Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective, Part 1, Introduction, with Prof. C. Veniamin

Series: Mystical Theology
Episode 20: Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective, Part 1, Introduction, Episode 20 in Mystical Theology, with Prof. C. Veniamin

In Part 1 of “Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective”, Episode 20 of our series in “Mystical Theology”, we present the theology of the most influential Christian figure in Western thought. Our introduction begins by making reference to Augustine’s seminal work on the Trinity, and setting the context of his approach to the mystery by identifying his two sources of divine revelation: faith (Holy Scripture) and philosophy (analogy of being). Other themes broached in this episode are listed in the Timestamps below.

Q&As available in The Professor’s Blog: https://mountthabor.com/blogs/the-professors-blog

Recommended background reading: Christopher Veniamin, ed., Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies (Dalton PA: 2022) ; The Orthodox Understanding of Salvation: "Theosis" in Scripture and Tradition (2016) ; The Transfiguration of Christ in Greek Patristic Literature (2022) ; and Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, Empirical Dogmatics of the Orthodox Catholic Church: According to the Spoken Teaching of Father John Romanides, Vol. 1 (2012), Vol. 2 (repr. ed. 2020).

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Transcript

Intro: Augustine, Athanasius & the Cappadocians

Speaker 1 0:01

We're going to take a look now at the Trinitarian theology of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose years are from 354 to 430. And Saint Augustine of Hippo is regarded by the West as the greatest father. This is significant because we've been looking at the mystery of the Holy Trinity, particularly as presented by the great Cappadocian fathers, who, for us, give us the foundation of the Church's doctrine on the Holy Trinity. They complete the work of Saint Athanasius in the sense that Saint Athanasius gave us the homoousion emphasising the oneness of God, the Holy Trinity. In his time, the focus was particularly on the Son and Word of God and the question of his divine status. So it was the consubstantiality of the Son and Word of God with God the Father that concerned Saint Athanasius the Great most. There's a similar situation in the time of the Cappadocians, who come in the later part of the 4th century, the 350s and 360s, inasmuch as they too were dealing with the subordinationist doctrines of the Neo-Aryans or the Anomoyans. The divine Logos in his divinity was completely and totally unlike God the Father. So Aetius and Eunomius changed their strategy, and eunomius changed their strategy. Still wanting to promote their subordinationist theology, they changed their strategy in as much as the orthodox had knowledge of the Father and of all things.

Arius and the Early Arians

Eunomius’ change of strategy on Knowledge of God

Augustine of Hippo

Speaker 1 2:48

The Orthodox were able to argue successfully that the Logos does indeed know all that the Father knows, and this knowledge was reflection of their oneness of essence, the emotion, their consubstantiality. So the early Arians, led by Arius the heresiarch himself, used to claim that the Logos does not know the essence of the Father, hence he is not consubstantial with the Father, he doesn't even know his own essence. And that was for them an important part of the argument against the consubstantiality of the Logos with God the Father. So Eunomius and company come along a little later and they said so what if the Logos knows the essence of the Father? Even we can know the essence of the Father, and we made numerous points on the question of man's inability to know the essence of God according to the teachings of the Cappadocian fathers, st Basil the Great, st Gregory the Theologian and St Gregory of Nyssa, not forgetting also St Amphilochius of Iconium. So Eunomius claimed that we human beings can know even the essence of God the Father as well as he knows his own essence, as well as the Father knows his own essence, which of course was for the Cappadocian fathers blasphemy. Why? Because knowledge of means identification with Knowledge of means, participation in so. To know the essence of God means that you're identifying with God the Father, you're claiming that you yourself are God, and this is, of course, highly problematic from an orthodox perspective, though it didn't seem to phase Eun, unamius and company at all. This is what they were implying. So this brings us to Saint Augustine of Hippo who, firstly, doesn't seem to be much aware of the work of the Cappadocian fathers and, secondly, as it is often claimed, probably didn't know Greek well enough to appreciate what they were saying, the subtleties of what they were arguing. And when I say that St Augustine doesn't appear to have known or was not apparently familiar with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers, the Second Ecumenical Council was the product of the Cappadocian father's work and indeed, for a certain period, st Gregory the Theologian as Patriarch of Constantinople.

Western critique of the Cappadocians

Speaker 1 7:08

Saint Augustine of Hippo, he is the man, as we said, in Western theology, it is important to arrive at Saint Augustine of Hippo and then, as it were, saint augustine of hippo and then, as it were, you've made it to first base, you've made it to a safe haven. Does he therefore, in comparison with the trinitarian theology, theology of the great Cappadocian fathers, does Saint Augustine offer us a better solution to the question of the mystery of the Holy Trinity? I'll sum up the criticisms, the critique of the West, regarding the Cappadocian quote-unquote solution. So let's just make three points here, and here I'm drawing from a schema which was presented by Metropolitan Callistos Ware in one of his lectures on the Cappadocian Fathers and Saint Augustine. Metropolitan Callistos posed these three questions or made these three points regarding the lines of criticism that sometimes are made against the Cappadocians.

Speaker 1 8:46

Firstly, and I think this is particularly with the Cappadocian doctrine of the monarchy of the Father, it is argued that the Cappadocians weaken the divine unity in comparison with Augustine. They weaken the divine unity. I think the Cappadocian emphasis on the threeness of God, the hypostasis, the distinctiveness of the three hypostases, the way that they work that out, emphasizing the hypostatic characteristics, that is to say the mode of existence of each of the divine hypostases, how the hypostasis is equally transcendent with the divine essence, and so on and so forth, that they have weakened the divine unity by emphasizing the threeness. Perhaps the fact that in their analogies they use a three-human-person analogy Adam, eve and Seth, they say, and then they go from there to show how there is a radical difference between the mystery of the threeness of God, the Holy Trinity, and three human beings. But secondly, we'll come back to that. Secondly, there is the charge of subordinationism, that the Cappadocian doctrine of the monarchy of the father still represents in some measure, the subordinationist approach of origen. There are all kinds of assumptions implicit in that line of criticism. And then, thirdly, would be that they have not told us clearly the distinctive characteristic of the Spirit, which is curious, because I think that that is exactly what the Cappadocian Fathers do, and particularly Saint Gregory the Theologian.

Gregory the Theologian’s & the Holy Spirit

Speaker 1 11:34

Perhaps I mentioned this before. One of our professors, professor Panagiotis Christou, in Thessalonica, who was the man who spearheaded the patristic revival in Greece, led the team of international scholars who produced the critical edition of the works of St Gregory Palamas, and then so many others. He played such a seminal role in all of that, a seminal role in all of that. But yes, the point that I was going to make with regard to Professor Christou is that he points out, among many other things, that so complete was Gregory the Theologian's treatment of the mystery of the Holy Spirit, the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, that not one thing in the Orthodox tradition, not one thing has been added to it ever since. So complete, so perfect was St Gregory. The Theologian's presentation of the mystery of the Holy Spirit would criticize the Cappadocian fathers in this way and exhort the solution that St Augustine of Hippo gives as an alternative. So those are the three lines of criticism which Metropolitan Callistos discerns and identifies for us, for the cappadocians.

The “de Trinitate” of Augustine

Speaker 1 13:44

Once again, let's underline it for the sake of clarity the doctrine of the trinity is not an intellectual exercise, spiritual exercise. The Trinity is the living God whom we enter into communion with through worship. We experience the Holy Trinity, we live the Holy Trinity in the church by worship. All one has to do is to remind oneself of the beginning of the divine liturgy and of all the great mysteries or sacraments of the church. Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. So the Holy Trinity is not an intellectual puzzle. The Holy Trinity is not a logical conundrum. The Holy Trinity is is our God, who has revealed himself to us and whom we worship. So let's say a word or two by way of introduction regarding St Augustine and his methodology, his approach to the question.

Speaker 1 15:22

Saint augustine decided to write a treatise on the holy trinity, his day trinitate, but this was not as a response to a particular heresy that was raging in his part of the world at that particular time. This was an exercise that he took upon himself for the sake of his own clarity on the subject, and it's a work that he wrote slowly. As, again, metropolitan Callistos points out, it took him about 10 years to write his De Trinitate.

Speaker 1 16:10

It's often said that the Cappadocians, and consequently the Orthodox tradition, begins thinking about the Holy Trinity on the basis of the threeness of God and then moves towards God's oneness and then moves towards God's oneness. And Metropolitan Callistos says that the opposite movement is discerned in the Western approach, the approach that follows St Augustine, that one begins with the oneness of God and moves towards God's threeness. The Cappadocians then move from the three hypostases and work from that to the divine essence. The essence is seen as the content of the hypostases, as the content of the hypostases and the model of the Cappadocians is, as we said, chiefly that of three human persons in interrelationship. And you see the opposite.

Speaker 1 17:29

With St Augustine, we're often told there is the reverse movement. He moves from the one essentia and, in contrast, we have the three personae and Augustine sees the personae as relationships, relationships within the essence. So moving from the oneness of God to the three, Augustine does so. He does so on the basis of a one-person model, not a three-person model. We'll see what is meant by that in a moment. So his primary analogy is the model of the, the model of the interdependent faculties of a single human person.

Speaker 1 18:47

So this is what's commonly claimed, that the Cappadocians and Augustine have a different approach. Cappadocians start with the threeness of God, move from there to the oneness of God, and the reverse is the case with Augustine. Cappadocians say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or at most, as Gregory of Nyssa does, they say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. And Metropolitan Callistos asks whether this is such a significant difference. So we pointed out that the De Trinitate of St Augustine was written slowly and we said that it wasn't written during a time of theological strife and it's non-polemical. So it's written in a speculative and sometimes strongly devotional spirit. So by devotional we mean St Augustine expresses his feelings, his strong, devotional, pious feelings regarding God, god's love, his mercy and so forth, in his treatment of the subject, the Holy Trinity.

Speaker 1 20:19

This is a criticism that the West levels against the Greek-speaking fathers, in particular of the East, that they seem to be lacking in feeling, there's not enough feeling, which again is rather curious. What has happened in the West, I think, is that, when pushed a little further, this devotional characteristic ends up being a little sentimental, the kind of sentimentality that one encounters in the West, which is characteristic of the piety of the ordinary folk, which I know we also have some of that in the Orthodox tradition as well. We can't say we don't, but the degree to which we find it in the West is sometimes quite astonishing. It's on the emotional level. I think that's the problem, that it's on the emotional level, and it's on the psychological level, and one questions whether it is on the spiritual level at all. It's a difficult question, this one, and of course it's one to which we shall return in due course.

“Faith” and “Reason”: Holy Scripture and “analogy of being”

The two analogies: of faith, and of being

Speaker 1 21:45

But this is what we have and it's written, we said, in a speculative manner. It begins with faith. Faith in the Holy Trinity is given, according to Saint Augustine. So where is it given? It's given first and foremost through Holy Scripture, which is an authority, auctoritas, and you have reason. And this opens the door to philosophy. So the one is the analogy of faith, and then we have the analogy of being. What does that mean? Well, one is revelation. We know God by one revelation and two, through the world. So we know God by revelation, that means Holy Scripture, which is the analogy of faith, the analogia fide, and we know God through the world, which is reason, so philosophy, and that's the analogia entis, the analogy of being.

Appeal

Speaker 1 23:21

Now, the interesting thing is that the reformers in the 16th century rejected the second and they said only by revelation do we know God. And that's why they ended up with sola scriptura, only the Bible, only scripture, sola scriptura. And we can talk more about that in due course. Why they did that, what was the result? How does it differ from the Orthodox perspective? Because the Orthodox has none of them. Some of our Orthodox people think that we agree with the Protestants. We know that we don't philosophize about God. I think most of the time we do, but what that means we don't know. So we have a lot of work to do. It's quite a challenge. So how does Saint Augustine compare? We can continue next time, god willing. Please subscribe to our channel and share with your friends. Click on the join button below our video and become a friend or reader of the Mount Tabor Academy, support our drive to introduce the theology and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church to the wider community.