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Course 8 · Lesson 5.3

Augustine and the Western tradition

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 8 outline

Module 1: Speaking About God

  1. What systematic theology is and what it can claim
  2. Naming God: analogy, negation and the limits of language
  3. Classical theism defined and compared with alternatives
  4. Beyond the world and present in it: transcendence and immanence

Module 2: The Classical Attributes

  1. Divine simplicity: God is not made of parts
  2. Divine immutability: does God change?
  3. Divine eternity: timeless or everlasting?
  4. Divine omniscience and human freedom

Module 3: The Trinity in Scripture and the Early Church

  1. One God: the Shema and the Old Testament background
  2. Father, Son and Spirit in the New Testament
  3. Early Trinitarian language: Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian
  4. Two early errors: modalism and subordinationism

Module 4: Arius, Athanasius and Nicaea

  1. What Arius taught and why it spread
  2. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the word homoousios
  3. The long fight after Nicaea and the role of Athanasius
  4. Constantinople in 381 and the deity of the Holy Spirit

Module 5: The Cappadocians and the Shape of Trinitarian Thought

  1. One ousia, three hypostases: the Cappadocian vocabulary
  2. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa
  3. Augustine and the Western tradition
  4. The filioque and the monarchy of the Father

Module 6: Creation from Nothing

  1. Creation in Scripture
  2. Rivals to creation from nothing: eternal matter and emanation
  3. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo and its development
  4. Creation, the goodness of matter and the Trinity

Module 7: Providence, Sovereignty and Evil

  1. Providence: preservation, concurrence and governance
  2. Divine sovereignty and human freedom across the traditions
  3. The problem of evil: logical and evidential forms
  4. Christian responses: free will, privation and the suffering God
  5. Evaluating the responses and living with what remains unanswered

All courses

Program / Course 8: God, Trinity, and Creation / Lesson 5.3

What you will learn

  • Describe the aims and structure of Augustine’s On the Trinity.
  • Explain Augustine’s use of relation to distinguish the persons and his claim that the Trinity acts inseparably.
  • Describe his psychological analogies and their limits.
  • Summarize how Aquinas and the later Western tradition built on him, and the modern debate about whether the West stresses the one over the three.

The big idea

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, wrote the most influential Western work on the Trinity. He began with what the three have in common, one God and one divine action, and then asked how the three can be distinguished. His answer was that they are distinguished by relations: Father, Son and gift of the Spirit. He also searched the human mind for faint images of the Trinity, which he took to be pointers and not proofs. Later Western theology, especially Aquinas, followed him. Some modern critics argue that this made the West stress unity at the expense of the persons, while others defend Augustine.

Key terms

De Trinitate
Latin for On the Trinity. Augustine’s work in fifteen books, written over about twenty years, from around 399 to around 419.
Relation
The way one stands toward another. Augustine held that Father, Son and Spirit are distinguished by their relations to each other.
Inseparable operation
The teaching that the three persons always act together; no act of God is the act of one person alone.
Appropriation
The practice of attributing a shared divine act to one person for the sake of clarity. For example, creation is attributed to the Father, redemption to the Son, sanctification to the Spirit.
Vestige (vestigium)
A trace or footprint. Augustine and later writers sought traces of the Trinity in creation, particularly in the human mind.
Psychological analogy
An image of the Trinity drawn from the mind, such as mind, knowledge and love, or memory, understanding and will.
Subsistent relation
Aquinas’s account: a person in God is a relation that subsists, that is, a relation that is itself God.
Social Trinity
A model that thinks of the persons as a community of love. Contrasted with the psychological model.

Background

Augustine (354 to 430) was born in North Africa and educated in rhetoric. He taught in Carthage, Rome and Milan before being baptized in 387 and becoming bishop of Hippo in 395. He wrote On the Trinity over many years, partly to answer Arians, who were strong in his time among Gothic and other peoples, and partly to give a deeper explanation for believers. He said in the opening books that he wished to defend the faith of the Catholic church against sophistries, and that he wrote as one who seeks.

He was heir to Latin theology of Tertullian and Hilary of Poitiers and read Greek authors in translation. He did not know Greek well, and this is one reason for some differences between his approach and that of the Cappadocians, though he shared their faith. He also wrote in a different setting, in a church much influenced by Neoplatonist philosophy and by the struggles over grace and sin in the West.

The book has a clear shape. Books 1 to 4 set out the biblical witness and respond to texts that seem to subordinate the Son. Books 5 to 7 deal with the language of substance and relation. Books 8 to 15 search for an image of the Trinity in the human soul. Augustine ends in a prayer, asking forgiveness for anything in the book that is his own and not God’s.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Starting from the one God

Augustine begins with the Scriptures and with the rule that the Father, Son and Spirit are one God. Texts that speak of the Son as lesser, he argued, have to be read according to a rule: some speak of the Son in the form of God, where he is equal to the Father, and others of the Son in the form of a servant, where he took human nature (Philippians 2:6 to 7). A third class speaks of the Son as sent, and he explains that being sent does not mean being lesser, only that one comes from another.

He also taught that the works of the Trinity toward creation are inseparable. The Father, Son and Spirit act together in every divine work. When Scripture attributes creation to the Father, redemption to the Son and sanctification to the Spirit, it is speaking by appropriation, to make clear who a person is, not to divide the work. This guard against tritheism was passed to the whole Western tradition.

Step 2: Relation

How can the three be distinguished if they are the same in everything else? Augustine’s answer, building on the Cappadocians, was that what is said of God can be said in two ways: in itself, as God, great, good; or in relation to another, as Father to Son. In God, relations are not accidents added to the substance, since God has no accidents. They are real distinctions in the one substance. The Father is the Father in relation to the Son, the Son is Son in relation to the Father, and the Spirit is the Spirit of both.

He gave a name for the Spirit’s relation: the Spirit is the gift and the love by which the Father and the Son are bound. He drew on 1 John 4:8 and Romans 5:5, where the love of God is poured into hearts by the Holy Ghost. He said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not as from two sources but as from one principle. This is the basis of the Western addition to the creed, taken up in the next lesson.

Step 3: Images in the mind

In the second half of the work Augustine looks for traces of the Trinity in creation, and above all in the human person, since Genesis 1:26 says man was made in God’s image. He suggested several triads. The lover, the beloved and the love. Then the mind, its knowledge of itself and its love of itself. Then memory, understanding and will. Finally, and most deeply, the mind remembering, understanding and loving God. He thought this last is the true image, because there the mind is turned toward God.

Augustine was careful about his own analogies. He said that they are more unlike than like. In God the three are really three persons, whereas the three powers of the mind belong to one person. He thought of the images as aids for the seeking mind. Critics have said that he risked making the Trinity into a model of one mind, and defenders reply that he explicitly warns against this.

Step 4: The Western tradition and the debate

Later Western writers kept Augustine’s main lines. Boethius defined a person as an individual substance of a rational nature. Richard of St Victor, in the twelfth century, explored the persons from the perspective of love and developed a model of the persons as a community of shared love that anticipates modern social views. Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, gave the classic form of the doctrine of relations: the persons are subsisting relations, each identical with the divine substance but distinct from each other by their relations.

In the nineteenth century, Théodore de Régnon argued that Eastern theology starts with the three persons and moves to the one nature, while Western theology starts with the one nature and moves to the three. Twentieth-century theologians, among them Colin Gunton, used this contrast to criticize Augustine and the West for stressing divine unity and neglecting the persons. Recent historians, especially Lewis Ayres and Michel Barnes, hold that the contrast is unfair to both sides. They find that Augustine and the Cappadocians shared the same core and that the supposed split is more modern than ancient.

  1. What is the value of seeking images of the Trinity, and what is the risk?
  2. How do I read the texts that speak of the Son as sent or as less?
  3. What does it mean to say that the Spirit is the love between Father and Son?
  4. Do I tend to begin from the one or from the three?
  5. Why would Augustine end a long book with a prayer?
  6. What does the claim that all divine works are shared mean for how I pray?

Examples

Lover, beloved, love

To love requires someone who loves, something loved and the love between them. Augustine used this triad as a hint of the Trinity, while admitting that in God it is not three parts but three who are one God. The image appeals to many readers and has often been repeated.

Memory, understanding, will

In the mind these three are distinct, yet they are one mind. Each contains the others in a sense, since a person remembers what he understands and loves. Augustine used this as an illustration of how three can be in one. He admitted that it falls short, because the three belong to one person.

Appropriation

A church service may say, creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, sanctification to the Spirit. Augustine’s rule is that all three act in each work. The words are chosen to help the worshiper see a particular face of God, not to divide the persons.

Different perspectives

Catholic

Augustine is the most cited father in the Catholic tradition. Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity is a developed form of Augustine’s. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Augustine on the inseparability of the divine works and the processions of the Son and Spirit.

Orthodox

Orthodox theologians hold Augustine in respect as a saint but many criticize elements of his Trinitarian thought. Some, like Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, argue that starting from the unity of substance obscured the Father as source. Other Orthodox scholars judge him more favorably, and recent Orthodox opinion is varied.

Protestant

The Reformers were deeply influenced by Augustine, and Luther and Calvin regarded him as their chief ancient guide. Calvin accepted the Augustinian doctrine of the Trinity but was suspicious of speculation. Today many Protestants, particularly Reformed ones, defend Augustine against the charge of neglecting the persons.

Critical scholarship

Historians such as Ayres, in Augustine and the Trinity, hold that Augustine’s thought was closer to the Cappadocian than the textbooks suggest. Others, including some who follow Gunton, hold that real differences exist in emphasis. The question is lively in current scholarship.

Why it matters

Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity governs most Western preaching, hymns and theology. It also stands at the root of the disputes between East and West over the filioque. Understanding his actual argument, and not only the caricatures, lets a reader judge fairly in those disputes. It also shows how a deep thinker can seek images for God while insisting that they fail.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Augustine taught that the Trinity is like a single mind.

Correction: He used the mind as a trace of the Trinity and said plainly that the analogy fails because the three powers of the mind belong to one person. The image points but does not prove.

Misunderstanding: Augustine neglected the persons.

Correction: Some modern critics say this. Defenders say he spoke of the three as real relations and argued against modalism. The charge is a major point of current debate.

Misunderstanding: Augustine invented the filioque.

Correction: The idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son was already in use in the Latin West before him. He gave it its main argument, and later councils in Spain and elsewhere added it to the creed.

Misunderstanding: The East and West understand the Trinity in opposite ways.

Correction: The older contrast of the one against the three is now questioned by historians. There are genuine differences, such as on the filioque, but the shared core is large.

Knowledge check

How does Augustine distinguish the persons?

By their relations. The Father is Father in relation to the Son, the Son is Son in relation to the Father, and the Spirit is the Spirit of both and the gift of their love. These are real distinctions, but they are not differences of substance, since the three are one God.

What does inseparable operation mean?

It means that the Father, Son and Spirit always act together, so that no divine work is the work of one person alone. When Scripture assigns creation, redemption or sanctification to one person, this is by appropriation, to help the reader see the particular face of God, not to divide the work.

Why did Augustine use analogies from the mind, and what are their limits?

Because the human being is made in God’s image, he looked for traces of the Trinity in the soul, such as mind, knowledge and love. He said they are more unlike than like, since in the mind the three powers belong to one person, while in God they are three persons.

What is the de Régnon thesis and how is it now viewed?

It says that Eastern theology begins with the three persons and Western theology with the one nature. Many twentieth-century writers used it to criticize Augustine. Recent historians, including Ayres and Barnes, argue that it is overdrawn and that Augustine and the Cappadocians shared a common core.

Think it through

  1. Which image of the Trinity, if any, has helped you? Where does it fail?
  2. Why do you think the West came to prefer the psychological analogy?
  3. Do you think it matters whether theology begins from the one or from the three?

Independent assignment

Reading Augustine

In your own notebook, write about 450 words. Read the opening of Book 1 and a short section from Book 9 or Book 15 of On the Trinity. Summarize in your own words what Augustine says about the purpose of the work and about one analogy from the mind. Then say where he warns the reader that the analogy has limits. Do not send this to anyone.

Further study