The colossus, Augustine (354-430AD), stands alone in influence on theologians and thinkers who lived after him. To cite examples, Thomas Aquinas, in his work on the Trinity, quotes Augustine 104 times! In the Reformed camp, Jean Calvin, quotes Augustine constantly. John Owen quotes him 3 times as many times as he quotes Calvin. Readers today are still stirred by Augustine’s Confessions. My own brother-in-law became a Christian from reading it.
In understanding the Trinity, specifically, Augustine perhaps left his most enduring mark. No one can write on the doctrine without referring to his On the Trinity. On the platform of the Nicean (325AD) and Constantinople (381) Councils, with devotion and humility, our great teacher set the trajectory for trinitarian theology up to today. His defense of the full equality of the Holy Spirit, his recognition of Christ’s form of God and that of a man, his distinguishing of God’s being from God’s acts, how the three Divine Persons act together and indwell One Another, all these things all branches of the Christian Church confess because of Augustine.
Most significant to me, was Augustine’s distinguishing of the Divine Persons of the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, only by Their relation of origin. Because They all three are God, They all share God’s attributes. But in this one way They differ—in Their relationship to Each Other. Although some spoke this way before him (like Gregory Nazianzus), Augustine drove this point home. He crystalized our way of understanding the divine Three in One. This gives us insight into the meaning of gender.
But Augustine was not perfect.
For example, he believed in the spontaneous generation of life on a rotting carcass. His culture’s Neo-Platonism also skewed his thinking.
When He came to search for an apt analogy in our world for the Trinity (as far as one can), Augustine deliberately rejected persons in relation. Even though Genesis 1 says that God made us in His image, male and female, we should not find the Trinitarian image of God in human relationship, says Augustine, because:
- that would mean Adam was not in the image of God before Eve was made,
- Adam and Eve form a dyad (just two) rather than a triad (like the Trinity),
- in 1Corinthians 11:7, “Man is the image and glory of God, Woman is the glory of Man…”, Augustine reads Paul as saying only “Adam” is made in the image, just one, not two, so the image must be just in an individual (Augustine would like to also say that individual women are in God’s image, but he is extremely confusing on this point).
Each of these objections has easy answers, such as (briefly):
- how the “image of God” can have multiple meanings or layers,
- how, in the Genesis narrative, after God creates His image in the two, Adam and Eve, the very next verse tells them to multiply, generating out of their love a third,
- and how Augustine is most certainly reading Paul in 1Corinthians 11 wrongly.
But these are why our teacher tells us that he cannot see it. This uncharacteristically weak reasoning on Augustine’s part points us to other, deeper causes for his rejection.
Likely reasons Augustine cannot endorse this rather obvious analogy for the Trinity lie in his cultural conditions. A person’s context always determines what is cogent and persuasive to him. And Augustine, if he had anything, had three things:
- a disdainful estimation of the human body: “the lowest level…is the bodily one, and the soul itself is higher…”–Book XI.2;8,
- a degraded view of sexual intimacy as dirty and impure: “[sexual desire] could not have been present at all in paradise before sin…”–Book XIII.5;18,23,
- most limiting of all, a low opinion of women. Augustine purports that, in 1Corinthians 11:7, Paul was working out a mysterious symbolism, where the female body symbolizes the mind diverted to management of material things, and where the male symbolizes “as we climb up inward” the higher compartment—Book XII.3;10-11
His discussion on that last point is convoluted and contradictory. Honestly, I don’t think even Augustine understood what Augustine thought about women. These leave him unable to appreciate gendered relations as supplying us a high metaphor for God’s plurality.
Thus, Augustine’s highest comparison to the Trinity becomes the operation of the human mind. He leaves the church with the triad of an individual’s Memory, Thought, and Will as the best picture. Even though these three qualities are merely qualities, not persons, not found to be equal in any person, not always unified, and certainly not where Scripture directs us, this is our titan’s legacy metaphor for grasping the Trinity. Ever since then, many theologians and writers, e.g., Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, etc., took over this type of argumentation. Nowadays, they roll it out like a museum piece to observe and then roll back in, with zero application to our lives.
For all our gratitude to our great teacher, here Augustine missed. And the times in which we live urge us back to the Book for our best analogy of Who we worship in spirit and truth.