Abstract
From misogynistic poster boy to misunderstood mystic, the fourth-century writings of Augustine serve many different functions in contemporary theology. Augustine’s vast, confusing, and often contradictory writings lend themselves to many different interpretations.1 These interpretive issues come into focus particularly as we engage Augustine’s largest contribution to trinitarian theology—his de Trinitate (The Trinity). The Trinity is much more than a trinitarian theology and, using contemporary categories, might be more akin to theological epistemology than to trinitarian theology. My historical analysis begins here because Augustine’s theological epistemology sets up a way to know God that (reluctantly) affirms the necessity of the material body. Drawing on Augustine, this chapter suggests that there can be no material trinitarian theology without a material epistemology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
In part, these interpretive lines are drawn disciplinarily: philosophers such as Gareth Matthews use Augustine as an example of early Cartesian insight while historians such as Margaret Miles suggest that reading Augustine through modern lenses is anachronistic whether that reading is in praise (as in the case of Matthews) or as a critique (as in the case of Colin Gunton). Theologians tend to fall somewhere in between, as some lay the problems of modernity at the feet of Augustine while others use a historical approach that accounts for Augustine’s context. Margaret Miles has written numerous books and articles attempting to put Augustine’s work in its historical context. See Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine on the Body (Missoula, MO: Scholars Press, 1979);
Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992);
Miles, Rereading Historical Theology: Before, during, and after Augustine (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008). See
Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many: Augustine and the Theological Crisis of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993). Although Ayers has published a number of articles on Augustine’s theology see, especially, his “The Christological Context of Augustine’s De Trinitate XIII: Toward Relocating Books VIII–XV” Augustinian Studies 29:1 (1998): 111–139.
Augustinian interpreters such as Michél Barnes find the arguments about The Trinity being a speculative work unconcerned with the waves of polemical history unconvincing. See, “The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity,” Modern Theology 19:3 (2003): 329–355; “Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine’s De Trinitate I,” Augustinian Studies 30:1 (1999): 43–59; “De Trinitate VI and VII: Augustine and the Limits of Nicene Orthodoxy,” Augustinian Studies 38:1 (2007): 189–202; and “Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 56:2 (1995): 237–251. Also frustrated with scholarship that fails to place The Trinity within its historical context, theologian C. C. Pecknold explores the diversity of Augustinian scholarship that has challenged Augustine’s continuity with Descartes. See C. C. Pecknold, “How Augustine Used the Trinity: Functionalism and the Development of Doctrine,” Anglican Theological Review 85:1 (2003): 127–141.
In his 1962 study, Jacques Chabannes contends that Berbers intermarried with Phoenicians before Augustine’s lifetime, but other biographies of Augustine seem to consent that Punics and Berbers were two distinguishable ethnic categories in Augustine’s Africa. See Jacques Chabannes, St. Augustine, trans. Julie Kernan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 14–15;
Chvala Smith, “Augustine of Hippo,” in Empire and the Christian Tradition: New Readings of Classical Theologians, ed. Kwok Pui-lan, Don Compier, and Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 81;
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California, 2000, 1967), 10;
and Mark Ellingsen, The Richness of Augustine: His Contextual and Pastoral Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 8–11.
Rebecca Moore suggests that scholars consider “Monica” as “Monnica” in order to contextualize Augustine’s mother within North Africa. The name Monica is the Roman spelling of the North African Monnica. The name Monnica reflects pre-Roman religious practices in Thagaste and reflects Augustine’s North African heritage although Moore herself does not consider the question of Monica’s heritage. Rebecca Moore, “O Mother Where Art Thou? In Search of St. Monica,” in Feminist Interpretations of St. Augustine, ed. Judith Chelius Stark (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 49.
Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 69–80.
See Timothy David Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63–70 and 136–151;
Margaret Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 66–74;
Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43–51; Chvala-Smith, “Augustine of Hippo,” 80.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London, England; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8ff. According to Hardt and Negri, there must be a fundamental norm to support a system of global order that is permanent and necessary (11). This norm is achieved by consensus (15), which is increasingly interiorized within individuals (23).
See Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second Century Church Amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 83–84;
Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 45–106; Charles F. Pazdernik, “Paying Attention to the Man behind the Curtain: Disclosing and Withholding the Imperial Presence in Justinianic Constantinople,” in Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Thorsten Fögen and Mireille M. Lee (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 63–85.
Joerg Rieger, “Christian Theology and Empire,” in Empire and the Christian Tradition, 1, and Rieger, Christ and Empire, see the introduction in particular. In part, Augustine’s text betrays his intent to find a transcendent alternative to the material empire because Augustine finds himself constantly trying to avoid the Manichean dualism that held sway on his thought for so long. Although he does not explicitly mention the Manicheans in The Trinity, it evidences the continual influence of Manichaeism on Augustine. In response to the Manichean denigration of embodiment, Augustine attempts a positive valuation of embodiment. In particular, Augustine’s concluding apology for the role of the body in theological development counters Manichean desire to sublimate the body while Augustine’s use of the theophanies from the Hebrew Bible in the first half of The Trinity counters the Manichean anti-Judaism that understands the Jewish scriptures as unenlightened and outdated. See John O’Donnell, Augustine Sinner and Saint: A New Biography (London: Profile Books, 2005), 44–45;
Paula Fredriksen, “Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine’s Answer to Mani, Plotinus, and Julian,” Paul and the Legacies of Paul, ed. William Babcock (Dallas, TX: SMU Press, 1990), 227–251;
J. Patout Burns, “Variations on a Dualist Theme: Augustine on the Body and Soul,” Interpreting Tradition, ed. Jane Kopas (Chicago, IL: Scholars, 1984), 13; and
A. G. Gedaliahu Stroumsa and Paula Fredriksen, “The Two Souls and the Divided Will,” Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience, ed. Albert Baumgarten, Jan Assman, and Gedaliahu Stroumsa (Boston, MA: Brill, 1998), 198–217.
Barnes, Ayers, and Cavadini also suggest that The Trinity should be read as a coherent whole. Also see R. D. Crouse, Ayers, and Cavadini also suggest that The Trinity should be read as a coherent whole. Also see R. D. Crouse, “St. Augustine’s De Trinitate: Philosophical Method,” Studia Patristica 16:2 (1985): 509.
This is an expression disability theorists draw into question. See the discussion of the ideology of ability in Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008), 7–11.
This alternative kind of sight would be in line with an understanding of vision that had been around since at least the second century. As Nasrallah describes this second-century understanding, “Perceptions gained through the senses, even the highest sense, vision, were often considered to be of less epistemic value than perceptions gained through the exercise of the ‘vision’ of the nous (“mind”) in contemplation.” Nasrallah, 227. For a brief description of extromissionist and intromissionist theories of vision in antiquity, also see Shadi Bartsch, The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3. Michel Camille contends that the extromissionst theory reigned in antiquity and was, eventually, replaced by the intromissionist theory in the later Middle Ages. Naming Augustine as one of the key proponents of extromission, he states, “[Extromission] posited a theory of vision in which a visual fire emanating from the observer’s eye coupled with light or fire coming from the perceived objects.”
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000): 205.
For an example of this consider Julie Miller, “To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity,” in Feminist Interpretations of Augustine, ed. Judith Chelius Stark (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2007), 243–280.
Although this is not contained in any extant work of Porphry’s, O’Donnell contends that it is from a lost work of Porphry’s. Augustine cites this maxim in The City of God 10.29 and 12.26 (O’Donnell, 264, also see 368, n. 524). Also see Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Gender, Metaphor, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155.
In this, Plotinus remains largely consistent with Plato’s Timaeus. See Plato, Timaeus, trans. Donald Zeyl (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000); Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Boston, MA: Branford, 1949/50), Fourth Ennead VIII; and David Runia, “The Language of Excellence in Plato’s Timaeus and Later Platonism,” in Platonism in Late Antiquity, ed. Stephen Gersh and Charles Kannengiesser (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1992), 11–37.
A. Hilary Armstrong, “Plotinus,” in Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 233.
Thomas Wassmer credits Plotinus with influencing Augustine’s incorporeal understanding of God that absolutely prioritizes the internal over the external. See Wassmer, “The Trinitarian Theology of Augustine and His Debt to Plotinus,” Harvard Theological Review 53:4 (1960): 261–268.
See Plotinus, Third Ennead VI.1; Miles, Augustine on the Body, 12–13; and Armstrong, “Plotinus,” 233. See Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, “Matter and Prime Matter,” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) on the question of whether the Stoics were strict materialists, as Miles suggests.
Although some contemporary cognitive science would consider the exterior as a physical embodiment of interior processes, Platonist science in the third and fourth centuries often assumed correlations between the internal and the soul and the exterior and the body. For an example from contemporary cognitive science, see Francisco Verela and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). For a fourth-century example, see Augustine’s discussion of Platonism in City of God (10.29).
According to Sarah Coakley, the embodied reality of the trinitarian image will lead Augustine to reject the lover/loved/love analogy. Sarah Coakley, “Living unto the Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” Anglican Theological Review 80:2 (1998): 230. Yet, as we look forward to Book XV, we see Augustine return to this very image.
Catherine LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1991, 1973), 81–109.
As David Dawson suggests, “Rather, for Augustine, Jesus of Nazareth is what God is when God engages in self-determination or self-transcendence; God ‘becomes him or herself,’ so to speak, by becoming embodied; and we are to become more Godlike (and strangely enough, more ourselves) by enacting further our own embodiment.” Dawson, “Transcendence as Embodiment,” Modern Theology 10:1 (1994): 22.
Copyright information
© 2014 Meredith Minister
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Minister, M. (2014). Knowing the Trinity: Augustine’s Material Epistemology in The Trinity. In: Trinitarian Theology and Power Relations. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464781_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464781_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49935-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46478-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)