Life’s Paradox

I have begun reading Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991) in a small reading group with my pastor/professor, John Wright. We met for the first time last Thursday, but only this week have I had the chance to read the first of fifteen books which comprise this work, whose stated goal is “to account for the one and only and true God being a trinity, and for the rightness of saying, believing, understanding that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same substance or essence” (I.1.4). I wanted to note three things, the second of which I hope to give the most emphasis.

First, Augustine goes to some length in I.1 to describe the voyage ahead in terms of the path it charts between three extremes. Briefly, they are 1) those who “allow thmselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason” (I.1.1), 2) those who anthropomorphize God, and 3) those who (to anachronistically borrow a term of Thomas Nagel), think they have an objective “view from nowhere” to the point that they somehow think that their point of view is akin to God’s own “unchanging substance,” so that “what they do not know they wish to give the impression of knowing, and what they wish to know they cannot.” This last type kind of sounds like “know-it-alls who really know nothing,” or something of the sort.

Second, after a chapter of devoting himself to showing that Scripture proves “the unity and equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” in I.3 Augustine attempts to wrestle with the words of Jesus when he says, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). This verse had always somewhat confused me because I had always been told that because God is three equal persons in one, so how can any one of the Triune persons be “greater” than any one or both of the others?

To answer this, Augustine begins by noting that the truth is that “the Son is less even than himself. How could it be otherwise with him who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Phil 2:7)?” The distinction made, then, is between the Son in the form of God and the Son in the form of a servant. The Son in the form of God is the second person of the Trinity, co-eternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit; the Son in the form of a servant is Jesus the Christ incarnated on earth who suffered, died, and rose again. But it is important to emphasize that Augustine calls these two forms not distinct Christs at all, but the “same only begotten Son of the Father” taking on two different forms (III.3.14, my emphasis). Augustine thus says, “who can fail to see that in the form of God he too is greater than himself and in the form of a servant he is less than himself? And so it is not without reason that scripture says both; that the Son is equal to the Father and that the Father is greater than the Son. The one is to be understood in virtue of the form of God, the other in virtue of the form of a servant, without any confusion (ibid).

In I.4, this logic (Augustine calls it a “rule”) is then applied to multiple assertions in Scripture about Jesus Christ:

In the form of God, all things were made by him (John 1:3); in the form of a servant, he himself was made of woman, made under the law (Gal 4:4). In the form of God, he and the Father are one (John 10:30); in the form of a servant, he did not come to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him (John 6:38). In the form of God, as the Father has life in himself, so he gave the Son also to have live in himself (John 5:26); in the form of a servant, his soul is sorrowful to the point of death, and Father, he said, if it can be, let this cup pass by (Matt 26:38). In the form of God, he is true God and life eternal (1 John 5:20); in the form of a servant, he became obedient to the point of death, the death even of the cross (Phil 2:8). In the form of God, everything that the Father has is his (John 16:15), and all yours is mine, he says, and mine yours (John 17:10); in the form of a servant, his doctrine is not his own, but his who sent him (John 7:16).

I mention this way of interpretation for the simple fact that this is news to me. It also sounds pretty cool. I have never read much Augustine at all outside of a lot of secondary treatments, so for all I know, this is a very widely-held way of interpreting these passages; I just never paid much attention.

The last item I wanted to know in the first book of De Trinitate is that Augustine has no illusions about there being only one “correct” reading of these words in Scripture. Part of this move comes from Augustine’s humility, and part of it comes from his view of Scripture. He admits to the likelihood that his own words are going to be inadequate (although this should not be confused with any alleged inadequacy of the faith itself). To this, Augustine says, “This is why it is useful to have several books by several authors, even on the same subjects, differing in style though not in faith, so that the matter may reach as many as possible, some in this way others in that” (I.1.5).

Augustine’s view of Scripture seems to be that there are, as Cynthia Nielsen has noted (citing Michael Hanby), a “plenitude of true meanings for a single text.” Therefore we see that Augustine does not miss a step when he says at the end of book I of De Trinitate, “There are doubtless other ways of of understanding our Lord’s words.” He comes full circle on his three extreme cases listed above when he implores that “we may cheerfully use not merely one interpretation but as many as can be found. For the more ways we open up of avoiding the traps of heretics, the more effectively can they be convinced of their errors” (I.4.31). Even in this conclusion one can see there there is no mere academic aloofness in critiquing one’s opponents, but an end toward correction.

~ by Eric Lee on September 12, 2007.