The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Augustine: Contemporary Trinitarianism Part Two

St. Augustine is no doubt, short of Paul, one of the most revered (non-Jesus) figures in the history of Christianity. His brilliance, eloquence, and startling candor in works like the Confessions turned him into the poster-boy for Western Christian thought. Indeed the formula (for better or worse) of "good theology" which began to emerge in the centuries after Augustine and becoming especially codified, for example, amongst the Carolingian theologians in the 9th century forward, was to be "more Augustinian" than one's interlocutors. Theology was often teasing out the implications of "Augustinian" theology, or, in other words, using Augustine to answer new questions and concerns which arose in different areas, even if Augustine himself had never pronounced definitively upon a subject, or was himself more cautious in an area than his later interpreters (for example, the argument regarding whether there was a "real" or a "symbolic" presence of Christ in the Eucharist between Radbertus and Ratramnus in the Carolingian court was between two men who were trying to "out-Augustine" eachother, rather than between two innovators). Far from the compliment it is often taken to be today, being an "innovator" in theology was a pejorative title, often indicating one was heretical and straying from the canons of tradition and the truths of Scripture (hence for example Simeon's title The New Theologian was not a compliment but a derision which nonetheless stuck as a name).

Given the ubiquity of Augustine amongst most of Western Christian theology, and indeed the history of the West in general, it seems a natural thing to do, should we discern a current problem, to trace the problem back and find that perhaps the good Bishop of Hippo was in an incipient way the origin of our current troubles. Despite David Cunningham humorously (and aptly) noting that the extent to which these genealogies are traced back appears to almost be part of a contest between theologians of our day to see who can reach the furthest back into history (These Three Are One p.31) as Michael Hanby suggests there is a reason many, including many postmodern philosophers want to tell the story of how, for example, Augustine and Descartes are linked:

[These connections] have provided the architecture for a grand story of modern origins now taken as axiomatic by thinkers who otherwise have little in common. Augustine's place in this narrative is crucial as one of the great pillars of the 'Western metaphysical tradition' that concludes in the birth of Cartesian subjectivity, a tradition which has fallen into disrepute in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their disciples. Since Augustine is the father of the Western church par excellence, the discrediting of this tradition as intrinsically nihilistic is thought, by those inclined toward such unmaskings, to expose the intrinsic nihilism of Christianity. (Augustine and Modernity p.135)

In other words, as Hanby says in his introduction, the stories that are told about Augustine and his link to Modernity, is part and parcel of the debate surrounding just what type of thing modernity itself is.

In the same vein, though with slightly different intent, it is no secret that Augustine has been targeted by many theologians as perhaps the quintessential origin of problems bequeathed to contemporary trinitarianism. Thus when many contemporary theologians ask, assuming the absolute, universal, and categorical importance of the Trinity for Christian theology "why did the doctrine become marginalized?" the answer, they contend, finds its birth pangs in 4th and 5th century North Africa in the writings of Augustine. As a corollary to this (to be addressed in the next post) an additional distinction between Eastern and Western or Greek and Latin Trinitarianism, and their methodologies (Augustine of course exemplifying a supposedly Latin West trajectory) are often used as a lens to interpret Augustine, meaning often that not only was Augustine doing something quite different than the three usually lumped together as "the Cappadocian Fathers" (Gregory of Nyssa, his brother Basil of Caesarea, and their mutual friend Gregory of Nazianzus) but also, since in this story Augustine represents a peculiar western malaise, the Cappadocians are not just different, they offer an Eastern cure to Western woes. But more on that in the next post. Here we shall deal specifically with Augustine. To start we do well to note that there are many charges laid against Augustine, aptly summarized by Lewis Ayres (who, we should note, disagrees with them all): "[Augustine is accused of being] insufficiently trinitarian, with being focused overly much on the unity of God, and with being reliant on an alien Platonic metaphysics which serves to prevent a fully Trinitarian theology...and his focus on unity means his view of the Trinity is insufficiently personal." (Nicaea and Its Legacy p.364-365). For another excellent summary on the critiques of Augustine I suggest reading the first chapter of Hanby's Augustine and Modernity, and Michel Réne Barnes “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology” in Theological Studies 56 (1995) 237-250.

These charges are often interwoven with one another. Though my reading is hardly exhaustive several examples should suffice to show that this negative reading of Augustine is not only widespread, but particularly vital to many theological projects. What I mean to do here is just bring information together in a loose way, to compile it, so to speak, in order that we can get a small overview of the landscape. Infamously Colin Gunton in his essay “Augustine, The Trinity, and the Theological Crises of the West,” in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology pp.30-55 largely lays the blame upon Augustine and his Trinitarian legacy (p.31) and credits Augustine's Platonist legacy as the major culprit behind particular deficiencies. To Gunton Augustine is simply not very concerned with material reality, he posits a self-contained and absolute thinking subject who finds truth by traveling "inward" into contemplation of the soul, and is negligent of actual salvation history. Gunton believes these trajectories are in a very real way responsible genealogically for our present day individualism and spiritualism, and Trinitarian myopia.

Robert Jenson in The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel p.116ff apparently independently develops a similar critique of Augustinian Trinitarianism but this is subsumed under Jenson’s broader critique of the tradition of the timelessness of God. Again Jenson is critical of what he sees as the latent Platonism in Augustine's thought, which both moves Augustine away from the historical narrative of scripture and refracts God from the concrete man, Jesus. Jenson exhibits a profound Barthian worry that one could then, in theory, know God apart from Christ, thereby making "God" a presupposed category to which the history of the man from Nazareth is only loosely fitted. It should be noted however that the specific critique of Augustine in this regard is not reproduced later in Jenson’s two-volume Systematic Theology, although the general critique of the timelessness tradition is itself carried forward and considerably developed. Interestingly enough Jenson has many affinities to what is commonly termed the "psychological" Trinity (in which the Trinity is likened to the mental operations of a single subject, Father, Son, and Spirit being analogous to, say, Memory, Love, and Will) in the chapter in the first volume entitled the "Patrological Problem" in which he affirms the Trinity is "a person".

The Catholic theologian Catherine LaCugna in her book God for Us p.214 notes Augustine’s point of departure is to begin with the singularity of the divine essence, thus, she suspects, leaving little to no room to elaborate on the distinction of the divine Persons. This seems an esoteric quibble, but following both the now standard idea (outlined, for example, on page 10 in God for Us) that Augustine was a peculiarly poignant example of Western deficiency in Trinitarianism and the very real concept that it was within Trinitarian theology and Christology that the concept of person which we often take so for granted as obvious, emerged, Augustine's theology has, says LaCugna, hampered our understanding of what people are supposed to be and how they should act. Thus LaCugna observes that if the ultimate ground for persons-in-communion, God, is flattened out into a homogenous singularity in which the persons are overwhelmed by substance, then there is little conceptual promise in the Western tradition for an overcoming of individualism or collectivism.

Jürgen Moltmann in The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God pp.13-16 explicitly puts Augustine as the origin of a series of historical attempts to define God as “absolute subject” (as opposed to a community of relations) which culminates in the much maligned tradition of the Cartesian subject, to Kant, Schliermacher, Fichte, Hegel, and ultimately to the atheism of Feuerbach. To Moltmann this series—which finds its pedigree in Augustine—ultimately justifies the autonomous and self-subsisting individual person, as opposed to a communion-oriented plurality of persons which Moltmann’s own theology attempts to sketch. This is a continuation of the claims in his first major work The Theology of Hope pp.62ff in which he, like Charles Taylor did a few decades later in his The Sources of the Self, links Augustine to the Cartesian cogito and in general to Bultmann's existential linking of God and man. In this sense again Moltmann is painting a picture which describes Augustine as giving conceptual resources to the Western tradition to construct an idea of the nature of the human as an autonomous thinking subject who can be related to God quite apart from history and well within the strict confines of one's own self, rather than in community. This leads, one presumes, up into the Kantian radicalization of the Cartesian ego, so that the human individual is the sublime seat of freedom, and in this way Augustine is in a roundabout way the beginning of modern Liberal politics.

A basic extension of the critique of substance and single subject is carried forward by Moltmann's student, Miroslav Volf in After Our Likeness e.g. pp.208ff esp. at p.210 n.87 where he explicitly turns perichoresis (understood as a dynamic unity of personal communion) against unity of substance (which is slightly ironic since the original uses of perichoresis in regards to the Trinity by John of Damascus, as Volf himself notes, were specifically in regards to what type of unity of substance.) On the same page he writes “the unity of the Triune God is grounded neither in the numerically identical substance nor in the accidental intentions of the persons, but rather in their mutually interior being.” As a brief aside the terminology of what Volf believes he is rejecting, namely "the numerically identical substance" is a somewhat odd qualifier, both because pro-Nicene Trinitarianism believed the substance was "beyond numeration" and because the unity--despite the critiques of many--was not seen as something essentially different or "behind" the three persons. In antithesis, another of Molmtann's students, Leonardo Boff in his Trinity and Society p.55f notes "For Augustine, God, in the absolute sense is...the Trinity...the divine substance exists in such a form that it must necessarily and eternally subsist as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit..." noting that "numerical unity of substance" hardly does justice to the concept.

Cornelius Plantinga in his “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” in Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays pp.21-47 appears more generous than Moltmann or Volf by seeing two forces at work in Augustine: his Biblicism on the one hand points him toward a social Trinitarian model (that is, the Trinity is a society of persons in communion), yet on the other hand his still extant Platonism forces him to corrupt the biblical accounts towards the Divine simplicity and unity. Plantinga’s “generosity” compared to Moltmann’s more blatant analysis of Augustine is entirely a ruse, however, and is set up schematically (probably with no ill intentions on Plantinga’s part) to make Plantinga’s own position appear as the eminently “biblical” one a foregone conclusion, as he all but identifies the Social model as the only viably "biblical" one, and any reading emphasizing unity seems to be categorized by Plantinga as leaning towards some type of Platonism. The Process theologian John B. Cobb Jr. is in agreement with this assessment, stating for Augustine what matters is the simple unity of God, and the doctrine of the Trinity “is an unneeded appendage,” in “The Relativization of the Trinity,” in Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God p.5 (let me just add how ironic this criticism is from a process theologian).

Protestants and Catholics are not the only ones who are dissatisfied with Augustine, predictably several contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians also parallel the basic complaints already set out. Vladimir Lossky in his wonderful The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church p.57 argues that “filioquistic” theologies (Augustine historically was the originator of the filioquistic understanding of the Spirit’s procession) do not link the procession and begetting of the two Persons back to the Person of the Father, but rather they “become a system of relationships to the one essence.” And perhaps most famously John Zizioulas in his seminal work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Churche.g. at p.88 contrasts Augustine with the Cappadocians by noting “the subsequent developments in the West with Augustine and the scholastics, have led us to see the term ousia and not hypostasis as an expression of the ultimate character and causal principle (arche) in God’s being.” This critique is not really developed in Zizioulas' latest book Communion and Otherness but is, however, repeated at many points.

Not all of the major players amongst the Trinitarian “revivalists” agree with this treatment of Augustine, however. David Cunningham (These Three Are One p.31ff) is quite adamant that a majority of these critiques are simply off the mark: they are either anachronistically mistaking various directions Augustinianism took with Augustine himself, or they utilize tools which are anachronistic and unsuitable to handle Augustine's work (for example, our modern systematic fascination with the "starting point" of either unity or triversity). Others such as Wolfhart Pannenberg in his Systematic Theology vol.1 pp.284-285 have a much more complex, though still slightly ambivalent, reading of Augustine’s legacy. As opposed to the accusations of Gunton, Jenson, LaCugna, Zizioulas, Cobb et al, Pannenberg stresses that

Augustine did not try to derive the Trinitarian distinctions from the divine unity. The psychological analogies that he suggested and developed in his work on the trinity were simply meant to offer a very general way of linking the unity and trinity and thus creating some plausibility for Trinitarian statements…Hence Augustine could not develop a psychological doctrine of the Trinity in the sense of a derivation of the three divine persons from the unity of the divine Spirit. On the contrary, he stressed the inadequacy of all psychological analogies.”

However later Pannenberg holds back from unswervingly defending Augustine, noting “all the same, Augustine so strongly emphasized the unity of God that strictly no space was left for the trinity of persons,” (p.287) and he cites approvingly Robert Jenson’s analysis of Augustine in relation to the Cappadocians: “Augustine’s description of Nicene teaching is accurate. But what he regards as an unfortunate consequence of Nicene doctrine [namely that none of the three are “God for himself” but only in relation to the other two] was in fact the doctrine’s whole original purpose. The original point of Trinitarian dialectics is to make the relations…constitutive in God.” (p.323 citing Jenson Triune Identity p.119). Pannenberg nonetheless nuances this again by noting “we cannot share so unreservedly the positive judgment of the Cappadocian interpretation that Jenson links to his criticism of Augustine. To do justice to Augustine we have to see that the Cappadocians did not solve the problem of the unity of the Godhead…They also viewed the mutuality in the relation of the persons much less sharply than Athanasius, and esp. they did not move beyond Athanasius to reciprocal self distinction.”

Even Pannenberg's more nuanced criticism has not gone unchallenged, however. A recent rise in Patristic and Augustinian scholarship has risen up, and a partial portion of their projects have been to prune away many of the myths and cliches that surround treatment of early Trinitarianism (the specifics of these counter-narratives will be more elaborated upon in the next post to reduce this one's size). Already mentioned is the work of Lewis Ayres in Nicaea and Its Legacy though the whole book is in its own way a contextual resituation of pro-Nicene theology, ch.15 (pp.364-383) is devoted to outlining the actual tenets of Augustine's trinitarianism in the sequence of the narrative he presents up until then (and Augustine is a key figure in the preceding 4 chapters as well, though in different aspects). Also of note is Ayres forthcoming book devoted to Augustine (I believe its out in hardback, but is quite spendy). Ayres is perhaps the most vocal exemplar of what I like to call the "Oxford School" of Patristic scholarship (mainly because Oxford press is responsible for nearly 100% of the publications, but also because many are graduates from Oxford's Patristics program). Others include Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought who, though not devoting many pages to defending Augustine specifically, nonetheless gives a strong critique of how Augustine and other Patristic theologians actually viewed God's impassibility, its actual relation to Hellenistic philosophical options of the day, and so forth, in order to demonstrate not only that it is far too easy (and incorrect) to dismiss apatheia as "apathy"; and in fact most of the Patristic theological decisions were made in order to secure rather than problematize, the suffering and interaction seen in Christ, which was always one-sidedly discarded by the various heresies, such as Samosatism (also known as psilanthropism), Docetism and its variant apthartodocetism, Sabellianism, Arianism, Adoptionism, and Nestorianism. For a shorter intro to Gavrilyuk's work see his essay in the recent volume (probably one of my favorite reads last semester, it was excellent) Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering entitled "God's Impassible Suffering in the Flesh: The Promise of Paradoxical Christology" (pp.127-149). Along the same lines Thomas Weinandy's excellent book Does God Suffer? is a good complimentary book to Gavrilyuk's, and vice-versa (Weinandy also has an essay in Divine Impassibility but much to my (and Robert Jenson's) chagrin, Weinandy is uncharacteristically dense in dealing with Jenson's own take on God's futurity and impassibility and so I recommend the essay only with a grain of salt. Weinandy, in my opinion, has done injustice to Jenson's system, whatever its ultimate viability.

Other defenders include Michael Hanby's excellent book Augustine and Modernity in which he gives a thorough examination of Augustine in order to not only outline Augustines own thought, but to dispute many of the current narratives about his place in Western history, theology, and philosophy (critiquing, for example, the straightforward link drawn between Augustine up to Descartes and Kant, for example). A good summary of his thought in this book is provided in his essay contained in the Radical Orthodoxy volume. In a similar way John Milbank in the last chapter of Theology and Social Theory also attempts to demonstrate the power of Augustine's theology, and how it represents (along with Ps. Dionysius) a transformation and Christianization of Platonic ontology, rather than mere appropriation or "fall" into Hellenism. And finally of course is the pioneering work of Michael Rene Barnes "Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology" and his essay in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium in the Doctrine of the Trinity entitled "Re-reading Augustine's Theology of the Trinity." pp.145-176. Specifics of these critiques, like I said, will be given more in the next post, which will analyze literature on the Cappadocian's and their relation to Augustine, though again these posts are meant to be more of an overview of resources rather than an in depth interaction (which, time permitting, may come later).