50. Trin. 15.7.11 (CCL 50A:475); trans. McKenna, FOTC 45:465.
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.
This grammar of divine simplicity shapes the argument of Book 15. In Books 8 to 14, Augustine explored possible vestiges of the Trinity within human consciousness. Here Augustine deconstructs this quest, insisting that psychological analogies do not, in the end, work because any Trinitarian unities within human consciousness do not accurately mirror the intricate paradox of divine simplicity. From On the Trinity, Book 15:
(22.42) This [difference between ourselves and God] can be expressed briefly: I remember, I understand, I love—I who am neither my memory nor my understanding nor my love, but I have these. Such things could be said, therefore, by one person who has these three and is not himself these three. But in the simplicity of that highest nature, which God is, although there is one God, yet there are three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
(23.43) The reality of the Trinity itself is one thing, the image of that Trinity in something other is very different. . . . The inseparability within that highest Trinity, which incomparably surpasses all other realities, is so great that it defies comparison. A trinity of three human beings cannot be called one human being, yet the Trinity is such that it is both called and is the one God; and that Trinity is not in the one God; it is the one God. Once again, this image in the human being who has these three [that is, memory, understanding, love] is just one person; the Trinity, on the other hand, is these three Persons, the Father of the Son, the Son of the Father, and the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. In ourselves as the image of the Trinity, human memory (particularly as distinct from what beasts have, that is, containing intelligible realities not brought into it through the body's senses) has a likeness, yet incomparably inferior, yet nonetheless some kind of likeness to the Father; in the same way, human understanding, which is formed from the memory by the effort of thought when what is known is spoken—it is the tongue of the heart and belongs to no language—has some sort of likeness, in all its great disparity, to the Son; and human love, which proceeds from knowledge and combines memory and understanding as though common to parent and offspring—from which it is understood to be neither parent nor offspring—has in this image some likeness, though a strongly unequal one, to the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, in terms of an image of the Trinity, these three are not the one person, but belong to one person. But in the highest Trinity itself, whose image we are, those three are not of one God; they are the one God, and there are three Persons, not one.
And what is indeed wonderfully ineffable, or ineffably wonderful, is that, although this image of the Trinity is one person, while there are three Persons in the highest Trinity itself, yet this Trinity of three Persons is more inseparable than that trinity in the one person. For this Trinity by the nature of its divinity—or it may be better to call it the "Godhead"—what it is is mu-