The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridged Thesis Part Two): The Historiographical Place of Augustine

In the introduction to his beautiful biography of Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton reminisced that, “A lady I knew picked up a book of selections from St. Thomas, with a commentary; and began hopefully to read a section with the innocent heading, The Simplicity of God.  She then laid the book down with a sigh and said: “well, if that’s His simplicity, I wonder what His complexity is like.’”[1] These days, a great many words in contemporary theology are held aloft on the long sigh of Chesterton’s anonymous friend.  “The claim that God is simple,” writes Jay Wesley Richards, “is as obscure to most modern Christians as it is prevalent in classical theism.”[2]  Or as Stephen Holmes notes, “to say this doctrine [of simplicity] has something of a public relations problem is to understate the issue considerably,”[3] because, as Robert Jenson put it over twenty-five years ago: “rejection of the dominant tradition just at this point [divine simplicity] is endemic in contemporary theology.”[4] 

And yet, David Bentley Hart, Jenson’s friend and complete theological antithesis, writes: “No claim, I think it is fair to say has traditionally been seen as more crucial to a logically coherent concept of God than the denial that God is in any way composed of separable parts, aspects, properties, or functions.”[5] While Hart openly concedes that there has not been “perfect agreement across schools and traditions as to what all the ramifications of this idea might be,” nonetheless its basic principle of non-composition is, says Hart, nonnegotiable: “If God is to be understood as the unconditioned source of all things, rather than merely some powerful but still ontologically dependent being, then any denial of divine simplicity is equivalent to a denial of God’s reality.”[6]   

Simplicity at this juncture may be provisionally defined as the idea claiming both that God’s essence is identical to God’s existence, and that all of the various attributes of God are ultimately identical in God as God.[7]  It is, as James Dolezal argues, a necessary affirmation to gesture toward God’s difference from creation, i.e. it names Him in His transcendence.[8]  Put the other way round: a composite thing is a creature.  Simplicity is thus not merely “an” attribute of God as David Burrell notes, because Simplicity acts more like a “formal feature,” of divinity in which it actually “defines the manner in which properties may be spoken of God.”[9]  As such it was and is (rather ironically!) a site of complex interaction between theology, ontology, epistemology, theories of language, and soteriological issues like union with God.[10] It follows that these current-day rejections or alterations to the doctrine of simplicity are not “mere” modifications or negations to an attribute of God, but register changes in wider networks of theory and practice regarding what constitutes proper theological discourse about God. 

It is no accident that this recent discontent with simplicity is directly correlated to a similar twentieth-century disgruntlement with Augustine’s Trinitarian theology, given the centrality simplicity takes in his theology. In opening his magisterial treatise De Trinitate, Augustine writes, “Dear reader, whenever you are certain . . . that I have [gone wrong], call me back to you.”[11]  And “should [the reader] feel grievance at my discourse . . . let them lay the book aside (or throw it away, if they prefer).”[12]  It would be only with a little exaggeration to say that large portions of twentieth-century scholarship on Augustine are exercises in taking him at his word.  Patristic specialist John Behr summarizes this basic flurry of anti-Augustinian sentiment well by opening a recent essay with the understatement: “this century has not been good for blessed Augustine.”[13]  Unfortunately this critical analysis has not also achieved a proportionate depth of understanding.  Michel René Barnes laments that though “it is impossible to do contemporary trinitarian theology and not have a judgment on Augustine,” this is, unfortunately, “not the same thing as saying that it is impossible to do contemporary Trinitarian theology and not have read Augustine.”[14] 

This “grim paternity,” of Augustine for Western thought, as Michael Hanby nicknames the caricature,[15] should not be mistaken for the quibbles of Augustinian specialists guarding their obscure corners of academia.  Identifying the historical genealogy of the Trinity and its reception history, especially in relationship to Augustine—for better or worse—is a key diagnostic device for nearly all who have participated and are participating in the so-called “Trinitarian renaissance,” of the second half of the twentieth century, and even now, beyond the first decade of the twenty-first.[16] In many ways this is merely a further refinement of the general historiographical tenor of contemporary Trinitarianism gestured to briefly in the introduction.  Given Augustine’s influence, it really comes as no surprise when Hanby, for example—commenting on the same systematic-theological culture Ayres remarked on in the introduction—states, “in its theological guise, the reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of Christianity’s ongoing self-assessment, especially in the West,” and, “in its philosophical and political guise, it is part of culture’s ongoing reassessment of Christianity,” in relation to new, secular forms of life and thought.[17]  So that ultimately, “[These connections of modern systematic theology’s historical narratives] have provided the architecture for a grand story of modern origins now taken as axiomatic by thinkers with little in common.  And Augustine’s place within them is crucial as one of the West’s great metaphysical pillars.”[18]  Indeed “Saint Augustine occupies a vexed place in modernity’s vexed self-understanding.”[19]

As we have already briefly seen in the introduction, there is among those participating in the so-called Trinitarian renaissance a similar sort of historiographical reading of the tradition in order to diagnose where and why Trinitarian theology began its decline, in order to detect and so overcome whatever problems were identified historically.[20]  It is in the figure of Augustine that these tendencies of Trinitarian historiography, and historiographical diagnostics regarding the causes, nature, and ramifications of theological and philosophical Modernity often converge. It is a common criticism, for example, both to excoriate Augustine’s “abstractly simple” “non-relational” and “all-too philosophical” God as a distant and pallid “theistic” imposter, floating far and away from the historical texture of the Biblical witness.[21]  Here, it is said, philosophical coherence has been purchased at the cost of its religious significance—where we are, in R. Kendall Soulen’s memorable phrase, “forced to think the ‘eternal identity’ [of God] in one-sided reliance on YHWH’s dialectical shadow, ousia.”[22] 

On the other side of the same coin, the so-called “de Regnón Paradigm”[23] has become common, where theologians juxtapose Augustine and Western Trinitarianism’s “Hellenizing” as beginning with theorization upon the “one substance” of God and only thereafter the persons, thus inherently tending towards an anti-economic, anti-historical, anti-materialist Sabellianism over/against the supposedly more robustly Trinitarian (and so, biblical) theology of the Eastern Fathers, most typically Augustine’s near-contemporaries, the Cappadocians.[24]  The circumscribing edge of the coin, holding the two sides together (to stretch the metaphor a bit), is ultimately a diachronic historical analysis that links Augustine’s abstract God, and circumvention of movement to God via the incarnate Christ by inward “psychologized” spiritual ascent, to Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum, thus creating a sort of historical plumb-line between the two, able to gauge the shadowy depths of the modern epoch itself.  As such, the decline of Trinitarianism is linked with the rise of secular modernity—and these within an Augustinian index.  Put tersely by the profound Catholic sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor: “On the way from Plato to Descartes, stands Augustine.”[25]

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[1] G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (New York: DoubleDay, 1956), xvi.

[2] Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration of Divine Perfection, Simplicity, and Immutability (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 213.

[3] Steven R. Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards A Defense of the Doctrine of Simplicity,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. 43 (2001): 137.

[4] Robert Jenson, "The Triune God” in Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten, eds., Christian Dogmatics 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 1: 166.

[5] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 134.  Cf. David Bentley Hart, “The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics After Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Democopoulos, eds (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 191-226.

[6] Ibid.  This is no mere fear-mongering for Hart’s preferred metaphysic.  The New Atheist front-man Richard Dawkins has recently made one of his arguments an attack on the coherence of God as an explanation for the universe precisely because, he says, any entity that made the universe would have to be more complex than the universe, and so violates (what he takes to be) Ockham’s famous razor.  Cf. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2006), 134f.;  Perhaps surprisingly given the general animus toward the doctrine, a recent and incredibly sophisticated account of God’s existence has been given with the doctrine of simplicity as a primary movement.: Robert J. Spitzer, New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 122ff.

[7] Cf. Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208ff.; Aquinas, Summa Theologia, I.3.7: “…but God is absolute form, or rather absolute being, so that in Him there is nothing besides Himself.”  There are more concomitants to the doctrine of simplicity that we will touch upon: God is not a genus, God is not reducible to a substrate, there is no potentiality in God—i.e. He is Pure Act.  Cf. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1996), 22-23.

[8] James Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 4.

[9] David Burrell, “Distinguishing God from the World,” in Language, Meaning, and God, ed. Brian Davies, (London, Geoffery Chapman, 1987), 75.

[10] I owe this way of understanding and investigating the doctrine to Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 273-384.  Cf. Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea, 241-281; Radde-Gallwitz, Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 2ff: “What must my knowing be like if its ‘object’ is God?”  It is apropos at this juncture to note that our use of “epistemology” here differs at the outset from the Modern concern for epistemology in a key way that might lead to misunderstanding.  We are not here worried about how our knowledge of God is justified (or a justified true belief).  Nor by epistemology do we really mean “how do we know God?”  This too would have been a relatively alien question to Patristic pro-Nicene theology, which assumes we know God in Christ and the Spirit.  Thus our use of epistemology more precisely is an attempt to key in on the question: given Christ Jesus as God’s mediator, what does it mean to know God?

[11] St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. and ed. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991) I.1.5.

[12] Ibid.

[13] John Behr, “Calling Upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou & George E. Demacopolous (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 153.

[14] Michel René Barnes, “Rereading  Augustine’s Doctrine of the Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, Gerald O’Collins, SJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 145.

[15] Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, ch. 1.

[16] An incredibly helpful summary of this phenomenon is contained in Michel René Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 237-250. Cf. A.G. Roeber, “Western, Eastern, Or Some Global Orthodoxy?  Some Reflections on St. Augustine of Hippo in Recent Literature,” Pro Ecclesia XVII no.2 (2008): 210-223.

[17] Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 6.  At this juncture it behooves us to note that we hardly mean to defend Augustine on all points of his theology.  Our contention is that his Trinitarian theology has much to add in dialogue with current theology that is often overlooked because of skewed historical readings.  It is always important, as John Rist, “Augustine of Hippo,” in The Medieval Theologians, ed. G.R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 3, puts it, that: “No account of the effects and influence of Augustine can ignore the challenge of the relationship between the genuine and the supposed beliefs of the bishop of Hippo.”  Cf. the helpful remarks of David Tracy, “Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentricism,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, 268-269.

[18] Hanby, Augustine and Modernity., 135. 

[19] Ibid., 6.

[20] Two excellent works that travel along this line while also complexifying it, are Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011); R. Kendall Soulen, The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity: Distinguishing The Voices (Philadelphia: Westmnister: John-Knox Press, 2011).  Unfortunately despite many wonderful insights in his book, Hinlicky displays little to no familiarity (or better: sympathy) with how simplicity actually functioned in the theological tradition, and is given to the trope of attributing it to some sort of Middle-Platonic philosophical infection of biblical discourse.  Soulen’s work is much more nuanced in this area, and is an absolutely brilliant attempt to read multiple patterns in the variegated history of theology together into a mutually reinforcing symphony.

[21] Though this could be dealt with at length, we must put to rest here the so-called “Hellenization” thesis: a tendency in early Christianity that supposedly lingers until contemporary times. and which juxtaposes Hebraic (read: Biblical) thought with Greek metaphysical (read: pagan) constructs, which to varying degrees were artificially “foisted” upon or “supercede” authentic Jewish (read: personal, dynamic, emotional, scriptural etc…) portraits of God.  Paul Gavrilyuk has helpfully summarized this trope by the title “The Theory of Theology’s Fall Into Hellenistic Philosophy.” (Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); cf. Idem., “Harnack’s ‘Hellenized Christianity,’ or Florovsky’s ‘Sacred Hellenism:’ Questioning Two Christian Metanarratives of Early Christian Engagement with Late Antique Culture,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly no. 54 vol. 3-4 (2010): 323-344).  As Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter With Hellenism (Yale: Yale University Press, 1995), 3-40, illustrates as well, the trope of theologians wanting to avoid tendencies of “the Greeks” is a complex phenomenon latent in Patristic theology—and is not just a “modern” concern!  Interaction with “Hellenism” (a vicious abstraction) occurs piecemeal and ad hoc in Patristic thought, and indeed at multiple levels beyond the theoretical—including rhetorical styling, aesthetic sensibilities, vocabulary, etc… Part of the problem is that many treat the concept of “Hellenization” as a priori grounds for rejecting an idea as unbiblical, without sympathetically treating its claims. cf. Janet Martin Soskice, “Athens and Jerusalem, Alexandria and Edessa: Is There a Metaphysics of Scripture?” International Journal of Systematic Theology vol. 8 no. 2. (2006), 149-162; Michael Allen, “Exodus 3 After the Hellenization Thesis,” Journal of Theological Interpretation vol. 3 no.2 (2009): 176-196; Matthew Levering, “God and Greek Philosophy in Contemporary Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Theological Interpretation vol. 4 no.2 (2010): 169-186; cf. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s lengthy essay: “The Appropriation of the Philosophical Concept of God as a Dogmatic Problem of Early Christian Theology,” in Basic Questions in Theology vol.2 trans. George H. Kehm. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 119-184, though ultimately Pannenberg is ambivalent regarding the Hellenistic legacy; Consider as well the similar and more recent commentary of Ayres:

In fact the opposition Greek and Hebrew, or Greek philosophy and Christian theology, is one of the most important examples of a wider narrative trope that relies on oppositions between idealized thought forms. Some versions of this trope are of course one of the more lamentable aspects of early Christian heresiology, but it is also important to note that a particular version of engagement via typification has been important within modern theological thought. Relating the history of a doctrinal theme as the story of two competing and abstract ideas has enabled systematicians to invoke the history of Christian thought without the need for deep textual and contextual engagement...this involves subtle strategies regarding assumptions about the nature and function of philosophy and about the appropriate use of the text of Scripture. This strategy presents philosophies as self enclosed systems of thought that frequently overcome theologians who attempt to appropriate them and that are only naively used piecemeal to expand on and explore the plain sense of Scripture...it is thus only a short step for theologians to assume as a working model that the history of Christian thought presents them with a history of accommodations to particular philosophies, or negotiations between self-enclosed philosophies and the Gospel (Nicaea and Its Legacy, 390-391). 

[22] R. Kendall Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” Modern Theology, 15 (1999): 50.  It should be noted that Soulen does not ultimately reject the idea that “ousiological speculation” is an illegitimate jump from biblical theology.  His main point is that it often adopts static and essentialist forms that then retroject and displace close textual engagement with the Old Testament in particular (so that Christian metaphysical thought is supercessionism by other means); Cf. Cornelius Plantinga jr. “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Ronald J Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 39: “And since simplicity theories are negotiable in ways that Pauline and Johannine statements are not,” (emphasis added) we should be willing to “adjust or even abandon simplicity doctrine for the sake of Trinitarian theology that is grounded in and arises from the Scripture.”  Regardless of whether or not one ultimately sides with divine simplicity, these sort of stark and facile binaries between scripture and “philosophical” language are much too simple to be of any use.; Clark Pinnock “The Need For a Scriptural and Therefore a Neo-Classical Theism,” in Perspectives on Evangelical Theology, ed. Kenneth Kantzer and Stanley Gundry, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1972): 37-42.: “How ironical for classical theism to claim that God is unlimited, and deny that he is able to do the very things the Bible says that he can and does do! Changing is something God can do [emphasis added], and more wonderfully it is some- thing God wills to do for the sake of our salvation. We have to say that the Greek idea of utter unchangeableness in God is false and misleading when measured by the Scripture.”

[23] This shorthand refers to the schematization of “Eastern” and “Western” Trinitarianism along the lines of their respective logical prioritization of either ousia or hypostasis—more crudely put whether they “start with” the One essence and then move on to speak of the three persons, or, conversely, “start with” the Three persons and only then speak of the unity—often called the “de Regnón paradigm,” after its supposed genesis by the late 19^th century historian Theodore de Regnón.  This is, however, an unfair epithet as it is, ironically enough, not just a caricature of Eastern and Western theology, but of de Regnón as well.  cf. Michel René Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” in Augustinian Studies, 26:2 (1995): 51-79; And especially Kristin Hennessy, “An Answer to De Regnón’s ‘Accusers’: Why We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no.2 (2007): 179-197. 

[24] This is not always the case, for where some use the West/East distinction, others transform it into terms of a more general monotheistic vs. Trinitarian paradigm.  In the words of Aquinas expert Gilles Emery, “Chronique de theology trinitaire (V)” (translation taken from Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 199n.6): “The history of theology shows that it is under the aspect of Trinitarian faith that monotheism becomes a question for theology.”;  Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1998), 210n.87 turns Trinitarian theology against a monotheistic tradition aligned with the doctrine of simplicity.  Cf. Volf’s mentor, Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 197: “It is only when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven, [emphasis added] and his divine patriarchs in the world, that earthly rulers, dictators and tyrants cease to find any justifying archetypes any more.”  And further: “what does this characteristically Christian answer [of the Trinity] mean in relation to those other concepts of God . . . [which is to say, God is Trinity] not as supreme substance and not as absolute subject, but as triunity, the three-in-one?” (10), cf. esp.149-150; Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 215, where he pulls no punches and states that “the God of classical theism,” is “a god of the pagans. ”  Indeed, the Father’s merely “baptized Aristotle” (Ibid., 20-22);  Cf. the very helpful essay by Randal E. Otto, “Moltmann and the Anti-Monotheism Movement,” International Journal of Systematic Theology vol.3 no.3 (2001): 293-308.  This is further complicated by those who take the “East-West” paradigm but specify it within a higher order, taking only a handful of Eastern theologians as truly exemplary of their respective cardinal direction.  Cf. Reinhard Hütter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1997), 239n.74 where he comments, “Western theologians [who want to defer to the East] tend to follow Gregory of Nazianzus, while the most important representative of Eastern Orthodox theology advocate the monarchia following Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa.”  This general trend of Western deferral to Eastern thought as supposedly specifically represented by Nazianzus as against the other two Cappadocian Fathers, owes much to the particularly influential reading of the tradition by T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) e.g. 321.  While we have great admiration for Torrance, a particular danger in his historical work is often that his extensive knowledge is taken at large as Torrance qua historian of doctrine.  However cogent and powerful Torrance’s erudite knowledge of the tradition may be, there are subtle and often wide-ranging facets of his engagement that nonetheless evince the guiding eye of his day job as systematic theologian (this in itself, of course, is no indictment.  History is never done out of mere curiosity, but to serve in whatever sense, the present).  For an enormously impressive investigation of Torrance’s (and many others’) historiographical “slants” on the Patristic tradition with a particular eye to Gregory Nyssa, cf. the wonderful study of Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15-37.  Cf. 31: “Torrance constructs a line of what one might call Trinitarian heroes extending from the earliest discussions of the idea of a triune God via Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus to Calvin, and thence to Barth.  He thus…supports his argument...by placing Nazianzen in a tradition or family of theological antecedents and descendants of whom Torrance approves.”  And 36-37: “What we have, then, in Torrance’s work on the Cappadocians’ is at one level a historical and theological examination of their Trinitarian theology, at another level, usually hidden, but for a few clues given by Torrance’s focus on certain terms and historical interpretations, is a theological response, not to the Cappadocians, but to Karl Barth.  In other words, a debate about modern systematic theology is going on in the pages of what many people have come to regard as textbook accounts of the development of early Christian doctrine.” [Emphasis added].

[25] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992), 126.; Cf. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 1: “the questions about the relationship between Augustine and Descartes are really questions about the kind of event modernity is, and the status of Christianity within it…”; Cf. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 189: “There has been considerable debate over the last hundred years about Descartes originality, almost all of it bound up with a debate about the origin and nature of modernity.”  As Hanby, and in a slightly different manner, Jean-Luc Marion (“The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity,” in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkley: University of California, 1986)) argue, Descartes received a skewed vision of Augustine and the Patristic and Medieval tradition through his familiarity with them via nominalism and univocal concept of being of major commentators like Suarez which Descartes would have been familiar with from his education at la Fleche (Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 174).  Recent scholarship has begun to point out that interpretations of Augustine that lead to Descartes are actually interpreting the Bishop of Hippo through his post-nominalist reception history, and so through a break from the Patristic and Medieval tradition catalyzed by Scotus and Ockham in the via moderna.   To point to this transition rather than continuity thus itself implicates a revised understanding of Modernism (and post-Modernism) themselves.  Cf. Pickstock, “Duns Scotus,” : “The invocation of Duns Scotus and the later middle ages by Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida and many others is a crucial part of what is best understood as a revised understanding of the nature of modernity itself” (545).  Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to deal with the so-called “proto-Cartesianism” of Augustine, cf. Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 134-159; Matthew Drever, “The Self Before God?  Rethinking Augustine’s Trinitarian Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 100 vol.2 (2007): 233-242; Thomas Harmon, “Reconsidering Charles Taylor’s Augustine,” Pro Ecclesia 20 vol.2: 182-206 for excellent demonstrations of why we should be very attentive to the differences between Augustine and Descartes.  The most recent, rigorous, and extensive analysis and refutation of this sort is Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).