In Defense of Lost Causes: A Brief Investigation of Simplicity and the Psychological Analogy in Augustine’s De Trinitate (Part One)

Saint Augustine occupies a vexed place in modernity’s vexed self-understanding

                                                                                                            --Michael Hanby[1]

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.

                                                                                                            --John Rist[2]

     

                  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.”[3]  And “should [the reader] feel grievance at my discourse. . . let them lay the book aside (or throw it away, if they prefer).”[4]  It would be only with a little exaggeration to say that large portions of 20^th century scholarship on Augustine are exercises in taking him at his word.  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.”[5]  Such is the obloquy upon the bishop of Hippo Regius that Colin Gunton, one especially influential critic, lays the particularly heavy burden of nearly all the West’s theological crises—its agnosticism, secularism, and the irrelevance of Trinitarian doctrine—square upon Augustine’s shoulders.[6]  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.”[7]  This “grim paternity,” of Augustine for Western thought, as Hanby nicknames the caricature,[8] 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 all who have participated and are participating in the so-called “Trinitarian renaissance,” of the second half of the 20^th century, and even now, beyond the first decade of the 21^st.[9]  Thus David Cunningham can very perceptively observe of the recent slew of Trinitarian projects that there is a theme, which at first glance

seems of small importance . . . but actually turns out to be quite significant.  This feature, which I shall call ‘historical scapegoating,’ represents the apparent necessity felt by many theologians to explain the decline of Trinitarian theology by casting aspersions on a particular theologian or theological movement….There even seems to be something of a contest in progress, seeing just how far back into Christian history a theologian can locate the beginnings of the ‘decline of Trinitarian theology.’[10]

         Cunningham identifies this trend of scapegoating in order to completely discredit it as useless (seemingly in antithesis to his comments on how important the phenomenon itself is), so that he might focus his efforts on the systematic task of theology rather than expend energy on such historical considerations.  Yet such a neat division between historiographical endeavors and systematic ones may not be so forthcoming.  This type of historical narration is so prevalent (as Cunningham himself admits) as to compose what Lewis Ayres calls a “culture of modern systematic theology.”  This is a culture which “narrate [stories] of error such that certain modern options seem necessary”[11] and as such “inculcate views of how one understands and deploys anything pre-modern counted as authoritative …” views which he argues are not extrinsic to modern Trinitarian theology and are not easily replaced.[12]  Thus it comes as no surprise given Augustine’s influence on Western culture, when Hanby, commenting on the same systematic-theological culture remarks that on the one hand, “in its theological guise, the reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of Christianity’s ongoing self-assessment, especially in the West,” and on the other hand, “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.[13]  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. . .”[14]

It is against this contemporary “theological-cultural” background that this essay proposes to briefly look at two areas in particular that Augustine has been maligned by a close reading of De Trinitate: his idea of God’s “simplicity,” and his (so-called) “psychological analogy” for understanding the Trinity.  These two themes have not been picked at random; rather Simplicity and the Psychological Analogy will be defended in Augustine at two angles 1.) Its scriptural basis. And 2.) No truly coherent theology can ignore the doctrine of simplicity or the psychological analogy.  Finally, in the background of the essay will be the tacit understanding that the many misreadings and aspersions on both simplicity and the psychological analogy are precisely driven by what Ayres’ terms the “culture of modern systematic theology.”  Which is to say many implicit “narrative tropes” (also Ayres’ term) while on the surface appearing to be the product of historical analysis, are actually producing that analysis in turn.  In order to understand what this means, let us first briefly turn to several specific claims being made against Augustine on these accounts.  Then, in what will constitute the bulk of our paper, we will attempt to approximate Augustine’s “theological grammar” as closely as our short essay will allow.  In conclusion we will briefly remark on how Augustine’s logic, or something similar to it, while obviously not the final word on God, displays a (if not the) necessary logic that any coherent doctrine of God must take seriously, and any contemporary formulation ignores such theology only to their own detriment.  Obviously the immensity of any one of the claims of this paper could be a book.  Hence here we merely intend to trace the outline of such thoughts in order to possibly suggest a way forward.

I.               The Sins of Our Father

Those who narrate the story of God clearly wield no little authority.  The same can be said for those who narrate the story of the doctrine of God.

--Kevin Vanhoozer[15]

Of the many accusations leveled at Augustine, in regards to contemporary Trinitarian theology he often runs afoul of two intersecting streams: “the standard critique of the psychological analogy is that, by taking its bearings from the mind, it is ultimately unable to move beyond the divine unity to a truly Trinitarian vision.”[16]  This is itself exaggerated by the trope of the distinction of Eastern and Western “strategies” of the Trinity (supposedly) schematized by Theodore de Regnón in the 19^th century,[17] thus making Augustine seem like he is doing something diametrically different than the “personalism” or “social analogies” of the Cappadocian fathers.  John Zizioulas for example has famously made much of this difference for his own theology.  He writes in his Lectures on Christian Dogmatics, for example: “The Cappadocians believed it is crucial to begin with the person of the Father, and thus with the persons of the Trinity.  Augustine however makes the ‘substance’ of God prior, and regards the persons as relations within the substance of God.”[18]  Or in his seminal Being as Communion: “By usurping the ontological character of ousia, the word person/hypostasis became capable of signifying God’s being in an ultimate sense.  The subsequent developments of trinitarian theology, especially in the West with Augustine and the scholastics, have led us to see the term ousia, not hypostasis, as the expression of the ultimate character and ultimate and the causal principle () in God’s being.”[19]  By this Zizioulas insinuates Augustine left the West with an ultimately monist, impersonal, perhaps even detached God.  Indeed in his latest book Zizioulas pulls no punches: “The fact, (!) well known by historians, that the West always started with the one God and then moved to the Trinity, whereas the East followed the opposite course, quite often has amounted to the West’s beginning and ending up with the one God, and never arriving at the Trinity.”[20]  The accusation here being that not only is the Western method from Augustine deficient for Christian theology and worship, but is ultimately responsible for the Deistic God, and penultimately protest atheism itself.[21]  Or take Robert Jenson’s similar accusation:

The consequence [of Augustine’s theology] is that the three persons are not only equally related to the one substance, but identically related, so that the differences between them, that is, the relations, are irrelevant to their being God.  But the original Trinitarian insight is that the relations between identities are their being God.  When the Nicenes called the Trinity as such God, they so named him because of the triune relations and differences; when Augustine calls the Trinity as such God, it is in spite of them . . . .Augustine’s description of Nicene teaching is accurate.  But what he regards as an unfortunate consequence of the Nicene doctrine was in fact the doctrine’s whole original purpose.  The original point of Trinitarian dialectics is to make the relation between identities—for example, that the Father’s knowledge of himself is what he sees in Jesus—and therewith the temporal structures of evangelical history, constitutive in God.  Augustine rejected the Cappadocian doctrine for the sake of his simplicity axiom [emphasis added] which indeed, as he says, makes absurd all talk about the identities only mutually being God . . . . The mutual structure of the identities, relative to the power, wisdom, and so on, that characterize God’s work and so God, is flattened into an identical possession by the identities of an abstractly simple divine essence.[22]

The equal yet opposite claim of this supposedly monistic, single-subject oriented analogy is best summarized by the profound Catholic sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor: “On the way from Plato to Descartes, stands Augustine.”[23]  Thus the already strong call towards a more personal, relational God by the East/West distinction (and the contemporary appeal of so-called social trinitarianism) is strengthened by another corresponding trope which creates a philosophical narrative link drawn between Augustine and modernity’s other infamous whipping boy, René Descartes.  The psychological analogy and doctrine of simplicity are on this telling of the tale of western (de)evolution, prodigious erasers of personhood and communion—thus fostering an essentially abstract—even Cartesian—view of the self as an ultimately self-enclosed non-relational image of a self-enclosed “monistic” un-biblical (Hellenistic, static, abstract, unfeeling, non-Jewish, etc…) God.

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[1] Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003) 6.

[2] John Rist, “Augustine of Hippo,” in The Medieval Theologians, ed. G.R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001) 3.

[3] St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. and ed. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991) I.I.V (p.68)

[4] Ibid.

[5] 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.

[6] Colin Gunton, “Augustine, The Trinity, and the Theological Crisis of the West,” Scottish Journal of Theology, vol.43 (1990): 33-58.  Reprinted in Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2^nd ed. (New York: T&T Clark) 30-56.

[7] 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.

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

[9] An incredibly helpful summary of this phenomenon is contained in Michel René Barnes, “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 237-250.

[10] David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998) 31.  More generally, c.f. Cyril O’Regan, “Von Balthazar’s Valorization and Critique of Heidegger’s Genealogy of Modernity,” in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Theology of Louis Dupré (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1998), 123: “If once very much an adiaphora in philosophical and theological discourse, genealogy increasingly has come to play a more and more central role, indeed has become so ‘inscripted’ that it itself has become in some places the script.  However regrettable this inversion of priorities may be, genealogical production shows little sign of abating, and in philosophy, at least, it is responsible for much of the most interesting and vital work of the past decades.”

[11] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to 4^th Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 385.

[12]  Ibid.

[13] Hanby, Augustine and Modernity, 6.

[14] Ibid., 135.

[15] Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82.

[16] Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 149.

[17] For example, take Catherine LaCugna: As the Cappadocian’s worked it out, hypostasis (person) was predicated as prior to and constitutive of ousia (nature).  The Theoretical and practical significance of this move simply cannot be overemphasized,” and she continues, very specifically: “particularly as [this] stands in sharp contrast to the instinct of the Latin-formed mind that wants to make ousia an inner core of reality, separate from or prior to qualities, attributes, or hypostases.” (God For Us, 369).  For rebuttals to de Regnôn’s paradigm, c.f. Michel René Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” in Augustinian Studies, 26:2 (1995), 51-79; Kristin Hennessy, “An Answer to De Regnón’s ‘Accusers’: Why We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard Theological Review 100:2 (2007): 179-197.

[18] John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics ed. Douglas H. Knight (New York: T&T Clark, 2008) 66.

[19]  John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) 88.  Here Zizioulas cites Rahner’s criticisms of Aquinas in Rahner, The Trinity p.58f.  However much Zizioulas wants to stress this distinction it is an odd one that seems to fly in the face of Zizioulas’ own excellent observation on the unique coincidence of ousia and hypostasis in God, namely that ousia never appears “in the nude,” but always “in its hypostasis.”  Meaning that hypostases are actually “modes of existence,” of the essence (tropos hyparxeos).  It seems incredibly misleading, therefore, to say that hypostasis can signify God in an ultimate sense, as opposed to ousia, since both are simultaneously referenced by Zizioulas’ own admission.  Thus even if one “starts” (again, an unfortunate word) with the Father in the Trinitarian taxis, “Father” does not signify person as opposed to ousia, but a tropos hyparxeos of the ousia.  Both personhood and ousia are therefore simultaneously referenced without collapsing into each other.  This is startlingly close to Augustine.

[20]  John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006) 34.  Italics added.  Zizioulas explicitly cites de Regnón in this regard. It is interesting to note that in this book Zizioulas brings out in further and quite brilliant ways the concept of tropos hyparxeos.  It is odd then that given this unification of person as the “how” of nature, that Zizioulas should seem even more militant in turning this as a nature/person distinction to use against the Western tradition.

[21]  With this accusation Zizioulas appears to be following a similar claim by his former colleague at King’s College, Colin Gunton, who levels the charge of the inherently atheistic trajectory at Western Trinitarian theology.  C.f. for an example Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many, 51-61.  The narrative that Gunton presents is a little bewildering and makes odd connections like drawing a straight line of development between Ockham and Augustine.  Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine, 47, notes, “After reading and re-reading Gunton, I am still puzzled by Gunton at this point.”

[22] Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Reprinted.  Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 118-120.  Even the usually careful Pannenberg, who is otherwise favorably disposed to Augustine (especially in regard’s his concept of time and eternity) explicitly follows Jenson on this point.  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1:323. 

[23] Taylor, Sources of the Self, 126.