Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective, Part 2, Analogies, with Prof. Christopher Veniamin

Series: Mystical Theology
Episode 21: Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective, Part 2, Analogies, with Prof. Christopher Veniamin

In Part 2 of “Augustine of Hippo: An Orthodox Perspective”, Episode 21 of our series in “Mystical Theology”, we present the terminology of St. Augustine's "analogies of Trinity". Our episode begins with a brief clarification regarding Augustine’s two sources of divine revelation: Holy Scripture (analogy of faith) and creation (analogy of being); and then proceeds to refer to Augustine’s place in the study of Patristic theology in the West. 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

Clarification: two forms of revelation

Speaker 1 0:00

I should like to begin with a word of clarification on the two ways of knowledge of God. In St Augustine of Hippo, in my introduction to St Augustine, I said that Holy Scripture was identified as the way of revelation and that knowledge of the world, and thus reason, was the way of philosophy, or something to that effect. This needs to be explained further, as it gives the impression that, for Saint Augustine, knowledge of the world and reason, philosophy, is something other than revelation. This is not so. As pointed out in my previous talk on Saint Augustine, the identification of Scripture alone as revelation is in fact the perspective of the reformers of the 16th century, not of Saint Augustine himself. So, to be clear, for Saint Augustine, there are two ways of acquiring knowledge of God, two forms of revelation, therefore. The first is by the authority, auctoritas of the Holy Scripture, and this is also referred to as the analogy of faith, analogia fide, analogy of faith, analogia fide. And the second way by which we come to a knowledge of God is by the world, through creation. This involves reason, philosophical speculation, and it is also referred to as the analogy of being analogia entis, as the analogy of being analogia entis. So now let us move on to the analogies that Saint Augustine employs in order to present the mystery of the Holy Trinity, with particular reference to the proprium, the special individuality of the Holy Spirit, and let us contrast Saint Augustine's presentation with that of the Cappadocian fathers.

Speaker 1 2:10

To this day, in the Orthodox patristic tradition, saint Augustine of Hippo is a marginal figure. He's mentioned as a saint in the or figure he's mentioned as a saint in the practica of the fifth ecumenical council. This is because he's listed, among many others, as defending the faith. In his case, he was defending the faith against pelagianism. So we have the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, when Justinian the First, the great emperor, who restored much of the empire, the Christian Roman Empire, and some say that in the process of doing so he dispersed his energies and this really led to the decline and fall, especially of the Western provinces. The criticism is that if Justinian had concentrated on the East, he might have consolidated and made it stronger and it would have withstood what happened later. Of course, but in those practica St Augustine is mentioned, and he's mentioned for defending the faith. Relatively marginal, I mean he's not known. Relatively marginal, I mean he's not known. He wrote in Latin. Translations into Greek came much later, and so on.

Oxford Patristics Conference

Speaker 1 3:52

We had said that there were basic concerns with Saint Augustine's solution to the mystery of the Holy Trinity and in particular to the proprium, the individual uniqueness, the unique characteristic of the Holy Spirit, said that the first concern is that the capadoshian solution, capadoshian teaching, weakens the divine unity. In comparison is St Augustine Because one would think, in terms of the history of Christian doctrine, that you would compare what the Cappadocian fathers taught to Saint Athanasius the Great, who is their predecessor, and he is the one who gets the ball rolling, so to speak, right on the question of the consubstantiality of the son and word of god with god the father. So right there, and I'm reminded of a story. I hope you don't mind all these anecdotes.

Speaker 1 5:36

Once upon a time I attended the patristics conference at oxford. I was a student there at the time, so it was easy for me to attend, and what they did there was in the mornings they had a series of communications. They called them in the various lecture rooms, in what's known as the examination schools. So there were about 10 lecture rooms and they would divide the fathers into periods, and so in one room, for example, you had the Cappadocian Fathers and St John Chrysostom. And it struck me I mean it was very easily noticeable that the Cappadocian Fathers and St John Chrysostom, for example, was the lecture room where all the communications in the mornings. Each communication was 20 minutes long, but all those fathers. One lecture room For St Augustine, on the other hand, only St Augustine. The communications for St Augustine took place in two lecture rooms. There were two lecture rooms dedicated to St Augustine alone. So that gives you some idea of the place of St Augustine in the Western theological tradition.

Speaker 1 7:24

Even among those who study the fathers, they specialize in patristics. The Oxford Patristics Conference. It's like the theological equivalent to the Olympic Games, once every four years. It's a major event. Four years, it's a major event. But despite the fact that all these specialists are studying Athanasius and Basil and Gregory and Chrysostom and Maximus and so on and so forth, and there is also a handful that go beyond John Damascene, that's mainly the Orthodox participants, because the West is not interested.

Speaker 1 8:11

After John Damascene, that's the end of the patristic period for the post-Augustinian West. Then come the scholastics John Scotus, erigena and company, right up to including Thomas Aquinas, so from the 9th century to the 13th. But that's not patristics, that's scholastic theology. There were presentations on these subjects, but that wasn't the focus. The focus was the fathers and indeed when you study patristics, it means first and foremost the Greek-speaking fathers. I don't know if it's okay to say that these days. I don't know if it's okay to say that these days, but that's what the top professors in the world in patristics study the Greek-speaking fathers. So that was an experience which showed me that there is an avalanche of material on and focus on and activity pertaining to Augustine.

Speaker 1 9:38

So we said the criticisms made against the Cappadocians include that they have weakened the divine unity in comparison with Augustine, not Athanasius. Second, that there is a subordinationist tendency, at least in the doctrine of the monarchy of the father. Does this not represent the subordinationist approach of origin? By the way, it's still discussed to this day among specialists in origin whether he was in fact a subordinationist. I think he was personally, but there is evidence to the contrary, and origin is complex. If you do not understand origin from an orthodox perspective, forget it. Forget it. It just doesn't work. He is a figure that is so important that if you don't grasp him correctly, everything else is skewed, everything else becomes distorted anyway. That's the second point, and the third point was that, to the Western mind, the Cappadocians have still not told us clearly what is the distinctive characteristic of the Holy Spirit, and that's what St Augustine sets out to achieveine's De Trinitate is a work that is non-polemic.

Analogies

Speaker 1 11:31

It was not written in response to a particular need in the life of the church. It is a speculative work. It's a work which is written over time and it has this speculative characteristic. So in saint augustine there are two types of analogy. There's a trinitarian analogy and there is a one-person analogy, a single person, a uni person analogy. So we said that, we said that the De Trinitate is our main text for this, and we said that this first analogy, which is referred to as an analogy of mutual love, it's a three-person analogy.

Analogy of Love

Speaker 1 12:35

Ostensibly it's an interpersonal analogy, what Augustine calls the Trinity of Love, and that is to be found in his De Trinitate, book 8, section 14, or in the other numbering 10. So the Trinity of love. Firstly we have the father says the Son is called Amatur, which means that which is loved, the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is Amur, which is love. So this is a very simple and ingenious schema. The Holy Spirit is the love, the love that unites Father and Son. They're mutual love, the love of the Father, of the Son and the Son of the Father.

Speaker 1 13:50

So on this analogy you can see that the Father is the subject, the Son is the object and the Holy Spirit signifies really their relationship. So you've got subject object relationship. This is actually very important. It might not seem important at this point, but it is. And the reason why it's important is because there is no subject-object in God. From the Orthodox perspective, there is no subject-object in God and relationship. What is the character of the relationship of the three divine hypotheses? Come back to these points in due course.

Speaker 1 14:50

So there are certain defects about this analogy that it's really. When you look at it closely, it's more a two-person analogy than a three-person analogy, and the holy spirit seems to be depersonalized. The lover and the beloved are certainly two different persons here, but on the human level, the love that passes between the lover and the beloved or the beloved is not in itself a third person. So just reiterating that point, I think we need to say here quite clearly that this is not Saint Augustine's intention. Saint Augustine believed that the Holy Spirit is as much a persona. So the Holy Spirit is a person, much as the father is, as much as god the son is, and that has to be underlined. But it also has to be noted that this analogy doesn't show you that it is lacking in this sense.

Kallistos Ware’s evaluation

Speaker 1 16:22

So Metropolitan Calixtos Ware takes this analogy and he agrees with all these points that it's really a two-person analogy, there's a depersonal personalization implied and so on. It's insufficient, it doesn't do the trick. But he also says, because he's looking for a way to build bridges with the West, bridges with the West. He's saying well, it may not be perfect, but at least this is not so very far from the Cappadocian presentation of the Holy Trinity. Unfortunately, this is the analogy that gives us the filioque that the holy spirit is from the father and from the son. It's in the process of unpacking this analogy that saint augustine says this. But metropolitan calistos wants to see things in positive terms and he says at least this is something that we can begin to work on in our dialogues with our non-orthodox christian brethren.

The problem

Speaker 1 17:43

Now metropolitan canistos sees the communion which saint basil referred, if you remember his statement that it is in the communion of the Godhead that the unity consists. Well, st Augustine says here the communion is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit signifies the communion of the Father, the Son and then also, by implication, the Holy Spirit himself. The problem is that with the Cappadocian fathers the communion was not in fact on the level of person at all. And the Godhead means the divine essence or nature and the energy, the divine energy that is what is communed among the three hypostases, starting with the source of the Godhead, the Father, who gives, who communes his essence and his energy to the Son and to the Spirit. Remember, we said da kina, keta akinonita, things which are held in common and the things which are unique to each of the three hypostases. So already there is a different dynamic here. St Augustine is looking at the person and he's looking at, in particular, relationship as defining personhood, the personhood of each member of the Holy Trinity.

1st Trinity of Mind

Speaker 1 20:06

The next thing is to talk about the two trinities of mind. These are the unipersonal analogies. This is the second set of analogies, not interpersonal but unipersonal, and st Augustine bases them on the human mind, the men's, as in mens mentis. This is the mind. So we have two trinities of mind, and the first trinity of mind is found in the De Trinitate, book 9, paragraph 4. And here, just for good measure. Let's add the second one, de Trinitate, book 10, paragraph 17. The first one is De Trinitate 9, 4. The second is De Trinitate 10, 17. The second is De Trinitate 10.17.

Speaker 1 21:20

So in the First Trinity we have mens, which is mind, and then we have notitia, which is knowledge, and amor, which is love, is love. And we'll read a passage from Saint Augustine's De Trinitate to see how he uses these trinities, what he says about them. So he calls this a triad that is inseparable though distinct, that is inseparable though distinct, and he speaks of a mutual co-inherence in this connection, all are in all the men's. The mind is in the knowledge of itself. So you have the mind, you have the mind's knowledge of itself and you have, curiously, the mind's love of itself, amor. So the knowledge of the mind is in the mind, the love of the mind is in the mind. The mind is in its knowledge of itself. The mind is also in the love of itself, the mind is also in the love of itself.

2nd Trinity of Mind

Speaker 1 22:39

I think already, just by what we're saying, the way we're saying it, you'll begin to get the impression correctly, that we are leaving Orthodox, patristic theology. We're speaking in terms which are well, let's just say they're more philosophical. So here we are, the second trinity of mind. What I should say, before going to the second trinity of mind, is that we have relationship. This is the major point in St Augustine, that it's all about relationship. A relationship is affirmed here the mind, its knowledge of itself, its love of itself and that in this relationship, it's not a reciprocal relationship between persons that is, but it's a reflexive relationship within one person, within one person.

Speaker 1 24:03

Then St Augustine offers us a second trinitive mind in his book 10 of the De Trinitate. And here we have the following trinity, the following triad we have memoria sui, which is memory. This is the memory of itself, the sui, the memory of itself, memoria sui. Then you have intelligentsia. What is intelligentsia? It is understanding, and voluntas is will. These are the nuts and bolts that we're clarifying the terms. So this time you have memory, understanding, will, memoria sui, intelligentsia, voluntas.

Speaker 1 24:58

Now, before we proceed any further, perhaps I should say a word about memory, because memory in Saint Augustine does not mean what we usually understand the term to mean. It's not, in other words, simply a case of remembering things past. Memory means much more than what we mean today when we use the word. It means self-awareness, and it's not just thinking of things past, but, as Father Andrew Louth says in his book on the origins of the Christian mystical tradition, I think it is.

Speaker 1 25:47

Memoria is more than just the faculty of recollection. It really means the whole mind. It means both conscious and unconscious, in contrast to mind or mens, which refers only to the conscious mind. And what does that mean, mind? And what does that mean? Well, for Saint Augustine, memoria contains everything he has experienced or can imagine, and the whole universe is embraced by his memory. But the best way to get a grasp of this in Saint Augustine is to quote Saint Augustine himself on what he says about memory. Now he refers to memoria in his Confessions, book 10, section 8, where Augustine says the following about Memoria Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, o my God.

Soliloquy

Speaker 1 27:10

A spreading limitless room within me, hiding limitless room within me who can reach its uttermost depth. Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. When we say faculty in philosophy, it's another word for power. It is a power of my soul and belongs to my nature. So it's natural, it is of our human nature. In fact, I cannot totally grasp all that. I am Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself. But how can it not contain itself? How can there be any of itself that is not in itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost with stupor. This is an interesting passage. It's characteristic of Saint Augustine's confessions.

Psychology & Philosophy

Speaker 1 28:26

Saint Augustine is credited with inventing the soliloquy speaking to oneself. The soliloquy speaking to oneself when he says thus, the mind is not large enough to contain itself, but how can it not contain itself? How can there be any of itself that is not in itself? He's talking to himself. He has this soliloquy. It's not a dialogue, it's a soliloquy. It's not a dialogue, it's a soliloquy. And in fact some of saint augustine's prayers, the prayer that confessions begins with, has this character. And it's not for nothing that saint augustine is there in the histories of psychology. First chapter, first chapter often is St Augustine. He's in the histories of psychology because for the psychologists as well, who are not orthodox, generally speaking, they regard him as well important to mention. He may not be particularly prominent, but he's there, and he's there at the beginning.

Speaker 1 29:39

So what's going on? This is psychology from an orthodox perspective, it's not theology. In the west I've said this many times before theology has become philosophy and psychology Theology Philosophy about God, is how theology is understood. It is a philosophy about God. So you have philosophy, which is this broader discipline, and when philosophy decides to concern itself with God, that's theology. Suddenly, it becomes theology. That's what's happened with psychology as well, and, if you notice, I regard this as a sad state of affairs. But if you notice, most of our priests who have a PhD have their PhD in psychology. Fewer of them proportionately have PhDs in theology, and there's a reason for that, but it's a sad state of affairs. I think that our priests turn to psychology as a kind of capstone, deepening into I don't know what.

Why our priests turn to psychology

Speaker 1 31:01

There's a significant confusion that takes place here. I think the reason for it is twofold. First, because the way that Orthodox theology is being taught is not meeting the needs of our priests in their pastoral ministries. So they look for methods and techniques from other disciplines which may assist them in trying to help their people. So, in that sense, our theology has failed them, and so they're looking for solutions through the institutions of this world, one of which is psychology.

Healing in the Church

Speaker 1 31:51

There's nothing wrong with psychology. It's perfectly fine in its proper place. But the grace of God is not on the level of psychology. Psychology is not on the level of the grace of God, and the healing which is available to us in the church is higher. It's more effective than psychology. But psychology in a sense is necessary, especially for those people outside the church.

The Enlightenment

Speaker 1 32:22

The problem is our people. Many of them have still not discovered the spiritual life of the church. On the other side you have the fact that we're living in a world where Saint Augustine and the tradition that goes back to Saint Augustine is in the air we breathe. So all the theological slash, philosophical slash, psychological presuppositions are in our environment, all around us, and therefore we have something of an intellectualistic approach to theology, where we believe that God and the things of God can be subjected to human reason. And yes, that brings us back to the Enlightenment, I guess.

Speaker 1 33:17

But where did the Enlightenment come from? When you trace it back to its roots, I think you have to say that St Augustine is a significant starting point. In the Roman Catholic tradition you would go from St Augustine through Aquinas, thomas Aquinas, and in the Protestant traditions, plural, you would have to skip Aquinas, because he was rejected by by the reformers, and go from there to the reformers of the 16th century and from there, yes, again to the enlightenment. So there's a lot that we could say about that, but we'll just, we'll just leave it there for now. We We'll come back to it, necessarily, and in a relatively short space of time, we'll be discussing more of these themes and the shape of Western theology, that Western theology that follows St Augustine and is based on him, because there's another western latin speaking tradition which doesn't follow augustine, which is perfectly in keeping with the orthodox, because it is orthodox. So, yes, this is what we have.

Platonism & Manichaeism

Speaker 1 34:54

With regard to specifically returning to the question of memory, memoria, memoria sui, the memory of oneself, or the memory of one's mind, you have to remember. The other thing that needs to be noted is that Augustine is deeply influenced by Platonism. It is true that he was also influenced by Manichaeism. Platonism helped him to convert from. He spent about 10 years as a Manichaean, as one of the hearers, not one of the inner members of the sect, but he was influenced by that duality, the dualist view of the world and the scheme of things in general the, the good god, the bad god, the evil god, forces of light and the forces of darkness, and etc. Etc. Forces of darkness and et cetera, et cetera. But for the most part he rejected all of that thanks to Platonism. Now he stayed with Platonism for another 10 years approximately and eventually he became Christian. Some say that that was the influence of his mother, the prayers of his mother, saint Monica.

Soul & Logistikon

Philosophical understanding of the “nous”

Speaker 1 36:30

At any rate, it does seem that his focus on mind is deeply influenced by Platonism. His anthropology is Platonist in as much as Augustine never knew really what to do with the body, the human body. He knew that, biblically, man is body and soul, a psychosomatic entity. But, influenced by Platonism, he always thought that the true man was the soul, and the immortal part of the soul, according to Plato, is the mind, or the logistikon, if we're going to use purely Platonic terms. Well, the logistikon contains the rational, but also the noetic in Plato, but also the noetic in Plato. And here it is true that Augustine is focusing on the nous, what we would call the nous, and you may recall that I had mentioned my professor, father John Romanides, who used to say that the problem with St Augustine is that his understanding of the noose is philosophical. So here we have the mind focused on the mind, and the reason why I said all of that was to say bear in mind.

Understanding (intelligentia)

Will (voluntas)

Speaker 1 37:58

Here, for Saint Augustine, we're talking about the true man, that which survives death, just as in Platonism. Though again, saint Augustine wants to remain faithful to the Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body, it is plainly clear it doesn't know what to do with it, why the true man is the soul, and indeed the nous, or the mens, to use the Latin term, is the immortal part of the soul, of the soul. So there you have the memory, self-awareness of the mens, intelligentsia, understanding. Here again it's reflexive, so it's the mind understanding itself, and the will is contained in the mind, it is the mind willing itself, so the will is of men's. Now, this part of day trinitate and I said in due course we'll read the relevant passages to familiarize ourselves with how he brings these into play, these terms, these tr trinity of mind, men's, notitia, amor. And the second trinity, memoria sui, intelligencia, voluntas.

Speaker 1 39:49

But what we can say as an immediate reaction to this is that these analogies from the mind seem to have very little scriptural basis. The Trinity is not being related to the great events of salvation history. Metropolitan Callistos used to point out why not look at moments like the annunciation or the baptism of the lord in the jordan or the transfiguration of christ or indeed of pentecost. Well, says metropolitan calistos, augustine isn't doing that here and this doesn't seem to bear any relation to specific events in salvation history. Where is it coming from? Well, what did father john romanidi say? The problem is that saint augustine has a philosophical understanding of the nous. It's coming from philosophy.

Speaker 1 41:05

A second point which is also quite obvious is that Augustine is now, if we regarded the first analogy of augustine, his analogy of mutual love, his trinity of love, if we regarded that as being somewhat closer to the cappadocian teaching, well, now it seems that it's much further away from the Cappadocian presentation of the mystery. When he was using the analogy of mutual love, we said the problem with that was more a two-person analogy than a three-person analogy. There was an implicit depersonalization of the third hypostasis, third person persona of the holy trinity and so on. Here we don't have that. As we said, it's reflexive, it's a unipersonal analogy. In both cases, two trinities of mind pertain to a single person and the faculties within a single person.

Speaker 1 42:26

It is true that if you were to take a look at saint gregory, the Theologian's Oration 12, the very first paragraph, the opening paragraph of his Oration 12, who speaks of God, the Holy Trinity, as nous logos, and then pnevma and then pnevma spirit. In fact, this is also alluded to and utilized by St Gregory Palamas in one of his harmonies. So there, st Gregory the theologian is thinking of god in terms of the faculties within a single human person, nous logos. However, this kind of language, this uh analogy, is very rare. Saint gregory the theologian says himself, says nothing further about the matter, doesn't elaborate, in other words, of the, at least the second and third persons of the holy trinity. There is ample scriptural evidence to show that the second hypostasis is logos and the third hypothesis is third. Hypothesis is never so.

Appeal

Speaker 1 44:18

Coming back to Augustine, there's a basic problem here. There's a basic problem, metropolitan Callistos says, of interpretation. Callistos is referring to something which is debated by Western scholars which of the two kinds of analogy is most prominent in the thinking, in the theology of St August? The one side, and the trinities of mind on the other, precisely because, as we mentioned earlier, if you say, well, it's the trinity of love that's most important to augustine, then you could argue not so convincingly in my opinion, but you could argue that he's closer to the Cappadocian funds. If, on the other hand, you think the two trinities of mind are the more prominent form of analogy, then you have a greater distance between augustine and the tradition of the cappadocians, which is the tradition of the orthodox church. This is probably a good segue to us reading together the relevant passage from saint augustine's de trinitate. The relevant passage from St Augustine's De Trinitate.