Augustine in His Own Words
On the Trinity 285
Now insofar as He is the Son, He receives being from the Father, whereas the Father does not receive it from Him. And it was from the Father that the Son, in His ineffable mercy and in His ordering of salvation history, took on becoming a human being, mutable, a created being destined for a more perfect transformation. Many statements are found in the Scriptures concerning the Son, but they have been put in such a way as to occasion error in the ungodly minds of heretics who want to teach before they understand, leading them to believe that the Son is not equal to the Father nor of the same substance. Some examples are these: "For the Father is greater than I" (Jn 14:28); and "The head of the woman is the man, and the head of the man is Christ, but the head of Christ is God" (1 Cor 11:3); and "Then [the Son] Himself will also be made subject to the One who has subjected all things to Him" (1 Cor 15:28); and "I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God" (Jn 20:17). There are other similar statements, but not one of them was made to indicate an inequality of nature and substance. Otherwise, these other statements would not be true: "I and the Father are one" (Jn 10:30); and "The one who sees me sees also the Father" (Jn 14:9); and "The Word was God" (for He was not made) "since all things have been made through Him" (Jn 1:1,3); and "He did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped" (Phil 2:6); and so on. The first texts were composed partly because of the economy of [Christ's] assuming the human, about which it is said that "He emptied Himself" (Phil 2:7). This does not mean that Divine Wisdom, being absolutely unchangeable, has undergone change, but that He chose to reveal Himself to humankind in such a humble manner. So these declarations, which the heretics falsely interpret, were written down partly because of the economy of salvation and partly to show that what the Son Himself is, He owes to the Father; in fact, He also owes it to the Father that He is equal to and like the Father Himself. The Father, on the contrary, owes nothing of what He is to anyone.26
The Trinity Within: First Explorations
Augustine believed that if God is truly Trinity, then human beings, who, according to Genesis 1:26, are made in God's image, should themselves be Trinitarian in some way. In the final book of Confessions, Augustine suggests that in the depths of human consciousness, a Trinitarian dynamism can be uncovered. This passage offers a first, terse glimpse of a direction that Augustine would explore at length and with great originality in Books 8–15 of On the Trinity. From Confessions, Book 13:
26. De fide et symbolo 9.18 (CSEL 41:20–22); my trans., based on Russell, FOTC 27:334–36.