Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings (continued)
INTRODUCTION
Image of the Trinity
In his book On the Trinity Augustine worked out the theology of that Trinitarian God of whom his religious experience had made him increasingly conscious. First there had been the experience of Truth and then there came the experiential knowledge of God through love. This experience of love was an experience of the Spirit but also of the entire Trinity.
Because he studied the Trinity in the cultural climate of the Arian claim of the Son's inequality with the Father, Augustine's Trinitarian theory, unlike that of the Greek Fathers, stressed the unity of the Divine Substance rather than the distinction of the Divine Persons. He spoke of the Trinity as one single divine Nature subsisting in three Persons having the same nature. At first the Greek Fathers had used the word "God" only of the Father whereas for Augustine "God" signified the Godhead, referring implicitly to all the Persons. He attributed to all three Persons indistinctly all external divine activities, but some divine actions were appropriated to each divine Person, whereas the Greek Fathers tended to emphasize the distinct role of each Person in a community of action.
The divine unity was safeguarded by the status of the Persons as mutual relations of the Divine Essence itself. Unlike Aristotelian accidents, the relations do not add perfections to God but constitute something beyond the perfection of the essence alone. In later theology they were called "subsistent relations." This means that to be the Divine Being is to be related as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are related.
Although Augustine learned much about the Trinity from Gregory Nazianzen, Hilary of Poitier, Ambrose, and other Fathers of the Church, his understanding of the Trinity as "imaged" in the human soul was truly original. And since the Trinity is central to Augustinian spirituality, this spirituality can be distinguished rather sharply from that of the Greek Fathers, who studied directly the Mystery of God in Christ.?! The influence of his later reading of the Greek Fathers led Augustine to deal more fully with the divine relations within the Trinity itself. But he was fascinated with the mystery of the human self, which he tried to fathom in the light of the Trinity. This reflexive and anthropo-
21. Bouyer, Spirituality, pp. 467-94.