Augustine in His Own Words
On the Trinity 309 can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). If the last day of this life finds anyone progressing and growing, holding fast to the faith of the Mediator, then one will be received by the holy angels in order that one may be brought to the God whom one has worshiped and by whom one is to be brought to perfection, and at the end of the world one will receive an incorruptible body not for punishment but for glory. For our likeness to God in this image will be perfect when our vision of God is perfect. The Apostle Paul says of this vision: "We now see through a mirror in an obscure manner, but then face-to-face" (1 Cor 13:2). He likewise says: "But we, beholding the glory of the Lord with face unveiled, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as through the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:18). This is what takes place in those who are making progress steadily, day by day.48
The Trinity Who God Is
One finds in textbooks certain glib contrasts between Greek and Latin Trinitarian theologies. The Greek East supposedly begins with the three Persons and struggles to locate God's unity, while the Latin West begins with the divine unity and struggles to locate the distinctiveness of the three Persons. In such textbooks, Augustine is described as the paradigm and source of this Western approach. Recent scholarship has debunked this. As Lewis Ayres has noted, "the charge that Augustine's theology describes the divine essence as prior to the divine persons, or as the source of the persons, is unwarranted. In fact, he consistently and specifically rules out any such account of the divine essence. . . . Using the grammar of divine simplicity, Augustine argues that we should beware of speaking about a substance in which the three persons are 'contained': there is nothing but the three co-eternal and consubstantial persons."49 For example, Augustine notes in On the Trinity, Book 15:
(7.11) But that Trinity that the mind is an image of is nothing else in its totality than God, nothing else in its totality than Trinity. Nor does anything belong to the nature of God that does not belong to the Trinity; and the three Persons are of one essence, but not as each individual human being is one person.50
48. Trin. 14.8.11–17.23 (CCL 50A:435–55); my trans., based on McKenna, FOTC 45:417–45. 49. Lewis Ayres, "The Fundamental Grammar of Augustine's Trinitarian Theology," in Dodaro and Lawless, eds., Augustine and His Critics, 68.
50. Trin. 15.7.11 (CCL 50A:475); trans. McKenna, FOTC 45:465.