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Theology Today
2017, Vol. 74(2) 149-156

Liberating Augustine: (2) The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1 177/0040573617702546

emphasis on interiority1 journals.sagepub.com/home/ttj

®SAGE
Nancy Elizabeth Bedford
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

Abstract
Has Augustine’s emphasis on interiority, along with his ideas about how to imagine the
Trinity, been a negative influence on “Western” (in the sense of Protestant and Catholic)
theology? Jürgen Moltmann has been very critical of Augustine’s influence in this regard,
as have other theologians, including many feminists. The essay problematizes that claim
from the perspective of subaltern subjectivities and the construction of personhood in
situations of vulnerability.

Keywords
Augustine, interiority, subjectivity, Trinity, subaltern subjects, agency

Introduction
I must confess that as recently as a couple of decades ago I saw very little worth
retrieving in the theology of Augustine. In fact, I heartily disliked him. I had even
chosen the name Julián for my first born if the baby turned out to be a boy,
primarily because of Julian of Eclanum and his opposition to Augustine. Agustín
was not a contender in the list of names (to be fair, neither was Pelagio). But the
baby was a girl. When she was very small and my movements were often limited by
childcare options, the closest theological library to where I lived in Buenos Aires
was just a block away. It was quite small and limited, but it did have an almost
complete set of the critical edition of Augustine’s works in Spanish edited by the
B.A.C. (Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos). This was before the days of internet
access to electronic collections. Out of convenience, I often dipped into Augustine’s
sermons or letters or treatises to supplement my lectures or come up with readings

1. Editor's note: This article was inadvertantly omitted from the April 2017 series of articles arising
from the Moltmann conference held at Emory University in October 2016.

Corresponding author:
Nancy E. Bedford, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2121 Sheridan Road, Evanston IL, 60201, USA.
Email: nancy.bedford@garrett.edu
150 Theology Today 74(2)

for my students. Consequently, I got into the habit of seeing what he had to say
about this or that and—rather to my surprise—came increasingly to appreciate
some of what I discovered. By the next time I got pregnant, I didn’t dislike
Augustine enough to want to name a child after his enemies, and so the option
of Julián dropped by the wayside.
Because of this almost accidental engagement with Augustine’s work, I slowly
began to take note consciously of how very influential he has been and continues to
be in the theologies of the Western traditions, both Roman Catholic and
Protestant, not only in Europe or North America, but also in Latin America,
Africa, and Korea. It is almost a given that references to Augustine’s work will
appear repeatedly in the "index of names” of books written by theologians of all
stripes, sometimes in agreement with him and sometimes heartily in disagreement,
but inevitably engaging his legacy. I began to realize that for those of us that belong
to this historical stream, it is important to think through the ways in which he
influences us. In my own writing and lecturing I began to do so more explicitly.
I began tentatively to explore what I call "liberating Augustine,” highlighting
aspects of his theology that seem liberating to me while looking at ways in
which his theological influence can be liberated from its ideological use in the
service of androcentrism, distrust of women, sex and the body, anthropological
complementarity and gender inequity, hierarchical thinking, political and ecclesial
authoritarianism, individualism, and a lack of pneumatological imagination,
among other toxic tendencies.2
Here I want to focus particularly on the question of individualism, and specif-
ically on the charge made by my beloved teacher and friend Jürgen Moltmann
in the context of his social doctrine of the Trinity, namely that Augustine’s
"psychological” interpretation of the Trinity contributes to the harmful
"possessive individualism” so characteristic of Western societies.3 I am contesting
neither Moltmann’s insights about the need to bring together Augustinian
"psychological” perspectives with Cappadocian "perichoretic” ones, nor his
challenge to develop a social personalism and a personal socialism informed by a
rich doctrine of the Trinity.4 I do want to explore the possibility that Augustine’s
"psychological” understanding of the Trinity can actually be a powerful force for
good in the subjectivity of subaltern subjects, and thus can function as a rich

2. For example, in my essays about De C.ivitate Dei (“De la Ciudad de Dios y la Ciudad de las Damas:
La teología y las mujeres en la gran ciudad." in ed. Juan José Barreda. Diálogos de Vida. Ensayos en
homenaje a Jorge A. León [Colección FTL 25. Buenos Aires: Kairos. 2006], 11-32) and about the
way divinization and the wonderful exchange in Augustine sheds light on theological anthropology
(“Unfinished Choreographies: Divinization as a Theme and a Challenge." in Perspectives in
Religious Studies 41.2 [2014], 171-181); see also my book-long treatment of Galatians, which dia-
logues extensively with Augustine's commentary on the epistle (Galatians. Belief. A Theological
Commentary on the Bible [Louisville: Westminster John Knox. 2016]).
3. See Jürgen Moltmann. Trinität und Reich Gottes. Zur Gotteslehre. second edition (München:
Christian Kaiser Verlag 1986). 216.
4. Cf. Moltmann. Trinität und Reich Gottes. 216-217.
Bedford 151

resource for the development of voices able to contest the dominant common sense
of "possessive individualism” and its material implications.

Augustine’s insights in context

In the history of art Augustine is often depicted sitting at a desk and writing, quite
alone in a darkened room, perhaps thinking of persons far away, as in the painting
by 17th century Mexican artist Antonio Rodriguez now in the Museo Nacional de
Arte in Mexico. There, Augustine is shown having a vision of Jesus and Mary
offering him blood and milk as holy food to help inspire him as he writes.5 Another
17th-century painting (now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art),
by Philippe de Champaigne, shows Augustine sitting alone, holding in one hand
a flaming heart that irradiates toward his head, and in the other hand a pen, as he
gazes at the word veritas.6 In such paintings one gets the sense of an isolated soul in
harmony with transcendence, separated from the material world and from its
contemporaries. The truth could not be more different.
Augustine is a towering figure with such a booming voice that it can be easy to
forget that he was basically never alone. He was always surrounded by people
and—if at all possible—by his close companions, some of whose names are familiar
to us from the Confessions. In his years as bishop he continued to be at the center of
a "tight group of like-minded friends”; he also brought in family members to be
nearby, such as his widowed sister, his niece, and his nephew Patricius. His visitors
were so many that he had a hostel built to lodge them.7 His literary production was
never a matter of solitary contemplation; he dictated at high speed to different
scribes, often more than one document at a time.
Even in the famous scene of his commitment to the Christian faith in the
Confessions, he is not alone, but in the company of his friend Alypius, who observes
him in surprise as he weeps and throws himself down under a fig tree to let his tears
flow freely.8 Likewise, the sublime vision of God at Ostia that he describes in
the Confessions happens in the presence of his mother and alongside her, making
it a shared mystical vision.9 As bishop, even when he was preaching (as he did for
39 years) he was not physically isolated from the congregation but rather seated in
his cathedra, surrounded by his standing parishioners.10 Suffice it to say that it
probably would not have been possible to maintain an emotional distance from the

5. Antonio Rodríguez. “San Agustín." Museo Nacional de Arte, accessed December 10. 2016.
https://www. google. com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/saint-augustine/kwGS5ApcSQpaiw?111=en.
6. Philippe de Champaigne. “Saint Augustin." LACMA. accessed December 10. 2016. http://collec-
tions.lacrna.org/node/171584.
7. Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo. A Biography. New edition, with an epilogue (Berkeley. CA:
University of California. 2000). 194-195.
8. Conf. 8.12.28-30.
9. Conf. 9.10.24-26.
10. Brown. Augustine of Hippo. 248.
152 Theology Today 74(2)

people around him, and he did not. As Peter Brown points out, "Augustine needed
the constant response and reassurance of a circle of friends: both to know that he
was loved, and to know that there was someone worth loving, encouraged him
greatly to love in return.”11
This, then, is the personal and social context out of which his "psychological”
model of the Trinity emerges. It has become a fairly standard critique to say, as
does for instance Catherine Mowry LaCugna, that "Augustine’s psychological
analogy of the Trinity is inadequate not because it is psychological, but because
his psychology and anthropology tend to focus on the individual soul” apart from
social relations.12 Although there is truth to this, especially as regards the reception
of this legacy in many Euro-American circles, I’m not convinced that the critique
can be made fairly in such an ahistorical and decontextualized manner. Augustine’s
culture and his way of life presuppose the profound engagement of each human
being in a thick web of relationality, friendship, familial ties, and social interaction.
If the human subjectivity that serves for him as an icon of the Triune God is so
deeply embedded in relationality and mutuality that physical and perhaps even
psychological isolation were all but unthinkable, how can it fairly be said that
the God toward which the icon points is somehow to be imagined in isolation?
In De Trinitate he famously laid out triadic patterns that he discovered in human
subjectivity, such as being, knowing, and willing; memory, intellect, and will; mind,
knowledge, and love; the lover, the beloved, and the love that binds them; thinking,
speaking, and willing.13 He uses them as imaginative exercises for thinking and
speaking about God. Clearly, he valued this sort of self-scrutiny as part of his
theological method. His approach reflected the continuities between him and the
Platonic traditions which had in part formed him.14 Human subjectivity and
human spiritual life became for him lenses through which he could detect traces
of God (vestigia trinitatis) and conversely, the Trinity could be considered "the
deepest substrate of the human spiritual life.”15
At the heart of De Trinitate there is a move inward, to the modo interiore
(Book 8) and the contemplative function of the human being, as seen particularly
in the analogy of memory, understanding, and will in Books 9-11 not simply as
vestiges of the Trinity, but also as an exploration of the imago Trinitatis itself.
These sections constitute a voyage into the interiority of the singular human being.
Nonetheless, this emphasis on subjectivity, interiority, and individuality as a prime
site for the development of a trinitarian analogy is embedded in community and

11. Brown. Augustine of Hippo, 195.

12. Cf. Catherine Mowry LaCugna. God for Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1991). 103.
13. Cf. Saint Augustine. The Trinity, introduction, translation and notes by Edmund Hill. O.P..
second edition (Hyde Park. NY: New City. 2012). Books IX-XI and XIV.
14. Cf. John Anthony McGuckin, “Augustine of Hippo." The Westminster Handbook to Patristic
Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox. 2004). 4L
15. John Anthony McGuckin. “Trinity." The Westminster Handbook, 343.
Bedford 153

mutuality, not in the late modern isolation and individualism characteristic of

privileged subjects.

The construction of subjectivity in hostile environments

My teaching career has been spent in Protestant seminaries in South and North
America. One constant presence in these seminaries has been that of Korean
students and colleagues, because of the large immigrant Korean communities
in the countries where I’ve lived. In many different conversations with female
Korean students of theology in Argentina and in the United States across the
years, I have heard them express in a polite but firm way that some of my oft-
repeated statements about the centrality of community and my concomitant cri-
tiques of the regnant individualism of white Euro-North American societies are
not particularly helpful for them.16 Certainly, they agree with a critique of the
harmful aspects of individualism. But they point out that they are much more
interested in pursuing constructions of subjectivity capable of fortifying them and
their voices in social and ecclesial contexts where they often are not heard or
recognized as individuals. These conversations have helped me realize that my
standard polemic about individualism, directed at the dominant model in US
society and beyond, does not resonate with the situation of women whose com-
munity commitments and obligations (exacerbated by church duties) are already
so burdensome and all-consuming that they are hard-pressed to find spaces to
express and develop their individuality.
Clearly, it would be a mistake to conflate individualism and individuality. But
there is even more to think about here. Even when we do use the first-person
singular, what we say is never only about us individually. As Judith Butler puts
it, "this creature that I am is affected by something outside of itself, understood as
prior, that activates and informs the subject that I am.”17 She adds that "norms,
conventions, institutional forms of power” are always already acting upon us,
"prior to there being an T who thinks of itself from time to time as the seat or
source of its own action.”18 In other words, our formation as a subject is always
also intersubjective. Some "people do act as if they were not formed,” which can
lead to a kind of brittle version of a sovereign "I,” one grounded in denial.19 Such
denial is rooted in privilege, in the fiction that what one is and what one has
attained is somehow one’s own achievement. But as Moltmann likes to say, quot-
ing Paul, "What do you have that you have not received? And if you received it,
why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor 4:7).

16. I've most benefited from conversations with my Korean doctoral advisees through the years. Hwa-
Young Chong. Yoojin Choi, and Minsun Bahk.
17. Judith Butler. Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham, 2015). 1.
18. Butler. Senses of the Subject. 6.
19. Ibid.. 8-9.
154 Theology Today 74(2)

To the embeddedness that we all share in multifaceted intersubjectivities, we can

consider a further layer of complexity when we consider the formation of subject-
ivity in a subaltern social location, which is often also a racialized one. I’m speak-
ing of what Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, calls la conciencia de la mestiza. She
speaks of the "work that the soul performs” balancing many opposing powers,
languages, opposing cultures, and a constant crossing of borders.20 For Anzaldúa,
the close attention to interiority and indeed to her "soul” is necessary for her
construction of subjectivity, but also for her very survival and her struggle to be
recognized fully as a human being in a society that disdains and silences her as a
queer person of color. She writes,

The struggle is inner. Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant
Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the
bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been
inner, and is played out in the outer terrains.21

This inner struggle is not at all individualistic. It always also entails looking for
common ground with others and calling the powerful to account. But clearly, it is
necessary to look inwardly with care and attention.

Agency and the psychological model of the Trinity

How might Augustine’s psychological model of the Trinity be read considering
this subaltern perspective? Edmund Hill makes the point that for Augustine the
image of God in us is not "a static datum to be discovered and analyzed,” but
something "we are responsible for constructing”; it is "a kind of program, which
we have to execute.”22 In other words, human agency is built into the analogy.
Take, for instance the triad of memoria, intellegentia, voluntas (memory, under-
standing, and will) that for Augustine characterizes our minds and our lives as
singular human persons in community.23 How can we reformulate it from the
perspective of active subjects who have historically been silenced and denied
individuality?
We can start with memory, the memoria that for Augustine entails immediate
self-awareness. It entails being aware of ourselves and of our community, and thus
necessarily points to historical memory and particularly to a memory of resistance.
Personal memory is always embedded in a collective story. We can see this beau-
tifully expressed in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s song "I remember, I believe,”

20. Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza, fourth edition (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute. 2012). 100-101.
21. Anzaldúa. Borderlands, 109.
22. Edmund Hill. “Introduction." De Trinitate, 57.
23. Cf. De Trinitate 10.11.18.
Bedford 155

sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. It shows the link between testimony, remem-
bering and faith:

I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down

I don’t know how my father stood his ground
I don’t know how my people survive slavery
I do remember, that’s why I believe.24

No matter how personal our memories, our memory can never be only an indi-
vidualistic exercise, as we can see in the case of those who are going
through Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. Those around them
hold together memories for them, sometimes even including the memory of their
own names, and in caring for those whose memory has faded reweave and recon-
stitute their memory so they can live one more day with dignity. This is my own
experience with my mother, who from being most of her life exactly the kind of
admirable, keen practitioner of memory that Augustine admiringly describes in De
Trinitate 10.11.17, has become one whose short-term memory is non-existent and
whose recollections of the past are scrambled. Nonetheless, her dignity is intact in
part because her memories are cherished and preserved by those of us around her
and by a wider community of people who know and remember her.25
For Augustine memory, understanding, and will were not theoretical
mental faculties or powers, but rather mental activities.26 In the face of dementia
and the limits it puts on the activity of the mind or inner self (mens) in remember-
ing itself, we discover anew the force and unlimited nature of love, which allows
the participation of others in helping the soul "remember itself.” Likewise,
the work of "understanding ourselves” and "willing ourselves,” allows us to
work alongside the Holy Spirit and a manifold cloud of witnesses in the formation
of a subjectivity aware and able to express our own dignity and worth, as well
as that of others.
According to Augustine, God’s image in us—or said otherwise, God, in
whose image we are created—looks for God. Ultimately, then, what we are
remembering, understanding and willing is not just about ourselves but about
God, while paradoxically, in looking for and finding God, we also are finding
ourselves.27 This happens in deep mutuality with all the other creatures that God

24. Bernice Johnson Reagon. “I remember. I believe." accessed December 10. 2016. http://www.ber-
nicejohnsonreagon.com/2014/12/03/remember-believe/.
25. As part of that task, my sister has written a book that preserves part of the story of our parents:
Neida B. Gaydou, To the Ends of the Earth. High Plains to Patagonia (Austin: Progressive Rising
Phoenix. 2015).
26. Cf. Edmund Hill. “Introduction." De Trinitate. 26.
27. Cf. Edmund Hill. “Introduction." De Trinitate. 58-59.
156 Theology Today 74(2)

has created and found to be good. In the words of Julian of Norwich, who so
creatively reworked Augustinian theology:

And so, my understanding was led by God [...] to know, to understand and to rec-
ognize that our soul is a created trinity, like the uncreated blessed Trinity, known and
loved from without beginning, and in the creation united to the Creator.28

In short, depending on the social context and location of the person doing the work
of introspection, Augustine’s so-called psychological analogy may be more libérât-
ing than not. It can serve as one more tool for the celebration of people’s individu-
ality, particularity, and intrinsic worth, particularly if they are faced with a society
that denies them recognition, respect and even personhood.

Author biography
Nancy Elizabeth Bedford has been Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied
Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary since 2003. Her latest
books are Galatians, A Theological Commentary (Westminster John Knox, 2016)
and (with Virginia Azcuy and Mercedes Garcia Bachmann) Teología feminista a
tres voces (Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2016).

28. Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Mahwah. New Jersey:
Paulist. 1978). 287.
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