The Gift of Love: Augustine, Jean-Luc Marion, and the Trinity

sense.

Introduction

To say and mean ‘God,’ writes David Tracy, is what must drive all theology, whenever, wherever and whoever speaks.[1] But as driving theology, to so say and mean rouses and draws not a disciplined, abstract, faith-seeking understanding but theologians. God is neither said nor meant by theology, as such, but by particular women and men who find themselves in the middle of life’s way, responding to this restless drive that is itself a response to an always already given gift. Whenever and wherever we say God, we hope to mean not the idea, image, or model of God, but God—we hope to mean the God who creates, saves, and sustains us—to mean the God who loves us first.[2] Because in saying God we hope to actually mean God, no theologian speculating amidst the heights of the discipline’s discourse can long ignore the question of how we say and mean God—how we name that which is beyond every name. Therefore, no theologian, Jean-Luc Marion relatedly observes, can remove himself from the question of the names of God and each must face the difficulty of "naming the unnameable, and naming it as such."[3] Ever before us are both the question of how we name God and the impossibility of our doing so sufficiently, each standing upon the further and fundamental question of how we call upon God by that impossible name. For theology does not name God so as to identify God, to proclaim this or that as God, to put God on the table, so to speak. Rather, theology’s reason is the naming of God so we might then call upon God by a name that opens us to be saved, healed, and made new.

But the inquiry into this how—to understand how we might begin to relate the name of God and our calling upon God by name—requires that we search for and test the right example, the best test case of the phenomenon we seek to understand.[4] And it is fitting that with the doubled question of the name of God and the calling upon God by name ever before us, we turn for the right example to the name revealed in the New Testament, the mysterious Trinitarian name by which the Christian church has long called and called upon the one God of Jesus Christ: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.[5]

Augustine’s De Trinitate stands as a, if not the, paradigmatic Western theological exploration of this Trinitarian name (a name that seemed to have become, by the twentieth century, irrelevant both to the majority of theology and to the experience of the faithful[6]), in large part because of the author’s theological authority, but also in part because of its having been misunderstood. Rather than directly engaged, Augustine’s argument was reduced to an abstract and clear "exposition of the relations of God in se,[7] and therefore, a curious kind of intellectual luxury[8] that paradoxically secured this influence through minimizing the need to closely read the original text. But with its exceptionally nuanced fusion of theology and anthropology,"[9]De Trinitate offers to its readers more than what this reductionist interpretation allows. Delicately walking along the edge of reason, attentive both to predicative possibility and to the hermeneutical significance of love, Augustine presents an approach to the Trinity that is intimately intertwined with the conversion of our own memory, understanding, and love of God. De Trinitate suggests that we advance to the Trinity that God is (and not just to any trinity) via the promise and limits of the idea of the Trinity, always aware that the sign systems we create are no better than the love in which they were ultimately begotten.[10] The predicative exhaustion of these systems serves as a sign of the efficacy of the gift of love. For although unaided reason cannot traverse the unknown path from our idea of the Trinity to the Trinity that God is, what is impossible for us is not impossible for God (or, at least, that is the hope of Augustine and of the Christian faith).[11]

Praised and proclaimed by the scriptures,[12] love is, for Augustine, the way by which we might investigate further, and on a higher plane, the irrepressible Trinitarian name of God.[13] But to proclaim that the God of Jesus Christ is not only a God of love but the God who is love (following the scriptures generally and, more particularly, the Johannine assertion: God is love[14]) is nothing if not commonplace and often risks (if not outright succumbs to) banality. Mitigating this risk requires attention to an interrelated pair of fundamental questions each inviting both philosophical rigor and theological focus. First, what is this Trinitarian gift of love? Second, how does it impact our approach to God? It will be my argument that these two questions cannot be engaged separately because our possible response to the first question manifests itself almost entirely within our response to the second and because the response to how? demands the particularity of the response to what? (Moreover, let us remember that in the case of the God who is love, asking what is this gift? is really a matter of asking who is this gift?). To say and mean the Trinitarian name of God through the love of God (in both subjective and objective senses of the genitive), is not simply a matter of discovering the correct theological vocabulary and grammar. An understanding of how we say and mean this name is not therefore simply a matter of calling God by a particular name, nor of a deep philosophical understanding of what such a name might mean about God, but is always also an attempt to call upon God by name in response to the gift of love already given to us by God. To come to know God through love—the path Augustine offers—invites reading De Trinitate in a way open to love and its impact upon us. It invites reading with a mind and heart open to the transformation necessary to receive the vision of God. In this way, De Trinitate is not only an investigation into the theological and philosophical particulars about the name of God but one that takes seriously that the naming of God is the naming not of an object external to me (grand though it might be) but of the one who is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought.[15] Consequently, while it is the Trinitarian name of the Christian God that is my ultimate concern, it is this gift of love—what it is and how it turns us to remember, understand, and love the Trinity—that is the primary focus of this book.

If love is where we are to look to come to know the limits of our idea of God, to open to the Trinity that God is, and to know ourselves as made to the image of God, then it is only appropriate that we come to remember love, understand it, and even to love it. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of love promises to ground this Trinitarian speculation in the givenness of love, offering a way by which we might unite the deepest mystery of the Christian faith—the mystery of God that comes to us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit—with its phenomenological impact upon us. Marion’s phenomenology of saturation and excess renders his philosophy of love a promising criterion by which we might begin to speak to the interrelated mysteries of the Trinitarian life of God and our participation in, and transformation by, that life. When this reception of the gift of love is applied to Augustine’s theology—and particularly his assertion that the image of God is visible in the mind’s remembering, understanding, and loving not itself but God—we might discover both a glimpse of divine love and a demonstration of a union of the theological endeavor with the deepening of our love of God, itself a response to our being loved first. Marion’s insight into his own interpretation of Confessions, offered in In the Self’s Place, holds true for this study of De Trinitate as well: the outcome would be at best approximate: somewhat ignorant and surely incomplete, but above all falling incommensurably short of the terrifying gravity of the project undertaken by Augustine—of his advance toward God, more exactly of his harsh discovery that in fact God always advances from all eternity toward me.[16] We always arrive late to this love that is always already given to us. We are always responding to what has already been given. The God who loves us in advance of our response, loves us so we might respond, so we might, too, become lovers. Therefore, along with De Trinitate, Marion’s work will serve as the second exemplary proposal through which we will seek deeper understanding of this name and of calling upon God by this name. It is my hope that the convergence of Augustine and Marion will illuminate new interpretations of the divine life given in and through this love, and our related naming of, and participation in, this love.

In effecting such a convergence, I hope to read De Trinitate in a space focused less upon a theological parsing of the doctrine of the Trinity and more upon how we might come to know and love God through an always insufficient doctrine. If, for Augustine, to call God by name is always already to call upon God, to enter into the space of God’s own graced offer and to respond to what arrives in advance of our first thought and first desire, then an approach to the name of God should profit from not only a detailed description of this place but from an invitation into this place itself. And understanding this place of response to that which is given to us might very well help us understand what is given—and perhaps even help us become willing to receive it. Joseph S. O’Leary observes that Marion’s writings do not fuss about ontological claims of classical dogma—like, for instance, the relationship between the divine substance and the persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—"but initiate the reader into a space, an enveloping event, something like Teilhard’s milieu divin. In this space it makes little sense to define ontological foundations. Rather, one discerns its dimensions from within the space itself."[17] It is as this enveloping event that Marion’s work holds so much promise for Trinitarian theology. Marion’s analysis of this place of loving response invites us to find it within ourselves, an inward turn that corresponds well with Augustine’s own interior way.[18] But Marion’s work offers a description of this place wherein we might glimpse both a deeper vision of love (offered to us on its own terms) and a fuller understanding of how we receive this vision.

In this way, the turn to Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of the gift and the rigorous erotic reduction is in continuity with the claims and demands of the ancient text—claims and demands that have ourselves as their intended target. Tracy notes that "hermeneutically the reception of Augustine, pace all pure historicists, is sometimes as important for understanding Augustine well as are readings determined solely by Augustine’s historical context."[19] This does not only mean that each reader is a part of the reading and interpreting but also that Augustine himself was not only interested in imparting knowledge but also in transforming his readers through their response to his words. For we intend a Trinitarian God not generally but particularly; we intend not the idea of God (however inescapable and necessary such a sign is for us) but God. In our intending God, comparatives surpass the superlatives,[20] leading us not to an unsurpassed abstract idea but to the God who comes to us through the gift of love. In receiving what Augustine offers in De Trinitate, we receive his approach to saying and meaning the God who is revealed and offered through, with, and in Jesus Christ. This means that the name of God is inescapably part of our naming God as the one who comes to save us.

To approach De Trinitate through love—and particularly through love understood in light of Marion’s phenomenology—is certainly to risk an approach without certainty. For if nothing else, to approach through love means that we can only hope to begin to grasp the reality of this approach if we risk ourselves in sympathy and openness; we cannot be intellectually honest to the subject matter of love while remaining detached. It also means that there is no neutral place from which we might analyze what is given, as if it were not given to us but simply there—generally, abstractly, and without intention. But it is also a risk because, although consistent with Augustine’s approach, it is not the only possible path by which we might interpret the text. If Augustine intended an unambiguous singular point of departure from which we might begin an explanation of his Trinitarian thought, it is well hidden beneath the at times quite distinct books of the text (differing to such an extent that any presentation of De Trinitate inevitably includes a theory by which these fifteen books are grouped, related, and prioritized). What is true of Augustine’s thought in general hold true for De Trinitate: Studying the texts of Augustine is indeed like getting to know an ancient, crowded, labyrinthine city, resulting in a never-completed understanding[21] not only of a specific text but also of any single rich and complex idea. It is difficult to know where we are in his thought and how one intriguing section of text relates to what we read yesterday, last week, or years ago. When adding to Augustine’s vast literary corpus (or even to the vastness of De Trinitate) the varying and always increasing amount of secondary literature (among which, I suppose, this book might now be counted), we can be left without a clear way of approach, without a firm foundation upon which to anchor a first step.

No less do other, more standard interpretive warnings remain true here, too. For inescapable as these hermeneutical choices are, they always demand caution, lest we find in the text the confirmation of what we already have in mind—a discovery of our own idols masked by the words of the Doctor of Grace. James J. O’Donnell warns readers of Augustine:

If repeatedly we feel on reading stories of his life that we understand the issues, concerns, and attitudes he and his contemporaries shared, that’s not because we have seen and understood them and made a serious historical attempt to compare them to our own, but because they (and their modern translators) use names and labels that elide the gaps that separate us and make their issues and their affiliations seem relevant.[22]

It is De Trinitate that we long to understand; we do not want to reduce it to a text about our own issues and concerns. We therefore are right to struggle with its terminology and methodology, prescinding as far as possible from imposing upon it antecedent definition, and to allow the text to speak for itself. At the same time, we cannot hope to read De Trinitate as if it can, in fact, speak for itself, as if its words and concepts could mean anything to us without our understanding them within our own contexts. We cannot presume to begin from where Augustine himself began (the date, place, and context of the composition of the text). Nor can we presume to begin from a place of neutrality, where the words (translated or not) of the text have no cultural or personal accent and where we might enter into the world of the text unencumbered by antecedent definition. Nor could we hope to begin to understand anything (let alone something as extensive and theologically symphonic as De Trinitate) without understanding it as related to our prior, and developing, understanding. We can only come to know this text—as with any text—through our own context, try as we might to conform our context to that of the author. We cannot learn anything without signs signifying something new, Augustine teaches, even if it is also the case that signs cannot teach us anything we do not already know.[23]

While inescapably of concern in all readings of any text, this hermeneutical elision has taken a common form in contemporary —particularly following strains of thought roughly categorized as postmodern—readings of Augustine. Lieven Boeve observes that it is far too easy, for the postmodern Augustine has merely become a double of the postmodern decentering of the subject, marketed as the structure of religious desire where recontextualization here equals accommodation.[24] He encourages theologians to instead attempt to maintain a balance between the tendency to lift Augustine’s thinking out of its historical context, and forget about the historical-contextual dynamics of his searching and thinking and systematic theology’s double insistence that the Christian theological truth claim does not allow itself to be reduced to a kind of particular filling in or exemplification of a more original religious structure as well as that radical historical-contextual consciousness should not necessarily lead to radical historicism.[25] The challenge of a postmodern reading of Augustine is the challenge of postmodernity in general and the challenge addressed by this book: how might I allow the other to speak to me, to remain other, yet at the same time to traverse the distance between us so as to make possible an encounter? Theologically speaking, this challenge may be rephrased: how might we read De Trinitate so as to both genuinely read De Trinitate (and not find therein only what we already know or think we know) and read it in a manner that might allow it to impact us, to shape us, to interpret us?[26] How might we, therefore, read De Trinitate while remaining on guard against our own sophistries that scorn the starting place of our faith in God[27] (which is the text’s own starting place) and deepen of our understanding of our encounter with that very God (which is Augustine’s goal in the text)?

I purpose to follow Marion’s experiment in In the Self’s Place, wherein he interprets the Confessions according to the terms of a phenomenology of givenness,[28] and turn Marion’s phenomenology of saturation, gift, and love toward a theological interpretation of De Trinitate. But where In the Self’s Place (and Marion’s project in general) is characterized by a marking of the limits of metaphysics, this book neither takes up that work expressly nor seeks, as its end, to criticize it. It is my hope instead to offer a phenomenological theology in which the promises and limitations of Trinitarian theology, read in light of Marion’s philosophy, can illuminate the rationality of this transformative encounter with God’s gift of love. Ultimately, my question is this: how might this phenomenology of love serve a theological investigation into the self-revelation of the Trinitarian God, such that this revelation might be rendered incarnate in our lives, particularly in our love through, with, and in which we embrace the God whose inexpressible reality can only be seen as inexpressible?[29]

Part 1 of this book concerns De Trinitate itself and offers a reading of the text with the gift of love ever in mind. It begins with a study of Augustine’s philosophy of language and the impact of love on interpretation, understanding, and belief. The preponderant concern of part 1 is then an exposition of De Trinitate read through the animating interest in the gift of love. Part 2 presents Marion’s interrelated phenomenology of excess, his philosophy of the gift, and the erotic reduction. I will focus my examination on Marion’s phenomenology of the gift and its theological implications. Thus, I lean heavily on his explorations of the phenomenology of love, givenness, and the gift; his more theologically oriented books; and, of course, his study of Augustine’s Confessions, In the Self’s Place. It should be clear at the outset that I am not, therefore, explicitly interested in his extensive work on René Descartes, his study of Husserl or Heidegger, or on phenomenology as such.

Together, Marion’s concepts of love, givenness, and gift offer a promising convergence with Augustine’s own understanding of the gift of love and its significance to Trinitarian naming. Part 3 is the site of that convergence, wherein Marion’s work can serve a reading of De Trinitate in two ways. First, with the risk of idolatry in mind, Marion’s study of the saturated phenomenon—in particular the icon—divests the ego of its self-groundedness, inviting instead a subjectivity that is first and foremost responsive to givenness and to the antecedent gift of love. Such a reading of subjectivity can sharpen Augustine’s understanding of the human being as made to the image of God, defined by a gift that always already precedes me and that which gives myself to me. Second, although the exercise of marking possible impossibility leaves phenomenological reason gasping for breath as it tries to outrun its own horizon, such impossibility does not frustrate theology if the discipline is defined not by its ability to name God exhaustively—to present God here within my present horizon—but as reflection upon my formation and movement toward God.

Therefore, this engagement of De Trinitate will not be a search for a model of divine life through the interrelatedness of the mind’s memory, understanding, and will. Rather, this particular reading of De Trinitate, which is not intended to be exhaustive of the text or of Augustine’s ideas, will focus on two intimately interrelated aspects of the text. First, it will attempt to draw from the bishop’s words an understanding of the gift of love. This name particularly signifies the Holy Spirit but also the Trinitarian life of God. Second, this name will be brought to bear on those who confess it as a name of God, examining how the gift of love orients us and forms us. And while Augustine considers this formation within the context of understanding, it is important to remember that understanding and love can be reduced to neither separate functions of the human mind nor independent actions on the part of two of the divine three. This book undertakes this study of the gift of love by means of a journey through the pages of De Trinitate.

Augustine wrote De Trinitate in service of the salvation of souls, and the conversion effecting salvation is dependent upon God’s antecedent gift of love, a gift that coincides with the life of God and the unity of the Father and Son in the Spirit. Therefore, the emphasis of this study of the text will fall on the gift language of books 5–7, the dynamic of love that begins in book 8, and the Spirit’s role in transforming human beings into the fullness of the image of the Trinitarian God. It is my intention not to argue that there is no other significant theological content within the text, but to articulate a central dynamic of the text, one that has points of connection and comparison with the work of Jean-Luc Marion. Such an approach is certainly not without its assumptions, blind spots, and dangers. The sixteen-hundred-year history of interpretations of the work of the Bishop of Hippo warns against trust in any naïve claim at a possible objective reading of the text—that is, engaging the text itself, without time, space, and one’s own subjectivity playing inescapable roles in the reading. Texts do not simply speak for themselves. To understand, David Tracy reminds his own readers again and again, is to interpret.[30] And interpretation of a text of the complexity, significance, and subject matter of De Trinitate requires of its reader continuous hermeneutical decisions, each shaped by the reader’s fundamental concerns and questions. Therefore, a guiding hermeneutic concerned with the nature and effect of the gift of love is not without its weaknesses. However, such a hermeneutic is rendered relatively adequate and trustworthy as internally consistent with De Trinitate itself as a significant concern of the text and as an emphasis active elsewhere in the Augustine’s vast corpus.

While the language of gift and love is more prevalent in some parts of the De Trinitate than in others, the entire text figures in this progressive transformation wrought by the gift of love, pedagogically revealed not as a school of loquacious chattering[31] but as a gradual teaching through a definite order directed at the salvation of the reader’s soul,[32] while at the same time intellectually defending the rationality of that teaching. While emphasis is not only unavoidable but itself the very method of interpretation, it is valuable to illuminate the text as a whole, if only from a particular perspective.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my late arrival to Augustine, De Trinitate, and to Marion. This book adds to the already countless analyses of Augustine’s thought, itself of immeasurable influence upon the whole the Christianity. Moreover, I have arrived late in applying Marion’s thought to Augustine directly, such an application having already been undertaken by others.[33] But especially, this book arrives after Marion himself has published his own interpretation of Augustine’s Confessions, In the Self’s Place.[34] Furthermore, I recognize that to a significant extent, mine is another work in a tradition that has been followed many times before in the sixteen hundred or so years since De Trinitate’s composition. Anything I have to offer here is at best a modest and momentary glimpse of a hope. Indeed, all of our accomplishments are few. All of our accomplishments are minor: my scribblings, his book, the best lines of the best living poets. We embroider away at our tiny tatters of insight as though the world hung on them, when it is chiefly we ourselves who hang on them.[35] But because we ourselves do hang on them for the deepening of our knowledge of God, any new glimpse (however fleeting, however limited) we may offer of our approach to God is not one to be received lightly—not because of what we offer but precisely because of what is offered to us. We cannot hope to arrive at this approach except as those arriving late, always responding to those who themselves began in response. I take up my place of response to a tradition rooted in the revelation of God’s name, a tradition that was given to me so generously by those who, themselves, had received it. To name the Father, Son, and Spirit the God of love is to call upon God, to call as one arriving late, panting for what we have already breathed, hungering for what we have already tasted, and yearning for the embrace already given.[36]

David Tracy, God, Dialogue and Solidarity: A Theologian’s Refrain, The Christian Century 107 (October 10, 1990): 904. ↵

By using the first person plural throughout part 1, I hope it might serve as a reminder that as a reader of De Trinitate, I assume the posture of membership in both the human species created by God and the community to which Augustine wrote (i.e., the church). Augustine writes not so much to me as an individual but to me as part of a we. ↵

Jean-Luc Marion, In The Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 289. ↵

David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 11. ↵

Matthew 28:19, referenced by Augustine as he begins his closing prayer in De Trinitate 15.51. ↵

The neo-scholastic dogmatic structure made the tract on the Trinity impermeable to other relevant themes (such a soteriology) and, most unfortunate of all, presented a trinitarian theology disconnected from the revelation and the experience of Father, Son, and Spirit in salvation history. Trinitarian theology became a purely speculative endeavor, of interest to precious few, unintelligible to the vast majority. Hence the misleading commonplace that ‘We cannot explain anything about the doctrine of the Trinity since it is a mystery.’ (God is mystery, to be sure; the doctrine is complex but not the same as the Mystery.) And so, generations of Christians were taught virtually nothing about this central truth of the Christian faith, except that it was enshrouded in mystery and in any case had no bearing on living out one’s faith. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, introduction to The Trinity, by Karl Rahner (New York: Crossroad, 1997), x. ↵

Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 81. ↵

Edmund Hill, OP, introduction to The Trinity, by Augustine, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation of the 21st Century, vol. 3, no. 9 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 19. ↵

Rowan Williams, "Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate," in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T.J. van Bavel, ed. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, J. van Houtem (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), 332. ↵

John C. Cavadini, "The Quest for Truth in Augustine’s De Trinitate," Theological Studies 58, no. 3 (1997): 436. ↵

Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27; Luke 1:37. ↵

Augustine, De Trinitate, 8.14. Unless stated otherwise, all English translations throughout are from Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, OP, ed. John E. Rotelle, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation of the 21st Century, vol. 3, no. 9 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991). ↵

Ibid. ↵

1 John 4:8. ↵

Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.2. ↵

Marion, In the Self’s Place, xv. ↵

Joseph S. O’Leary, The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?, in Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 136. ↵

See Augustine, De Trinitate, 8.1. ↵

David Tracy, Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentrism, in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 269. ↵

Marion, In the Self’s Place, 98. ↵

Tracy, Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentrism, 263. ↵

James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 174. ↵

Augustine, The Teacher, in Against the Academicians and "The Teacher," trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995). All English translations of De Magistro throughout are from this version. ↵

Lieven Boeve, Retrieving Augustine Today: Between Neo-Augustinianist Essentialism and Radical Hermeneutics?, in Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity?, ed. Lieven Boeve, M. Lamberigts, Maarten Wisse (Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2009), 15. ↵

Ibid., 17. ↵

See Marion, In the Self’s Place, 12. ↵

Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.1. ↵

Marion, In the Self’s Place, 10. ↵

See Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.3. ↵

Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 9. ↵

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8.5.10. All English translations throughout are from this version. ↵

Paul R. Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls: Revising a Classical Ideal (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 96. ↵

See, for example, Kyle Philip Hubbard, ‘Who Then Are You, My God?’: Augustine of Hippo and Jean-Luc Marion on the Nature and Possibility of Loving God (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2009). ↵

Au lieu de soi was originally published in 2008, its English translation in 2012. ↵

Cristina Nehring, Loving a Child on the Fringe, Slate, November 28, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/h22btex. ↵

Augustine, Confessions, 10.27.38. ↵

A Reading of De Trinitate

1

Language and Conversion Within the Limits of De Trinitate

Human beings must . . . be told how to love.

—Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 1.54

As he begins the work, Augustine presents his De Trinitate as a response to the cry of the Psalmist, Seek his face always,[1] through a pursuit of the unity of the three, of Father and Son and Holy Spirit[2]—an endeavor, he warns, in which no mistake is more dangerous, or the search more laborious, or the discovery more advantageous.[3] Having struggled with his own conception of God for years[4] and all too aware of the difficulty of the text to come, the Bishop of Hippo invites his reader along the path of charity, in hope that this gentle authority might lead both author and reader to a deeper understanding of the Trinitarian mystery.[5] The progressive structure of the text itself conforms to Augustine’s general rhetorical and dialectical concerns, which, in turn, conform to his pedagogical telos. He intended for his reader a lengthy but focused journey through this tightly unified text;[6] a journey that would, he hoped, prove transformative of the reader’s understanding of God, certainly, but even more so of the reader’s love of God, each being necessary for the other.

How De Trinitate Fails

Augustine’s thought rests upon a mutually supportive coherence of theology and rhetoric. While such a coherence may be susceptible to charges of tautology, Augustine’s faith in God as creator and end of a good creation—underlying the bishop’s most celebrated words, You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you[7]—both permits and demands such internalized implications. Operating with a theological anthropology wherein understanding and love cannot be separated, for all one may attempt to distinguish between them,[8] book 8—and indeed much of De Trinitate itself—rotates around this particular unity. Just as Augustine’s concept of love requires an object, and therefore some understanding of that object, so too does understanding of the object per se require a loving openness to it and a proper valuation of it. This legitimizes an emphasis on the conversion of the reader’s love to a love for God. The human being is made to desire God—and this is true whether or not we are aware of this intended end of our created desire or have inhibited our love from reaching for this end. Of course, precisely how the relationship of understanding and love within the human being relates to God requires all of De Trinitate to explore, and even there, such an exploration can only be done incompletely.

Not only is Augustine’s theology rhetorical in form but his rhetoric is theologically conditioned. Whether conceived as psychagogic, pedagogical, or a pastoral function of the role of bishop, Augustine’s understanding of rhetoric is not only the result of an anthropology rooted in desire but is also soteriological in its trajectory. That is, the salvific transformation of human love as the central dynamic of the human being itself is the necessary and sufficient condition justifying the linguistic appeal to human desire.[9]

At its heart, De Trinitate is not an elaborate study of church dogma,[10] a protracted intellectual exercise,[11] or an establishment of juridical (or ecclesiastical) standards for theological speculation,[12] although it can, in some manner, direct its readers in their investigation into each of these matters. Instead, as Chad Pecknold argues, the Trinity—or at the very least, theological speculation and dogma about the Trinity—functions most importantly not to regulate theology but to bring about the conversion of De Trinitate’s readers. Lewis Ayres, too, concludes that Augustine is not exploring how the Trinity may be known independently of [Christ’s] revealing and drawing, but showing how that revealing leads us to read anew God’s creation with the eyes and terms of faith, and showing us how that drawing pulls us into a fuller life within the intelligible order.[13] The conversion is the point,[14] Pecknold writes, and the so-called analogies—lover/beloved/love and the inward turn to human memory, understanding, and will—are tools that perform upon the reader a process of spiritual conversion.[15] Both the analogies in creation and the theological speculation itself serve the salvation of the soul. By way of his ambitious plan "to train the reader, in the things that have been made (Rom 1:20), Augustine hopes that both he and his reader, getting to know him by whom they were made, will come eventually to his image."[16]

And yet even as the final book concludes, this arrival is deferred. The Trinity does not yet appear to readers in divine glory. Facing this deferred arrival—this as of yet non-thing—with prayer, Augustine pleads to God, Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely.[17] Would this have been an attempt to make the interlocutor in question accessibly concrete and to reify the text’s potential signification into substantial actuality, then the reader of De Trinitate would be forced to conclude that the theological display, impressive though it may be, is little more than the hollow noise of vanity, unable to grasp the mysterious God who does not condescend to be possessed together with falsehood.[18] This, however, is not Augustine’s intention; in his theology of the Trinity, he does not presume to present the Trinity to his reader.

John Cavadini, in search of the theological significance of such a display of accepted failure (that is, the failure to present the Trinity or even a compelling model of the Trinity), acknowledges: Pointing out how difficult it is to ‘see’ and ‘fully know’ the substance of God, and that faith is necessary if we are to ‘see the ineffable ineffably,’ Augustine goes on to state that his treatise will serve to point out precisely this.[19] Contrary to the claims of his critics, Augustine is not imposing upon God a model based on an inadequate understanding of the human mind[20]—or, to the degree that he is, the inadequacy is recognized and brought to serve the bishop’s actual purpose.

That an inadequate approach produces inadequate results can, but does not necessarily, frustrate the movement of conversion. That looking for an opening to the Trinity in that which is made in its image—the human mind—cannot but lead to poor Trinitarian models does not mean that the search itself need be abandoned. Cavadini continues, "But we have also discovered that to continue the purely introspective Neoplatonic ascent is to continue a process which has not only failed but cannot but fail, for the more we persist in contemplating a disfigured image as though it were not disfigured, as though it were, so to speak, an accurate image of God, the more we persist in furthering the disfigurement."[21] Our intellectual vision, and particularly our contemplation of God, is not only limited but also distorted by sin, rendering our approach prey to a twisted and self-serving will. Any relatively adequate understanding of the Trinitarian God—a, if not the, goal of theology—requires of us a healing and transformation of our will, opening us to relationship with God. By means of the turn away from the revelation of the scriptures and the philosophical rules of Trinitarian predication, and a turn inward toward his deepest part (described by Edmund Hill as the movement of a patristic Alice through the Neoplatonic looking glass[22]), this intellectual inadequacy and weakness of will can be made to further conversion in being quickened by love.

In inviting his readers to locate, understand, and love that which is signified by the text, while at the same time demonstrating the impossibility of doing precisely that, Augustine attempts to persuade his readers of our total dependency on the transforming power of God’s gift of love and affirm that this impossible signification is transcended in the incarnate person of Jesus Christ, understood in light of the Holy Spirit. Cavadini concludes:

But what it is important to note here is not simply that we have a new way for completing an ascent which remains definitively Neoplatonic in its goal, but that the goal—noesis itself—has acquired a new character. Our contemplative regard is pushed outward, from the consideration of a static metaphysical self essentially disconnected from the uncomfortable realm of the bodily and historically contingent—that realm which defines our ontological distance from God—to that very realm itself and to the blood, irreducibly contingent and irreducibly historical, which for Augustine became its central node.[23]

The contemplative inwardness having turned to Christ inexorably moves us to irreducibly contingent blood—both that which was shed in love upon the cross and that for which it was shed. This is an intellectual conversion, to be sure, but one marked by the priority placed upon one’s concrete loving relationship with God and with neighbor—that is, a conversion to, and by, love.

The reader who begins De Trinitate in expectation of unearthing within the human mind a veracious model of the triune God will leave disappointed at best—and potentially woefully misdirected—if he or she does not attend to the hermeneutic of love. Augustine orients his reader to conversion to love, by love. The inadequacy of our own attempts to attain this end—a result of both our created finitude and our fallen nature, to be sure, but perhaps better put, a result of how we hope to come to know the mystery of God—has a pedagogical role. For what it is we were created to know cannot be learned as pure data, delivered to our unconverted understanding to be seen directly with the mind’s eye. Rather, as Peter Burnell observes, this limit implies that we were created such that the humility that accords with our nature must be learned.[24] What it is we seek to know—the Trinitarian God of love—comes to us only in and through our transformation. Where this supreme Reality is concerned, therefore, our cognition is an act of loving, he continues, The deepest knowledge, then, is charity.[25]

Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and the Conversion of the Soul

Before that day in a Milanese garden when Augustine took and read Paul’s letter to the Christian community in Rome (or so his own narrative goes), his professional training and practice had been primarily focused upon rhetoric. This appreciation for, and application of, the power of beautiful and persuasive language would mark Augustine’s work as bishop and would continue to be part of his later theological works. De Trinitate is no exception to this. Its structure is consistent with the subject of Augustine’s schooling and teaching even as the bishop transforms classical rhetoric by exceeding it. A text easily and often dismissed as obtuse, as an intractable mass of speculation floating oddly aloof from foundation in any particular context,[26]De Trinitate has a form that fully serves its Trinitarian content; a content that, in turn, cannot be separated from its status as a linguistic (and conceptual) presentation of the nature of the triune God. An engagement with De Trinitate, therefore, requires an understanding of the rhetorical and pedagogical features of Augustine’s thought and his philosophy of language. Where its detractors read its speculative theology as a foundation for the so-called Western or Latin model of Trinity, "understood to be the exposition of the relations of God in se, with scarce reference to God’s acts in salvation history,"[27]De Trinitate has been more recently interpreted as fundamentally focused on the transformative and salvific heart of Trinitarian theology. Therefore, to understand De Trinitate, we must first explore the relationship among language, knowledge, and love—a relationship effectively structuring Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity itself and illuminating the reader’s way of proceeding toward knowledge of the triune God.

Roughly four years after having been ordained, Augustine was consecrated bishop, assuming pastoral responsibility for the Christians of the North African maritime city of Hippo Regius, putting an end to a personal dream that had been dying since he was compelled into the priesthood: living a life of contemplation removed from the concerns of the world. His first biographer, Possidius, tells us that the tears Augustine generously shed the day of his ordination had been ascribed by many to wounded pride and by way of consolation told him that while he was worthy of greater honor the office of presbyter was but little inferior to the bishopric.[28] However, having intentionally avoided visiting cities in need of episcopal leadership in fear he would be seized and forced to serve, Augustine was mourning not the insignificance of his new position, but the death of the contemplative life he had desired to live,[29] smothered as he now would be beneath the precarious responsibilities of his office and ashamed that he had once thought ill of clergymen and their congregations.[30] Although he had long since abandoned his determination to achieve political and oratorical success, he had remained hopeful that a contemplative life might yet be possible, a life in which he and his close companions and students would retreat from the world and focus on an ideal of the Christian life centered on prayer and intellectual speculation. Such a life would be transformed beneath the enormous pressures of his new position, forcing Augustine to reconsider both what type of life ought to be the Christian’s goal and the way of achieving that end.[31]

While responsibilities for his flock required the new bishop to transform his earlier way of life, he did not completely abandon it. Indeed, he had already taken to revise his previous classical rhetorical ideal to be of service to his Christian students. This revision would simply have to be taken a step further; it would now be directed toward shaping a rhetoric designed to appeal to the Christians of Hippo. However, while a study of the rhetoric Augustine employs in his sermons—in those words directed at the Christians of little or no formal philosophical education, the many who occupied the nave of his church—is indeed a worthy endeavor, our focus on De Trinitate concerns us with a form of rhetoric directed not at the masses but at the educated few.[32] This rhetoric was not, unlike that of his sermons, made deliberately artless[33] to appeal to the uneducated mind, but instead reveals Augustine’s high intellectual expectations for his readers.

Before his conversion, Augustine was both talented enough and strategically positioned to achieve not a small amount of success in a Roman culture that revered a gifted rhetor’s artistic brilliance in shaping the stories and ideas that would define a people and an empire. At its worst, the speech of such a rhetor, Paul Kolbet writes, would provide the audience with an image of themselves—not as they were in fact but as they wanted to believe they were,[34] perpetuating the prejudices and misconceptions already dominant in a society. However, the Socratic ideal of uniting rhetoric and philosophy—bequeathed to Augustine through an education shaped, however subtly at times, by Aristotle and Ciceronian Stoicism—orients him toward employing persuasive language not merely for praise but in a manner that overcomes the audience members’ resistance so that they actually become receptive to hearing the truth about themselves.[35] A rhetoric designated psychagogic by contemporary scholars of the classical period,[36]