Read on:

31 October 2010

Blessed are we to have such a wonderful defender of our faith such as Saint Augustine

Excellent for the explanation of the Trinity in the Old testament but a bit boring to read

4.5 stars. This is both an enriching and deeply challenging read. Anyone coming to this book with expectations that it contains a systematic approach to the Trinity will be disappointed. Moreover, Augustine's at times wandering line of thought can be very challenging to follow--certainly there were sections where my interest waned. This is due in no small part to a fact that Augustine himself laments--chapters of this work were published without his consent prior to the completion of the whole, and thus most of this work represents Augustine's first draft in somewhat disjointed form--at times this shows. But the gems contained throughout in typical Augustine brilliance are priceless and more than repay the reading. A few of my favorite parts:

1) Augustine's overall commitment to charity as a hermeneutical principle in reading the works of fellow Christians/theologians, and which he asks from his readers, is a model of authorial humility and theological method worthy of wider emulation. "Let us set out along Charity Street together" Augustine remarks, going so far as to describe this relation between reader and author as a "covenant" (as an aside, I think I detect here the scaffold for Van Hoozer's  covenantal and trinitarian approach to hermeneutics). I need to grow in this commitment to charity in reading/interacting with theologians willing to engage upon difficult subjects, that others might extend such charity to me.  

2) The discussion of difficult OT texts of types and theophanies in relation to the Trinity was excellent.

3) Augustine shines in defending the equality of the Son, and in differentiating between eternal generation and eternal procession. These sections (maddeningly, they are interspersed throughout rather than in one unit) are gold.

Finally, I admit to struggling a bit tracking with Augustine's use of various analogies in relation to the Trinity. Admirably, Augustine is careful to insist we understand such analogies as always deficient in describing the ontological Trinity in key respects (i.e., he is highlighting the fact that an analogy by its nature constitutes analogical rather than equivocal predication).  But because we are made in the image of the triune God, Augustine suspects we will discover triads everywhere (such as the relation of the lover, love, and the object loved, or the knower, the known, and the act of knowing).  Yet, given Augustine's own admission that such analogies always contain gross ontological deficiencies, one wonders the true value of these analogies in relation to the Trinity, even given that all human knowledge of God is analogical. Moreover, some of these triads seem a bit contrived, and frequently the process of explicating them is a bit tortured.

Notwithstanding, this is a truly deep, worship-inspiring and excellent read from one of the greatest theologians of the church.

Augustine is an intellectual and theological monster in the Christian tradition. I’ve read The Confessions and City of God as well as his anti-Pelagian writings for a class in seminary. I think this work, On the Trinity, is probably his third most well-known work, after Confessions and City of God. It is most well-known for the Trinitarian analogy of memory-understanding-will.

Overall, this is clearly a vital work in the development of the Christian understanding of God as Trinity. I’ve had a sort of anti-Augustine tendency due to his theology of predestination, freedom and so on. I still think his turn that direction is a mess that still needs to be corrected, and the church in the west would benefit from elevating more eastern writers (Maximus, Isaac, the Cappadocians). That said, even for whatever errors he may have made and what those errors contributed to in Western theology, I recognize I’m a gnat barking at a pit bull. And this is a fantastic work by the pit bull that is worth reading.

All that said, its dense. I do not think I was well-served reading it in the old Niceness and Post-Niceness Fathers series, though all 38 volumes are only 2 bucks on the kindle! One day I’ll have to get a more up-to-date translation in a hard copy. For now, if you want to learn the Trinity and dive into some theology, this is for you.

Fascinating how Augustine considers all the previous ways of theorizing the Trinity and then develops an interpretation that harmonizes and includes a little of all of them. The introduction is just as valuable, because it gives a historical development of the doctrine, beginning with the ways the Hebrews thought of God in the Hebrew Bible, and how this becomes Father, Son, Holy Ghost in the NT. A bit technical and repetitive, as Augustine often is, but his interpretation basically created Trinitarian theology and is still the basis of all subsequent interpretations to the present.

About as easy to traverse as skiing on melted snow.

Augustine is a brilliant man, and its possible that something is lost both in translation and with time, but much of this book feels like he woke up at 3 AM, thought, "Oh, this is a great idea! It makes total sense!" wrote it down, and never looked at it again. He desperately needed an editor to make sure he finished his thoughts before jumping to the next one. The book is overall very convoluted, he starts talking about something, goes off on a tangent that lasts four pages, and comes back to the original, leaving you wondering what he was actually talking about. Reading it, I feel like I need to be a full theologian to even grasp what he's trying to say, which maybe is the point? I don't know. I'm just overall completely confused. (side note, I had to read this for a college class on the trinity...)

Reading Augustine is much more valuable than reading about Augustine. The thing that struck me most strongly was that Augustine replied primarily on the scriptures, rather than any church tradition, for the formulation of his arguments. Some of his hermeneutical methodology would be suspect for most modern exegetes of scripture, but he was a man of the book. His trinitarian expositions were filled with minute linguistic slicing and dicing on the exact phraseology used in scripture. Augustine was a wonderful champion of orthodoxy, and as we all are, a man of his time. I very much enjoyed reading this work and thinking through his methodology and conclusions.

An indispensable guide to perhaps the deepest mystery of the Christian faith. Dense, closely reasoned, brilliant, mind blowing - yah, typical Augustine :)

"De Trinitate" is, alongside "The City of God", the bedrock of Western theology/ philosophy. Every thinker who is concerned with the tradition has to respond to Augustine in so many ways. This is a more mature, focused work (generally speaking) that has wide ranging implications. Here he talks about God, the nature of man, the nature of sin, knowledge, and more. He's not in dialogue, per se, with Aristotle and Plato but he clearly uses them. I always grew up thinking Augustine was heavily influenced by Plato, and while that is true, Aristotle is a much more noticeable influence in this text than I was prepared for.

As a work of scriptural exegesis, 'De Trinitate" was superb. The first half is almost entirely devoted to showing the basics of the Trinity (and the necessary distinctions that follow) and it was the best treatment of the topic I've read. In typical Augustine style, the text isn't some amazing read but it was lucid and brilliant in its analysis. Some early Church conflicts around who the Son is, who the Father is, their proper relationship, and the role of the Holy Spirit are all tightly analyzed. While I personally don't care about the issue, Augustine also comes down quite firmly as pro on the Filioque debate even if he's, obviously, unconcerned with the issue as such. There are a few digressions but nothing that really takes away from the first half. It's brilliant and not much to say.

The second half of the work, however, is a little more uncontrolled. This time, Augustine tries to demonstrate the ability to "know" or rather to understand the trinity through different ways. He goes through different methods and discards them until he finally settles on the human mind of understanding, knowledge, and will. This is a bit of a tentative summary, however, as I didn't fully understand this section. The text is much more loose and while Augustine is as brilliant as ever, it's difficult to really pay attention. There are discourses on knowledge, love, scripture, and even language. There are traces of thinkers like Heidegger in this part of the text that I found really interesting.

The notes offered by the editor of the text, a Presbyterian theologian, were erudite and he did an excellent job offering an analysis of more difficult parts of the text. Unfortunately, and like Cyril's commentary on St. Luke, the publisher had an abundance of easily fixable editorial mistakes. Think weird capitalization, sentences without a period, and every single section actually ended without a period. Not as bad as St. Cyril's text but still a little annoying.

I started reading this book a couple years ago, but ended up putting down after a while. Surprisingly, it's the first Augustine book that didn't really grab my attention. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood. I'll have to pick it up again later sometime.