the one we saw in ep. 11Augustine asks how it is
34. serm. 52.2 (PL 38:355): Dicat mihi aliquis: Ostende inseparabilem Trinitatem. Memento catholicum te loqui, catholicis loqui. 35. serm. 52.2 (PL 38:355): . . . Patrem, Filium, Spiritum sanctum, inseparabilem esse Trinitatem, unum Deum, non tres deos. Ita tamen unum Deum, ut Filius non sit Pater, ut Pater non sit Filius, ut Spiritus sanctus nec Pater sit, nec Filius, sed Patris et Filii Spiritus. Hanc ineffabilem divinitatem apud se ipsam manentem, omnia innovantem, creantem, recreantem, mittentem, revocantem, judicantem, liberantem; hanc ergo Trinitatem ineffabilem simul novimus et inseparabilem.
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that such a faith may be seen as consonant with the separation between the persons seemingly apparent at Matt 3.13ff.36 Against the seemingly obvious separations of Matt 3.13ff., and the conict between Scripture and traditional confession that seems now to have become apparent, Augustine says that he will rst consider the relationship between Father and Son. To do so he brings forward John 1 and Wisdom 8.1, which taken together are read as indicating that the creating and the ordering of the world are jointly the work of the Father and the Son who must hence be continually the Fathers Power and Wisdom.37 Having made his way via Scripture back towards the doctrine of inseparable operation, which had seemed initially against Scripture, Augustine restates the paradox caused by inseparable operation as a doctrine, even when it is seen (truly) as a doctrine of Scripture. He does so by drawing attention to the very problem we faced in Nebridius question many years before. If we have inseparable operation, he asks, should we say that the Father was also born of the Virgin? God forbid, he says, we do not say this, because we do not believe it.38 Indeed, he continues, the creed itself seems to make it clear that the Father was not born of a virgin, did not suffer, and did not rise again: these are, the creed teaches us, the work of the Son. Thus, Augustines tactic in this restatement of the problem is to draw attention to the problems of a Patripassian reading: a reading which would over-, or wrongly, emphasize the inseparability to the extent of contradicting the creed. However, this argument has so far only brought us back to our starting point: if the creed is right then we seem to have a clear example of the Son doing something that the Father does not. Augustine moves us forward by rst stating the answer he thinks necessary in his own words and then demanding that it must be proven by the Scriptures. The answer in sum is that,
The Son indeed and not the Father was born of the Virgin Mary; but this very birth of the Son, not of the Father, was the work both of the Father
36. serm. 52.4 (PL 38:356): Opera Patris et Filii inseparabilia. Solet haec quaestio ab studiosissimis fratribus proponi, solet in amatorum verbi Dei sermone versari, solet pro hac multum pulsari ad Deum, dicentibus hominibus: Facit aliquid Pater, quod non facit Filius; aut facit aliquid Filius quod non facit Pater? 37. serm. 52.5. His argument here is noteworthy because his exegesis of 1 Cor 1.24 represents an earlier exegesis of 1 Cor 1.24 than we nd for instance at trin. 6: indeed it is an example of the very tradition of Nicene exegesis that Augustine himself criticizes at trin. 6.1. 38. serm. 52.6 (PL 38:356): Absit. Non hoc dicimus, quia non hoc credimus.
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and the Son. The Father indeed suffered not, but the Son, yet the suffering of the Son was the work of the Father and the Son.39
The sections which follow list scriptural testimony to demonstrate the appropriateness of this formula for describing the scriptural accounts of the Sons birth, death, and resurrection. At the end of this demonstration Augustine leaves us with a general principle: You have then the distinction of persons, and the inseparableness of operation.40 Augustines formula has a certain austerity: it consists only of a formal or grammatical rule for speech about the work of the Trinitarian persons. It is a principle that forms a particular sort of attention to the scriptural account, an attention which Augustine takes also, of course, to grasp the basic structure of that account. I will return to the grammatical quality of Augustines solution later in the paper. Augustine can now claim to have shown the consistency of Scripture with traditional credal belief: the logic of the one faith is shown as present through both. It is also important to note how much more sophisticated an answer Augustine is able to give here than in ep. 11. The answer Augustine gave to Nebridius almost leaves him open to the charge of Patripassianism, at least in comparison with the more nuanced presentation in serm. 52. However, at this point in the sermon, around half way through the text, Augustine is open that his formula is satisfying at one level, but at another his audience may still lack understanding. This lack of understanding is said to result from the inability of people to think of God in truly incorporeal termsa charge that we nd Augustine frequently making.41 Accordingly Augustine turns to the task of nding an analogy for inseparable operation that may provide further illumination. At this point we need to be very clear about the task Augustine has set himself. It is far too blunt to say that he is looking for illustrations of the Trinity, or even to say that he is looking for illustrations of the unity of the Trinity. It is only the doctrine of inseparable operations for which Augustine struggles to nd an analogy.42 Indeed, when Augustine begins to
39. serm. 52.8 (PL 38:357): Filius quidem, non Pater, natus est de virgine Maria; sed ipsam nativitatem Filii, non Patris, de virgine Maria, et Pater et Filius operatus est. Non est quidem passus Pater, sed Filius: passionem tamen Filii et Pater et Filius operatus est. 40. serm. 52.14 (PL 38:359): Habetis personarum distinctionem, et operationis inseparabilitatem. 41. E.g., Io. eu. tr. 2; serm. 264. 42. See also the use of memoria, intelligentia, and voluntas in ep. 169 (ca. 415 c.e.). There Augustine admits to his correspondent Evodius that understanding the ineffable unity of the Trinity is very difcult. A little later in the letter Augustine
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introduce the actual analogy he will offer here he rst pleads that we do not think he is comparing something created to God, and then he says that he is only trying to nd something in which three things are separate yet operate inseparably, not trying to decide how far the three things he offers are like or unlike the Trinity.43 Again, at the end of the sermon, he is insistent that we should not think he is equating each of the terms of his analogy with a person of the Trinity.44 We should also immediately note that Iand a considerable number of other scholarshave been somewhat careless and imprecise by the very use of the word analogy to describe the likenesses that Augustine explores here and elsewhere. When, at the end of the sermon, Augustine says that the three terms of his triad should not be taken as each equivalent to a person of the Trinity he also adds:
describes that unity as one in which the persons work inseparably in creation but are shown separately in Christs baptism: it is this unity he then tells us that the likeness of memoria, intellegentia, and voluntas is to illustrate. Even in trin. 815 it is the doctrine of inseparable operation that provokes much of the discussion. For example, when Augustine says, in the prologue to Book 8 of trin., that he is considering again in modo interiore the questions he has been concerned with up to that point (which may be taken to specifcally include those of Book 7: the initial statement of the prologue about the Trinitarian simplicity mirrors directly the last paragraphs of Book 7), it is the question of inseparable operation that lies at the heart of that which demands illustration. At 7.6.12 Augustine asserts his insistence that God simply is Goodness and Justice, explains that this must be understood as indicating that the persons are distinct and yet there is a unity of essence, and then provides the examples of John 14.23 and Gen 1.26 as determining texts. Both of these texts are taken to demonstrate inseparable operation. See also n. 58 below: it is certain that outside trin. the triad is only used to illustrate this aspect of Trinitarian theology. 43. serm. 52.19 (PL 38:362): Trinitatis similitudo in homine. Ergo interrogo, dissimilem rem dico. Nemo dicat: Ecce quod comparavit Deo. Jam locutus sum, et praelocutus, et cautos reddidi, et cautus fui. Longe ista distant, a summis ima, ab incommutabilibus mutabilia, a creantibus creata, a divinis humana. Ecce primo hoc commendo, quia quod dicturus sum longe distat, nemo mihi calumnietur. Ne forte ergo et ego aures quaeram, et ille dentes paret, hoc me promisi exhibiturum, aliqua tria demonstrata separatim, operata inseparabiliter. Quam sint ista similia vel dissimilia Trinitati omnipotenti, non nunc ago: sed in ipsa creatura ima et mutabili invenimus aliqua tria, quae possint separabiliter demonstrari, et inseparabiliter operari. 44. In the notes to his translation of this sermon, E. Hill comments that this statement is not mirrored in trin. However, we actually nd a directly comparable passage at trin. 15.7.12. The reasons for this nal refusal to equate the Trinity itself and this likeness in such close terms are given clearly at ep. 169.6: the analogy of memory, intellect, and will is always to be found in the soul, and does not exhibit the simplicity of the Trinity, and, more importantly here, no one created thing can illustrate by itself a Trinitarian person inseparable from the others. trin. 15.7.12 is discussed further in the penultimate section of this paper.
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I do not say that these three things are in any way to be equated with the Holy Trinity, as if arranged according to an analogy (analogia), or according to a ratio of comparison (ratio comparationis). This I do not say.45
This statement is one that demands some detailed consideration if we are to grasp Augustines intentions. We know that Augustine understood analogia in a technical sense because we nd the term so used in the De musica. There, an analogy is a proportion between two things which share a similar nature or position within some sort of harmonic series, the relationship between sequential numbers being archetypical and fundamental.46 However, outside the De musica, and for the rest of Augustines career, we nd the term being used in this sense only onceat serm. 52.5and only so that its appropriateness for describing the relationship between God and creation can be denied.47 When Augustine translates analogia (rather than just transliterating the Greek) he often follows Latin philosophical precedent, and turns to proportio.48 Proportio is used in a range of senses almost directly mirroring the usage of analogia.49 In only one place does Augustine bring proportio into a discussion of relationships between God and any part of creation, and even there he does not do so directly. At ep. Io. tr. 4.9 Augustine uses the example of a proportionate relationship between a basilica and a small model basilica as parallel to the relationship between
45. serm. 52.23 (PL 38:364): Non dico ista illi Trinitati velut aequanda, quasi ad analogiam, id est, ad rationem quamdam comparationis dirigenda: non hoc dico. 46. E.g., mus. 1.12.23 (PL 32:1097): . . . quae quantum ualeat, eo iam assuesce cognoscere, quod illa unitas quam te amare dixisti, in rebus ordinatis hac una efci potest, cuius graecum nomen analogia est, nostri quidam proportionem uocauerunt, quo nomine utamur, si placet: non enim libenter, nisi necessitate, graeca uocabula in latino sermone usurpauerim. The source of the term is specically from musical theory. 47. However, we should note that, for the early years of Augustines career, the term is also applied, in a clearly consonant sense, to those passages of the Bible which indicate the consonance of the Old with the New Testament: e.g., util. cred. 3.5. As a formal term in biblical interpretation Augustine ceases to refer to analogia after 393 c.e., see Gn. litt. imp. 2. Other than the serm. 52 instance the only use of the word in any context after this date is at qu. in hept. 2.17 (ca. 419). At util. cred. 3.5 he also claims to have learnt these terms in the Greek rather than in Latin translation. This remark does not help matters as Ambrose uses the word only once, at de Noe 6.13! 48. E.g., mus. 1.12.24. Cf. Victorinus, De def.: Tertia decima est species denitionis katanalogian [in Greek], id est iuxta rationem, quae proportio dicitur, cum aliquid quod disputari licet cum altero id esse dicitur, quod illud est alterum propter rationalem similitudinem. 49. E.g. mus. 1.12.24 et alia; civ. 8.15 et alia; div. qu. 49; quant. anim. 36; qu. in hept. 2, q. 177.
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a person and their image in a mirror. Augustine then argues that, similarly, the relationship between our status as imago Dei and that of which we are the image is not one of equalityas is the relationship between Son and Father. These examples are then also taken to illustrate the relationship between our possession of justice or purity through grace and Gods possession of these qualities by nature: the two situations are related by likeness (similitudo), but not in terms of equality.50 In some ways this passage is revealing, in others far less so. It is revealing in that Augustine uses proportio directly here only to describe the relationship between the two basilicas: he prefers the term similitudo to describe that which he is illustrating. On the other hand, the unique nature of this example can provide little general information, except where it backs up Augustines wider patterns of usage. Simply put, Augustine never directly uses analogia or proportio to describe the relationship between God and any aspect of the creation (and interestingly neither term even appears in trin.). Both in serm. 52 and in ep. Io. tr. 4 Augustine prefers the term similitudo for positive description of relationships between God and creation, and in serm. 52 he uses similitudo exibly alongside imago and vestigium.51 This exibility in terminology is mirrored elsewhere, and Rom 1.20 and Gen 1.26 are often used as exegetical justication. It is also helpful to note that in trin. we do not nd any absolutely clear consistency of terminology for describing the likenesses that Augustine discusses. Sometimes similitudo is used, sometimes indicium or vestigium, sometimes Augustine seems to avoid any particular term and he sticks to trinitas in a broad sense. Imago is reserved for likenesses found in the human being as image of God.52
50. ep. Io. tr. 4.9 (PL 35:2010): numquid quando audivimus quia justi sumus, sicut et ille, aequales nos debemus putare Deo? . . . Sed, sicut, non semper ad aequalitatem dici solet. Qomodo, verbi gratia, visa basilica ista ampla, si velit facere aliquis minorem, sed tamen proportione ad mensuras eius, ut verbi, gati, si lata est ista simplum . . . impar est . . . verbi gratia, videte quantum sit inter faciem hominis, et imaginem de speculo . . . dispar est res: sed, sicut, ad similitudinem dicitur. 51. At serm. 52.18. The same preference is apparent at serm. 117.9.12 and at ep. 169.6. Both texts are discussed below. 52. Thus, for example, at trin. 11.1, similitudo is used twice, efgies once. At trin. 15.3.5, where Augustine offers a summary of the whole book, the only term used is trinitas. At 9.2.2 imago is used twice, once as impar imago, a term repeated at 10.12.19: in all three cases Augustine refers to the imago Dei. At 12.5.5, discussing why two parents and a child are not a trinitatem imaginis Dei he uses similitudo and vestigium. That trinitas is used in a broad sense, as well as the obvious narrow sense, roughly equivalent to his usage of similitudo and vestigium is clear from 12.4.4 and 13.20.26.
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From among these various terms, Augustines use of similitudo may serve as an important example and as part of a picture that would require much more detail to set out in full. Generally, similitudo almost always serves to indicate the sort of aesthetic resemblance between a model and copies, or between two things of disparate nature, that does not carry with it the technical sense of actual continuity of nature that is so central to analogia or proportio. This also seems to be the case when it is used in its technical rhetorical senses.53 As Robert Markus has shown in specic consideration of Augustines interpretation of Gen 1.26, Augustine denes similitudo consistently throughout his career, beginning at div. qu. 74.54 Similitudo is a general category which may receive further specication. All images are likenesses, although not all likenesses are images: the likeness between two eggs does not imply that one is the image of the other, whereas a child is both an image and a likeness of its parents. Some likenesses also have the characteristic of equality. In the case of likenesses between creation and Creator, ep. Io. tr. 4.9 directly rules out the possibility of equality, and from elsewhere it is reasonably clear that imago is used only when referring to likenesses in the imago Dei. Thus, given that the technical sense of analogia has also been ruled out in serm. 52, we will only be able to add further specication to Augustines sense of likeness in this context through close attention to the adjectival qualication or more extended gloss that the term receives in particular texts. We have already seen that Augustine insists that such likenesses are only distant, that they cannot convey the simplicity of God, but that they are necessary for our created and fallen nature. In consideration of serm. 117 below we will see further material that expands on these initial qualications. In his general attitude towards the various likenesses he uses to illustrate aspects of Trinitarian theology Augustine broadly follows Latin Christian precedent, although he adds considerable clarity to the tradition that he inherits. Hilary provides a clear precedent for Augustines combination of three broad strategies: rst, denying the possibility of anything approaching formal analogy between God and creation; second, using a exible vocabulary to describe the resultant theological process; third, arguing that such illustrations are necessary because of our inability
53. For its rhetorical uses see H. Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols. (Mnchen: Max Heuber, 1973), 1:813. 54. R. A. Markus, Imago and Similitudo in Augustine, REAug 10 (1964): 12543. In what follows I am simply summarizing the principles laid out at the beginning of div. qu. 74.
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to comprehend the divine.55 However, Hilary does not anticipate Augustines terminology, nor his particular exegetical justications. In Ambrose we do nd some direct usage of Rom 1.20 to argue for the necessity of using examples to illustrate to the nature of the divine.56 Augustines contribution to these patterns of argument is to add further precision both through increased clarity about his terminology and through a more detailed analysis of the biblical basis for the drawing of likenessesrather than to change its fundamental structure. Augustines continual insistence on the impossibility of formal analogy here makes it difcult for any modern writer who wishes to argue that Augustines account of the Triune unity is simply a mirror or projection of one particular likeness.57 As I will argue in more detail in the next two sections of this paper, the drawing of likenesses is a necessary part of the theological enterprise, but it is one which is only appropriately pursued as part of a participation in that form of life which is the exercitatio provided in and by Christ. The likeness that Augustine actually offers in serm. 52 is that of memoria, intellegentia, and voluntas: here being used for the rst time to illustrate inseparable operation.58 At this point there are two roads I could take: I could focus on the sources for and implications of the triad Augustine goes on to discuss here, or I could concentrate further on the way in which the process of analogy itself is used and grounded. It is the latter road I shall take as it is this which will most directly enable me
55. Hilary, de trin. 1.19 (CCL 62:19): si qua vero nos de natura Dei et nativitate tractantes conparationum exempla adferemus, nemo ea existimet absolutae in se rationis perfectionem continere. Conparatio enim terrenorum ad Deum nulla est. Sed intellengentiae nostrae inrmitas cogit species quasdam ex inferioribus tamquam superiorum indices quaerere . . . omnis igitur conparatio homini potius utilis habeatur quam Deo apta . . . Cf. de trin. 7.28 (CCL 62:295): humanas conparationes divinus non satisfacere exemplis, tamen pro parte intellegentiae nostrae sensum formis corporalibus erudiri. See also Hilary, In ps. 91.4, commenting on Col 1.1517. 56. Ambrose, De Spiritu Sancto 3.13; De mysteriis 3.8ff. The latter example is particularly interesting as it applies a standard Nicene strategythat the unity of nature in God may be known from the unity of operationsin a catechetical situation. This may thus have been one context in which Augustine encountered Rom 1.20 turned to this usage. As R. A. Markus demonstrates in his Imago and Similitudo in Augustine, Augustines use of Gen 1.26 is in many ways sui generis. 57. On this point see also the brief discussion of trin. 15.12.17 below. 58. On the origins and signicance of this semi-Ciceronian formula see my Discipline of Self-knowledge, 287ff.; idem, Signicance of Memoria, Intellegentia, and Voluntas, passim. Outside trin., where the triad is used nearly forty times, the three terms are used to illustrate aspects of the Trinity only in ep. 169 and serm. 52.
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to esh out what I have said about the context within which Augustine argues that we must grow in understanding of the divine unity. Understanding this context is vital as it is only against this background that we can make useful judgements about his success in arguing for a conception of unity that does full justice to the Nicene principles he has inherited. Following this path will also allow us to see the persistence of the Christological themes that were so central to ep. 11. However, to take this discussion further I want to leave serm. 52 and turn to the slightly later serm. 117 (ca. 418 c.e.). IV. AUGUSTINES MATURING TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY 2: SERMON 117 Serm. 117 is an anti-Homoian sermon roughly contemporary with Augustines other late anti-Arian works.59 Much of the sermon is concerned with the problem of explaining the relationship between the Word and God at John 1.1, and especially their co-eternity. As a preliminary Augustine explains,
We are not now discussing . . . possible ways of understanding the text . . . it can only be understood in ways beyond words. . . . I am not speaking in order that it may be understood, but telling you what prevents it being understood. You see, it [the Word] is a kind of form, a form that has not been formed, but is the form of all things that have been formed. . . . The Word itself is called the Wisdom of God; but we have it written, In Wisdom you have made them all. Therefore all things are in it. And yet because it is God, all things are under it. What I am saying is how incomprehensible is the passage that was read to us. But in any case, it wasnt read in order to be understood, but in order to make us mere human beings grieve because we dont understand it, and make us try to discover what prevents our understanding, and so move it out of the way, and hunger to grasp the unchangeable Word, ourselves thereby being changed from worse to better.60
59. Although I have indicated in general terms that Augustines point of departure in considering the divine unity is the doctrine of inseparable operations and engagement with the Latin anti-Homoian tradition, I have not been able to consider in detail how his developing Trinitarian theology was shaped by continuing antiHomoian polemic. That theme is particularly the subject of Michel Barnes work, see the articles listed in n. 8. 60. serm. 117.3 (PL 38:66263): Non modo, fratres, tractamus, quomodo possit intelligi quod dictum est. . . . Ineffabiliter potest intellegi: non verbis hominis t ut intelligatur. Verbum Dei tractamus, et dicimus quare non intelligatur. Non dicimus ut intelligatur, sed dicimus quid impediate ne intelligatur. Est enim forma quaedam,
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Augustine again makes a profession that radically qualies any supposedly analogical/illustrative procedure he may then seem to apply to the problem. Moreover he links the importance of not applying any strict analogical procedure both to the difference between creation and Creator, and to the need for a reformation of our fallen minds if we are even to comprehend the reality of this difference. At the same time Augustine offers en passant a rationale for the possibility of our speaking about God: all things are not simply under and distinct from the Word, but also in some sense in the Word. Although it is impossible to give any exact account of the character of the likeness between creation and Creator (and between imago Dei and Deus)Augustine having already given us clear reasons why this relationship should be literally unquantiablethis passage of serm. 117 offers an important clue. If we wish to understand the nature of the likeness possible here, we should attempt to understand what it means for all things to be in the Word. Throughout the body of the sermon, Augustine argues strongly that the reason Arians have problems conceiving of the co-eternity of God and Word is because of their inappropriate application of material, temporal, and spatial language to the Godhead. They are, in his phrase, carnales, which we might gloss as materially-minded.61 In the middle of the sermon Augustine once again argues for the co-eternity, copresence and simple nature of Father and Son, and offers a slight and tenuous likeness (ex aliqua tenui et parua similitudine) to illustrate his meaning. The coeval link between the burning bush and its re, or a lamp and its light, offer one way of approaching the co-eternity of Father and Son, and the act of human generation provides an example of a generation in which the same nature is shared. In the last case, the equality between a human Father and a human Son lacks the atemporal qualities of the union in the Godheadthe nature shared in the human example does not fulll the
forma non formata, sed forma omnium formatorum . . . dicitur est enim ipsum Verbum Sapientia Dei: habemus autem scriptum, Omnia in sapientia fecisti. Ergo in illo sunt omnia: et tamen quia Deus est, sub illo sunt omnia. Dicimus quam incomprehensibile sit quod lectum est: tamen lectum est, non ut comprehenderetur ab homine, sed ut doleret homo quia non comprehendit, et inveniret unde impeditur a comprehensione, et removeat ea, et inhiaret perceptioni incommutabilis Verbi, ipse ex deteriore in melius commutatus. 61. serm. 117.7. As he does frequently elsewhere, Augustine also links the materialism of his anti-Nicene opponents with a tendency among his own congregation to allow their own thinking to be governed by materialist patterns of thought: e.g., Io. eu. tr. 2, serm. 51.2.
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identity requirements of saying that Father and Son are one substance.62 When we try to interpret these examples the last moves he makes in the sermon become extremely signicant. In the last sections of the sermon Augustine argues that whatever illustration we may nd for this problem will be inexpressibly surpassed by the Creatorinerrabiliter transcendere. Given his open avoidance of analogy in the technical sense we have seen, it is perhaps more precise to say that the Creator inexpressibly surpasses any analogy or proportion we think we have established by examining the creation.63 Thus, by implication, it is the difference between creation and Creator that is beyond our comprehension and which must somehow be allowed to govern our forms of speech about God. Once again Augustine has offered a likeness (similitudo) but simultaneously insisted that such likenesses are governed by the inexpressible distinction between God and creation. Because of this inexpressible distinction, Augustine continues, if we do wish to approach an understanding of the Word as God and hence as coeval with the Father, we must we must listen to the Word made esh. Christs incarnate nature is intentionally adapted to our fallen carnal ways of understanding:
But in order to get there, if we cannot yet see the Word as God, let us listen to the Word as esh. Because we have become esh-bound, materialistic, let us listen to the Word who became esh. The reason he has come, you see, the reason he has taken upon himself our infirmity, is so that you may be able to receive the rm discourse of the God who has taken up your inrmity. . . .64
Augustine goes on to say that his hearers are expecting him now to argue that, if all this is true, then Christ must somehow provide a comprehensible account of the structure of the heavens and the nature of God. However, Augustine draws the sermon towards a close by exploring how we must learn to see the commands of Christ to a particular form of life as also the basis for a particular style of and context for knowing God. If we want to comprehend the nature of the one who made all things, we must learn to develop practices of Christian humility and, importantly, practices of patient attention to the way that Christ teaches. Christ does not
62. serm. 117.1214. 63. serm. 117.15. 64. serm. 117.16 (PL 38:670): Sed ut perveniamus, si nondum possumus videre Verbum Deum, audiamus Verbum carnem: quia carnales facti sumus, audiamus Verbum carnem factum. Ideo enim venit, ideo suscepit inrmitatem nostram, ut possis rmam locutionem capere Dei portantis inrmitatem tuam.
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provide knowledge as if knowledge of God (or even knowledge of the distinction between God and the world) could be made available to us in our present fallen nature:
You were thinking, no doubt, that the Wisdom of God was going to say, learn how I made the heavens and the stars . . . . Is that the sort of thing you were thinking she would say? No; but rst this: that I am meek and humble of heart. . . . So catch hold of Christs humility. . . . When you have caught hold of his humility, you start rising up with him. Not as though he has to rise, insofar as he is the Word; but it is you rather, who do so, so that he may be grasped by you more and more. . . . With Christ dwelling in your hearts through faith, be rooted and grounded in love, that you may be lled with all the fullness of God.65
Here we nd the same formal structure of Christological argument that we found nearly thirty years before in ep. 11: we may grow in understanding of the Triune unity through attention to Christ, the effective model and example. The argument is considerably more developed, but the possibility of our beginning to comprehend the divine unity is still tied rmly to the need for us to attend to the structure and teaching of the incarnate Christ. However, the incarnate Son has a very special epistemological function in the last text quoted above. The incarnate Son is not providing information, but establishing and continually enabling a form of life which leads to increasing participation in Christ. We can further say that the epistemological function of the incarnate Son is dependent on its ontological and anthropological function: knowledge of God comes through transformation of humanity within the incarnate Christ. This text not only provides evidence of continuity with the theology of ep. 11, but it may also serve to ll out the invocation of Christ found at the very end of serm. 52. Although we may and must nd some likenesses if we are to grow in understanding of Scriptureand creation is so formed that this is possiblewe best learn how to draw and understand those likenesses through participating in Christs reshaping of our very conception of knowing. Just as, in the last section of the paper, I offered Augustines discussion of likeness (but not analogy) as the context for understanding the intended descriptive power of the actual likenesses
65. serm. 117.17 (PL 38:671): putabas forte dicuram Sapientiam Dei, discite quomodo coelos feci et astra . . . . Haec putabas et talia esse dicturam? Non. sed prius illud, Quoniam mitis sums et humilis corde . . . . Carpe prius humilitatem Dei . . . . Cum ceperis humilitatem eius, surgis cum illo: non quasi et ipse surgat secundum quod Verbum est; sed tu potius, ut magis magisque a te capiatur . . . . Habitante Christo per dem in cordibus vestris, in charitate radicamini atque fundamini, ut impleamini in omnem plenitudinem Dei.
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that Augustine offers, so this discussion of the epistemological and ontological function of Christ (and the hints about the Trinitarian structure of creation in the Word) in turn forms the context for that discussion about the place, difculty, and function of drawing likenesses. Indeed, the picture here is consonant with my argument elsewhere that, throughout Augustines career, the exercitatio which the fallen mind needs to undergo if it is to approach any comprehension of the Word as God and as man is set always within the context of a Christological dynamic which places much emphasis on the theme of the body of Christ.66 Understanding the relationship between the visible human Christ and the presence of the eternal ever-present Word is the fundamental paradigm for and point of approach to understanding the relationship and yet absolute distinction between Creator and creation in all circumstances. At the beginning of this article I set out to demonstrate four points. The rst two of these were: 1. the closest we can come to identifying Augustines point of departure for describing the unity of God is the pro-Nicene doctrine of the inseparable operation of the three persons; 2. Augustine shapes his account of how we grow in understanding of this unity around the epistemological and ontological function of the Incarnation. These two points I now take to have been demonstrated, and much of the groundwork has been laid to prove the remaining two. To nish my argument in their favor I will turn briey to ep. 120, written around 410 c.e. (and thus contemporary with serm. 52) in answer to a query from one Consentius. My initial concern is to show that Augustine does not use the language of Gods essence or substance to talk of an essence in any way distinct from the communion of the three persons: Augustine deploys his understanding of the divine simplicity to bolster his accounts of inseparable operation. In this paper I have discussed only Augustines use of divine simplicity: in a more extended discussion I would argue that these arguments may be reinforced by consideration of Augustines understanding of essentia and substantia. After consideration of ep. 120 I will turn lastly to the relationship between Augustine and his immediate predecessors. Because of space concerns I have limited myself in the forthcoming section of the paper to texts only from one phase of Augustines career: but if my case is proved here then the burden of proof lies on those who would allege that things are different at some other stage.
66. See my Christological Context.
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V. PERSONS, ESSENCE, AND DIVINE SIMPLICITY: LETTER 120 Consentius, himself something of an author,67 writes to Augustine in ep. 119, explaining that he cannot grasp the ner points of Augustines doctrine of God. Two things trouble him, although he feels that he should believe them. First, how can we conceive of God as a light that is truly innite, and hence fully beyond human comprehension? Second, how is it possible for God to be spoken of as justice itself when we only know of justice as a subsistent quality? In the rst case Consentius is keen to assert that Christ with his bodily eyes was able to see something of Gods light, even if this light must necessarily be incomparable and unimaginable. Consentius own doctrine and its context is a worthy subject for investigation,68 but here we must only note that it provides an occasion which allows Augustine to dwell at some length on what it is for God to be an immaterial substance, simple and truly distinct from the creation. Consentius begs Augustine to provide some illustration (portionem et imaginem similitudinis) by which he will be able to grasp the nature of Gods ineffable substance. Augustine replies in ep. 120. After a very clear statement of his understanding of the relationship between faith, reason, and mystery, Augustine moves to criticize what he sees as a particularly pernicious form of idolatory in Trinitarian theology: imagining the three persons materially. The list of misconceptions coming under this general heading is revealing: the three should not be imagined as three large objects spatially bounded, nor as touching, nor as arranged in any shape, such as a triangle (in modum trigoni). We should not think as if the three persons were in heaven and the Godhead everywhere. Nor should we imagine that the three persons possess a single godhead not like any one but common to all, which would then become a fourth person.69 One thing that this letter
67. The new CPL misses the extensive quotation from his writing that Consentius himself quotes to Augustine in ep. 119. 68. Consentius insistence on Christs visible glory is of particular interest. I am grateful to Fr. Alexander Golitzin for sharing with me an unpublished paper on this question which opens the question of the relationship between patristic theologies of glory and those theologies often labeled anthropomorphite. Consentius interest in the unity of power and glory in the Godhead also demonstrates the pro-Nicene character of his own Trinitarian theology. 69. ep. 120.2.7 (CSEL 34.2:710): earumque trium tantarum ac talium personarum licet in grandi ualde molibus tamen a summo et imo et circumquaeque terminatarum unam esse diuinitatem aliquid quartum nec talem, qualis est aliqua ex illis, sed communem omnibus tamquam numen omnium et in omnibus et in singulis totum, per quam unam diuinitatem dicatur eadem trinitas unus Deus. Cf. trin. 7.6.11.
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makes very clear at this initial point and, as we shall see, again later in the letter, is that Augustine clearly rejects the idea of a common divinity as in any way separable from the persons. The next section of his reply to Consentius concerns the question of vision, and is important insofar as it provides further context for the attempts to offer likenesses for aspects of the Trinity which surround it. Augustine lists three types of vision, dependent on three types of object.70 The third and highest kind of object is noncorporeal and something of which there may be no corporeal representation. As elsewhere, the example given is that of wisdom: something in whose light the other sorts of object maybe conceived. Augustine means here wisdom as it is present in the human soul, not simply the Wisdom that is God.71 Augustine then asks in which class the Trinity itself must fall, and offers two possible ways of relating it to the series he has set out. On the one hand, one could think of the Trinity as tting into the last category, as parallel to wisdom. But if so, Augustine insists that we must be aware that any wisdom we have in usand we will have such wisdom only as a giftmust be a lesser thing than (minus est quam) the highest and unchangeable Wisdom that is God. In this relationship of participation through gift we see through a glass in a mystery (1 Cor 13.12) and can only make out any likeness by separating this wisdom from all material imagery (thus anticipating the long discussion of 1 Cor 13.12 at trin. 15). On the other hand, Augustine also allows that we might think of the Trinity as being in none of the three classes. If we make this move we have no reason for thinking the Trinity to be like material objects or representations of them: it is different from them because of the unlikeness and dissimilarity of its nature.72 It is also to be divided or separated (discreta
70. The question of the vision of God, both in this life and the next, in Augustines thought is extremely complex, and the secondary literature extensive. Two key texts from the mature Augustine relevant to our understanding of ep. 120 are the long ep. 147 (De videndo Dei) and Gn. litt. 12. For a survey of the issues involved in interpreting the latter text see the note complmentaire at BA 49:57585. See also R. Teske, St. Augustine and the Vision of God, in F. Van Fleteren, J. C. Schnaubelt, and J. Reino, eds., Augustine: Mystic and Mystagogue (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 287308. Teske comes to the same conclusion as the BA note: the mature Augustine does allow for a possible vision of God in this life. However, the following observations are important: such a vision is only possible if we are taken by God out of the body as if we were dead; the vision is of God insofar as God can be seen by a created being; the vision is indescribable in corporeal terms; the vision takes place through the Trinitarian structure of God speaking his Word and is of the consubstantial Trinity. 71. ep. 120.2.11. 72. ep. 120.2.12 (CSEL 34.2:714): . . . dissimilitudine ac disparilitate naturae.
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est) from such goods of the soul as we possess, such as wisdom or justice, themselves things that we do not compare with material objects. However, even if we opt for this second strategy, Rom 1.20 is taken to indicate that we must not entirely abhor such comparisons. Not only is this discussion entirely consonant with that which we have seen in serm. 52 and serm. 117, but it also serves to further emphasize the exibility in Augustines account of any statements we may make about God on the basis of knowledge of created things: our created situation does not allow us to bring into clear knowledge the relationship between Creator and created. Augustine next offers a short statement of what we should believe about the relationship between the persons and the essence which provides him with a point of departure for considering Gods presence. That short statement is fairly standard, including once again the assertion that [the persons] are only one God; not that the divinity, which they have in common, is a sort of fourth person, but that the Godhead is ineffably and inseparably a Trinity.73 The discussion of Gods omnipresence which follows is of importance for our purposes because it culminates in another, and this time much more extended, account of the evil of separating the Father and the divinity (and by implication the persons and their divinity in general):
(A) . . . but that opinion is to be unhesitatingly rejected by which it is held that the substance of the Father, whereby the Father is one person of the Trinity which is in Heaven, but the divinity is everywhere and not in heaven onlyas if the Father were one thing and his divinity something else, something which he shares with the Son and the Holy Spirit. . . . (B) If perchance you do not understand the difference between quality and substance, you surely grasp this more easily: that the divinity of the Trinity, which is thought to be something other than the Trinity. . . . is either the substance or it is not the substance. If it is the substance, and if it is different from the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, or the Trinity altogether doubtless it is another substance; and truth recoils from this idea and rejects it. (C) . . . in the Catholic faith it is the true and rm belief that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God while remaining a Trinity, because they are inseparably of one and the same substance, or, if this is a better word, essence. . . . It remains for us, then, to believe that the Trinity is of one substance and that the essence is nothing else than the Trinity itself.74
73. ep. 120.3.13. 74. ep. 120.3.1617 (CSEL 34.2:71819). For the sake of space I have provided the Latin only for my section C: agnoscis autem in de catholica, quoniam hoc est uerum, hoc esse rmatum, quod pater et lius et spiritus sanctus ideo, cum sit trinitas,
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The argument here is complex, and perhaps not the clearest Augustine presents in his work. Most importantly we need to realize that, in this text, Augustine uses substantia in the sense of the general nature of something: what something truly is.75 In the rst section of this passage (A) Augustine argues, in part, that if you use any language which implies the Trinitarian persons possessing divinity then you are guilty of attributing to God a division between, on the one hand, Gods substance and, on the other hand, Gods divinity as a quality which subsists in it. If you speak of God as being everywhere and of the person of the Father as being in heaven, then (above and beyond the materiality which would have infected your account of God) you would be imagining the persons and the nature of God as distinct, as if divinity were a quality inhering in substances. This argument is made clearer by noting that the rst clause of the section I have labeled (B) directly portrays the previous sentences as revolving around a distinction between qualities and substances. Augustine then goes to on to argue in (B) that, in fact, the scenario is even worse than this. If you argued as if the persons and the divinity were separate you would actually be implying the existence of two substances or natures, what it is to be Father and what it is to be God which in God are brought together in the same place. Any such statement would of course be simply nonsensical. Therefore, Augustine argues in (C), we must say that Father, Son, and Spirit are one substance (in the sense of one nature) and that the divinity simply is the divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit: it cannot be spoken of as in any way separable: the essence is nothing other than the Trinity itself. Ep. 120 shows us that Augustine uses his doctrine of Gods incorporeality to describe and defend his account of the persons as irreducible and inseparable. The fact that this letter is specically aimed at explaining to Consentius the problems of material imagery in Trinitarian theology, enables us to see with particular clarity that Augustine uses his account of
unus est deus, quod inseparabiliter sint unius eiusdemque substantiae uel, si hoc melius dicitur, essentiae... ut ita credamus unius esse substantiae trinitatem, ut ipsa essentia non aliud sit quam ipsa trinitas. 75. I intentionally offer a gloss for Augustines confusing use of substantia here rather than simply saying that he uses it in the sense of Aristotelian primary substance. Space here does not permit an extensive discussion of the question of substance, and this topic will be the subject of consideration elsewhere. Without providing an account of that argument at length, the reason for my gloss is that, although Augustine knows substantia is used in both Aristotelian senses, he shows no awareness of the debate about the relationship between these uses, and we do not need to ascribe to him a direct knowledge of this distinction as Aristotelian.
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the incorporeality and simplicity of God as a key tool in the defense of inherited pro-Nicene orthodoxy. Enough evidence has been presented here for me to argue, not only that my third thesis is now demonstrated, but also that Augustines deployment of divine simplicity here enables him to present the philosophical terminology of Trinitarian theology as what we might term in modern terms a series of grammatical rules or identity markers. Augustines account of God as esse itself, and as truly distinct from the creation,76 renders the terminology of persons and essence necessary if we are to speak appropriately of Gods action and of the persons, but it removes from them the capacity of describing entities. In considering serm. 52 I remarked that Augustines statement of principlethat Father, Son, and Spirit worked in the Incarnation, but that only the Son was born and sufferedis highly formal and seems to have the function of a rule for our speech and for our reading of Scripture. In the same way Augustines deployment of divine simplicity has the effect of rendering the principles that we adduce for grasping the logic of Trinitarian relations equally grammatical and logical in function. The terminology that he deploys is explicitly designed to argue against an account of God as some sort of material body in which relations between qualities and essence or genus and species might apply as they do in those cases for which we could adduce precedence in creation.77 Knowing how to apply such terminology is intimately linked, as we have seen in a number of texts, to participation in the form of life that is provided in Christ. I remarked in passing that in serm. 52 Augustine denies that each term of the triad memoria, intellegentia, and voluntas should be equated with a person of the Trinity directly. There is a passage in trin. 15 which not only offers a similar assertion but does so in a way which may add considerably to our account of Augustines mature presentation of the irreducability of the three persons. The passage is long and complex and I quote only its conclusion:
76. For readers versed in modern theological debates about immanence and transcendence, being distinct has no necessary consequences for accounts of Gods presence. In Augustines account, as we have seen, Gods simplicity involves omnipresence. 77. Cf. trin. 7.6.11 (CCL 50:26465): Nec sic ergo Trinitatem dicimus tres personas vel substantias, unam essentiam et unum Deum, tamquam ex una materia tria quaedam subsistant, etiamsi quidquid illud est in his tribus explicatum sit; non enim aliquid aliud eius essentiae est praeter istam Trinitatem . . . tres autem personas ex eadem essentia non dicimus quasi aliud ibi sit quod essentia est. Both this section and trin. 7.6.12 argue this point in an extended fashion.
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From this we conclude that the Father is his own love, in the same manner as he is his own understanding and his own memory. . . . And because the Son also is wisdom begotten from wisdom, as neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit understands for him, but he himself understands for himself, so neither does the Father remember for him, nor does the Holy Spirit love for Him, but he remembers for himself and loves for himself. For he himself is also his own memory, his own understanding, and his own love; but that he is so, comes to him from that Father of whom he was born. The Holy Spirit, too, because he is wisdom proceeding from wisdom. . . . has these three things, and so has them that he himself is these three things. But that he is so, comes to him from him from whom he proceeds.78
On this rich passage I want to offer only a few brief remarks, with particular reference to the ways in which it serves to demonstrate the full depth of Augustines account of the irreducibility of the persons. Putting the matter at its starkest, all that Augustine accords to the human self as the shape of its active unity, and all that he accords to the human self as the means by which it may grow in knowledge and love of God (and hence achieve its most appropriate unity and individuality as a part of the creation): all this he also accords to each of the Trinitarian persons. We may put the matter in more polemical fashion and say that one of the biggest problems facing anyone wishing to assert that the analogy of memoria, intellegentia, and voluntas makes the Trinity into an image of the unied human mind, is that at the summit of Augustines application of this likeness to describing the Trinity, he ascribes the triad to each of the persons, not as a likeness of all three collectively. To put this a little more precisely, the likeness of memoria, intellegentia and voluntas is used in the latter books of trin. directly to illustrate aspects of the Trinity as a whole, and then used negatively to prevent us thinking that the persons are reducible to the unity. It is only after this passage of Book 15 that Augustine turns to his nal comments about the individual processions (and missions) of Son and Spirit through the use of related but also distinct analogies and appropriations of the Son as Word and the Spirit as Love and Gift. Lastly we should note the importance of divine simplicity to this argu-
78. trin. 15.7.12 (CCL 50A:477): Ex quo colligitur ita esse Patrem dilectionem suam, ut intellegentiam et memoriam suam. . . . Et quia Filius quoque sapientia est genita de sapientia, sicut nec Pater ei, nec Spiritus Sanctus ei intellegit, sed ipsesibi; sua enim est et ipse memoria, sua intellegentia, suadilectio; sed ita se habere, de Patre illi est, de quo natus est. Spiritus etiam Sanctus quia sapientia est procedens de sapientia . . . ipse habet haec tria, et as sic habet, ut haec ipsa ipse sit. Verumtamen ut ita sit, inde illi est unde procedit.
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ment. Within Augustines Trinitarian logic because the Triune God is truly simple each person must be their own memory, understanding, and will. And yet, at the same time, the memory, understanding, and will that each irreducibly is is also simply that of the one God. If the three terms were applied each to a person directly then, as Augustine says both here and earlier in Book 6, the Father would not be a full person but would, for instance, have will only in the Spirit. The problems of this position are overcome in Book 6 of trin. by the exgesis of 1 Cor 1.24 that there is only one power and wisdom of God, in which all three persons irreducibly share, and which is appropriated by Scripture to the Son.79 In Book 15 the full power of Augustines solution is seen: the simplicity of God guarantees the irreducibility and yet inseparable nature of the persons and allows Augustine to maintain the logical order of Trinitarian procession. The argument we have seen in this text was not yet open to Augustine in serm. 52 or ep. 120, and represents the most mature phase of Augustines theology: but it is a development which further builds on, and is consonant with, his direction up to that point. We can now move to my fourth and last thesis: the question of how far we may take Augustines deployment of this notion of divine simplicity as a break from his immediate predecessors. From elsewhere in his corpus it is reasonably certain that Augustine encountered the synthesis of elements which make up his understanding of divine simplicity in neoplatonist writings.80 However, this observation by itself should not be taken as proof for a radical distinction between Augustine and his immediate predecessors. Before we could make such an assertion we would need to answer at least two important questions. Are the ideas which constitute divine simplicity for Augustine, and which he seems to have encountered in neoplatonic works, distinctively neoplatonic? Is Augustines deployment of those ideas in defense of pro-Nicene theology itself distinctive, or does it instead indicate that we must learn to read his developing application of these themes as a detailed engagement with existing traditions of Christian thought rather than mainly as a direct engagement with neoplatonic texts? My answers to these questions may already have begun to
79. In my papers Fundamental Grammar of Augustines Trinitarian Theology and Divine Simplicity and the Order of Generation in Augustines Trinitarian Theology I have explored Augustines deployment of divine simplicity in further detail. A key text which should also be noted in this regard is civ. 11.10. This text serves to reinforce the conclusion that Augustine consistently sees the Father as the source of the persons, and that he eventually comes to set out as a corollary of this position that the Father is necessarily the source of the divine essence and simplicity. 80. See conf. 7.20.
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emerge through the course of this paper: to make those answers clearer I want to turn rst to a brief examination of some texts from Hilary. Hilary begins his De trinitate with an account of Gods possession of absolute power and omnipotence. At De trin. 1.5 Hilary argues that Exod 3.14 indicates Gods revelation that he most truly is, and that this absolute existence indicates his absolute eternity, and the impossibility of predicating either past or future of the divine being. God is also innite and present in all things, such that direct comparison between the nite and the innite is impossible.81 However, I am not so much interested in the mere fact that Hilary uses these categories, but rather in the particular purposes for which he deploys them. At the beginning of De trin. 3 Hilary begins his account of the relations between Father and Son by ruling out any notion of generation which involves division, temporal sequence, or change because of the divine attributes of innity, absolute Life, and universal presence.82 We nd him here using an account of God parallel to Augustines and we nd him using that account to defend a pro-Nicene theology. Another example will prove equally revealing. In Book 7 arguments about Gods life recur in the midst of other arguments based on various
81. Hilary, de trin. 11.5 (CCL 62:5): Ego sum qui sum . . . admiratus sum plane tam absolutam de Deo signicationem, quae naturae divinae incompraehensibilem cognitionem aptissimo ad intellegentiam humanam sermone loqueretur. Non enim aliud proprium magis Deo quam esse intellegeretur. On sources for and parallels with this passage see E. P. Meijering, Hilary of Poitiers: On the Trinity. De Trinitate I.119, 2, 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 3233: Hilary can say that the revelation given through Moses and common sense are in harmony, because this revelation is adapted to human understanding.This denoting of God expresses a cognitio incomprehensibilis, which means that the divine nature transcends human understanding, so Exodus 3. 14 conrms natural negative theology, cf. Athanasius, De Decr. 22: For nothing else could be understood to be more characteristic of God than being, because being itself cannot be predicated of what once comes to an end or once began. Being here has the meaning of eternal being. Hilary states repreatedly that being is a correct denition of God, see trin.7.11 where it is said that being is not an accidental title for God, but an eternal reality, lasting cause and inherent character of Gods nature. That divine felicity excludes mutability and emotions is an important Epicurean concept, see Lucrece, de rer. nat, 5; Cicero, de nat. deor. 1, 17, 45; Lactance, de ira dei 15, 6. This concept of God which Hilary provides in explaining Exodus 3. 14, viz, that God as really being is always identical, is in accordance with e.g. the middle-Platonic and later Platonic doctrine of God which was adopted by many Christians, see e.g. Numenius, fragm. 17 and 11, Attiucs fragm. 9, 5; 5, 6; 8, 2; Porphyry, Sent. 39, Justin Dial. 3, 5. Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 2, 37, 3; 2, 56, 1; 4, 21, 2; 4, 62; Athanasius, Contra Arian. 1, 18; 1, 35. 82. Hilary, de trin. 3.23.
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models of generation. Because God is Life itself the Son is born in a way which does not divide the unity: there can be no parts or divisions of any kind.83 Whatever God is must, in God, be identical to all the other divine attributes.84 In what follows, in a passage loosely resembling one we have already explored in Augustines serm. 117, Hilary argues that, although analogies cannot describe the divine nature but only point us towards what remains always beyond us, the examples of human generation and the lighting of one re from another may prove helpful.85 Ultimately, the former fails because it is a union of two unlike natures which produces a child which is itself unable to live life fully; the latter is problematic insofar as it is dependent on something prior for its existence or possibility (inammable substances). Nevertheless Hilary argues that these illustrations help, and are necessary, as long as they are not taken as clear comparisons. Lastly, in De trin. 8 Hilary interprets Luke 4.18 (The Spirit of the lord is upon me) rather idiosyncratically by using his notion of Gods noncorporeality. The phrase Spirit of God is taken by Hilary to indicate that the persons are not present to or in each other in a corporeal way: God is a living force, wholly present everywhere.86 Further Spirit of God is taken to refer sometimes (and esp. in Luke 4.18) to the Father, and to indicate that the Father is not in one place where the Son is not, the persons are not divided by space. This statement about the Father is then repeated for each of the persons. Along with the argument that God is one power, this argument enables Hilary to move into a long exposition of the inseparable operation of the persons (De trin. 8.28ff.). This brief discussion of some passages from Hilary has a multiple signicance. Firstly, Hilarys theology of Gods unity was not shaped by neoplatonism, and very considerable problems would present themselves to any scholar seeking to argue that it was. Indeed, although a slow but increasing amount of literature has tried to identify the sources for Hilarys philosophical argumentation, the older picture of Hilary as one who knew little technical philosophy still persists. Further, Hilarys place in the larger narratives of early Christian thought that one nds in modern theologians is that of a Westerner who still understood the signicance of the economy before later generations became too concerned with the
83. Hilary, de trin. 7.28. 84. Hilary, de trin. 7.27 (CCL 62:294): Totum in eo quod est unum est, est quod spiritus est, et lux, et virtus et vita sit; et quod vita est, et lux, et virtus et spiritus sit. 85. Hilary, de trin. 7.2830. Cf. Augustine, serm. 117.1214. 86. Hilary, de trin. 8.2325.
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inner workings of the Trinitarian processions.87 However, leaving aside these larger narratives, it is clear from the texts that I have considered above that Hilarys thought makes use of a notion of God as simple (having no parts or temporal succession, being present everywhere, and as Life itself) to defend and shape his pro-Nicene theology. That notion almost certainly does not have a neoplatonic origin, and its constituent parts can be explained from other sources. However, and perhaps despite appearances, my argument is not at all moving towards an attempt to argue that Augustines own account of divine simplicity was not neoplatonic. Rather, I want to make two observations. First, that which is sometimes taken in Christian authors to be a distinctively neoplatonic account of divine simplicity is actually an amalgam of many sources: we should be careful to separate the action of using the modern scholarly construct neoplatonism to label a particular collection of ideas, and the action of arguing that a particular collection of ideas are peculiarly or uniquely neoplatonic. Second, the extent and nature of Augustines borrowing from his neoplatonic sources in this regard does not mark his theology out as radically different from his immediate Christian Latin forebears who did not borrow from those sources. The specicity of this observation should not be missed: there may well be areas of Augustines thought where he is dependent on engagement with neoplatonist syntheses or specic ideas in ways which clearly mark his thought in those areas as radically distinct from his immediate predecessors. But with specific reference to the ways in which he understood the character of divine unity this does not appear to be the case. Thus I am not arguing about the possibility of deploying the heuristic category neoplatonic to investigate some of Augustines philosophical sources, but I am arguing that it cannot not usefully be deployed as a category for differentiating his thoughts on the divine unity from those of his immediate predecessors. In my initial discussion of inseparable operation I argued strongly that Augustines adherence to the doctrine not only indicates his deep indebtedness to his immediate Latin predecessors, but also indicated some fundamental lines of continuity with pro-Nicene Greek theologians. The deployment of an understanding of divine simplicity in a pro-Nicene context provides us with another example of such fundamental continu87. E.g., LaCugna, God for Us, 44. T. F. Torrance stands out as perhaps the key recent English-speaking instance of a theologian willing to separate Hilary from Latin tradition as much as many other theologians have separated Augustine from the same tradition.
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ity. In his On the Holy Spirit (relevant sections ca. 37375 c.e.) Basil writes:
(8.21) He who has seen me has seen the Father; this does not mean that he has seen the image and the form of the divine nature, since the divine nature is simple, not composed of various parts. Goodness of will is a current in the stream of the divine essence, and thus is perceived to be the same in the Father and the Son. . . . (9.22) the Lord taught the Samaritan woman, who thought that God had to be worshiped in specic places, that God is Spirit. He wanted to show that an incorporeal being cannot be circumscribed. When we hear the word spirit it is impossible for us to conceive of something whose nature can be circumscribed or is subject to change or variation, or is like a creature in any way. Instead we are compeled to . . . think of an intelligent being, boundless in power, . . . whom time cannot measure. . . . He does not increase by additions, but is always complete, self-established, and present everywhere. . . . He is simple in being; his powers are manifold; they are wholly present everywhere and in everything.88
Here we nd all the features we have come to expect: God as a simple being, without parts, immutable, beyond spatial containment, beyond time and ever present. Importantly, John Rist, in his important article Basils Neoplatonism, has argued strongly that the passages I have quoted here do not demonstrate any necessary reference to Plotinus or to another neoplatonist.89 Rather we should think of them as embodying middle platonic commonplaces as articulated by some Christians in the mid to late fourth century. Direct engagement with Plotinus may be apparent a few paragraphs later in Basils work, but even there the matter cannot be raised beyond the level of probability. Of course, in the work of Gregory of Nyssa we do nd a detailed engagement with neoplatonic thought, and a deployment of arguments about the divine unity that reect different philosophical sources from those used by Basil. However, perhaps we can think of the relationship between Basil and Gregory as being in one sense parallel to that between Hilary and Augustine. Deploying the category neoplatonic to describe the sources for Gregorys or Augustines understanding of divine simplicity will not actually help us to distinguish well their use of divine simplicity
88. Basil of Caesarea, De spiritu sancto 9.2122. 89. J. Rist, Basils Neoplatonism: Its Background and Nature, in P. J. Fedwick, ed., Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981), vol. 1, 137220, esp. 199201. In Rists account 8.21 contains no necessary Plotinian reference; 9.22 contains some similarities, but no certain or necessary Plotinian reference.
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in pro-Nicene theology from the usage of Basil or Hilary. Basil, Gregory, Hilary, and Augustine all use a conception of divine simplicity to explore and bolster the doctrine of inseparable operations: in the case of Basil and Gregory to work towards an emerging consensus on the doctrine, in Augustines case to argue for a doctrine become the heart of tradition. To distinguish their theologies on this point we will need to look at a much wider range of reference points. VI. CONCLUSION At the end of this essay I am, I hope, able to offer the following brief narrative as the framework within which we should further investigate Augustines theology of the Triune unity. This narrative I offer on the basis of the four theses for which I have argued throughout this paper. Augustine inherited from his immediate predecessors the doctrine of the inseparable operation of the three irreducible persons. Further, he took this principle as his point of departure for considering the divine unity throughout his career. A particular presentation of the divine simplicity formed a key plank in his defense and presentation of this doctrine, a strategy of argumentation that again nds many parallels in his immediate context. We can, I suggest, now identify three key aspects of the theological and philosophical context within which Augustine argued that presentation of the Triune unity should be situated. First, Augustines presentation of Gods simplicity strongly emphasizes the distinction between God and creation, and hence the impossibility of our directly comprehending the Triune unity. No analogia or proportio is possible between the Creator and the creation: a prohibition which, in modern terms, forbids any direct analogy of proportion, extrinsic or intrinsic. One clear consequence of the force with which Augustine presents the difference between the creation and the absolutely simple existence of God is that he does not permit any understanding of the Triune unity which would separate the divine essence from being anything other than the unity of the three irreducible divine persons. Indeed, the thoroughgoing manner in which simplicity is applied to our notion of God not only secures the irreducibility of the three persons, it also forces on the language describing the unity and distinction of the Trinity a primarily if not solely grammatical function. Second, and on the basis of a complex theology of participation, Augustine argues that the drawing of likenesses between creation and Creator, that is, the identication of signs which point towards the Creator, is a necessary part of the theological enterprise. Our status as imago Dei and the biblical certainty that the
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creation as a whole points to its Creator provide the justication for this understanding of participation, while (in ways I have not discussed in this paper) certain platonic allegiances provide much of the cosmological background. Third, growing in attention to the way that the Incarnation reveals the Triune God and effects human knowledge and love of God is the fundamental context within which we can come grow in understanding the unity of the three divine persons. This brief account offers only a foundation for understanding Augustines account of the divine unity. Many important areas of consideration have not been touched on at all here: to end, three examples will sufce. Perhaps the most obvious and important aspect of Augustines understanding of the divine unity absent from this paper is a discussion of the particular likeness (which also has the character of being an image) that Augustine draws between the joint interaction of memoria, intellegentia, and voluntas in love and worship of God and the unity of the three persons.90 Elsewhere I have offered accounts of the signicance of this triad based on observing its Ciceronian origin, and on its relationship to the Christology and theological anthropology of the latter half of the De trinitate.91 However, much work remains to be done to see how far this triad does shape Augustines account of the Triune unity in ways that are noticeably distinct from other pro-Nicene theologies of the period. Perhaps the second most important theme not considered in this paper is the question of how far Augustines account of the order of relations between Father, Son, and Spirit gives a character to his account of their unity that differs from his predecessors. I have alluded to Augustines consistent insistence on the Fathers principium, a theme which requires much further consideration. At the same time his account of the Spirits procession has received much critique in this century, but there has been surprisingly little detailed consideration of his position in its immediate context. One aspect of this second theme which also needs close consideration concerns the status of the Son as image. A number of scholars have argued that Augustines early shift to presenting people as being in the image of the Trinity, not the Son, reinforces a theology which conceives of relations between a unitary God and humanity, and thus plays down the signicance of the individual Trinitarian persons. While it is true that Augustines conception of the divine unity does not appear to make much extended use of a theology of Son as image (at
90. See esp. trin. 14.12.15. 91. See my Discipline of Self-knowledge; idem, Signicance of Memoria, Intellegentia, and Voluntas.
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least until the most mature period of his writing), it is not at all clear that this has the deleterious effects described. On the one hand, only a close study of Augustines exegesis of the texts which describe the Son as image would show us the exact place this title occupies in his thought. On the other hand, the central epistemological and anthropological place that the incarnate Word occupies in Augustines Trinitarian theology (a place occupied in part because of the place of the Word in the Trinitarian relations), makes it extremely difcult to sustain the charge that the Sons role in the dispensation of salvation is not central or intimately related to the Words eternal procession. More work is thus necessary, this paper serving only to hone some of the questions that need to be asked. Third, and last, some indications have been given here that many developments in Augustines Trinitarian theology may be understood as developing engagement both with Homoian theologians and with the Latin anti-Homoian tradition: a theme particularly evident in recent articles by Michel Barnes. Further exploration of this context for Augustines Trinitarianism will allow us to reconsider even more deeply the relationship of Augustine to his immediate predecessors. Such reconsideration will, in turn, allow us to further revise the broad contrast that has been so easily drawn between Eastern and Western Trinitarian theologies. It may have seemed to some readers that it was strange to present an account of the Triune unity in Augustine without extensive reference to the De trinitate. However, I hope I have indicated the necessity of reading that text in the context of Augustines other Trinitarian texts, as well as in the context of the Trinitarian debates that were the point of departure for his theology. I suggest that the themes explored in this paper can provide a basis for exploring that complex text and reading it in ways considerably different from those with which we have become all too comfortable. Lewis Ayres is Assistant Professor of Theology at The Divinity School, Duke University

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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66. See my Christological Context.

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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AYRES/AUGUSTINE ON THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD

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