In Defense of Lost Causes: A Brief Investigation of Simplicity and the Psychological Analogy in Augustine’s De Trinitate (Part Two)
II. On Not
Throwing His Book Away: De Trinitate’s Biblical Considerations
Every time, in the West, that Christian renewal has
flourished, in the order of thought as that of life…it has flourished under the
sign of the Fathers
--Henri de Lubac[1]
These accusations are meant to give a certain backdrop
to the historiographical reading of Augustine: with these (and many more)
narratives we can only agree with Behr’s assessment when he writes, “with this
agenda driving inquiry, Augustine has inevitably faired poorly.”[2] These artificial juxtapositions (east/west,
social/psychological, static/dynamic…) have created a primarily Platonist
Augustine, who has an abstract God, aloof from the Bible, locked up in a
speculative eternity; and what is worse Augustine has condemned man, who is in
the image of God, to a similar egoistic self-enclosure which has led to the
destructive modernist legacy of the autocratic Cartesian self. We cannot deal sufficiently with either of
these charges here, though thankfully Augustine’s specific considerations of
the persons of the trinity,[3]
along with charges regarding the supposedly “proto-Cartesian” nature of
Augustine,[4]
have already been dealt with by many more able scholars.
Nonetheless the absurd claims that Augustine locks man
into individualism completely ignores that the “trinities” Augustine perceives
are, for their part, constantly denied adequacy; and even further to claim they
lead to an isolated, static, pre-constituted self apart from relation is to
utterly ignore the entire dynamic character they exhibit, and the very fluidity
of inner man/out man totally alien to Descartes. Thus some brief comments are necessary. For we read, for example: “The Trinity of the
mind is not really the image of God because the mind remembers and understands
and loves itself, but because it is also able to remember, and understand, and
love Him by whom it was made,”[5] so
that “by forgetting God it was as if [humanity] forgot its own life.”[6] And again: “For a man’s true honor is God’s
image and likeness in him, but it can only be preserved when facing [God] from whom the impression is
received.”[7] Conversely,
“when the mind loves God, and consequently as has been said, remembers and
understands him, it can rightly be commanded to love its neighbor as itself“[8] or
even more explicity: “Oh, but you do see a trinity if you see charity…for when
we love charity we love her loving something, precisely because she does love
something. What then does charity love
that makes it possible for charity herself also to be loved? She is not charity if she loves nothing; but
if she loves herself, she must love something in order to love herself as
charity. So what does charity love but
what we love with charity? And this, to
move beyond our neighbor, is our brother.”[9] Which is to say self-love is not a discrete
“moment” before love of another. Rather
self-love is loving oneself loving another.
Charity cannot love itself without being
charity, i.e. love of the other. It
is love of the other as loving
itself, and vice versa: the only “internal” moment of this love is the
recognition of its love and delight in being
love for another. Self love and love
of the other, are themselves thus a dynamic movement that find infinite impetus
in love of God, which ecstatically (and very non-Cartesianly) moves one beyond
oneself to encompass all others precisely because the mind seeks God, who is
the term and horizon of all goodness, justice, love, and beauty.[10]
Nor is Augustine’s God “aloof” or so transcendent and
immaterial as to be proto-deistic. Thus
it is difficult to reconcile Karl Rahner and his student Catherine LaCugna’s
criticism that Augustine made the Trinity a speculative reality isolated from
salvation history or everyday Christian life, with what the man himself
actually wrote and intended. God is so
present that Augustine can even sound (almost) panentheist when he judges that one
is in a sense “seeing” God in the other: “[A man] cannot love a just man if he
does not know what ‘just’ is…but where does he know it from?...All he has ever
seen with his eyes are bodies, and it is only the mind of man that is just…for
justice is a sort of beauty of mind by which many men are beautiful even though
they have ugly, misshapen bodies. But
just as mind cannot be seen with the eyes, so neither can its beauty.”[11] Which is to say—love, justice, beauty,
truth—are not “bodily” recognitions.
They do not stem from the physical matter but from some eidos (namely, God) that registers them
as beautiful, and gives them semblance: “When anything is taken up in pursuit
of this knowledge from things that belong to the outer man, it is taken up or
the lesson it can provide to foster rational knowledge, and thus the rational
use of things we have in common with non-rational animals belongs to the inner
man, and cannot properly be said to be common to us and the non-rational
animals.”[12]
In a very real sense then God himself is the
ontological solidity of the creature, for being is itself a darkness without
God: “This body by the soul breathed into it is rational, and so although it is
subject change, it is capable of sharing in that wisdom which is changeless.”[13] So that Augustine can even be so radical as
to speak of, not God’s distance, but immense closeness precisely in
transcendence: “And if a man is full of love, what is he full of but God?”[14] When we love our brother, therefore, “we love
our brother out of God.”[15]
But conversely for Augustine, this does not result in an “occasionalism” where
the real world is purely epiphenomenon to God’s action, but rather a dialectic
ensues in which we equally at the same time move toward the concrete, embodied
nature of our fellow man precisely “loving out of God”: “Thus on the one hand
love of that form we believe [our brother] lived up to makes us love their life, and on the other belief in
their life stirs us to a more blazing charity toward that form; with the result
that the more brightly burns our love for God, the more surely and serenely we
see him, because it is in God that we observe that unchanging form of justice
which we judge that a man should live up to.”[16]
This is beautifully summarized by the Catholic
Patristic scholar Henri de Lubac commenting on Augustine at this point:
For
man, God is not only a norm [a la Kant] that is imposed upon him and, by
guiding him, lifts him up again: God is the Absolute upon which he rests, the
Magnet that draws him, the Beyond that calls him, the Eternal that provides him
with the only atmosphere in which he can breath and, in some sort, that third
dimension in which man finds his depth.[17]
Thus
to the charge of Augustine’s “too-transcendent” God, De Lubac comments:
Those
who uphold immanence deny transcendence whereas those who believe in transcendence
do not deny immanence. Indeed, they
grasp the idea of transcendence sufficiently to understand that it necessarily implies immanence. If God is transcendent then nothing is
opposed to him, nothing can limit him or be compared to him: He is Wholly Other
and precisely therefore penetrates the
world…[where God] comes to us on all sides through the world…Every creature
is, in itself, a theophany. Everywhere
we find traces, imprints, vestiges, enigmas; and the rays of the divine pierce
through everywhere.[18]
This reading of Augustine may seem a bit uncomfortable
perhaps if one is bent on describing his “locked away” God, or an austere Platonist
“dualism” (an inaccurate charge even to a pure Platonist, let alone Augustine),
but our attention should be directed to one of the most beautiful passages of de Trinitate:
Once
more come, see if you can. You certainly
only love what is good, and the earth is good with its lofty mountains and its
folded hills and its level plains, and a farm is good when its situation is
pleasant and its land fertile, and a house is good with its harmonious symmetry
of architecture so spacious and bright, and animals are good with their
animated bodies, and the air is good when mild and salubrious, and food is good
when tasty and health-giving…Why go on and on?
This is good and that is good.
Take away this and that and see good itself if you can. In this way you will see God, not good with
some other good, but the good of every
good. For surely among all these good things I have listed and whatever
others can be observed or thought of, we would not say one is better than
another when we make a true judgment unless we had impressed on us some notion
of good itself by which we both approve of a thing, and also prefer one to
another. That is how we should love God,
not this or that good but good itself, and we should seek the good of the soul,
not the good it can hover over in judgment but the good it can cleave to in
love, and what is this but God? Not good mind or good angel or good heavens but
Good Good.[19]
God is not locked away in transcendence, but is, as it
were, the very “breathing room,” of creation, the pure, free air that allows
being to be—de Lubac’s “third dimension” that gives man his depth (and so
atheism is not just the abolition of God but the erasure of humanity). That this can be described as a “seeing of
God” seems to come from Augustine’s affirmation elsewhere that “man is not made
in the image of God as regards the shape of His body, but as regards his
rational mind.”[20] Again this is often taken to mean that the
material world is degraded, but it is precisely the opposite: the world “glows”
with God, and we might speculate that it is the priestly function of man to
care for creation because he is the only one endowed with the faculty of mind
which can perceive the qualities of justice, beauty, truth, love. It is these qualities which open man to the
world, precisely because he is open to God who is beyond and encompasses the
world (“what, after all, is not in God?”)[21] For look at how Augustine describes the
converse reality when man tries to seize things not but a sort of “ecstatic”
outward movement to God, but by self-possessing:
What
happens is that the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole, which is common to all
into the part which is its own private property. By following God’s directions and being
perfectly governed by his laws it could enjoy the whole universe of creation;
but by the apostasy of pride which is called the beginning of sin it strives to
grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws; and
because there is nothing more than the whole it is thrust back into anxiety on
a part, and so by being greedy for more it
gets less.”[22]
It is
well to note here, as Bradley Green does, “[for Augustine] it is through material things that we come to
see the true and living God.”[23] This preceeding discussion is not merely a
circumspect start to this essay, but is a key movement toward understanding why
Augustine moves to the so-called “psychological analogy.” Earlier Augustine posed a dilemma of sorts:
we must love God in order to see Him, and we must know God in order to love
Him.[24] The theological aesthetics just outlined in
its essence provides a solution, or at least an intermediary toward one: for
when we see love we do in fact see
and know God, after a certain likeness (“oh but you do see trinity if you see
charity,”[25])
in fact: “thus it is that in this question we are occupied with about the
trinity and about knowing God, the only thing we really have to see is what
true love is; well in fact simply what love is.”[26] But the highest form of this knowing of God
through created reality is the Incarnation of Christ, who as Word is also the
Form and Perfect Image of the Father:
As
regards the image, I suppose he [Hilary of Poitiers] mentioned form on account
of the beauty involved in such harmony, in that primordial equality and
primordial likeness, where there is no discord and no inequality and no kind of
unlikeness, but identical correspondence with that of which it is the image where
there is supreme and primordial life, such that it is not one thing to live and
another to be, but being and living are the same…being as it were one perfect
Word to which nothing is lacking, which is like the art of the almighty and
wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are al one in it,
as it is one from the one with whom it is one.
In this art God knows all things that he has made through it, and so
when times come and go, nothing comes and goes for God’s knowledge.[27]
And
Our
knowledge therefore is Christ, and our wisdom is the same Christ. It is he who plants faith in us about
temporal things, he who presents us with the truth about eternal things. Through him we go straight to him, through
knowledge toward wisdom, without ever turning aside from one and the same
Christ.[28]
And so this “Model” (e.g. Christ) came into the world
“in order to offer a model of return to man who had allen away and was unable
to see God on account of his impurity of sin and the punishment of mortality, he emptied himself (Phil. 2:6) not by
changing his divinity, but by taking on our changeability.”[29] Thus in this way God demonstrates true love by also revealing himself as
trinity, coming down into the form of man to lead us back to God, rather than
maintaining fixated in our idolatrous elevation of the material and the finite
into the place of God himself. So in
Christ we see the son come from the
Father; but we are also incorporated into this movement by the Spirit:
Then
that inexpressible embrace, so to say, of the Father and the image is not
without enjoyment, without charity, without happiness. So this love, delight, felicity, or
blessedness (if any human word can be found that is good enough to express it)
he calls very briefly “Use” and it is the Holy Spirit in the triad, not
begotten, but the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures
according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness, that
they might all keep their right order and rest in their right places.[30]
Thus within the world we are introduced to the inner
life of God himself through the form and beauty of Christ, and through the form
and beauty of the Spirit giving form and beauty to creation; one is begotten of
the Father while the other is not begotten but proceeds from both. Augustine has painted a beautiful picture of
God as the beauty of the world, the light that shines through the material veil
and gives the veil its own shimmer and splendor. Yet simultaneously Augustine understands that
God is not matter, and that God is infinite, and that God is one:
In
that supreme triad is the source of all things, and the most perfect beauty,
and wholly blissful delight. Those three
seem both to be bounded or determined by eachother, and yet in themselves to be
unbounded or infinite. But in bodily
things down here one is not as much as three are together, and two things are
something more than one thing; while in the supreme triad one is as much as
three are together, and two are not more than one, and in themselves they are
infinite. So they are each in each and
all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all in one.[31]
Here then we
reach a certain crux of the issue: in Christ and the Holy Spirit God has
revealed himself and the ultimate form of the world’s beauty: the Son has come
from the Father, was begotten by Him, while the Spirit is the love between
them. Yet in material terms three things
are not one thing; combinations increase mass and complexity, while divisions
sever and break what was once united.
Can God be so broken? Combined?
Enlarged? How can Christ be “God from God” without simultaneously being
“God apart from God?” What allows for the continuity without
division? The distinction without
separation? Augustine is unequivocal on
this point: “In God…when the equal Son cleaves to the equal Father, or the
equal Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son, God is not made bigger than each
of them singly, because there is no possibility of his perfection growing.”[32] The same basic logic occurs when Augustine
deals at length with the problem of calling the Son “the wisdom of God.” Does this then mean the Father is not wise of
himself? Michael Hanby notices here why
the doctrine of simplicity becomes so important for Augustine:
The grammar of simplicity is crucial here. Augustine insists, on the one hand ,that
whatever it might mean to call the Son wisdom or the Spirit love, it cannot
mean that the Father begets his wisdom in such a way that so as not to be his
own wisdom, nor that the Spirit is Love in such a way that the Father is not
his own love…[33]
And Lewis Ayres agrees:
As
his theology grows in sophistication, Augustine’s attention to these issues
only increases: to grow in understanding of the relationship between our changeability
and the divine changelessness is always also to grow in understanding of what
it means for the Father to generate another who is distinct and not separated
from him in whom all find its cause and existence.[34]
Thus the biblical and
historical revelation—in time and space, amongst matter and bulk—are hardly
epiphenomenal for Augustine. Nor is some
crass sort of dualism driving him to look “inward and upward” away from models
of “communion” to models of “psychology.”
As we have seen, Augustine is hardly averse to seeing the Trinity as a
communion of intimate love, one that evokes charity in us as we are swept into its
richness. Rather, upfront Augustine is
at pains to describe the Trinity in terms that allow for the biblical witness to be true: that is, Christ and the
Spirit come from the Father without ever being divided, and reveal to us God’s
inner life. This is the task of the
first four books of de Trinitate, to
investigate the story of scripture to see precisely what it says; Augustine’s
“metaphysics” in the rest of the book are an attempt to wrestle with how the
narrative could be true. How is Christ
from God and yet God? Ayres, again,
summarizes this very well and it behooves us to quote him at length:
Augustine’s
argument is simple, but its consequences profound. At its heart is an application of his basic
understanding of divine simplicity to the question of how the Son’s generation
from the Father also involves the Father and Son being of one substance. Both Father and Son are wisdom…and when
Father or Son is said to be Wisdom this mean ‘Wisdom itself.’ Neither participates in wisdom because, if
both are divine, then to be and to be wise are the same for both. This is so, as he points out a number of
times in these books, because of wider principles from the theology of creation
and salvation: God is the source of all wisdom and is the wisdom itself in whom
we seek to participate. But
consequently, although the language of faith demands that we say that Father
and Son are distinct, we are also driven to assert that they must be one in the
necessarily indivisible one wisdom itself…In the context of the divine
simplicity, therefore, it becomes possible to imagine the generation of another
without division, a generation which results in two who are non-identical even
as they must also be one…Augustine has shaped an account of the divine
generation by means of considering what it means to speak of God from God given
the simple principle that God is what God is said to possess and from his
fundamental assumption that there must be one source of all.[35]
In this sense it is
immediately understandable why then Augustine would turn to “mental” analogies
in order both the explicate the threefold oneness of God, and to elaborate a site in which we are imago Dei:
Augustine
does not simply discover the perfected mind’s self-knowing structure in the
mind, he partly constructs this structure from the logic of Trinitarian faith,
and partly constructs it by abstraction, imagining the minds activity without
the marks of fallen existence…Thus we see the twofold problem with an assertion
that Augustine begins to use the mens as
analogy for the Trinity: in the first place, he partly uses the language of
Trinitarian faith to construct that analogical site: in the second play, we
must imagine, beyond our fallennesss, the perfected mind if we are to see how
the mens might function as
analogy. We might already say, then,
that the mens functions as analogy
not merely because the imago Dei is
there located, but because in the mens we
find the site at which human failure to know and love God finds its
source…Knowledge of bodies misleads when we judge ourselves to be in the same
class as that of which we have a likeness within us. Thus when the mind knows and loves itself
appropriately an image is born within the mind that perfectly matches the mind:
the knowledge or image is expressed from the mind and known as perfectly equal.[36]
Thus in a preliminary form
(all, sadly, that this essay can cover) the driving grammar for Augustine’s
predilection to the psychological analogy can be seen. It is not some perverse mistrust of matter,
an overly “Latinized” trinity, or a proto-Cartesian egoism. Rather Augustine is wrestling with the fundamental
theological grammar that would allow the scriptural narrative of Christ as God
from God, to be true. And, as a corollary, this true account must
also then explain in what sense man is in the image of a God that cannot be
seen. These two pressures combine at the
site of psychology, whose life is assumed by Augustine to be triadic because of the Trinity (not, as it is
often argued, the other way around, where Augustine proves the Trinity from the
mind); and it is the least inadequate analogy precisely because it is
noncorporeal and almost totally identical with itself, thus engendering the
basic supposition that Christ and the Father cannot be divided. We have also seen that it is hardly adequate
to turn these ideas against a so-called “social” model of the Trinity. While it is true that many contemporary
efforts—like those of Moltmann, Boff, LaCugna, and Volf—would perhaps not find
favor with Augustine because of their almost tritheistic nature, nevertheless
the juxtaposition “psychological vs social” or “individualist vs communitarian”
is not helpful. As we have seen,
whatever the legitimacy or helpfulness of the continued shorthand
“psychological model,” Augustine is by no means advocating a solitary,
loveless, communionless God, or such a corollary in an egoistic vision of the
human. Quite the opposite. God is the movement of all graces; the
goodness that glows beautiful through the hills and through the faces of
friends; the face of Christ who draws us heavenward; God is the triune One who,
in short, is the hearth from which the souls of men in love draw their light,
like so many lamps.
[1] Henri De Lubac, At
the Service of the Church: Henri De Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that
Occasioned His Writings, trans. Anne Englund Nash (SanFrancisco: Ignatius
Press, 2003), 317-318.
[2] Behr, “Calling on God as Father,” 153-154.
[3] Richard Cross, “Quid
Tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate V and VII,” Harvard Theological
Review 100 (2007): 215-232.
[4] Specifically 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.
[5] Augustine, De
Trinitate XIV.4.15 (p.384).
[17] Henri de Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism (SanFrancisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 67.
[18] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 94, 88.
[19] Augustine, De
Trinitate VIII.2.4 (244-245).
[23] Green, Colin
Gunton and the Failure of Augustine 94.
[28] XIII.6.24 (367)
[31] Ibid.
[33] Hanby, Augustine
and Modernity, 50.
[34] Ayres, Augustine
and the Trinity, 208.
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