in 1274, the Latin fathers were to be translated into Greek so that the eastern Church could

in 1274, the Latin fathers were to be translated into Greek so that the eastern Church could

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East dare to soil the saint's reputation by including him among those who reject both the gospel and the teaching of the Church's ecumenical councils.!* That Photius was willing to go to such lengths to defend the sanctity of a saint that he appears to have never read offers a clear testimony of two overlapping concerns: (1) he knew the importance of Augustine to the western Church; and (2) he felt that it was critical to retain Augustine among the canon of Orthodox fathers. The elaborate excuses Photius offered in defense of Augustine were ultimately designed to protect the dignity of Augustine and to retain him as an authority for the Orthodox.

In short, Photius' defense of Augustine suggests that he remained well respected, if rarely read, in ninth-century Byzantium.

In the later part of the thirteenth century, more than eight hundred years after his death, Augustine's De Trinitate was, for the first time, translated into Greek as part of the wide-ranging pro-union agenda of the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos.'? The translation was conducted by Maximus Planoudes in a complex and highly charged theological environment. This translation was subsequently employed by some of the most prominent members of the Byzantine Church, including Gregory

Following Planoudes' translation of De Trinitate, other works ofAugustine appeared in Greek. The fourteenth-century brothers, Demetrios and Prochoros Kydones, translated several texts into Greek—the latter having better fortune than his brother in avoiding pseudonymous works. A list of these translations have been provided in recent essays by Aidan Nichols

'8Photius, Ep. 291.245f. Photii Patriarchae Constantinopolitani Epistulae etAmphilochia, vol. 3, ed. B. Laourdas and L.G. Westerink (Leipzig: BSB G.G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft,

assumed the throne of the Empire of Nicaea in 1261 and of Byzantium (upon his successful capture of Constantinople) in 1263. He held that position until his death in 1282. As one of the stipulations for lasting union pronounced at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, the Latin fathers were to be translated into Greek so that the eastern Church could conform to the teachings of the West. See Aidan Nichols, "The Reception of St Augustine and his Work in the Byzantine-Slav Tradition," Angelicum 64 (1987): 443-44.

R. Flogaus, Theosis bei Palamas und Luther. Ein Beitrag zum 6kumenischen Gespréch (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997); and "Der heimliche Blick nach

Westen. Zur Rezeption von Augustins De trinitate durch Gregorios Palamas," Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen Byzantinistik 46 (1996): 275-97.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and Alfons Fiirst.?! The small circle of pro-western intellectuals in Constantinople certainly drew upon these texts as they sought to forge a theological bridge to the West in the final century of the Byzantine empire.

But they were not alone. Manuscripts of Planoudes' and the Kydoneses' translations survive on Mount Athos (never a hotbed of pro-unionist sentiment) and in Jerusalem. What is more, Mark of Ephesus, the fifteenthcentury leader of the anti-unionist cause, accepted the authority of Augustine at the Council of Florence (1438-39) and even quoted from his

Epistulae (Epistles), Soliloquiorum (Soliloquies), and De Trinitate during the debates on purgatory.?? Mark repeatedly referred to Augustine as 6 baKaptog Abyovotivos (Blessed Augustine) and concludes one lengthy collection of proof-texts (which included several references to Augustine) by noting that all of these statements were offered by teachers

(St6a0KdAo1) of the Church.?? That Mark openly accepted the authority of Augustine and, like Photius, deflected the possibility that his teachings could be used to endorse subsequent western errors?' is conclusive evidence that Augustine, the individual, remained an authority for leading members of the eastern Church until the end of the Byzantine empire.?°

?!Nichols, "The Reception of St Augustine," 444—45; and First, "Augustinus im Orient,"

?2For his use of Augustine's Ep. (Ep. 82 and 148), see Marci Epesii, "Oratio altera de igne Purgatorio," in Councilium Florentinum: Documenta et Scriptores, vol. 8, pars 2: De Purgatorio disputationes, ed. L. Petit and G. Hofmann (Rome: Pontificum Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1969), 76 (beginning at lines 18 and 27 respectively). For his use of the Sol.

(ch. 31), see his "Responsio quibusdam quaesitis Latinis," in op. cit., 110 (line 32)—11 (line 17).

And for his use of Trin. (14.19), see ibid., 113 (lines 4-17).

to the Greek acta, Mark believed that Augustine's corpus has been deliberately corrupted by western scribes. See Councilium Florentinum: Documenta et Scriptores, vol. 5, pars 2: Acta Sancti et oecumenici concilii Florentiae Habiti, ed. J. Gill (Rome: Pontificum Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1953), 259.

5]t should not go unnoticed that each of the three "Pillars of Orthodoxy" (Ss Photius, Gregory Palamas, and Mark of Ephesus) who are frequently promoted by modern opponents of engagement with the West embraced Augustine as an authoritative father of the Church. Photius did so by reputation alone; Palamas carefully extracted what he found useful from Trin.; and Mark took advantage of additional, more recently translated, materials in his campaigns against the innovations of the post-Augustinian West. rig | Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East

The Greek Church in the Ottoman Period Following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Christian East suffered a prolonged economic and intellectual decline.

During the same period, three distinct forces combined to inject a new level of western influence into the vacuum. The first was the Ottoman government's promotion of the Uniate Church, a measure designed to spread division among the Christian subjects of the empire. The second was the government's restrictions placed upon the printing of Orthodox materials."° These restrictions led to the establishment of Orthodox printing houses in the West, especially in Venice, where the majority of the Orthodox ecclesial books were printed for the first time. The third was the closing of most Orthodox schools, resulting in a migration of clerics to the Catholic seminaries in the West.?" Not surprisingly, the resulting interaction between Orthodox and Catholics produceda variety of results

(ranging from peaceful coexistence to open hostility) and led to fiercely ambivalent reactions to the West among those Orthodox communities that remained under Ottoman control.

For our purposes, it is worth noting that during this period the Byzantine translations of Augustine's works (as well as several pseudonymous texts attributed to him) continued to circulate, especially on Mount

Athos, the last great bastion of Orthodox identity and culture within the Ottoman territory. St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749-1809), an Athonite monk and prolific author, was perhaps the most significant theological mind from the Ottoman period, and his own ambivalence toward the West well characterizes the attitudes of many within the Greek Church of °Ecclesiastical printing was not completely prevented, but it was limited. For example, when the patriarch of Constantinople Cyril Loukaris attempted to opena print shop in the early seventeenth century, the Ottoman government had it closed. See H.A. Hodges' introduction in Unseen Warfare (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987), 41.

27We would like to acknowledge that the situation in Turkey is even more oppressive for the Orthodox community today than it was during the Ottoman period. The last

Orthodox seminary, the Halki School of Theology, was closed by the Turkish government in 1971 and remains at the center of an international dispute over the lack of religious freedom in Turkey. For more on the campaign to promote religious freedom in Turkey, visit the website of the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, www.archons.org.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE his time.?* For this reason, it is all the more important to see the extent to which Nicodemus embraced Augustine.

In 1799, Nicodemus edited and published Demetrios Kydones' translation ofAugustine's Soliloquiorum, which had been circulating under the title Monologia.*? Perhaps more significantly, he included Augustine's name among the saints to be commemorated on June 15, when he completed his monumental revision of the Synaxarion (a calendar of saints' feastdays) between 1805 and 1807 (published for the first time in Venice,

1819 ).°° Following Nicodemus' lead, the Russian Church added Augustine to their own Synaxarion later that century.*! These Synaxaria remain in use today. Although Nicodemus did not offer a vita or publish hymns for liturgical veneration, the latter was produced by Fr Ambrose Pogdin of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1955.2?

When Nicodemus compiled the Pedalion (Rudder), the first printed collection of Orthodox canon law, in 1793, he added a fascinating footnote

?8Although he translated and appropriated many contemporary western texts (including his famous Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises), Nicodemus remained openly critical of western errors. He wrote, "[w]e must hate and detest the misbeliefs and unlawful customs of the Latins and others who are Heterodox; but if they have anything sound and confirmed by the Canons of the Holy Synods, these we must not hate." Cited by George

Bebis in his introduction to Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain:

A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 26. For more on Nicodemus' appropriation of western writers, see Hodges, Unseen Warfare, 41-56. See also Bebis, Nicodemus, 14-15 and 26-30.

original printing was done in Constantinople with the title "Emitoy ék TOV TPOPYtavaKktosaPittkOv yarp@v. We would like to thank Fr Maximus Constas, the librarian of the monastery of Simonopetra (Mount Athos), who informed us of this and other holdings in Simonopetra's library. Also of note is the so-called Kekragarion, which was translated by Eugenios Voulgaris (1716-1806). Of this, the library at Simonopetra has five editions (Leipzig, 1804; Moscow, 1824; Athens, 1910 [edited by St Nektarios]; Thessaloniki,

1973; and Athens, 2002).

added hundreds of names to the existing Synaxarion, the great majority of which were the "neo" martyrs of the Ottoman period.

Rose, The Place of the Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church, rev. ed.

(Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1996), 78.

the appendix to Rose, The Place of the Blessed Augustine, 117-38. For an excellent discussion of the liturgical commemoration of Augustine in the Christian East, see Peter

Galadza, "The Liturgical Commemoration of Augustine in the Orthodox Church: An Ambiguous Lex Orandi for an Ambiguous Lex Credendi, SVTQ 52.1 (2008): 111-30. rig | Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East to canon 81 of the Council of Carthage. He observed that in North Africa at that time was "St Augustine, that wonderful man ... who was so great a theologian of the Church, ..

. [and whose writings] were preserved despite the fact that thereafter they were garbled by heretics. That is why Orthodox Easterners do not accept them in toto and as a matter of course, but only whatever agrees with the common consensus of the catholic

Church.'?? Note that Nicodemus, like Photius and Mark of Ephesus, did not attribute the possible errors in Augustine's corpus to the saint himself, but rather presumed that any errors that they contained had been inserted by others. Nevertheless, unlike Photius or Mark, Nicodemus seems to have had a personal knowledge of the actual "errors" and therefore cautions his reader that the Church does not endorse the entire corpus. By the end of the nineteenth century, Orthodox theologians would begin to identify specifically what it was that they found to be unacceptable in the Augustinian corpus.

Tsarist Russia Students of early-modern European history know well the attempts of Peter I (1672-1725) and Catherine II (1729-1796) to modernize (i.e., westernize) Russia. One important aspect of their program was the creation of an educational system that was designed to establish and sustain a submissive and patriotic populace that would, in turn, fuel the desired modernization.*' For our purposes, it is important to note that these educational reforms included the creation of the first unified seminary system in the Orthodox world. In part, because Peter and Catherine's priority for these seminaries was to train an elite bureaucratic corps (rather than an educated priesthood) and, in part, because they saw the seminary program as a means to further other pro-western agendas, these schools

Rudder, trans. D. Cummings (Chicago: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1983), 652.

Black, Citizens for the Fatherland: Education, Educators, and Pedagogical Ideals in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East twentieth century: theological epistemology, sin and grace, and trinitarian theology.*?

For the most part, however, the Russian intellectual response to Augustine was a generous critical engagement.*° The middle of the nineteenth century saw the first systematic attempt to translate patristic texts into Russian. Of significance is the translation of the entire corpus of Augustine's works, which was completed between 1879 and 1895. Paralleling this translation project were twelve distinct studies of Augustine that were published in Russia between 1870 and 1914.1!

Russian Sophiology One of the most sustained theological engagements with Augustine occurs in the work of Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944).'? Bulgakov focused on two theological themes: Augustine's teachings on sin and grace and his trinitarian theology. The latter was already a focus of some discussion in Byzantine theology because of the filioque controversy, but there is a lack of any sustained discussion of the former prior to Nicodemus. It may well be that the central role ofAugustine's understanding of sin and grace in post-reformation debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics may have contributed to turning the attention of the Orthodox to this aspect of Augustine's theology.'? Much of Bulgakov's

a good overview of the reception of Augustine in Russia, see Tataryn, Augustine and Russian Orthodoxy.

4m fact, the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia (St. Petersburg, 1900), 108, asserted that "the teaching of Augustine can be accepted as the image of true Orthodox Christian teaching."

"!Tataryn, Augustine and Russian Orthodoxy, 15.

"For a general overview of contemporary Orthodox theology, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, "Orthodox Theology," in Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Mili¢é Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav

Pelikan, Lukas Vischer, eds.; Geoffrey W. Bromiley, English-language ed.; David B. Barnett, statistical ed., Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol.

5 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 414-18.

Although the Russian intellectual response to Augustine was generous, his understanding of sin and grace was generally criticized. See Tataryn, Augustine and Russian

Orthodoxy, 22-24, 81-84, 107-16.

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East not the most influential form of Orthodox theology both within and outside Orthodox intellectual circles. The Russian Orthodox diaspora would give birth to an alternative vision for Orthodox theology that Georges

Florovsky (1893-1979) coined as a "neo-patristic synthesis," one that, at least in its initial phases, would self-identify itself against Russian sophiology. This neo-patristic school of Orthodox theology can also be seen as "neo-Palamite" because of its emphasis on apophatic theology and the essence/energies distinction, i.e., the notion that even though God's essence is incomprehensible, humans were created for deification, which is given througha participation in the divine energies, which are fully God.

Together with Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958), a Russian émigré to Paris, would become one of the most influential representatives of this neo-patristic school.°' Though he was far from being a Slavophile,

Lossky echoed their understanding of the causes of division within Christianity in terms of a western rationalization of theology versus an eastern emphasis on a knowledge of God as mystical experience. For Lossky, the culprit of this rationalization of theology was not so much Augustine as it was Aquinas and, more specifically, the modern interpreters of Aquinas.

The failure of scholasticism, for Lossky, was its misinterpretation of Dionysian apophaticism, which would lead to the western rejection of the essence/energies distinction and the understanding of grace as created.

The essence/energies distinction, Lossky would argue, is rooted in the affirmation of the realism of divine-human communion, i.e., that God is so as to allow for a communion with what is not God (creation). Put another way, the only way to adequately conceptualize theosis (deification) is through the antinomic distinction between God's essence and God's energies, even if such a distinction is judged nonsensical by certain philosophical criteria. The rationalization of theology by scholasticism obfuscates the truth of human existence as created for union with God by affirming a propositional notion of truth, thus constructing idols out of human concepts, and by attempting to justify Christian beliefs in philo- °'For Lossky's theology, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East phy to examine the essence of God" and employs "certain philosophical systems in order to understand the dogma of the Holy Trinity? As a result of his theological method, which gives understanding to faith,

Augustine interpreted the God-world relation in terms of the philosophical category of divine essence and, thus, mistakenly identified God's being with God's activity. This identification laid the foundation for the scholastic conceptualization of God in terms of esse, which affirms that God's essence is God's existence:

St Augustine himself does not appear to have accepted this (essence/ energies) distinction. Speaking about the procession of the Holy

Spirit, he makes a clear confusion between essence and energy in God.

This identification of essence and energy in the West led Western theologians to articulate the thought that God is "pure energy." The articulation of the above thought is also due to other philosophical presuppostions of Augustine, such as his faith concerning knowledge of the essence of God.°° This identification, however, makes theosis impossible and accounts for why, "[i]n the theological tradition of the Franks, beginning with Augustine, there is no doctrine of deification."®! The absence of the essence/energies distinction means, according to Romanides, that there can be no bridge between two ontological others, God and creation. The latter can only relate to God through the created effects of God's activity, ie., created grace; precluded is any real union with God, i.e., uncreated grace, which is what is necessary for salvation from death. Romanides essentially extends Lossky's critique of scholasticism back to Augustine, to whom he attributes its foundations." Although Florovsky also admit- *"Tbid., 37 and 39. lbid., 5.

the most sophisticated philosophical defense (much more developed than Romanides') of the position that Augustine's rejection of the essence/energies distinction is the source of the theological differences between East and West, and for a good overview of the contemporary debate on the essence/energies distinction, see David Bradshaw, ArisORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ted that Augustine rejected the essence/energies distinction, Romanides went beyond Florovsky in labeling Augustine's thought as the source for subsequent western theological errors. One could say that for Romanides, the theological schism begins with Augustine, and he would not agree with Florovsky's referring to Augustine as a "Universal Father of the Church."

Romanides' 1957 doctoral dissertation, T6 IIpozatomikov 'Apudaptnwa (The Ancestral Sin) was the first systematic attempt to compare Augustine's doctrine of grace, free will, and predestination to the firstand second-century Orthodox writers (mostly Greek) who had written on the same topic.°* Despite the many criticisms of Augustine's teaching on original sin, human freedom, and predestination by earlier Russian theologians, no one, prior to Romanides, had offered a textual comparison of Augustine and the Orthodox fathers on these points. That modern scholars almost universally hold Augustine's views on these matters to have been so innovative among the church fathers is a testament to Romanides' ground-breaking work. For example, Romanides distinguished between the ancient Church's idea of an "ancestral sin" and Augustine's concept of an "original sin."** Although Romanides' assessment of Augustine's position was not especially systematic, we can now see that Augustine's teaching on original sin came to comprise five principal tenets: (1) the actual sin of Adam, as well as its punishment, was inherited; (2) the post-lapsarian condition left every dimension of the human person subject to sin; (3) original sin was transmitted from parent to offspring through the concupiscence associated with procreation; (4) the infant soul was guilty; and (5) salvation required baptism even for infants.°° totle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004), 263-77. For a less persuasive defense of the Romanides thesis, see Michael Azkoul, The Influence ofAugustine ofHippo on the Orthodox Church (Lewiston, NY:

The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991). Azkoul wonders whether it might be better to call Augustine "an outlaw" (265).

addition to biblical authors, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons feature prominently in the text.

Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, trans. G. Gabriel (Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr Publishing, 1998), 155-75.

scholarly output on this subject is endless. For a concise overview of Augustine's Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East

With few exceptions, Romanides' study does not engage eastern texts later than the third century. Nor does it deal with the historical circumstances of the Pelagian controversy, which had prompted Augustine's advanced thinking on the subject. Throughout the controversy, Augustine's aim had been to counter an inflated optimism that he believed would lead to arrogance anda failure to appreciate God's generous gifts.

But these positions were vehemently critiqued by Pelagius' supporters, such as Julian of Eclanum, and they remained unique within the Christian tradition to that point. Even by 600, leading theologians in the West continued to advocate a soteriology that was more consistent with that of Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and John Chrysostom than that of Augustine.°° With the exception of the fifth tenet ofAugustine's teaching (salvation required baptism), most eastern writers of the patristic period would not have shared Augustine's teachings on original sin.°7

Following Romanides' thesis to a more exhaustive conclusion, we are now able see that the eastern fathers of the late fourth century believed that the fall brought corruption to humanity and inaugurated a cycle of death, but they did not believe (as Augustine, at the end of his life, had) that the post-lapsarian human condition prevented the possibility of human participation in the process of salvation. For example, the ascetically inclined Cappadocians consistently taught that salvation required acts of almsgiving, fasting, and worship.®* Through ascetic discipline and active participation in the sacramental life of the Church,

Christians united their own efforts to God's grace-filled economy—the teaching, see Paul Rigby, "Original Sin," in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed.

A. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 607-14.

George Demacopoulos, "The Soteriology of Pope Gregory I: A Case against the Augustinian Interpretation," The American Benedictine Review 54 (2003): 313-28; and Five

Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 100-105.

had carefully distinguished between the Augustinian "original" sin and the Orthodox teaching of the "ancestral" sin, which implied that whereas Adam alone was guilty, each of Adam's descendents shared in the punishment—namely death.

for example, Basil's various ascetic treatises, such as the Moralia and Regulae fusius tractate (Longer Rules) (PG 31), or Gregory Nazianzen's Orations 11, 14, and 32 (SC 405,

PG 35, and SC 318, respectively).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Augustinian/Pelagian dichotomy between grace and free will was simply not part of the Cappadocians theological imagination. The same was also true of Augustine's teaching on predestination, which even the western

Church did not accept at the pivotal Second Council of Orange in 529.

And yet despite the appeal of his basic thesis (i.e., that Augustine's anthropology was not consistent with the eastern tradition before or after), by today's academic standards, Romanides' study is somewhat superficial and anachronistic. For example, although there is plenty of textual evidence for his treatment of biblical and eastern authors, Romanides' work has very little engagement with Augustine's actual writings. Footnotes rarely point to specific passages in Augustine's corpus, and when they do there are frequent mistakes and/or false attributions.°? Moreover, like

Florovsky, Romanides read the Augustinian material on grace and free will through the lens of the fourteenth-century Palamite distinction between God's essence and his energies. As more than one of the speakers at the Orthodox Readings of Augustine conference noted during the discussion,

Romanides essentially accused Augustine of being a poor hesychast.

Through this and subsequent writings, Romanides inaugurated a movement in Greek theological circles to expunge the well-established

Roman Catholic and Protestant academic perspectives that prevailed in the Greek universities of his day." One can read much of Romanides' historical work as a post-colonial search for an authentic Orthodox identity in the midst of what he took to be a poisonous western influence in the theological academies of the Christian East."' Romanides was, of course,

would like to acknowledge Jason Stevens, a doctoral student at Fordham, who identified the latter point.

70Another important example of Romanides' criticisms of western innovation in the early middle ages is a collection of his public talks, entitled Franks, Romans, Feudalism and Doctrine (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981). Here too, he attacks Augustine specifically. See 53, 72-90.

71Romanides was especially critical of the two main dogmatic theologians in Greece in the twentieth century, Christos Androutsos and Panayiotis Trembelas, for falling under western influence. As a result, his The Ancestral Sin was an indirect attack against the leading twentieth-century theologians in Greece, which prompted a negative reaction to his dissertation. For more on the debate The Ancestral Sin caused in Greece, see Yannaras,

Orthodoxy and the West, 275-78.

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East not the only Orthodox writer of the twentieth century to point to Augustine as the cause for most of what went wrong with the West in the middle ages, but it was his work that first articulated and likely informed the sentiments espoused by later authors, including Christos Yannaras (b.

1935) and John Zizioulas (b. 1931).

Yannaras would agree with Romanides that Augustine's rejection of the essence/energies distinction was the beginning of the emergence of a distinct western theological and cultural ethos, but he would amplify this claim by arguing that the sources of the absence of this distinction lie in Augustine's rejection of apophaticism. The problems of the West do not begin with the misinterpretation of Dionysius, as Lossky had claimed of the scholastics, but with Augustine's rejection of apophaticism: "The first heretical differentiation which not merely survives historically, but has transformed radically the course ofhuman history is one which denies the fundamental presupposition of orthodoxy, the apophaticism of truth ...

Augustine is surely the first great stage in the theoretical foundation of the rejection of apophaticism.''? Elsewhere Yannaras adds, "Augustine's theology was decisive, offering an ideal basis for a differentiated Western version of Christianity'? Following Lossky, apophaticism for Yannaras is not simply defining God in terms of what God is not, but the affirmation that true knowledge of God occurs in mystical union with God.

Although apophaticism does assert the incomprehensibility of God's essence, it does not deny that God is known. Apophaticism points to a limit in the adequacy of human conceptualization of God not to silence theology, but to indicate that true knowledge of God is an ekstatic going beyond human reason in the experience of mystical union. The logic of divine-human communion, theosis, thus demands an apophatic method in theology, in the sense that it asserts the incomprehensibility of the divine essence; but this incomprehensibility implies that knowledge of God lies beyond reason in an ekstatic movement of participation in the divine energies.

72Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. K. Schram (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 154-55.

7°Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 16.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Yannaras follows Romanides in identifying Augustine's fatal flaw as understanding knowledge of God as an intellectual activity, which caused him to prioritize the essence of God and reject the notion of the divine energies. Augustine ultimately attempted to weld together philosophical notions of the divine essence to the tenets of Christian faith and, in so doing, allowed the content of Christian faith to be determined by the logic of philosophical rationalism. The rationalization of theology by Augustine would be a fateful move that would determine western thinking about God, through Descartes and, ultimately, ending in the atheistic nihilism of Nietzsche:

Hence, the proclamation of the "death of God" is revealed as the historical outcome that makes clear the whole theological development of Western Christianity. The replacement of ecclesial experience with intellectual certainty prepares for rational argument over this certainty. Rationalism, freed from the metaphysical guarantees provided by scholasticism, assumes the role of the historical preparation for the dominance of an empiricism centred on the individual. And an empiricism centred on the individual is the "open door" at which nihilism reappears."4

Like Romanides, Yannaras argues that Augustine instituted a way of thinking that would define a western cultural ethos that is diametrically opposed to that formed within the Byzantine East.

Theologically, one could summarize the critique of both Romanides and Yannaras of Augustine in one word: distance. What both see occurring in Augustine is the foundation for a theological method that would ultimately deny theosis, the realism of divine-human communion, and reinforce a distance between the God-world relation in terms of a propositional understanding of theological knowledge, an understanding of 74Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, ed. with introduction Andrew Louth, trans. H. Ventis (New York: T&T Clark International,

2005; orig. pub. 1967), 46. For an account of how this historical trajectory begins with Augustine, see 21-37.

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East grace as "created" and, hence,a legalistic, Anselmian understanding of salvation. The question must be raised, however, whether Romanides and Yannaras were judging Augustine anachronistically through a hesychastic framework. It might also appear that they were injecting neo-scholasticmanual understandings of theological epistemology and salvation, albeit in their filtered, imitative Greek form, into Augustine.

Of the new generation of Greek theologians, the most influential both within and outside Orthodoxy has been John Zizioulas.'° Zizioulas follows Romanides and Yannaras in attributing to Augustine's thought the basis for theological errors in the West. Surprisingly, however,

Zizioulas does not locate Augustine's mistakes in a rejection of apophaticism or the essence/energies distinction. In fact, even though

Zizioulas would identify his theology as a response to the call for a neopatristic synthesis (Florovsky was his teacher), his own version of such a synthesis is distinctively non-Palamite: apophaticism and the essence/ energies distinction do not play a central role in Zizioulas' theology.'°

Instead, the problem with Augustine is his trinitarian theology, specifically his prioritizing the essence of God over the trinitarian hypostases:

"There can be no doubt that Augustine makes otherness secondary to unity in God's being. God is one and relates as three. There is an ontological priority of substance over against personal relations in God in Augustine's Trinitarian theology.''"" For Zizioulas, Augustine's trinitarian theology is based on a substance ontology that attempts to understand how the one God can be Trinity, and which has affinities with the substance ontology of the ancient Greeks. It is because of Augustine that dogmatic manuals in the West always began with a consideration of the one God, the God of philosophy, before discussing the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

influence, including his interpretation of western trinitarian theology, particularly that of Augustine, is evident in Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); and Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991).

7°For more on why, see Papanikolaou, Being with God, 106-27.

77Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 33.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Zizioulas contrasts such an approach to the Trinity with that of the Cappadocians, whose trinitarian theology initiated a "revolution in Greek philosophy.''® The revolution in ontology consists primarily in prioritizing personhood over substance; such an identification means that being is identified with relationality, particularity, otherness, and communion.

Augustine's attempt to justify philosophically how the one essence of God can be three betrays the ontological implications of the Cappadocian trinitarian theology. These implications include an understanding of personhood as freedom and uniqueness that is constituted in relations of communion. In contrast to this trinitarian understanding of personhood,

Augustine lays the foundation for a definition of personhood in terms of self-consciousness, which is ultimately individualistic and solipsistic.

Augustine's trinitarian theology, thus, represents a radical break with the Cappadocian approach, even if unintentional—and one that would have repercussions throughout the history of western philosophy."°

"The West" in the East What began in nineteenth-century Russia as a general rejection of the Augustinian understanding of sin and grace developed into a more sweeping condemnation of Augustine's theological method. In fact, his understanding of sin and grace is eventually attributed to his approach to theology. The common thread in the contemporary Orthodox critique of Augustine is the perception that Augustine prioritizes philosophy over theology. This particular critique, however, only began to take shape in the 78Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985), 36.

It should be noted that not all Orthodox theologians agree with this condemnation of Augustine's trinitarian theology. As we saw, Bulgakov certainly did not, but more recently, Dumitru Staniloae appropriates Augustine's "love analogy" in his own trinitarian theology. See his "The Holy Trinity: Structure of Supreme Love," in Theology and the Church, trans. R. Barringer (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1980), 73-108; also, The Experience of God, vol. 1, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, trans. I. loanita and R. Barringer (Brookline,

MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), esp. 245-80. Interestingly, Stanilaoe does not cite Augustine. For Stanilaoe, the source for the love analogy appears to be Pavel Florensky, whose work also was decisively influential for Bulgakov.

Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East generation of Greek theologians of the 1960s. For them, the prioritization of philosophy was evident in Augustine's attempt to understand Christian doctrines in terms of the Greek philosophical category of essence, which either prevented him from accepting the necessary essence/energies distinction and thus resulted in a denial of divine-human communion (Romanides/Yannaras), or led him to a trinitarian theology antithetical to the Cappadocian trinitarian ontology (Zizioulas). Either way, the result was the same: the foundation for a western Christian understanding of the God-world relation is legalistic and, thus, ultimately nominalistic; and as a consequence, it makes possible an Anselmian atonement theory of salvation rather than the eastern patristic notion of deification. Even the evils of a secularized, unfettered individualism have their roots in Augustine's Confessiones (Confessions). Prior to this generation of Greek theologians, Augustine's status as a father of the Orthodox

Church was never questioned, though aspects of his theology were critiqued, especially his understanding of sin and grace. The latter, however, first appears in the early nineteenth century primarily due to the central role of Augustine's theology in post-Reformation debates. Prior to the Reformation, eastern Christian concerns with Augustine's theology related entirely to his supposed endorsement of the filioque. These concerns, however, never led to the condemnation of the man or his work in the Byzantine period, and did not preclude the appropriation of his writings once they were translated.

It is illuminating that the unequivocal condemnation of Augustine by Orthodox theologians first appears in early nineteenth-century Russia in its Slavophile form and then reappears in the late 1950s among Greek theologians. In both situations, the anti-Augustine sentiment emerges together with a reaction against what is perceived to be western influences that are incompatible with the intellectual and spiritual tradition in Russia and Greece. The move towarda restoration of a more authentic national, intellectual, and spiritual identity in these Orthodox countries was based on a construction of a particular set of categories, namely "the West" and "the East," and an understanding of these categories in terms of diametrical opposition. Anything falling on one side of the divide was

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE judged as opposed to the other. Augustine, one could say, simply lived on the wrong side of the tracks. The contemporary Orthodox response to Augustine, coupled with an anachronistic emphasis on the essence/energies distinction as the hermeneutical key for interpreting an East/West dichotomy, may have as much to do with Orthodox identity formation vis-a-vis "the West" as it does with genuine theological differences.

The Conference The articles presented here offer for the first time an ecumenical engagement with the history of the reception of Augustine, both the man and his work, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Elizabeth Fisher illuminates with unprecedented clarity the context surrounding Planoudes' translation of Augustine's De Trinitate, while Reinhard Flogaus evinces convincingly that Gregory Palamas not only knew of this translation, but extracted from it lengthy quotations. Flogaus also shows how this appropriation of Augustine by Palamas has gone unnoticed in contemporary scholarship on Palamas and may have something to do with an inability on the part of eastern

Christian scholars to admit of any western influence on the person whose work is perceived to be the culmination of the eastern patristic tradition.

Not surprisingly, many of the essays in this volume tackle the problem of Augustine's trinitarian theology. Joseph Lienhard, SJ, traces the extent of Augustine's knowledge of the Cappadocians. David Bradshaw offers a sophisticated defense of the Romanides/Yannaras thesis that Augustine rejects the essence/energies distinction and, as a result, initiates a way of doing theology unknown in the East. Lewis Ayres challenges specifically the charge that Augustine's trinitarian theology begins with an identification of the one God with the divine essence. Though rejecting a Zizioulian interpretation of the Cappadocians, John Behr argues that the Augustinian approach to the doctrine of the Trinity is one that is not discernible in the eastern patristic texts of the fourth century. David Bentley

Hart disputes the diametrical opposition between Augustine and the eastern fathers established by contemporary Orthodox theologians, and Augustine and the Orthodox: "The West" in the East instead of arguing for how Augustine is continuous with the Greek fathers, evinces how the Cappadocians are closer to Augustine than previously imagined. Against the criticism that Augustine's understanding of God is non-apophatic, Jean-Luc Marion posits the thesis that Augustine's notion of "being" is analogous to that of Pseudo-Dionysius and, more forcefully than Lossky, situates Augustine in the Christian apophatic tradition rather than the Christian metaphysical tradition of the scholastics.

Brian Daley, SJ, is the sole author in this volume to explore Augustine's theology of sin and grace. Daley shows that though it cannot be determined to what extent Maximus the Confessor knew of Augustine's work, there are affinities between Augustine's and Maximus' soteriologies, implicitly questioning whether Augustine's soteriology in its entirety is mutually exclusive with the eastern Christian patristic tradition. Though the contemporary Orthodox theologians were united in rejecting Augustinian notions of sin and grace, it is worth noting that the same criticism is evident in twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologians such as Karl

Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Gustavo Gutiérrez.

Since Vatican IH, Augustine's view on sin and grace can no longer be isolated as a major point of dispute between the Orthodox and Roman

Catholic traditions.®° The essays of David Tracy, Andrew Louth, and Carol Harrison challenge Christians of all traditions to go beyond the usual suspects of Augustine's corpus, which include Confessiones, De Trinitate, and De civitate Dei

(City of God), and to look at ignored or forgotten aspects of Augustine's work, especially his sermons. Augustine "as pastor" does not mean Augustine has stopped being a theologian, and these unexamined works of Augustine's corpus may serve as a point of departure and point of unity for the Christian reassessment of the value of Augustine's thought. David

Tracy implicitly disputes the notion that Augustine is primarily a philosopher by showing how Augustine's sermons reveal a theocentricism that is informed by Augustine's affirmation of the divinity of Christ.

80See Roger Haight, "Sin and Grace," in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, ed. Francis Schiissler Fiorenza and John P. Glavin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991),

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE The title, Orthodox Readings ofAugustine, can be interpreted in several ways: it could indicate a reassessment of responses to Augustine by Orthodox theologians; or, it may refer to an attempt at readings of Augustine that illustrate his continuity with the dogmatic tradition shared by the Christian West and East. We hope this volume initiates a conversation that speaks to both these concerns. There can be no question that Augustine exercised an influence on western Christianity that is not discernible in the East. In fact, it is difficult to locate anyone in the East who was as influential as Augustine was in the West. In the East, the writings of one patristic writer were always read in the light of the other patristic texts. The language divide may have prevented Augustine from being read together with the Greek fathers, but there is nothing to prevent that from happening today.

Planoudes' De Trinitate, the Art of Translation, and the Beholder's Share —— ELIZABETH FISHER am doubly grateful for the opportunity to participate in this cooperative venture between the eastern and western Churches, and for the occasion to examine the translation into Greek of Augustine's De

Trinitate (On the Trinity) by Maximus Planoudes. This topic seems especially appropriate in the context of"Orthodox Readings of Augustine," for Josef Léssl has termed Planoudes' translation "the pioneering effort towards bridging the huge gap between Augustine's paramount role in the West and near oblivion in the East."!

My assessment of this "pioneering effort" will be from the standpoint of a philologist focusing upon Planoudes' role as a translator and upon the reception of his work by both Byzantine and western readers. I must note from the outset that neither my training nor my research qualifies me as a theologian. However, many other contributors to the present volume fill that important role.

It is generally agreed that Planoudes made his translation of the fifteen-book De Trinitate around the year 1280 in the context of strenuous measures taken by the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos

(1261-1282) to secure union with the western Church.? Ecclesiastical union was a contentious issue in Byzantium. Some Greeks supported uni- 'Josef Léssl, "Augustine in Byzantium," Journal ofEcclesiastical History 51 (2000): 275.

Rigotti, in Abyovotivov aepi Tpiddoc Bipria zevtexaidexa dmep &k Tic Aativav dwéxtov sig TV "EAAdSa petTiIVveyKe Maemtoc 6 HAavovdye, ed. Manolis Papathomopoulos et al. (Athens: Kentron Ekdoseds Ergon Hellénon Syngrapheon, 1995), liv.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ate measures, either recognizing union as a political necessity to maintain Byzantine control of Constantinople or regarding it as a desirable ideal for the Church. Most of Michael's subjects, however—monks, clergy, and laity alike—despised the idea of surrendering to what they considered foreign ideological/theological domination, famously summarized in the western filioque clause that specified the procession of the Holy Spirit.

In the theological debates between the eastern and western Churches, Augustine's De Trinitate had special merit. As a theological bridge to the East, Augustine's writings were attractive because the bishop ofHippo was eager to present his theology in accord with Greek patristic texts.* De

Trinitate was, however, little known in the East, although it was regarded in the West as basic to trinitarian theology.' The work admittedly presented exceptional difficulty for the reader, as Augustine himself acknowledged. While engaged in writing it, he complained that its fifteen books

"involve too much hard work and are understandable, in my opinion, to only a few."® Therefore, Michael's project to make Augustine's De Trinitate accessible to a Greek audience representeda significant challenge. The emperor needed a translator who was not only able to understand correctly the theological content and Latin syntax of Augustine's Latin text but who was also well trained in the artificial and archaizing "Attic" register of the Greek language that Byzantine readers considered appropriate to a serious workofliterature.° To appreciate the challenge faced by Michael VIII, it will be useful to examine briefly the tradition of Latin translation inherited in thirteenth-century Constantinople.

For a detailed examination of Augustine's use of Greek patristic authors, see Joseph Leinhard's contribution in this volume; see also Léssl, 268-71.

operosi sunt et a paucis eos intelligi posse arbitror." Augustine, Ep. 169.1.1. S.

Aureli Augustini Hipponiensis episcopi Epistulae, ed. Alois Goldbacher, CSEL 44 (Vienna: F.

a lucid description of the artificial "Attic" dialect favored in Byzantium, see Robert Browning, "The Language of Byzantine Literature," in The Past in Medieval and Modern

Greek Culture, ed. Speros Vryonis (Malibu: Undena Publications, 1978), 103-33 (repr. in Robert Browning, History, Language and Literature in the Byzantine World [Northampton,

England: Variorum Reprints, 1989], as XV [same pagination] ).

Planoudes' De Trinitate 4B For Byzantium, the Latin language was reserved exclusively for diplomatic and commercial contacts. Secure in the possession of their own rich

Greek cultural heritage, educated Byzantines saw no necessity to translate Latin literary texts surviving in a western culture they considered inferior; this prejudice began to erode only in the final decades of the thirteenth century.' Up until that time, translation was a matter of practical necessity, and translators in the chancery of the emperor and of the patriarch were functionaries who provided Latin translations to accompany Greek documents sent to western powers. The first evidence of such a dual-language document survives from the reign of Basil I in correspondence with Ludwig II (871); in the following century, an Arabic translation accompanied the correspondence of Romanos I Lecapenos with the caliphate of Baghdad (938). By the mid-twelfth century the activities of translators in the imperial chancery included not only providing written translations of documents but also interpreting for western diplomatic missions to Constantinople; their work was sufficiently complex and extensive to warrant the creation of a new chancery official, the péyacg Steppevevtyc, who supervised translation under the general purview of the AoyobEtNg tod dpouov.? Several translators served in the Latin translation office, both native speakers of Latin and of Greek; an accomplished Latin translator might also be borrowed from the imperial chancery by the patriarch. On occasion, the imperial chancery "outsourced" a document, as in the case of the Armenian translation provided by the monastery in Philippopolis.!° After 1204 the Laskarid empire of Nicaea continued these practices, as did Michael VIII in his Constantinopolitan chancery.'! Unlike his

Nicaean predecessors, however, Michael VIII emphasized relations with 7See Elizabeth A. Fisher, "Planoudes, Holobolos, and the Motivation for Translation,"

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 43 (2002): 77-104.

8Christian Gastgeber, "Die lateinische Ubersetzungsabteilung der byzantinischen Kaiserkanzlei unter den Komnenen und Angeloi," in Byzance et le Monde extérieur, ed.

Michel Balard, Elisabeth Malamut, Jean-Michel Speiser (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005), 121.

'OGastgeber, 107-11, 122.

"Luca Pieralli, "La corrispondenza diplomatica tra Roma e Costantinopoli nei secoli XIII e XIV,' in Byzance, 151-63.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE the West in his foreign policy and placed westerners in positions of responsibility within the Latin translation office.!

Michael VIII could therefore look to his own chancery for Latin translators, to the chancery of the patriarchate, or to reliable Latins or Byzantines competent in both Latin and Greek. Who, then, was not only available to accept Michael's commission but also competent to undertake the translation of so lengthy and difficult a text as Augustine's De

Trinitate? I know of only a handful of such individuals: John Parastron, Simon of Constantinople, Manuel Holobolos, Ogerius the Protonotarius, and Manuel (later Maximus) Planoudes.

In order to suggest how Manuel Planoudes, the youngest and least experienced of this group, became Michael's translator of De Trinitate, it is necessary to makea brief excursus into the complex ecclesiastical and political circumstances of the mid-thirteenth century.!*

When the Fourth Crusade expelled the "schismatic" Byzantines from their capital and installed a Latin king and a Latin patriarch, Constantinople fell under Latin domination. Under papal mandate, mission houses of Franciscans and Dominicans worked zealously to convert the Greeks of the East and restore them to union with the western Church. In 1259,

Michael Palaiologos assumed power at the exiled Byzantine court of Nicaea, and in 1261 his forces captured the city of Constantinople. Michael blinded John IV Laskaris (1258-1261), the legitimate heir to the throne, and as emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos (1261-1282) expelled the Latin king Baldwin II, the Latin patriarch, and the Latin monastic houses from the city. Although threatened from the east by the Ottoman Turks and from the north by the Slavs, Michael's greatest fear was of the ambitious and skillful politician Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies

(1266-1285). Michael's political enemies, Baldwin II and John IV Laskaris, joined Charles at his court and provided him with some pretext to legitiNicolas Oikonomides, "La chancellerie impériale de Byzance du 13e au 15¢ siécle,"

Revue des Etudes byzantines 43 (1985): 171-73, 193- '5For my discussion of this period and its complexities,I have relied upon the clear and concise narrative in the classic survey by A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, vol.

2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), 592-99, 656-63.

Planoudes' De Trinitate macy in his plans to overthrow Michael and restore Constantinople to Latin control. In such a climate, Michael VIII, no less adroit in politics than Charles, used the prospect of ecclesiastical union to solicit aid from Charles' enemies in the West and neutralize the threat from Sicily. He dispatched an embassy to Louis IX ("the Pious") of France in 1270 and opened discussions with Pope Gregory X (1271-1276) in 1272 to unify the eastern and western Churches. Michael ensured that the pro-union patriarch he installed would accept the terms for ecclesiastical union ratified at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and enforce the union harshly, exiling, imprisoning, and publicly humiliating those who opposed it, including members of his family, his court, and his military.'4

With the single exception of Planoudes, the known potential translators of Augustine's De Trinitate were each associated in some way with the contentious politics of Michael's reign.

John Parastron/Parastos was a Franciscan, born probably in the Latin kingdom of Constantinople and perhaps in the Greek/Venetian community.!° Although John Parastron's origins and early career are obscure,

Michael VIII commended him for his perfect fluency in Latin as well as in Greek and dispatched him as imperial envoy to Louis IX and to the papal court; he also served as a legate to the Second Council of Lyons and brought the signed union agreement back to Constantinople, where he participated in the public celebration of ecclesiastical union. No evidence suggests that he extended his expertise as an accomplished bilingual negotiator into the field of literary or even documentary translation during his diplomatic service to Michael. In any case, his death in 1275 removed John Parastron from the list of potential translators of De Trinitate.

VIII expressed his frustration over this situation in a detailed and confidential letter addressed to the messengers he dispatched in 1278 to Pope Nicholas III; see R.-J.

Loenertz, "Mémoire d'Ogier, protonotaire, pour Marco et Marchetto nonces de Michel VIII Paléologue aprés du pape Nicolas III (1278, printemps-été)," Orientalia Cristiana Periodica

'ST have relied for this account upon Gualberto Matteucci, La mission francescana di Costantinopoli, vol. 1 of La sua antica orgine e primi secoli di storia (1217-1555) (Florence:

Edizioni Studi francescani, 1971), 111-36.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Like John Parastron, Simon of Constantinople (c. 1235—c. 1325) was born probably in Constantinople, where he joined a western monastic order and lived at the Dominican monastery in the city until the community relocated to Negroponte after 1261. His fellow Dominican and student Philip of Pera described him as "steeped to an even greater degree in Greek learning than in Latin."!° In Negroponte, Simon was an active and energetic scholar. He consulted ancient manuscripts of patristic texts in the libraries of nearby Greek monasteries and conducteda lively but undated correspondence promoting ecclesiastical union with several notable Byzantine figures back in Constantinople, among them Michael

VIII's son and successor Andronikos II and Manuel Holobolos. Simon's language, citation of scholarly sources, and pattern of argumentation were impeccably Greek in style and design, although his theology was undeniably Latin. Like John Parastron, Simon of Constantinople does not seem to have translated Latin texts into Greek, although he had ample opportunity to do so during his long career; he died c. 1325 and would surely have qualified for any list of candidates capable of producing a Greek version of De Trinitate for Michael VIII.

Available within Michael's own imperial court circle was a highly qualified candidate for the commission to translate Augustine's De Trinitate,

Manuel Holobolos (1245-c. 1312). Although a talented and precocious scholar, Holobolos was combative by nature and undeterred by the drastic consequences of imperial displeasure. Because he vigorously protested

Michael VIII's mistreatment of John IV Laskaris, the angry emperor ordered Holobolos mutilated and confined to a monastery in 1261/62, where he translated two Latin rhetorical treatises of Boethius.'" Rehabilitated at the request of Patriarch Germanos III in 1265, Holobolos was lo', imbutus scientia graeca magis etiam quam Latina." For this discussion of Simon, I have followed Marie-Héléne Congourdeau, "Frére Simon le constantinopolitain, O.P. (1235?- 1325?)," Revue des Etudes byzantines 45 (1987): 165-74; Philip of Pera quoted on 165, n. 3.

'7For a discussion of Holobolos' translations, see Fisher, "Planoudes, Holobolos, and the Motivation for Translation," 77-104; and Bérje Bydén, "'Strangle Them with These

Meshes of Syllogisms!': Latin Philosophy in Greek Translations of the Thirteenth Century,"

Interaction and Isolation in Late Byzantine Culture, ed. J.O. Rosenqvist (Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2004), 137-46.

Planoudes' De Trinitate appointed professor of rhetoric in the patriarchal school, although he was only about twenty years old at the time.

In his official capacity as "rhetor of the rhetors,' Holobolos delivered public panegyrics for Michael VIII and may have been the clever writer who drafted the imperial letter of 1265 that proposed to the pope a discussion of ecclesiastical union.!? The period of his imperial favor, however, was brief. In 1273 Holobolos openly declared fervent opposition to the proposed Union of Lyons and found himself first exiled to a Bithynian monastery and then cast as the chief miscreant in a humiliating and disgusting procession through the streets of Constantinople."

In the 1270s the translation section of Michael VIII's imperial chancery included a westerner euphoniously known as Ogerius the Protonotarius or Ogerius Boccanegra, related to a prominent Genoese family.'! Pieralli traces the chancery career of Ogerius back to the Treaty ofNymphaeum (1261) and through various documents exchanged between 1272 and 1279 by the Byzantine and papal courts concerning the Union of Lyons. Despite his extensive experience in the chancery and skill as a translator, Ogerius did not have sufficient command of Latin theological terms to avoid complaints from the papal court regarding vocabulary choice." In this respect, Ogerius was clearly not the ideal translator to undertake Augustine's De Trinitate.

At this point, let us recapitulate the inventory of potential translators for De Trinitate remaining in 1275, after the Union of Lyons and the death of John Parastron. Manuel Holobolos was a bitter enemy of the emperor

'8Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), s.v.

!Pieralli, "Corrispondenza," 155, 161; also discussed by Bydén, 145.

?0Michael VIII ordered ten opponents of the union to be roped together, laden with sheep entrails and dung, and led through the city, with Holobolos as their leader. Holobolos was further humiliated by blows to the mouth with sheep's livers. See Relations historiques/Georges Pachymérés, vol. 2, ed. Albert Failler (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1984),

am grateful to Tia Kolbaba of Rutgers University for this vivid citation.

?!Luca Pieralli,"IRapporti diplomatici tra Roma e Costantinopoli negli anni 1274-1279 attraverso le varianti introdotte nel testo della professione di fede imperiale," in Documenti medievali greci e latini. Studi comparativi, ed. Giuseppe de Gregorio, Otto Kresten (Spoleto:

Centro italiano di studi sull'alto Medioevo, 1998), 396.

?Pieralli, "Rapporti, 396.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and the union, and Simon of Constantinople was in Negroponte living in the Dominican community that had attempted under the Latin kingdom of Constantinople to convert the Greeks of the East. This association made Simon suspect in the view of the anti-unionists Michael hoped to persuade with a translation of Augustine's De Trinitate. Moreover,

Michael was on very poor terms with the Latins of Negroponte. Confronted with further intrigues against him by Charles of Anjou, Michael sent an expedition against Negroponte in 1276.?° As a potential translator in such a highly charged political atmosphere, Simon occupied the unenviable status of an untrustworthy "in-between" from the perspective of the Latin and Greek communities, rather than that of an honest "gobetween.?4 Similarly compromised because he was a Latin, Ogerius

Boccanegra was in any case fully engaged in the complexities of Michael VIII's Latin diplomatic correspondence and does not seem to have attempted any sort of literary translation from Latin during his career.

Moreover, as we have seen, Ogerius had little aptitude for translating a lengthy and complex theological treatise like Augustine's De Trinitate.

Since Ogerius the Protonotarius, Simon of Constantinople, and Holobolos were all either unavailable or undesirable as translators, only Planoudes remained.

In 1275 Planoudes was about twenty years old and perhaps already employed in the imperial chancery as a Latin translator.*° Like Holobolos, he must have been a precocious student of both Latin and Greek, for around 1280 he appeared as one of the principal scribes in a manuscript copied in Constantinople (Florence, Laurenziana ms. Plut. 32.16) that displays his facility with both classical Greek and Latin literary texts.?°

41 owe this provocative distinction to Sylvia Molloy in her paper "Reading Bilingual:

An Uneasy Reflection on Cultural Encounters," delivered at The George Washington University, April 27, 2007; to illustrate the ambivalent position of current translators in a conflicted political situation, she cited George Packer, "Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted

America the Most," The New Yorker (3/26/2007), 52-73.

Carl Wendel, "Planudes, Maximos," in Paulys Real-Encyclopiidie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 20. 2 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1950), col. 2203-05.

Alexander Turyn, Dated Greek Manuscripts of the 13th and 14th Centuries in the Libraries of Italy, vol.

2 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 28-33; discussed by Planoudes' De Trinitate Manuel Planoudes undertook Michael's commission to translate Augustine's De Trinitate. Precisely when Planoudes began to work is unknown, but given his relative youth scholars suggest that he made the translation about 1280, as noted above. If so, Planoudes evidently worked quickly at his task, because the political and ecclesiastical landscape in Byzantium was shifting rapidly. In 1281 the new pope, Martin IV, a partisan of Charles of Anjou, abrogated the Union of Lyons. In 1282 Michael VHI died, and his successor Andronikos H abandoned his father's policy of ecclesiastical union."" Supporters of union were disgraced and its opponents, such as Holobolos, returned to Constantinople and to imperial favor.?8

The first complete critical edition of Planoudes' De Trinitate appeared in 1995, when Manoles Papathomopoulos, Isabella Tsavari, and Gianpaolo

Rigotti presented the Greek text accompanied by Augustine's Latin original on facing pages. Rigotti provided a very substantial introduction describing the career of Planoudes, his other translations from Latin, the reception of his De Trinitate translation, its style, and its manuscript tradition. His work is indispensable, and I have drawn heavily from it. Rigotti characterizes the translation as accurate but not mechanical nor slavishly literal.?? Planoudes' translation is a work of Greek literature that readers could appreciate as both idiomatic and stylish. To accomplish this, some omissions, expansions, syntactic adjustments, and variations in vocabulary were necessary. Rigotti insists, however, that Planoudes did not deliberately misrepresent Augustine's text in any way. A brief passage from Planoudes' version of De Trinitate 15 (with critical apparatus) followed by Augustine's original Latin text will provide the basis to illustrate and expand upon Rigotti's characterization of the translation:

Elizabeth A. Fisher, "Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sailing to Byzantium," Classical and Modern Literature 27.1 (2007): in press.

N. Constantinides, "Byzantine Scholars and the Union of Lyons (1274)," in The Making of Byzantine History, Studies Dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, ed. Roderick

Beaton and Charlotte Roueché (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 92.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE (60)... 0088 &€ od éyevvnOn 6 Adyoc Kai &E od ExropEvetat &pyoEtdHc TO IIvedpa tO Gytov, ei pt] 6 Osdc Kai Matip. Ata todto 6é poo té8etka, dpyoedac, émeidi] Kai Ek Tod Yiod [tod Oeod] 10 IIvedpa 10 Gytov ebpioxetat

Exmopevopevov. AAAG [ExEtd1)] Kai TODTO ATH 6 Tatip EdwKev (OdK Hon (65) bpEoTHKOTI Kai UNTH Exovtt), GAA' 6 TLMOTE TO WOovoyEvet AOYH dé5axev, Ev TO yevvav Sé5xeEV. Obtwc &pa adtOV EyévvIOEV WC KOE adtod 10 SOpov Kolvov mpoépyeoOat Kai veda aywov <Ivedpo> eivat GUoiv.

63 TOD Weod seclusimus ex Aug || 10 &ylov G, spiritus sanctus Aug: om.

B 64 émetdi) seclusimus ex Aug 66 K&é nos, etiam de Aug: & codd. 67

Ivedpa suppleuimus, spiritus Aug (Planoudes, Iepi Tpiadoc BiBiiov Hevtexatséxatov, ed. Papathomopoulos et al., 2.933, lines 60-68)°°

(61) ... nec de quo genitum est uerbum et de quo procedit principaliter spiritus sanctus nisi deus pater. Ideo autem addidi, principaliter, quia et de filio spiritus sanctus procedere reperitur. Sed hoc quoque illi pater dedit (non iam exsistenti et nondum (65) habenti), sed quidquid unigenito uerbo dedit gignendo dedit. Sic ergo eum genuit ut etiam de illo donum commune procederet et spiritus sanctus spiritus esset amborum.

(Augustine, De trinitate liber quintus decimus, cited by Papathomopoulos et al., 932) The editors of Planoudes' translation have followed a modern edition of Augustine's text in marking additions (i.e., [tot Ogod] and [éxe161]]

50" .. (and there is no one) from whom the Word was begotten and from whom the Holy Spirit proceeded principally except the God and Father. For this reason I have added 'principally, since also from the Son [of God] the Holy Spirit is found to proceed. But [since] the Father also gave this to him (not as already existing and not yet having it), but anything he ever gave to his only begotten Son he gave in his begetting, thus then he begot him so that also from him the common gift goes forth and the Holy Spirit is [Spirit] of both." ri Planoudes De Trinitate lines 63-64) and omissions (i.e., <ITvebpa> line 67) in the Greek translation. Since the textual tradition of Planoudes' translation is strong,*!

I consider its deviations from a modern Latin text of Augustine to be authentic and intentional, representing either Planoudes' deliberate alterations or an accurate translation of the unidentified Latin manuscript he was using.

A superficial comparison of the Greek translation with its Latin original demonstrates that Planoudes devised a more sophisticated sentence structure in lines 64-66 by adding [&ze161)] (line 64) in order to combine two of Augustine's fairly straightforward Latin sentences (Sed hoc... dedit, lines 64-65, and Sic ergo... amborum, lines 65-66) into one complex Greek sentence and at the same time preserve the subordinate clauses from Augustine's original text (quidquid. . . dedit, line 65:6 tT. .

. dé5m«ev, lines 65-66; and ut... amborum, lines 66-67: wc .

. Gov, lines 66-68). In general, Planoudes preserves the structure of the original Latin constructions, although the rules of Greek syntax require some adjustments: the infinitive with reperitur (line 64) becomesa participle with ebpioxetar

(line 63), the ablative gerund gignendo (line 65) becomes an articular infinitive in a prepositional phrase (év t@ yevvay, line 66), the Latin subjunctive in a result clause (procederet, line 66) becomes a Greek infinitive

line 67), and the perfect tense of verbs indicating simple past action, so comfortable and frequent in Latin, sometimes yields to the Greek aorist (genitum est: éyevvnOn, line 61; genuit: éyévvyosv, line 66).°?

Planoudes regularly translates a Latin compound word with a Greek compound, not awkwardly nor automatically calqued from Latin but each appropriate in its Greek connotation: forms of pro/cedere (lines 62, 63, 66) with forms of &«/nopeveoOar (lines 61, 64) or mpo/épyeo@at (line 67), ad/didi (line 63) with mpoo/té9e1Kka (line 62), ex/sistenti (line 64) with bo/eomKort (line 65), and uni/genito (line 65) with povo/yevei (line 65).

manuscripts of the fourteenth century, ten of the fifteenth, two of the sixteenth, four of the seventeenth, and one of the nineteenth; Rigotti, lxx—lxxxiv.

this period the aorist and perfect tenses of Greek were functionally interchangeable. See Robert Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1983), 30, 64.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Planoudes' compound words, perfectly idiomatic in context, elevate the tone of his Greek text as does his use of the perfect tense, of the dative case

(adt, line 64; bpeotNKOTL, line 65; TH Lovoyevel Adya, line 65; and T@ yevvav, line 66), and of the dual form (Gov, line 68). These forms, obsolete in the spoken Greek of Planoudes' time, characterize the translation as a properly literary and "Attic" text.*> Considerations of pleasing "Attic" style may also have induced Planoudes to replace the repetitive phrase spiritus sanctus spiritus (line 67) with a simple veda Gytov (line 67) and to construct donum commune (line 66) with an emphatic predicate adjective to dHpov Kowov (line 67). Further, Planoudes translates Augustine's significant adverb principaliter (line 62) with its exactly equivalent Greek adverb

(lines 61, 62), a voxpropria rare in Christian texts before the time of Planoudes but frequent in TLG citations thereafter.**

In closing, it is important to note that Planoudes chose to incorporate in his translation some features of vocabulary and syntax that echo the Constantinopolitan Creed and place the Greek version of Augustine's De

Trinitate into the linguistic framework of this fundamental Christian text:>> rovoyevei (line 65) recalls "Inootv . wovoyevi (Creed line 3), forms of yevvay (lines 61, 66) reflect yevvnOévta (Creed lines 3, 4), the emphatic positioning of the attributive adjective in 10 veda 10 &ytov

(line 63) is identical to the phrase appearing in line 13 of the Creed, and forms of éxnopeveo8at (lines 61, 64) recall the formulation to zvedpa. TO Gytov TO KUptov Kai CmomowWv TO EK TOD TATPOG EKmoOpEevdLEVOV (Creed lines 13-15). Planoudes uses a form of ékxopeveo#at to translate two of the three occurrences of procedere in Augustine's Latin text (procedit, line 62; and procedere, line 63), but in the third instance he chooses to vary his

3] bid., 45-50, 58 (dative case).

"The Thesaurus linguae graecae (on-line version available under license at http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu) cites Gpyoetd@c in act 3 of the Lateran Council of 649 (see R.

Riedinger, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 2d series, vol. 1: Concilium Lateranense a. 649 celebratum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984] 122, |. 10) and in document 13 of the Third Council of Constantinople of 680-81 (see R. Riedinger, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 2d series, vol. 2: Concilium universale Constantinopolitanum tertium, pars 1-2 [Berlin: De Gruyter,

1990, 1992], pars 1, 604, I. 10).

to the text of the Constantinopolitan Creed are from Guiseppe L. Dossetti, II simbolo di Nicea e di Costantinopoli (Rome: Herder, 1967), 244-51.

Planoudes' De Trinitate vocabulary, perhaps for stylistic effect. He translates procederet (line 66) with zpoépyeo8at (line 67), an equivalence he later favors in his version of Ovid's Metamorphoses when the subject of the verb is a person;*° when a form of procedere refers to an animal, a collective, or an inanimate noun,

Planoudes prefers a compound of the verb ywpeiv. In no other occurrence of procedere in the Latin texts translated by Planoudes does he equate the verb with a form of ékxopeveoOat;*" that usage is distinctive to his translation of Augustine's De Trinitate.

It is interesting to note that Planoudes' translation style and methodology in De Trinitate are consistent with his practices in his other Greek translations of Latin literature—Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides and Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, to name only the most substantial.°* The same style and methodology also characterize the translations of Manuel Holobolos.*? Gastgeber notes that twelfth-century chancery translations from Greek into Latin attempt to reflect a compound word in the original text with a compound in the Latin translation, just as Planoudes and Holobolos do in their Greek translations of Latin literary texts.*° A practice customary in chancery translation evidently influenced the style of these pioneering literary translators.

Sometime around 1283 Manuel Planoudes became a monk under the name Maximus;*! also to the reign of Andronikos II belong two essays

Metamorphoses 13.533, processit: mpdetot of Hecuba; and ibid., 14.46, procedit: mpostot of Circe.

2.685, processisse: dtoyopijoat of cattle; ibid., 7.515, processit: A1POYOpPNodons of a troop of young men; and Heroides 9.109, procedit: tpoyapet of a measure of property.

is only one other theological translation in Planoudes' oeuvre, the anonymous seventh-century Irish tract On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, immensely popular in the middle ages. There is no evidence for the chronology or sequence of the translations, although

I have followed other scholars in assuming that Planoudes' two theological translations were part of Michael VIII's project for ecclesiastical union (Rigotti, xxxiv—xlvi). For an analysis of Planoudes' translation practices in the Metamorphoses, see Fisher, "Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sailing to Byzantium."

a brief analysis of Holobolos' translation practices, see Elizabeth A. Fisher, "Manuel Holobolos, Alfred of Sareshal, and the Greek Translator ofps.-Aristotle's De plantis, Classica et Mediaevalia 57 (2006): 208-10.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE (Ilepi... Aativwv and Adyog zepi miotews) written by Planoudes that attack the western doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit. In these essays Planoudes directly contradicted the theological position of Augustine's De Trinitate.** Moreover, Planoudes indicates his disinclination for theological topics in a letter to his friend Alexios Philanthropenos, written sometime in the 1290s, where he rehearses the annoying qualities of a mutual acquaintance who must always present himself as Planoudes' intellectual superior: "and now he is an authority on matters of the natural world and in some fashion also touches upon medical [knowledge], now he is an authority on matters of theology, which of all things I especially fear and never approach except under duress. And now he belabors a discussion of morality ..."* As an aid to understanding why Planoudes dissociated himself from Augustine's De Trinitate and even declared a general aversion to theology,

I would like to introduce the concept of "beholder's share." The art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich coined this term to illustrate the active role a viewer necessarily takes when encountering a visual image: "Interpretation on the part of the image maker must always be matched by the interpretations of the viewer. No image tells its own story .. . the 'beholder's share' [is] the contribution we make to any representation from the stock of images stored in our mind.""* This concept can be adapted usefully to objects other than visual images, such as music, poetry, or events in a narrative. Harry Broudy refers to the "allusionary base," a broader expression of beholder's share: "The allusionary base refers to the conglomeration of concepts, images, and memories available [to each of us] to provide meaning."*> Planoudes' abandonment of theology may be seen as the *2Wendel briefly describes these two unpublished texts that exist only in manuscript;

Wendel, "Planudes," 2208.

Bai vOV HéVv PUOUKOS EGTL Kat TOV Kai taATpIKT|G Tapayaver' (40) VdV dé DEoAoytKOc, bnep éy@ pddota TévtoOV Sé501Ka Kai OdK EoTLV STE TOUT MpdoEyUtA <bn'> dvayKns. kai vdv Hév HOtKaic Evotatpiper tpooAaAtaic: (Planoudes, Ep. 113, lines 40-43, ed. Leone).

"EH. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 139, 145.

45Harry Broudy, The Role of Imagery in Learning (Los Angeles: Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1987), 21.

Planoudes' De Trinitate result of conflict between two different beholder's shares at different periods in his life. As a young scholar in the 1270s he lived in a period of intense debate over theological interpretation in the eastern and western

Churches. Providing an accessible version of a text central to the western concept offilioque seems to us and may have seemed to him an intellectually defensible activity and even a desirable means of gaining imperial favor while avoiding punishment. Some twenty years later as a mature scholar, however, Planoudes could have looked back upon the consequences of involvement in theological debate with a very different beholder's share. His translation of De Trinitate had not assisted the union of the eastern and western Churches, and he had subsequently contradicted and rejected Augustine's theological position in his own writings. Entering the theological discussion of the 1270s had required

Planoudes to occupy an embarrassing intellectual position in later years and perhaps necessitated his monastic vocation as well. Experience would certainly have altered Planoudes' own beholder's share regarding his involvement with Augustine's De Trinitate and with theological controversy.

Planoudes' translation of De Trinitate was influential in the Greek East. Rigotti lists thirty manuscripts of the work dating from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries and seven Byzantine theological writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who used the translation, among them Gregory Palamas, John Cantacuzene, and Prochoros

The significance of Planoudes' translation for Gregory Palamas is only now gaining scholarly recognition through the writings of Reinhard Flogaus.*" In addition, Demetrios Kydones (c. 1324—-c. 1398),

Bessarion (c. 1400-1472), and Gennadios II Scholarios (c. 1400-c. 1472) offer opinions on Planoudes and his translation that were informed by contemporary discussions and by their own knowledge of both Latin and Greek. At this point, I would like to turn to their remarks.

Gregory Akindynos, Manuel Kalekas, Joseph Bryennios, and Gregory Mamme; Rigotti, lv and note 175. For the manuscripts of Planoudes' De Trinitate, see Rigotti,

47See Flogaus contribution in this volume.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE In a refutation of Planoudes' previously mentioned essay on the procession of the Holy Spirit, the uniate Greek Cardinal Bessarion quotes

One would wonder at this man who attempts through these paltry, weak arguments to undermine the book of St Augustine over which he labored greatly as he translated it into Greek. For if wishing to harm the readers he submitted to the toil of translation, he is truly unnatural and deserves great blame from the pious, in that he toiled to harm the souls of the faithful. But if knowing that the book would be beneficial to those who would read it he chose to translate it and to do his fellow Greeks a kindness, why in turn as if out of regret does he warn his readers to guard against as harmful what he translated for their benefit? The cause of this unnatural behavior was his fear of the one who was then emperor, whom he knew to be without mercy toward those who said that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son; he desired through these arguments to escape prison and chains.*® As quoted by Bessarion, the uniate Greek Kydones acknowledges the difficulty of translating Augustine's De Trinitate and says nothing critical of the translation itself. He traces Planoudes' overt rejection of western trinitarian doctrine to his fear of punishment by the anti-union emperor

"8Demetrios Kydones quoted by Bessarion in PG 161.312.B3—C5: Anpntpiov tod Kvdeavy Kate TAavovdn && oiketoyeipav ypagévta Oavpdoeté Tig TOV GVdpa TODTOV, TOV dt TOV OAiyOV TOVTOV Kai GODEVOV EXIYEIPHEUGTOV TEIPOLEVOV TO Tod Gyiov AdyovoTivov Bipdiov dvatpéretv, &p' © NOAA' Endynoev Eni THY "EAAGSa peteveyKov. Ei pév yap

PAcyot BovAdpEevoc Tovc EvaytvOokovtas TOV EV TH Eppnveia. TOvov baéoTH, &tom0¢ 6VTS Kai MOAAi>¢ Toig evoePEow HEtog péEMWEwS, MOVEIV EM' © Taig yoYaic TOV GAA@V vphjvacbar' ei 5' EmiotapEevoc, OPEALOV Toig EvtevEopEvoIc EceoVat TO PIPAtov,

LleteveyKEtv TOVTO EthETo, Kai TOIS OMOVAOIC YapiouoOat, Ti TAAW HomEp EK LETApEAEIac, Os PAaPepa puAGTTEDVaI Mapatvel, 45' OpEAreiav TOV EVTVYYAVOVTOV Tppvevosv; "AAAG

Tic GtomIac TAVTIS AitTLov 6 Tod TOTE Pactredovtoc POPBoc' Sv idac Grapaitntov dvta ToIs tO Lvedpia tO &ytov &k Hatpdg Kai Yiod Aéyovow exaopevecbar, HOEANoE 51a TOV

EMULEIPNLATOV TOVTOV EipKTI|G Kai SEGLOV EaUTOV AMaAAGEaL.

Iam grateful to Denis Sullivan of the University of Maryland for assistance in translating the Greek passages here. ri | Planoudes' De Trinitate

Andronikos II, implying that Planoudes' own convictions were in fact uniate, although he could not openly express them in the political climate following the death of Michael VIII.

After quoting Kydones, Cardinal Bessarion includes his own brief discussion of Planoudes' puzzling behavior in first translating Augustine's De

Trinitate and then attacking western trinitarian views:

And so you were going to advocate for the Latins rather than to oppose them, O best and wisest of men. For I would not accuse you of the opposite, who are so well versed in every branch of knowledge, so outstanding in philosophy and insight, so well traveled in all learning, so esteemed in everything, trained to the highest degree in the Latin language in addition to Greek, and with the abundance of your ability having translated into our language both many other marvelous things and the great work De Trinitate of the great and wondrous

Augustine, in which in addition to many other things also the divine procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son is presented in theological terms in the best and wisest and most inspired manner.

How could you yourself oppose him and words as great as his, when you were his foster child and admirer? And to do that, with these arguments (or rather puny protests) that even a child could refute? But wishing to indulge the wrath of some people, | think, or to avoid it, you took this course, both to escape the wrath and more than that to protect the truth by the weakness of your own arguments, making obvious the superiority of the truth even to those who are unable to comprehend it.*?

The most wise Cardinal Lord Bessarion, "Against the Syllogisms of the Monk Maximus Planoudes concerning the Procession of the Holy Spirit according to the Latins"

(Fourth Refutation), PG 161.317.C5—Du1. Kai obt@ cvvnyopjs@v Aativotg i éAéyE@v El)vbac, &vop@v Gpiote kai copatate. Od yap Gv éy@ cov Katayvotny tobvavtiov, obTH naoayv &noxnpévov matdetav, ota dé dtaPEPyKdTOs év PocOGig Kai Dewpig, Kai did

TAVTIOV LEV LAOH LATOV ddedoavtog, EddoKyINOaVTOS 5' éV Gaal, MpOs dé TH "EAAGS1 Kai ti Aativav yA@ttav & GKpov EEnoKHPEVODL, Kai TEplovoig SvvdpEe@s GALA Te TOA

Savpacta kai TO péya [epi Tpiddoc tod jteydAov Kai Savjaotod Adyovotivou épyov sic TI Tetépav peteveyKovtos Paviy év O Tpdc GAAoIs TOAOIs Kai 1} Ek Tatpdg Kai Yiod tod Gytov IIvevpatog Veia ExmdpEevoic Gplotd te Kai Cop@tata Oeodoyeitat Kai rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Like Kydones, Bessarion brings a pro-western beholder's share to a sympathetic assessment of Planoudes translation. He does not criticize its quality or accuracy but commends Planoudes' skill as a translator and returns to the theme of coercion exerted on Planoudes by the threat of imperial wrath, ingeniously asserting that Planoudes actually promoted a pro-western viewpoint by offering only feeble arguments in opposition to it.

An anonymous Dominican at Constantinople expressed a very different assessment of Planoudes' translation at the time of the translator's death. A reference to John XII Kosmos (1294-1303) as the "recently deposed" patriarch of Constantinople dates the Latin treatise to c. 1305°° and places it in the context of virulent dissension between Greeks and Latins in the city.>! With marked sarcasm the anonymous author complains:

And in order to be able to defend the errors in which (how sad!) they obstinately had persisted, some of them misrepresent texts, as did the "venerable" (ha!) monk named Maximus, who died recently in Constantinople. For he translated from Latin into Greek the book On the Trinity by the great doctor St Augustine, whom the Fifth Ecumenical

Council included among the Doctors of the Church, and yet the aforementioned "venerable" (ha!) monk passed over in silence and suppressed the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son as transmitted in that work, thus operating as a forger and not as a translator, and telling a lie not only to mankind but even to God.>? évOemtata' @ Kai Tog TooobTOIs AdTOD AdyoIg THs Gv adTOS EvavTiodoNat Sbvato, TPdgrHog OV Exeiva Kal Epaotys' Kai TadTA TOvTOIC TOTS AOyotG, 7] PNpaTtotc, & KaV Mac EEEreyEelev; "AAM' otal TO TWOV OLL® yapioaoOan, 7] ExKAivat BovAdpEvoc, tadtHV EdpEc Oddv,

EkEIVOV TE MVYELIV, Kai TH GANIEig UWGALOV G&rdvat TH GoVEvEta TOV AOyOv, TI Exeivyg MEptovoiav Kai Toic [1] ovvop&y Suvapévotc dvaKarbmTOv.

Dondaine, "'Contra Graecos. Premiers écrits polémiques des dominicains @Orient," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 21 (1951): 419, n. 72.

John J. Boojamra, "Athanasios of Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Reactions to Latin Religious Infiltration," Church History 48 (1979): 27-35.

ut defendere possint errores in quibus pertinaciter, proch dolor (!) perseverant, quidam eorum scripturas corrumpunt, sicut fecit kalogerus nomine Maximus, qui nuper obiit in Constantinopoli. Nam de latino in grecum transtulit librum De trinitate magni doctoris sancti Augustini, quem quinta ycumenica synodus connumerat doctoribus orthori

Planoudes' De Trinitate The charge that Planoudes falsified the contents of De Trinitate in his translation is puzzling. The translation as it survives is accurate.>> Dondaine suggests that the anonymous critic may have known Planoudes text only from excerpts, or in a revised version produced for the anti-union emperor Andronikos II. If such a revision existed, however, why is there no evidence of it in the substantial manuscript tradition of the Greek text?

Did third-party reports, rumor, and gossip in the Latin community promote a prejudicial and inaccurate picture of Planoudes' translation accepted by this author as his beholder's share without direct knowledge of the Greek text? Perhaps the acute political tensions of the time disposed this anonymous Dominican to accept a prejudiced and inaccurate view of Planoudes' activities.

Gennadios I] Scholarios, Patriarch of Constantinople immediately after the fall of the city to the Turks (1454-1456, 1463, 1464-1465), is the last and most substantial critic of Planoudes' De Trinitate to be examined here. He directly addresses the theological problem presented by Planoudes' translation of the Latin verb procedere, first surveying the vocabulary used in an acceptable Orthodox statement of the procession of the Holy Spirit and then continuing:

For the assemblage of our teachers proclaims aloud that the Spirit both is of the Son and goes forth [zpotévat] from the Son, being made manifest and being given to the apostles through him [i.e., the Son], and in this way the Spirit is of the Son just as of the Father, and in addition his [i.e., the Spirit's] first cause [aitiac] is from there [i.e., from the Father], in his eternal existence [ti di5i@ baapéet] not set apart from the Son, but remaining in him by nature although distinguished from him in hypostasis [ka0' b2d0taow] and thus said to "go forth"

through him |i.e., the Son]. Therefore Augustine speaks doxis; processionem vero Spiritus Sancti a Filio in eodem libro traditam, dictus kalogerus subticuit et suppressit, profecto falsarii et non translatoris functus officio, et non solum hominibus mentitus sed Deo." Text from Dondaine, 421-22. | am grateful to Frank Mantello of the Catholic University of America for advice and assistance with the translation and interpretation of this passage.

demonstrated by Dondaine, 422, n. 76.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE very well in agreeing with them in respect to this understanding. He agrees well in everything, except if procedere is always translated with "proceed" [éxnopeveoOat]; but when it [i.e., procedere] is applied to the Father alone, it should be translated with "proceed" [éxaopeveo8a1| and when applied to the Son, or to the Father and the Son, with "go forth" [mpotévat]. And thus that wise Planoudes should have translated his [i.e., Augustine's] words in On the Trinity. But he, who always translated procedere with "proceed" [éxxopeveo8at], either was inept in our theology and for this reason held to the teacher's [i.e.,

Augustine's] single expression, or he had the Latins' understanding lie. of the question] and corrupted his translation, thinking that everyone would attribute it to Augustine whenever they heard him say that he [i.e., the Spirit] proceeds [éxaopeveo8at] from the Son and from both [i.e., the Father and the Son].>4

Scholarios is not unjustified in his criticism of Planoudes translation; Planoudes does indeed translate procedere in the vast majority of its occurrences with éxxopeveoOat. However, it is incorrect to assert that the church fathers unanimously maintain a distinction in vocabulary,

I Scholarios, "Tractatus De processu spiritus sancti I," in Oeuvres completes de Georges (Gennadios) Scholarios, vol. 2, ed. M. Jugie, L. Petit, and X.A. Siderides (Paris:

Maison de la bonne presse, 1929), 228.34-229.14 (on-line text from Thesaurus Linguae To Hvedpa yap kai tod Yiod civat cai &k tod Yiod mpotévat toic GnootOAoIc SV adtOdD avepobptevov (35) Kai did5dptEvov, Kai obtac civat 16 IIvedpia tod Yiod, ka0dnep Kai tod

(229.) Hatpdc, adi tijc ExeWev aitiac, ob' év TH Gidio badpée1 Tod Yiod dtiotdpevoy, GAG pévov pév Ev adDTO Kata Obotv, dStaKptwopEvoy 5é adtod Kab' brdoTAOL, Kai ObTO dV adtod AcyOpevov, mpoiévat, 6 TOV HpETtép@V SdacKdOV KdKAOG Bog. OdKodV Kai

Adbyovotivoc &ptota AéyEl, Tpdg THY ATI ExEtvolg OVVTPEXOV StaVoLaV' GvVSpapeitat dE kai év nGol KaAGc, (5) ci pn] GEi TO TpOKEdEpE Tpdc TO ExnopeveoOat LETUBGAAOITO,

GAM Ste pév Tpdcg Tov Iatépa dvapéepetat LOvov Tpdc 16 ExnopebecOat Eppnvevorto, Ste d€ mpdg TOV Yiov, 7} TOV Ilatépa Kai TOV Yidv, Eig TO Apoiévat. OUT SE Kai TOV GOPOV éxeivov ITkavovdnv tovc mepi Tpididog AOyoug Eppvevderv éyprv' 6 5é, 10 TpoKEedepe dei mpd TO ExnopedeoOat pEetaPEBANKas, 7 (10) Tig KAO' Hydc Deoroyiag dtEIpog FV, Kat

516 TODTO TH A€EEt LOVY Tod SSaoKdAov mpoosiyey, 7] TA AaTIVOV OPOVOV EKaKoUpyet TIV Epunvetav, oidptevog MaVtac toig Abyovstivon Adyots Evdmoery, émedav &kodMow aAdTOV

&k Tod Yiod Kai & Gprpotépov Exaopevdeocbat AEyovta. For a discussion of Scholarius' views on the procession, see Rigotti, lvi-lvii. ri | Planoudes' De Trinitate describing the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone with éxzopeveoOa1 and from the Father and/or the Son with mpoiévav/ mpoépyeo@at. Although a survey of entries in Lampe generally confirms

Scholarios' statement, Lampe also cites several instances where forms of mpotévavapoépyeoOa refer to procession from the Father alone in the writings of Gregory Nazianzen and Cyril of Alexandria.°°

It is also inaccurate to say that Planoudes always (dei) translates procedere with éxxopeveoBa. In closing, we may return to the brief passage from Planoudes' De Trinitate cited above (50), for it illustrates the translator's apparent desire to vary for stylistic effect the equation procedere: éxnopeveobat. The passage suggests that Planoudes was indeed "theologically inept, if one uses Scholarios' criterion. In its first occurrence, procedit (line 62) in Augustine's text refers to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father only," .. [and there is no one] from whom the Word was begotten and from whom the Holy Spirit proceeded principally except the God and Father;" Planoudes translates here with the appropriate Greek verb éxzopevetat (line 61). In the third occurrence, procederet (line 66) refers to procession from the Son and the Father, " . . thus then he begot him so that also from him the common gift goes forth and the Holy Spirit is [Spirit] of both;" Planoudes translates appropriately here with mpoépyeoOat (line 67). In the second occurrence, however, procedere (line 63) refers to procession from the Son only, ".

. . since also from the Son [of God] the Holy Spirit is found to proceed;" in this case, Planoudes translates with éxtopevopevov (line 64), which is theologically incorrect according to Scholarios' criterion and illustrates Scholarios' complaint exactly. Were Planoudes to hear this criticism of his De Trinitate translation today, I suspect that he would say, after a long and thoughtful silence,

"T fear theology most of all and never approach it except under duress."°° °°See G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), s.v. mMpoeut (ibo) 2.

Planoudes, Ep. 113.40—41.

Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion:

The Use ofStAugustine in the Hesychast Controversy —_> a REINHARD FLOGAUS hen first invited to give a paper at this international conference on "Orthodox Readings of Augustine," I originally had in mind to present exclusively Gregory Palamas' reading of this Latin church father. The triad of "inspiration," "exploitation," and "distortion" appealed to me as a suitable heuristic instrument to describe how the fourteenth-century Byzantine archbishop used the Greek translation of Augustine's De Trinitate (On the Trinity) in his own works. However, while looking through the publications that had appeared since the publication of my own contributions to this topic, I suddenly realized the extent to which these three keywords were also appropriate to describe the contemporary scholarly discussion about Augustine in the hesychast controversy. I therefore decided to give not only a short account of the various ways Palamas read Augustine, but also a brief survey of the more recent publications on this subject.

Inspiration, Exploitation, and Distortion in the Modern Scholarly Discussion It was thirteen years ago, in the spring of 1994, that, while reading Augustine's De Trinitate,

suddenly realized that I had recently come across very ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE similar passages. These were, however, in the writings of a completely different author, i.e., in the Capita 150 (150 Chapters) of Gregory Palamas

(1296-1359). A thorough comparison of these two works very quickly revealed that the most obvious parallels to Augustine could be found in chapters 125 to 135 of Palamas' work, which deal with the problem of categories, a subject the bishop of Hippo had treated in books 5 and 15 of his famous De Trinitate.

A closer look at the only manuscript of the 1281 Greek translation of De Trinitate by Maximus Planoudes (c. 1255-1305)! held by a German library, i.e., the sixteenth-century Codex Monacensis gr.

54, revealed that the passages in question proved to follow rather closely Planoudes' translation. Given these obvious parallels, could then the surprising description of the Holy Spirit as the common love of the Father and the Son in chapters 36 and 37 of Palamas' work, of which scholars had long been aware, not also have been inspired by Augustine??

Whereas Roman Catholic scholars, such as the French Assumptionist Martin Jugie (1878-1954), have always been quick to suggest a direct or indirect influence on Palamas by Augustine's De Trinitate,? the most eminent Palamas scholar in the twentieth century, Fr John Meyendorff

(1926-1992), who had, in fact, called Palamas "one of the most Augustinian authors of the Christian East,'* remained more reluctant and only

'This text was edited for the first time in 1995. Abyovotivou epi Tptddog BipAia mevtekaideKka dmEep EK Tho Aativev diadéKktov sic tH "EAAGSa petyveyKe MaEytog 6

Thavovdys. Eicayayn, AAnvuxov Kai LattviKov KEipEevov, yYA@oouptov, ed. M. Papathomopoulos, I. Tsavari, G. Rigotti, 2 vols. (Athens: Kentron Ekdoseos Ergon Hellenon Syngrapheon, 1995).

?Gregorios Palamas, Cap. 36 ('pyyopiov tod Moarapa Lvyypépipata [hereafter, PS], ed.

P. Chrestou, et al., vol. 5 [Thessaloniki: Kyromanos, 1992], 54.25-55.57). Still unaware of this passage, Vladimir Lossky, Essai sur la théologie mystique de I'Eglise d'Orient (Paris: Aubier,

1944), 78 and 210, had declared that in eastern theology the Holy Spirit has never been described as the mutual bond of love of the Father and the Son.

Jugie, "Palamas," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, 11.1766; see also Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz. Der Streit um die theologische Methodik in der spétbyzantinischen Geistesgeschichte (14./15. Jh), seine systematischen Grundlagen und seine historische Entwicklung (Miinchen: Beck, 1977), 177. Jugie assumeda possible dependence from Aquinas' Summa contra gentiles. However, the translation of this work into Greek by Demetrios Kydones (1324—1397/98) was completed around Christmas 1354, i.e., after the composition of Palamas' Capita 150.

4John Meyendorff, Introduction a l'étude de Grégoire Palamas (Paris: Editions du Seuil, Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion admitted a "close similarity" between the two on this point.° In his 1988 edition of the Capita, the Basilian father Robert E. Sinkewicz still strongly rejected this kind of dependence and suggested other possible sources.° A closer look at the passage in question, however, showed that also in the surrounding chapters 34, 35, and 37 Palamas was obviously making use of some reflections and distinctions set forth by Augustine mainly in book

15 of De Trinitate.' Furthermore, the explanation in chapter 27 that the image of God is found in man's vows, as well as Palamas' reasoning about the death of the soul and the death of the body, found in chapter 45 and in the somewhat earlier Ad Xenam monialem, apparently also derived from passages in Augustine's De Trinitate.® Already on the scent ofAugustine in Palamas, I kept searching and discovered another work by the defender of the hesychasts that owed a great deal to the bishop of Hippo.

The work in question is Palamas' Treatise on the Economy of the Incarna1959), 175. This has been rejected by John Romanides, "Notes on the Palamite Controversy and Related Topics," Greek Orthodox Theological Review 6 (1960/61): 196-205.

Introduction a létude de Grégoire Palamas, 316; cf. also Boris Bobrinskoy, Le Mystere de la Trinité. Cours de théologie orthodoxe (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986), 304.

Edmund Hussey, "The Palamite Trinitarian Models," SVTQ 16 (1972): 83-89, had still reckoned with Didymus' De Spiritu Sancto as a possible alternative to Augustine,

R.E. Sinkewicz, in his editionofthe text (Saint Gregory Palamas: The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. A Critical Edition, Translation and Study [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988]), categorically denied any Augustinian influence on Palamas (18) and tried to detect a possible link between the passage in question and Theoleptos of Philadelphia or Gregory the Sinaite (25-34). Four years later, in his edition of the Capita

(see n. 2), Chrestou did not even mention this topic or scholarly discussion. Another two years later, Constantine Tsirpanlis, "Epistemology, Theognosis, the Trinity and Grace in St.

Gregory Palamas," Patristic and Byzantine Review 13 (1994): 9, pointed out that "Palamas totally avoided the 'Augustinian temptation' and its trinitarian analogies," but instead

"clarified the orthodox analogy of the Spirit as love."

'For the parallels, compare Cap. 34 (PS 5.52.24-53.9) with Trin. 15.5.7-6.9 (865.17f, 867.35-38.43f., 867.51-869.54, 871.711), Cap. 35 (PS 5.53.22-54.6) with Trin. 15.11.20

(901.2027, 903.43—49) and 15.15.25 (923.37-50), Cap. 36 (PS 5.54.25-55.15) with Trin. 6.5.7

(399.4-10, 401.21), 6.10.11 (413.30-37), 15.17.27 (929.8-11), 15.17.29 (933.69-73), and 15.19.37

(951.145-48), and Cap. 37 (PS 5.55.16-22) with Trin. 9.12.18 (549.63-78) and 15.26.47

(979.84-88). All reference numbers in parentheses following citations of Trin. refer to Planoudes translation, as it appears in the critical edition identified in n. 1.

8Compare Cap. 27 (PS 5.50.1-6) with Trin. 14.8.11 (803.6—9), and Cap. 45 (PS 5.61.7-24) and Ad Xenam 8f (PS 5.196.17-197.9) with Trin. 4.3.5 (269.11-15, 271.3140). ri |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE tion, a work commonly counted as number 16 of his numerous Homilies.

In this work, which in the past has been regarded as a major witness for the great importance attributed by Palamas to Christ's person and work,!° almost the entire train of thought can be traced back to the christological passages of books 4, 13, and 14 of Augustine's De Trinitate.

In November 1996, I first published these findings in my book Theosis bei Palamas und Luther. Ein Beitragzum 6kumenischen Gesprach, in which all the parallels I had discovered so far were extensively documented." In January 1997 shorter article followed in the Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen

Byzantinistik.' Finally in 1998 I published an article in English in St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly about the use of St Augustine in the hesychast controversy.!* I eagerly awaited an Orthodox reaction to these findings, which in some sense were able to disturb the hitherto largely accepted theological equilibrium and to overthrow some cherished ideas about East and West in the hesychast controversy.

In April 1997, the Greek philosopher John Demetracopoulos published a book in Athens about Augustine and Palamas,'* where he meticulously reproduced practically all the parallel passages from the Capita

tod Horkapa énavta ta épya. Eioaywyi, Keipevov, hetTappactc, oxOMa, ed. P. Chrestou, vol. 9 (Thessaloniki: Paterikai Ekdoseis "Gregorios ho Palamas" 1985),

422-80. For the parallels and quotations cf. Reinhard Flogaus, Theosis bei Palamas und Luther. Ein Beitrag zum 6kumenischen Gespriich (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,

'0Cf. Meyendorff, Introduction a étude de Grégoire Palamas, 181-85, 205, 215-27, 251, 267, 320; Georgios Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man: St. Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1984), 21-28, 44-48, 52, 67.

'IFlogaus, Theosis, 98-109, 140, 143-53, 155f, 238-61. Although the book was submitted to the editors in spring 1995 and appeared in November 1996, it bears the imprint "1997."

However, as of February 1996, a typewritten version of my doctoral thesis was available at the university library.

'2Flogaus, "Der heimliche Blick nach Westen. Zur Rezeption von Augustins De trinitate durch Gregorios Palamas," Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen Byzantinistik 46 (1996):

275-97. The article was submitted to the editor in spring 1995 but volume 46 only appeared in January 1997.

'5Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam Revisited:

A Reassessment of East and West in the Hesychast Controversy of 14th Century Byzantium," SVTQ 42 (1998): 1-32.

'4John Demetracopoulos, Abyovotivocs kai Mpnydptog Marapdc. Ta tpopAnpata TOV "APLOTOTEALKOV KATHYOPLOV Kai Ti}¢ TPLIASIKi|}¢ woxoUEoAoyiac (Athens: Parousia, 1997). rig | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion that were listed in my publications!> and also pointed to the parallels found in Homily 16.'° Surprisingly, Demetracopoulos quoted various

German books and articles, but did not mention my publications. In another publication about Palamas from the preceding year, i.e., from 1996, he had not yet identified the Augustine connection.'" In his 1997 publication, the only missing parallel is a passage from Palamas' Contra Beccum, which I had discovered only later and published in 1998 in my

English article.'* Thus, with the publication of Demetracopoulos' book we are led to conclude that shortly after the German publications of my discoveries in 1996, John Demetracopoulos discovered exactly the same parallels that I had found and published previously but did not detect a single Augustinian passage in addition to these.!?

'STbid., 183-93; cf. 13f, 52-54; 83-94. The most striking parallels to my own publications (cf. "Der heimliche Blick," 289f; Theosis, 143—45) can be found in Demetracopoulos' description (91-93) of the four different kinds of Adyo¢ found in Cap. 35. However, there is one difference, concerning the date of composition. Demetracapoulos suggested that Palamas read the Trin. and wrote his Capita while staying on Mount Athos from September 1347 to March 1348, where he would have had access to Cod. Vatop. 28 (dating mainly from the second quarter of the fourteenth century, cf. Erich Lamberz, Katalog der griechischen Handschriften des Athosklosters Vatopedi, vol. I: Codices 1-102 [Thessaloniki: Patriarchikon Idryma

Paterikon Meleton, 2006], 126), which contains Planoudes' translation, whereas I, because of the date of composition of Ad Xenam, had suggested that the period of Palamas' arrest in the imperial palace, i.e. the years 1345/6, was a possible moment for his first acquaintance with the Greek version of Trin. I was joined in this opinion by Josef Léssl, "Augustine in Byzantium," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51 (2000): 279.

'eDemetracopoulos, 14-16, 115f. In this case, Demetracopoulos limited himself to quotations of only the beginning of the Homily together with its parallels in Trin. that I had expounded in Theosis, 239f. However, probably due to his different dating of Palamas' acquaintance with the Trin., Demetracopoulos did not mention the passage from Ad

Xenam (see n. above), which in fact is not a literal quotation but nevertheless may have been inspired by the reading of Augustine.

'7See Demetracopoulos, Is Gregory Palamas an Existentialist? The Restoration of the True Meaning of His Comment on Exodus 3,14: "Ey éip 6 Ov" (Athens: Parousia, 1996).

'8Compare Contra Beccum 2 (PS 1.164.14-16) with Trin. 6.5.7 (399.19) and 15.19.37

(951.142-953.150); cf. Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam," 22. This discovery might have consequences for the dating of this work. Whereas normally the composition of this work is assigned to 1335, the Augustinian influence speaks in favor of the later date 1355 (cf. Sinkewicz, Gregory

Palamas, in La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, vol. 2, ed. C.G. Conticello and V. Conticello [Turnhout: Brepols, 2002], 138).

!He did, however, detect an additional instance, where the very same Augustinian passage is quoted once more by Palamas in a later work (see n. 52 below). rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE After all, from this point on we were already two scholars to contend a direct influence of Planoudes' translation on Gregory Palamas. This was not unimportant, since Augustine has been for a long time and, at least for some scholars, still is the heresiarch, the chief villain, whose heretical theology led to the deviation of the West from the Orthodox East, to the negation of the distinction between God's essence and his energies, and finally gave rise to heresy, atheism, and rationalism in the West.?° According to the Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras, the "technological rape of physical and historical reality" and the "rapid fading away of religion in the West and the appearance of nihilism and irrationalism as fundamental existential categories of western man" are further tragic results of the Augustinian theological option.*! Other Orthodox authors, e.g., Fr

Michael Azkoul, classified Augustine with Origen, Arius, and Nestorius, and ascribed his numerous heresies to his persistent cleaving to NeoPlatonism.?? From this point of view, since Palamas and Augustine were theological antagonists, Palamas' opponent Barlaam of Calabria (12901348) must have been an Augustinian who had read De Trinitate and who therefore sought to combat the doctrine of the uncreated divine energy and light using the "Augustinian" idea of a created grace.**

This interpretation of the controversy between Palamas and Barlaam is not new. It had already been advocated in the 1960s by the late Fr John

Romanides (1928-2001), who labeled Barlaam a Christian Platonist theologically schooled in the works of Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, and above all in those ofAugustine.?4 Romanides, thus, rejected Meyendorff's

Yannaras, "Orthodoxy and the West," Eastern Christian Review 3 (1971):

286-300; Person und Eros. Eine Gegeniiberstellung der Ontologie der griechischen Kirchenviiter und der Existenzphilosophie des Westens (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982),

?!Yannaras, "The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and its Importance for Theology," SVTQ 19 (1975): 244; cf. Person und Eros, 71f, 107.

2Michael Azkoul, The Influence ofAugustine ofHippo on the Orthodox Church (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 7f, 128-79.

3Azkoul, 49-51, 1126.

24Romanides, "Notes," 188, 192, 194. Recently, David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West:

Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222, once again construed the conflict between Palamas and his opponents as a dispute about "Augustinianism." See his contribution to this volume.

Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion conviction that the conflict had been exclusively an intra-Byzantine controversy. To be sure, Meyendorff had also seen Barlaam as a "Nominalist," though a Byzantine one,"° and therefore had excluded any direct Latin influence on him during the time of the controversy.*° In his later years,

Romanides bluntly declared "that the heresies of Barlaam the Calabrian condemned at the Ninth Ecumenical Council"—he obviously meant by this the synod held in 1351—"are those of Augustine himself."?" The apex of anti-Augustianism was reached by Romanides' statement that Augustine's observations in books 2 and 3 about the invisibility of the Trinity and the created character of the visions of the prophets and patriarchs in the Old Testament "are too silly to be called heresies,' which in his view, however, meant that they were actually much worse than heresies."*

In order to be quite clear on this point and to preclude any possible bias let me say that it is not only from the Orthodox side that such harsh criticism of Augustine can be heard. The erstwhile paramount position of Augustine as the theological authority in the West, still undisputed during the middle ages, had already seriously suffered through the use of Augustine in Reformation and Jansenist theology. In the twentieth century, however, this criticism has turned into an aggressive campaign of defamation and condemnation. One of the foremost critics of Augustine in the West is the German professor of medieval philosophy Kurt Flasch.

In his book Logik des Schreckens (Logic of Terror) of 1990, he held Augustine's doctrine of grace, his idea oforiginal sin, and his "despotic" conception of God responsible for all the bloody violence, religious wars, and various regimes of terror that Europe has suffered from late antiquity to the twentieth century and sardonically called Augustine the "classical

?5Meyendorff, Introduction a l'étude de Grégoire Palamas, 65, 74, 281f.

"Les débuts de la controverse hésychaste," Byzantion 23 (1953): 90-96.

?7Romanides, "Yahweh of Glory According to the 1st, 2nd and 9th Ecumenical Councils," Ogodoyia 71 (2000): 133.

28Ibid., 134; see also 199, where he called Augustine's thought "comical and outlandish."

It is somewhat confusing that Romanides repeatedly spoke of "1451" as the date of the "Ninth Ecumenical Council" (134, 136). In this article, Romanides also repeated his acrid criticism of Meyendorff and Mantzarides for their contention that the deification of man was rooted in the incarnation of Christ, and he pointed to Palamas as a clear opponent of this idea (for the theological background of this debate see Flogaus, Theosis, 262-68).

7O ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE author of Christian intolerance.'?? He was followed by the French historian Jean Delumeau and others.*° Thus, it is not surprising that the Parisbased Fraternité Orthodoxe Saint Grégoire Palamas sought alliance with these western voices and published works of past critics ofAugustine such as Richard Simon (1638-1712) and of contemporary critics as well in their series "La Lumiére du Thabor."?!

Thus, the influence of Augustine on Palamas and, even more, the evidence of Palamas' citations of Augustine are extremely sensitive topics that provoke fierce reactions and remain for some Orthodox scholars something of a taboo.** Mingled with the widespread concept that the conflict between Palamas and his opponents in the fourteenth century was, in fact, a conflict between Orthodoxy and western Augustinianism is the idea that in the hesychast controversy the "Greek personalism" of the fathers had been attacked by some adherents to a "Latin essentialism" allegedly inspired by Augustine.** Recently David Bradshaw has slightly modified this view by calling Barlaam "the unwitting representative of the West" in this "confrontation between Augustinian metaphysics of the ?°Kurt Flasch, Logik des Schreckens. De diversis quaestionibus I 2 (Mainz: Dieterich,

1990), 119: "Augustin wurde nach 400 zum Klassiker der christlichen Intoleranz"; cf. also 7-18 and 115-20. His last lecture at Bochum University in 1995 was therefore entitled "Why

I cannot be a Christian any longer" ("Warum ich nicht mehr Christ sein kann").

an overview of these various critics of Augustine see Goulven Madec, "Augustinus—Genius malignus Europas?" in Europa imaginieren. Der europdische Binnenmarkt als kulturelle und wirtschaftliche Aufgabe, ed. P. Koslowski (Berlin: Springer, 1992), 302-9. To be sure, Flasch was not the first to take this direction. Already in 1966, the German theologian

Dietrich Ritschl had published an essay "Die Last des augustinischen Erbes," in Parrhesia.

Karl Barth zum achtzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Eberhard Busch (Ziirich: EVZ, 1966), 470-90, in which he repudiated Augustinian theology.

3!Patric Ranson, Richard Simon ou du caracteére illégitime de lAugustianisme en théologie (Lausanne: LAge d'homme, 1990); Saint Augustin. Dossier congu et dirigé par P. Ranson

(Lausanne: LAge d'homme, 1988).

some way, a historical antecedent for this ongoing discussion is the fourteenthand fifteenth-century dispute over the correctness of Planoudes' translation, which, in fact, was nothing less than a camouflaged dispute over the orthodoxy of Augustine's Trin. For illuminating insights on this subject see Elizabeth Fisher's "Planoudes' De Trinitate, the Art of Translation, and the Beholder's Share" in this volume.

further discussion of this point see Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam," 29-31; TheoSis, 220-24. rig | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion divine essence and the apophatic theology of the East."** However, I still do not share this view. Instead I would like to caution against a systematic exploitation of this historical conflict of fourteenth-century Byzantium in order to fight a very modern theological battle. Such an approach would certainly lead us neither to a candid and unbiased perception of the history of this conflict nor to a real understanding of the different theological positions behind it, but instead to severe distortions of the historical facts. As a result of such a blurred perspective, it may very well happen that in the end Palamas as well as Augustine resemble caricatures of themselves more than anything else.

One important contribution to overcoming these misconceptions is certainly Michel Barnes' recent study in which he abundantly proved that the alleged "personalism" or "Christian existentialism" seen first by Lossky and then later by Meyendorff in Palamas' theology, as well as their negative image of Augustine's trinitarian theology, had in fact been inspired by the French Jesuit Théodore de Régnon (1831—1893).°° Another major work in this context is the 1998 publication of the critical edition of Barlaam's Anti-Latin Treatises by Antonis Fyrigos.°° His research showed that in Barlaam's corpus of treatises there is only one rather vague reference to Augustine as a witness for the opinion that the Spirit proceeds "kupime Kai idiwc" from the Father.*" In Gregorios Akindynos'

(c. 1300-1348) Refutatio magna, however, we already encounter four lit- *4David Bradshaw, 220f.

R. Barnes, "De Régnon Reconsidered," Augustinian Studies 26.2 (1995): 57f.

Barnes mentioned only Lossky, but Meyendorff has been clearly inspired by Lossky's Mystical Theology. As for Meyendorff, see also Romanides, "Notes," 268f, who had suggested the Russian theologian Serge Verhovskoy as source of this concept of "Personalism." However,

Demetracopoulos (Is Gregory Palamas an Existentialist? [see n. 17 above], 12) showed that one of Meyendorff's key witnesses for the supposed "Personalism" in Palamas is based on a wrong translation and concluded: "My view is that Meyendorff's interpretation of Palamas thought is altogether unjustified and totally misleading," 12.

Calabro, Opere contro i Latini. Introduzione, storia dei testi, edizione critica, traduzione e indici, ed. A. Fyrigos (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1998).

Syntagma 45 (Opere contro i Latini, 664.387—89): "Kai 6 dytog 6& Adbyovotivos, év BipA@ mevtexatdeKxaty [epi tijg 'Ayiag Tpiddoc oby dma, GAAG TOALEKIC

TO vedpa 10 "Aytov Kupiag Kai diag pnoiv ék tod [latpog éknopeveoOat." For a further discussion of this reference see Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam," 10-12.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE eral quotations from De Trinitate, in most cases explicitly attributed to Augustine.** Even if the number of quotations found here is much fewer than the number extant in Palamas, we may conclude that apparently at that time it was not so uncommon in Byzantium to cite Augustine as a witness and authority.

Nevertheless, even ten years after the first publications discussing the quotations from De Trinitate found in Palamas, some authors still mention only Barlaam's possible knowledge of the Greek translation of this work and pass over the fact that it is actually in Palamas' writings that we can find numerous literal quotations from Augustine's De Trinitate.°*?

Likewise, Norman Russell recently quoted one of Palamas' explanations of the reason for the incarnation, but he failed to mention that this passage hada literal parallel in book 13 of De Trinitate.*° Other strategies lead to a similar conclusion. Jeremy Wilkins, for instance, explicitly referred to my findings but, nevertheless, left it completely to the discretion of the reader whether Palamas actually used Planoudes' translation as a source for his theological writings or not.*! Finally, some Orthodox followers of John Romanides recently even voiced their suspicion that Palamas may

*8Compare Gregorios Akindynos, Refutatio magna 1.27 (CCSG 31.33.2-4), 2.9

(96.31-35), and 3.15 (189.22—42) with Trin. 1.10.21 (85.72f), 6.6f.8 (403.30—9), 7.1.1 (417.20—22), and 7.3.6 (439.106—-11).

234, referred to my article in SVTQ exclusively to provide evidence for Barlaam's possible knowledge of Trin., which was not exactly the main topic of this publication.

Recently Ettore Perella, "Palamas, Agostino e il ondamento del sapere," in: Rivelazione e conoscenza, ed. Giovanni Grandi and Luca Grion (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino 2007), 121, bluntly declared once again: "Sicuramente Palamas non conosceva direttamente Agostino e non meno sicuramente la sua concezione della processione dello Spirito Santo é molto lontana da quella descritta nel De Trinitate."

Russell, "Theosis and Gregory Palamas: Continuity or Doctrinal Change?"

SVTQ 50 (2006): 377. The passage in question is found in Hom. 16.19 (9.448.18—21); for a comparison with Planoudes, see Flogaus, Theosis, 249.

4lJeremy Wilkins, ""The Image of this Highest Love': The Trinitarian Analogy in Gregory Palamas' Capita 150," SVTQ 47 (2003): 384 and 389: "I emphatically do not intend to make any claims regarding the material sources of Gregory's ideas . .. It is beyond the scope of this article to establish whether or to what extent Palamas knew and used Augustine." In contrast to his own prudent approach to this question Wilkins blames me for making "an aggressive case for Augustinian inspiration" (389). rig | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion not, after all, be the author of the Capita.** Shall we soon be confronted with the same discussion about Homily 16?

I think my impression is not completely erroneous that some scholars are in fact so eager to avoid any taint of Augustinian influence on Palamas and any soupcon of a possible Latin theological pollution that their arguments eventually become somewhat strained. Frankly, I do not see the need for such anxious endeavors to erase any Augustinian traces from the writings of the defender of the hesychasts, all the more since they are doomed to fail anyway. Palamas' immaculate Orthodoxy is certainly not at stake just because he made use of some passages of the Greek translation of De Trinitate in his own theological and pastoral writings. Palamas certainly did not put the case for the filioque or any other trinitarian concept foreign to Orthodoxy by using various passages from the Greek De

am, therefore, very grateful that one of the most eminent scholars of Greek patristic and medieval literature, Robert E. Sinkewicz, who had originally denied categorically any Augustinian impact on Palamas, has lately recognized that, in fact, there are in Palamas' writings

"direct citations from Augustine's De Trinitate in the Greek translation by Maximos Planoudes."*?

Nevertheless, I definitely never claimed that Palamas was an "Augustinian" theologian or that his theology was in fact "Augustinian." The Jesuit scholar Joseph Léssl, of Cardiff University, who in two English articles otherwise summarized quite faithfully my German article on this topic,*4 made this allegation and, therefore, called my conclusions

"Thus, e.g., Andrew Sopko, "Scholasticism and Orthodoxy: Some Current Observations," in The Church and the Library: Studies in Honorof Rev. Dr. George C. Papademetriou, ed. Dean Papademetriou and Andrew Sopko (Boston: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005),

391, claimed that the Augustinian passages in the Capita were interpolations added by Theophanes of Nicaea (died c. 1381), but he failed to present any substantial evidence.

Anthony G. Roeber, "Western, Eastern or global orthodoxy?: Some reflections on St. Augustine of Hippo in recent literature," Pro ecclesia 17 (2008): 222, reports that Fr Maximos Lavriotes, a radically antiphanarian monk recently expelled from Mount Athos had even suggested Gennadios Scholarios (died c. 1473) as possible compiler of the Capita.

43Sinkewicz, Gregory Palamas, 163, who now also admits a possible Augustinian influence behind the image of Love and Joy used for the Spirit in Cap. 36f (ibid., 170).

"Compare Léssl, "Augustine's 'On the Trinity' in Gregory Palamas' 'One Hundred and ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE "methodologically questionable.'*> Instead Léssl presented the position of the Belgian Dominican Jacques Lison as a more appropriate assessment of the relationship between Palamas and Augustine."° It was likely Lison's dissertation that caused the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian

Unity in 1995 to refer to Gregory Palamas as an eastern witness for the Augustinian interpretation of the Holy Spirit as mutual bond of love between the Father and the Son.*" As for Lison himself, he had, in fact, repeatedly dismissed the possibility of proving any direct influence of Augustine on Palamas, but, in contrast to Sinkewicz, did not want to exclude at least some "superficial" or "indirect" influence of the bishop of Hippo in chapter 36 either.*® One of the key testimonies for his assertion that the context of chapter 36 has absolutely nothing to do with Augustinian speculations about mental acts as analogies to trinitarian relations was chapter 35, with its above-mentioned distinction of a fourfold notion of word found in each human being.*? Unfortunately, it is exactly this paragraph that has a quite literal correspondence in book 15 of De Trinitate.

This brings me to the second part of my paper, i.e., inspiration, exploitation, and distortion of St Augustine in St Gregory Palamas.

Fifty Chapters," Augustinian Studies 30 (1999): 69-81, and "Augustine in Byzantium,"

279-86, with my article "Der heimliche Blick," 280-97.

he did not consider it necessary to substantiate this objection by so much as a quotation from my works. The reason for this is conspicuous—he simply would not have found any remark of this type in my writings. Léssl, "Augustine's 'On the Trinity, " 63.

4eTbid., 71: "There is no need to push any further in Flogaus' direction, especially after Lison's call for caution." On the other hand he claims that "Palamas goes even further than

Augustine in On the Trinity. For he drops the terminology of similarity (oiov, 6potoy, like, similar to)—something Augustine never does ... —and equals the human spiritual experience of loving and being loved with the Spirit himself" (ibid., 70).

47Cf. "Die griechische und lateinische Uberlieferung tiber den Ausgang des Heiligen Geistes. Eine Klarstellung in Verantwortung des Papstlichen Rates zur Forderung der Einheit der Christen," Una Sancta 50 (1995): 324, n. 11.

48Jacques Lison, L'Esprit répandu. La pneumatologie de Grégoire Palamas (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 89; "LEsprit comme amour selon Grégoire Palamas: Une influence augustinienne?"

Studia Patristica 32 (1997): 325-32.

Lison, "LEsprit comme amour selon Grégoire Palamas," 329. rig | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion Inspiration, Exploitation and Distortion of St Augustine in the Writings of St Gregory Palamas

As I said before, in contrast to Fr Meyendorff,°° I never claimed that Palamas was an "Augustinian" theologian or that his theology as a whole could be suitably characterized as such. I do, however, believe it to be undeniable that Palamas made use of Augustine in various writings. He did so not only by letting himself be inspired by some Augustinian arguments, which he incorporated in his own writings, but also by simply exploiting

Augustine's notions, ideas, and arguments for a different purpose. Finally, in some cases, he used Augustine's words in order to support a concept that was the opposite to what Augustine had originally meant. Whether or not this copying and paraphrasing should be called a "reception" of Augustine may be subject to discussion. | did, in fact, use that term but showed at the same time how eclectic and sometimes even contrary to Augustine's intentions this reception was.°! In any case, in having recourse to the Greek De Trinitate, Palamas obviously was anxious not to unveil his source. So far, we know only of one instance where he introduced a quotation from Planoudes' translation with the phrase "since one of the wise and apostolic men said . .." without, however, giving either Planoudes' or Augustine's name.°? Nevertheless, the introduction of this quotation suggests that we may conclude that Palamas—at least partially—esteemed the books of De Trinitate as a patristic testimony faithful to the apostolic truth. Why else would he have repeatedly copied Augustine's words?

5!Flogaus, Theosis, 109, 241, 256, 277; "Der heimliche Blick," 287, 290, 297. Léssl, "Augustine in Byzantium," 286, argued against the use of this term, following a remark of Podskalsky in his review of my book (Byzantinische Zeitschrift 91 [1998]: 119).

Contra Gregoram 2.43 (PS 5.296.10s): "émei Kat Tig TOV GOMOV Kai G00TOMKOV GVSpOvV Pot, bt 'Ogcetg Kai EeIg Kai TOOL Kai YpOvot Kai Ei TL TOLODTOV, OD

Kupias émi tod Ood Agéyovtat, GAAG pETAPOpIKHc' TO 5é Mpg TO moLEiv Kal Evepyeiv GvijKov éxi LOvov Tod Osod GAnPéotata tv Aéyorto' ..." with Trin. 5.8.9 (363.25-31). The same quotation (which the editors of Contra Gregoram presented as "unidentified") is found also in Cap. 133 (PS 5.110.10-14). Whereas this quotations is a little longer in Cap. 133, it is in Contra Gregoram that its wording is a little more faithful to Planoudes' translation

(cf. for this Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam," 21, n. 100).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Since the space assigned to this contribution is limited, I shall restrict myself to giving a few examples for these various modes of incorporation of bits of De Trinitate in Palamas. One instance in which we can clearly see that Palamas let himself be inspired by Augustine's reflections is certainly the description of the image of the Trinity in our minds with the differentiation of the four kinds of "word" that can be observed in human beings.°? It is also quite remarkable that in the preceding chapter (34), the text ofAugustine inspires the archbishop of Thessaloniki to draw conclusions that normally would not have been his: namely, that God possesses goodness, life, and other predications not as qualities but as his essence

(odvota). This idea is actually foreign to Palamas' theology, since he would normally identify these predications with God's energy and consider

God's essence as beyond all names and all knowledge. Augustine, on the contrary, repeatedly made such an identification in order to safeguard the divine simplicity.°* Nevertheless, in another part of the Capita (chapters

3A comparison of Cap. 35 (PS 5.53.26-54.6): ".. Kai Adyoc OD KATA TOV NLETEPOV TPOoptKOV AOyoV, Od VOd YAP ODTOG, GAAG Gatos VO Ktvovplevov' OVSE KATH TOV LETEPOV

Evdtd0Etov Adyov, PHdyyaV yap Oiovel THMOIg KaKEIVOS EV Htiv StaTIBEpEVvos yiveTar GAN oOvdE KATH TOV HLETEpOV EV Stavoia Adyov, Kav YOpic ODdyyOV 1, EmtIBodAaic Gowpatotg

NAVIN OVLLTEPALODHEVOS, KAKEIVOS Yap 1E0 Hudc ott Kai StaArcIUBATOV Seitat Kai YPOVIKAV OVK SAty@V StaoTHLATaV, SteEodtKH¢ Mpoiwv, Kai & apyiic Utedods mpdc TO EVTEAES OVMEPUGHA MpoayopEvoc' GAAG KATH TOV ELPUTHS Hiv, & od yeyovapev Tapa

TOD KTIOAVTOS HLLGSG KAT sikdva OikElav, EVaTOKEILLEVOV TO VO AOYoV, TV dei ovvuTdpyovoay adt@ yv@ouv, ..." with Trin. 15.11.20 (901.20-27, 903.43-49) and 15.15.25 (923.3750) reveals that Palamas' hOyog mpo@optKds corresponds with the Aoyog mpo@optKds év POdyy@ in Planoudes translation, his Adyog évdtG0EtoG, PUOyy@V yap oiovEi TOmOIG . .

. StaTIOEjievoc with the évdid0etog év Gpotmpatt POdyyov, his Adyog év Stavoig with the AOyog év ti Stavoig, and the description of the Adyog Edt Hiv évanoKEiptevocg TO VO as Get ovverdpyovoed abt yv@otc corresponds with td mapovta sioi Kai Tpd¢ THV AdTOD TOd vod obvow a&viKovow which are described as év t vot &td1d¢ tig yvGotc. For further information see Flogaus, Theosis, 143-46.

Cap. 34 (PS 5.52.24-53.9): "O Gvatata vovde, 10 dKpov éyabov,...pavepOs od ZoloTHTa GAM ovdoiay éyet Ti &yabdotyta. Alo Kai mov SrEp dv EvvorjoEté Tig Gya0ov, év éxeiv@ EoTi, WaAOV dé Exeivdc Eotr Kai baep Exeivo got ... Kai

Car) Ev adt@ got, LGAAov 5é adTOS EoTLV 1 Cary Gya0ov yapH Car) Kai dya0dtng Ev adTO 1 Con. Kai} cogia EV ADTH EOTL, [LAAAOV SE ATO EoTIV' GyADOV yapN Cogia Kai GyaldTHs EV ADTH 1 Gogia,

Kai 1 GidtNS Kai 1 HaKaplotng ... Kai odk gotw éxet dwapopa Caij¢ Kai cogiag Kai Gya0dtyt0¢ Kai TOV ToLlobTOV. Hdvta yap 1 &yabOty¢ Exeivy ovvElknppEvas Kai Eviaiads kai Gmhovotat@s ovpmepipardrer ..." with Trin. 15.5.7-6.9 (865.17f, 867.35-38, 43f,

51-869.54, 871.7-11). ri | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion u7-19), which stems from his De citatione Cyrilli, Palamas argues that God's attributes are not to be equaled with his essence.°°

Another example of an Augustinian inspiration is certainly the much disputed comparison of the Spirit with the love and joy that the Father and the Son share, as found in chapters 36 and 37.°° Even though the parallels are less literal, this particular idea as presented here by Palamas and also in his Contra Beccum has clearly been inspired by Augustine. Finally most of the Treatise on the Economy of the Incarnation (homily 16), where

Palamas considers power and justice and the respective tasks of the two natures of Christ in the work of salvation, quite faithfully recounts Augustine's thoughts.°"

As an example of those passages where Palamas made use of Augustine, i.e., exploited Augustine's writings to procure for himself some valid material to support his own case, while strongly rejecting Augustine's conclusions, I would like to point to chapter 132. Once again, this chapter is based on Augustine's deliberations about relative predications in God, which were appreciated by Palamas because they showed that there was a reality in God that was not identical with his substance. In the underlying passage from book5 of De Trinitate, the bishop of Hippo had argued that the Father is referred to as Father in relation to his Son, and that he is referred to as principle in relation to the Son and to the Spirit, whereas in relation to creation, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit constitute together one principle.°* The final conclusion that Augustine had drawn from this

Capita (117-19) with De citatione Cyrilli (PS 5.100.22-102.14). For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Flogaus, Theosis, 100-18.

Cap. 36 (PS 5.55.8-15) with Trin. 6.10.11 (413.30-37). Note also, Cap. 37 (PS 5-55-2226): "AM év Exeivo TH Gpyetdaw, év Exeivy Ti Tavtedrcio Kai drEptErei Gya0ortntl, ...mavta éotiv daaparrdKtac 6 VEiog Epwc dou Exsivy. Alo Kai mvedpa Gytov

Kai mapaKAntos GAAOG OdtH¢ ETI TE KAI TAP HUOV KaAEitaL..." The translation by Hussey, op.cit. (n. 7), 85, "Therefore the Holy Spirit is another Paraclete and is named such by us," is erroneous; the conjecture suggested by Sinkewicz in his edition "and another [name for the] Paraclete" (125) is superfluous since Palamas is referring here to Jn 14.16. Compare also

Contra Beccum 2 (PS 1.164.15f) with Trin. 15.19.37 (951.142—953.150). For further evidence cf.

Flogaus, "Palamas and Barlaam," 22, n. 108.

the parallels (and also the minor differences), see Flogaus, Theosis, 238-61.

Cap. 132 (PS 5.109.26— 110. 9): ".. Aéyetar dé GvagopiKdc, Ka0dmep Epypev, Kai 6 TATIp LOvog MPdg TOV Spoodbotov vidV maTHP, 6 AdTOS 5é AéyeTat Kal GPX] MpOs TOV

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE was, of course, dismissed by Palamas and passed over in silence, namely, that in relation to the Spirit, the Father and the Son also constitute one principle. Thus, Palamas used Augustine to some extent for his own purpose but was not willing to follow this church father's train of thought beyond a certain point.

Finally, let me point out one instance where a passage from De Trinitate actually appears somewhat distorted in its rendering by Gregory Palamas. The passage in question is chapter 125, where Palamas had used a string of arguments expounded by Augustine in book 15 of De Trinitate in order to refute the Eunomian claim that every predication about God concerns his substance.*" The purpose of this argument in Palamas is, viov TE Kai TO ved, Aéyetat 5é Kai TPOs TI KTiotV O mATIP Gpyy, GAM we KTioTNS Kai deonOTNS TOV KTIOLATOV TaVTOV. "Otay odv TadTA mpd TI KTiow 6 TaTI}p A€yntat, apy} éott Kai 6 vidc, Kai odK ici dbo Gpyat, GAAG pia Kai yap dvapopiKds Aéyetat Kai 6 vidg apy > Mpdg TH Ktiow, Honep 6 SeondtNg Mpg TA SodAG. OdKOdV 6 aaTHP Kai 6 Vidg

Leta TOD AvEbpatos > Mpd¢ THV KTioLw Lia Gpyh got Kai Eig SeomdtN¢ Kai Eig KtIoTNS Kai gig Osdc te Kai TaTIp Kai mpopnOeds Kai Epopoc, Kai THAAG MavTA. Kai TAV TolodT@V ékaotov odK ~ottv odoia' Od yap Gv Mpdc Etepov GvaqopIKs ééyeTo, eimep Tv adtod ovoia" with Trin. 5.13.14f (371.4-373.17): "Aéyetat dpa dvagopik@s 6 Ilathp, 6 adtog 6& dvapopiks Aéyetat Kai dpi]... GAAG Tatip wév mpoc tov Yiov Aéyetan, &pyi] 5 mpdc

NAVTA Ta EE AVTOD ... Kai apy dé Aéyetat 6 Yidg ... Somep Kai 6 Matnp apyn tig Ktiseds éottv, Ott Si] &E aVtODd TA AdVTM' Kai YUP Kai 6 KTIOTIS AVAPOPIKHs A€yETal MpOc THYV KTIOLV, onep 6 Seondtyg¢ Tpd¢c TOV SodAovV. Kai Sta todto Aéyovtec Kai Tov Matépa &pyiv Kai TOV

Yidv dpyiqv, od dbo Gpyac Tig KTIGEMs AEyoptEV' 6 yap Tatip Kai 6 Yidg dod mpd¢ TI Ktiotv pia gotiv Gpyh, WomEp cig xtiotys Kai cig Od..." and (375.4-7, 377-37-41): "6 Matnp mMpoc Tov Yiov Gpyh éotr yeyévvnxe yap adbtov. Mdtepov sé Kai mpd¢ 16 Hvedpa 10 &ytov apy éottv 6 Hatyp,... od picpa Cytnoic éotw... O¢ 6 Hatip Kai 6 Yidc sig Ogdc, ... obTHS EVAPOPLKC Mpo¢ TO Hvedpa TO &ytov pia apyiy Mpos 5é TI Ktiotw 6 Hatip Kai 6

Yidcg kai 10 Hvedpa 10 Gytov pia Gpy, OomEp ic nuovpydg Kai Eig Kipios."

Cap. 125 (PS 5.105, 23-106, 8): "Ata todg Edvoptavots, doxodvtas pi THY adtiv matpdc sivat Kai viod ovoiav, émetdi] TGV TO TEpi Oeod AEyOpuEvov Kat ovotav héyeoOat olovtat Kai PUovetkodow wc, émEi TO yevvav Kai yevvao0at Siapopa EoTI, Sid

TOVTO Kai OdOIaG StaPdpovs Eival, ... SeikvUTUL [1] TEV TO MEpi Oeod AEyOptEVvov KAT" ovoiav AéyeoDat, GAAG AEyeoOat Kai AVAMOPIKHs, TOVTESTI TPd¢ TI, MEP ADTOG ODK EOTIV"

6 mathp Aéyetat mpdc TOV vidv' Od yap goTL maTIp 6 vidg Kai KUPLOg MPd¢g TIYV dovdedovoay Ktiow, Kuptevbet yap 6 Osdg TOV év Yp@va Kai év aiOvt Kai AdTOV TOV ai@vev' TO dé KuptEebselv UKTIOTOS EoTLV EvEpysta OEod, Siapépovose Tijg odotac, OG TPOG

ETEPOV TLAEYOLEVN, STEP ADTOS ODK EoTIV," with Trin. 15.3.5 (857.23-35): "Ev 6€ TO TELATO da tode Soxodvtac S14 Tadta pu] THY adtiv Matpdcg Kai Ytod eivat odoiav, émetd1 aa TO nepi Oeod AcyOutevov kat ovoiav AéEyecOat olovtat, Kai Sid tTadTa TO yew Kal yevvaobat

7 yevvntov eivat Kai &yévvytov, éxei Sagopa Eott, Povetkodov [Kai] obaiag Siapopovg ri | Inspiration—Exploitation—Distortion however, a different one, namely, to defend a third eternal reality in God besides ovoia and bxdotaotGc, i.e, Evépyeta. Therefore, Palamas not only skipped Augustine's remark that the predications "good" and "great" refer to God's substance but also expanded the relative predication of God's lordship over creation from the realm of temporal things to the realm of eternity by adding "kai év ai@vt Kai adtOv TOV aimvev" and by explaining that God's lordship is an uncreated energy. This, of course, was not at all the view ofAugustine, who taught that God's lordship like his creation must belong to the realm of temporal things. Thus, we are confronted with the fact that even while he quoted large parts of Augustine's argumentation, Palamas, nevertheless, rather skillfully altered it a bit here and there and thus reached a conclusion opposite to the original passage from De Trinitate.

To conclude, let me say once more that Palamas was certainly not an "Augustinian theologian," but that he clearly used the Greek translation of De Trinitate in his writings in various ways, which, in this paper, I have tried to differentiate with the three keywords "inspiration," "exploitation," and "distortion." Some of these passages, which were obviously the fruit of a rather thorough study of De Trinitate, have been mentioned here, but further careful scrutiny of the sources will certainly reveal even more such instances in the works of the defender of the hesychasts. Almost as important, however, as an unprejudiced look at the sources, will be the acknowledgment, at last, of the philological evidence that has been discovered so far and of the consequences drawn from this evidence for the historiography of the hesychast controversy. The various attempts to suppress these findings, to put them in question, or simply to deny them are as little help in this regard as is the reiteration of the old stereotypes used to depict the hesychast controversy in fourteenth-century Byzantium as a clash between "theological civilizations,' namely, of the Augustinian West eivat, Gmodeikvutat pu] Wav TO Epi Oeod Agyouevov Kat' odoiav AEyeo0al, HomEp KAT ovdoiav Aéyetat Gya0Oc Kai péyacg Kai st TL Etepov Ka' adTO A€éyetat, GAAG AgyeoOat Kai

GVAPOPLKAs, TOVTESTIV OD KAN' GDTO GAAG Mpg TL dmEp adTOG OdK EoTIV, Gonep Hatip Mpoc Tov Yiov Aéyetat 7H [codd.: kai] KUptog mpdg THY SovAEbovoay adTO ktiotv' EvOa Kai él TL AVAQOPIKHs, TOVTESTI MPO¢ TI, STEP ADTOS ODK EoTI, Kai EV YPOVO A€yetat .. . TAVTGNAOW adTOV EV TH EAVTOD PoEt 7] OVOIG GvaAAOiMTOV SiapLEvEtV."

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and the Orthodox East. Instead, we should look at the facts and accept that Palamas obviously did read Augustine as a father belonging to the tradition of the Church, even if some of his reasoning was not quite in accordance with Byzantine trinitarian theology. By doing so, Gregory Palamas proved to have had a much broader theological horizon than some of his modern interpreters. Would this not, after all, be a promising perspective for future research on the theology of Gregory Palamas and on the history of the hesychast controversy?

Augustine of Hippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and GregoryNazianzen ——— JosepH T. LIENHARD, SJ ith slight embarrassment but an Augustinian spirit, I begin by retracting the title of the paper that I originally submitted, "Augustine and the Cappadocians." There are two reasons for this retraction.

The first is that the title is an anachronism. The collective title "the Cappadocian fathers" for Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa has been in use only since the mid-nineteenth century.

Augustine probably never knew of Gregory of Nyssa at all, except to confuse one fact about him: he once calls Gregory Nazianzen Basil's brother—which, of course, he was not; Gregory of Nyssa was.!

The second reason for the retraction is that Augustine generally did not think of Basil and Gregory Nazianzen as belonging together, distinct from other Greek bishops. As we shall see, late in his life, he does institute a sort of argument from tradition by listing Christian bishops (and even, quite generously, one presbyter?) as Orthodox authorities who agree with himself. Only once does he join Basil and Gregory as a distinctive pair.

Right at the outset I need to acknowledge that one important topic cannot be treated here because the literature on it is so great and the con- "Duo isti tam insignes viri. . . sicut fertur, etiam carne gemani" (Contra Jul. 1.5.19 [PL

44.652]). See Berthold Altaner, "Augustinus und Basilius der Grofe," Kleine patristische Schriften, ed. Ginter Glockmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1967), 269-76. Altaner assumes that Augustine had Jerome's De viris illustribus and Rufinus' Latin translation and continuation of Eusebius history available to him as sources of information on the Greek fathers but made little use of them.

Jerome; see Augustine, Contra Jul. 2.10.33 (PL 44.697).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE clusions drawn are so divergent: namely, Augustine's knowledge of Greek.

On one end of the spectrum, the passage from the Confessiones (Confessions) in which Augustine complains about the poor pedagogy of his teachers of Greek is well known. On the other end of the spectrum, by the end of his life he could translate some sentences from Greek, and does so accurately. But still, how much Greek he really knew, and whether he could read Greek easily, remains a matter of speculation.

There are three possible approaches to the topic of Augustine and the Greek fathers Basil and Gregory. The first we might call impressionistic; the second, a sort of census approach or name-count; and the third, a search for sources. In every instance, the starting point in modern studies of Augustine and the eastern fathers must be the work of Berthold

Altaner, whose series of articles on this topic is foundational,' although other studies have followed.4

"Altlateinische Ubersetzungen von Basiliusschriften," Kleine patristische Schriften, 409-15 (orig. publ. Historisches Jahrbuch 61 [1941]: 208-26); Altaner, "Augustinus und Basilius der Grofe," ibid., 269-76 (orig. publ. Revue bénédictine 60 [1950]: 17-24);

Altaner, "Augustinus und die griechische Sprache," ibid., 129-53 (orig. publ. Antike und Christentum, Erganzungsband 1 [1939]: 19-40); Altaner, "Augustinus, Gregor von Nazianz,

Gregor von Nyssa," ibid., 277-85 (orig. publ. Revue bénédictine 61 [1951]: 54-62); Altaner, "Die Beniitzung von original griechischen Vatertexten durch Augustinus," ibid. 154-63

(orig. publ. Zeitschrift fiir Religionsund Geistesgeschichte 1 [1948]: 71-79); Altaner, "Eustathius, der lateinische Ubersetzer der Hexaemeron-Homilien Basilius des Grofen," ibid., 437—-47 (orig. publ. Zeitschrift fiir dieneutestamentliche Wissenschaft 39 [1940]: 161-70).

'Pierre Courcelle, Les lettres grecques en Occident, 2d ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1948); English trans. Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969);

Maria-Barbara von Stritzky, "Beobachtungen zur Verbindung zwischen Gregor von Nyssa und Augustin," Vigiliae christianae 28 (1974): 176-85; Waclaw Eborowicz, "Saint Basile et

Saint Augustin," Vox Patrum 3 (1982): 285-97; Gerard J.M. Bartelink, "Die Beeinflussung Augustins durch die griechischen Patres," Augustiniana Traiectina: Communications présentées au Colloque International d'Utrecht, 13-14 novembre 1986, ed. J. den Boeft and J. van

Oort, 9-24 (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987); Andrew Louth, "Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers," Augustinian Studies 33 (2002): 1-16. ri | Augustine of Hippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen

The Impressionistic Approach The impressionistic approach was often employed in the earlier twentieth century. In the impressionistic approach, a scholar read Augustine, and read Basil or Gregory; seeing similar ideas, he concluded that the Greek father must have influenced Augustine, but supplied little or no textual evidence. In these passages, of course, Augustine does not name his source—if he is using one. Practitioners of the impressionistic approach were, for example, Jean Chevalier and John F. Callahan. Chevalier, writing on trinitarian relations in Augustine, asserted that Augustine read Basil's works against Eunomius and on the Holy Spirit, as well as his letters and his homilies, but offered no documentary evidence.° John F. Callahan discussed Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa as sources of Augustine's theory of time; but, again, the conclusions he reached are impressionistic.®

Before I leave the impressionistic approach, however, I would like to indulge in an exercise parallel to it: pointing out two passages in which a parallel can be seen between Augustine and the Cappadocians, without claiming any direct dependence.

The first point is the so-called Cappadocian settlement. This phrase is scholarly shorthand for four Greek words, tia odoia, tTpeic broothoEIC

(one essence, three hypostases), which are supposed to sum up the Cappadocian fathers' doctrine of the Trinity. But the phrase never occurs in precisely that form in their writings, nor is it found verbatim in other

Greek writers of the time, although Didymus the Blind comes closest.'

The Cappadocian settlement was in fact formulated by Augustine. He Jean Chevalier, Saint Augustin et la pensée grecque: Les relations trinitaires, Collectanea

Friburgensia 33 (Fribourg: Librairie de Université, 1940). For criticism of Chevalier see Gerard J.M. Bartelink, "Basilius," Augustinus-Lexikon 1 (1994): 614-17.

John FE. Callahan, "Basil of Caesarea:

A New Source for St. Augustine's Theory of Time,"

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 437-543 Callahan, "Gregory of Nyssa and the Psychological View of Time," Proceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Philosophy, vol. 11: History ofAncient and Medieval Philosophy (Florence: Sansoni, 1960), 59-66.

7See Joseph T. Lienhard, "Ousia and Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement and the Theology of 'One Hypostasis, " in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. §.T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O'Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE writes it once in Greek, in book 5 of the De Trinitate (On the Trinity), in a famous sentence: "They [the Greeks] also say hypostasis; but I do not know what distinction they intend between usia and hypostasis, so that many of our people, who treat this matter in the Greek language, are accustomed to say pia odota, tpsic btoothostc, which in Latin is 'one essentia, three substantiae?"* Augustine goes on to say that, to the Latin ear, essentia and substantia mean the same thing. In book 7, Augustine repeats the formula of the Greeks twice more, this time in Latin.? Thus, the crisp formula known as the Cappadocian settlement comes, ironically enough, from Augustine.!° The second impressionistic passage is, perhaps, less well known. In his fifth theological oration, Gregory Nazianzen has a famous statement about his inability to define the procession of the Holy Spirit. "What then is procession?" he writes. "Do you tell me what is the unbegottenness of the Father, and I will explain to you the physiology of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit, and we shall both of us be frenzystricken for prying into the mystery of God."!! In other words, he is at a loss to define procession. There is a strangely similar passage in a late work of Augustine's, Contra Maximinum (Against Maximinus),'* where Augus8Trin. 5.8.10 (CCSL 50.216—-17): "Dicunt quidem et illi bad0taow, sed nescio quid uolunt interesse inter odoiav et badoTGOLY ita ut plerique nostri qui haec graeco tractant eloquio dicere consuerint [tia odoia, TpEic brootdOEIC, quod est latine, unam essentiam, tres substantias."

7.4.7 (CCSL 50.255): "Itaque loquendi causa de ineffabilibus ut fari aliquo modo possemus quod effari nullo modo possumus dictum est a nostris graecis una essentia, tres substantiae, a latinis autem una essentia uel substantia, tres personae quia sicut iam diximus non aliter in sermone nostro, id est latino, essentia quam substantia solet intelligi." Ibid.,

7.4.8 (CCSL 50.259): "Quod enim de personis secundum nostram, hoc de substantiis secundum graecorum consuetudinem ea quae diximus oportet intelligi. Sic enim dicunt illi tres substantias, unam essentiam, quemadmodum nos dicimus tres personas, unam essentiam uel substantiam.

'0See also Jean Plagnieux, "Les formules trinitaires grecques vues par saint Augustin," in Saint Grégoire de Nazianze théologien (Paris: Editions franciscaines, 1952), 405-6.

"Gregory Nazianzen, Orations 31.8, trans. in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed.

Edward R. Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 198.

"In 427 or 428 the Gothic Count Segisvult sent Maximinus to Hippo Regius "with a view to peace." There Maximinus first debated the priest Heraclius, but Heraclius became angry and summoned Augustine. Augustine debated with Maximinus for one day; the rig | Augustine ofHippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen tine, too, is trying to define procession. He writes several times in the Contra Maximinum of the procession of the Holy Spirit, stating explicitly the notorious filioque: "The Holy Spirit proceeds from [the Father] and from the Son,"!? and "He proceeds from both of them."!" Yet when it comes to defining procession, Augustine throws up his hands: "That much I know; but how to distinguish between generation and procession I do not know,

I am not able, I cannot do it"!*—"nescio, non valeo, non sufficio," he groans in desperation. All he can say is that begetting and procession are distinct, and that begetting is a narrower category than procession; whatever is born proceeds, but not everything that proceeds is born.'° Procession is not birth; hence the Holy Spirit is not a son.!"

Thus the impressionistic approach: the most intriguing, perhaps, but also the least trustworthy.

The Census Approach Another interesting indicator, but not an absolute one, is how often Augustine mentions Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen by name.

This approach is made easier, and more certain, by the possibility of electronic searches.

The results are easy enough to tabulate. Augustine never mentions Gregory of Nyssa, but he does name Basil of Caesarea and Gregory

Nazianzen, about a dozen anda half times each. debate is recorded in the Conlatio cum Maximino Arianorum episcopo (Discussion with Maximinus the Arian Bishop). Because Maximinus spoke too long, Augustine had no time to answer him and later wrotea refutation of what Maximinus had said, in two books (Contra Maximinum).

'SContra Max. 2.5 (PL 42.761): "De illo et Filio ... procedit Spiritus sanctus."

"Tbid., 2.14.1 (PL 42.770-71): "De utroque procedit."

'STbid., 2.14.1 (PL 42.770): "Haec scio: distinguere autem inter illam generationem et hanc processionem nescio, non valeo, non sufficio." Roland J. Teske's translation is: "These things I know; I do not know, I cannot, | am unable to distinguish that generation from this procession." See Arianism and Other Heresies, trans. Roland J. Teske, in The Works of Saint

Augustine, I/18 (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1995), 280.

'©Contra Max. 2.14.1.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Most of the places where Augustine mentions Basil and Gregory are in his two works against Julian of Eclanum, Contra Julianum (Against Julian, written in 422),and Opus Imperfectum contra Julianum (Unfinished Work against Julian, written in 428). Most of these instances occur in lists of Orthodox bishops. Augustine is trying to defend the thesis that his teaching, including his teaching on original sin, is the Church's teaching as well.

Hence he several times provides a list of bishops, eastern and western, who agree with him.

In book 1 of Contra Julianum, Augustine gives the same list twice: Basil and Gregory, "two distinguished men," he writes—and here, Basil and Gregory forma distinct group—followed bya list of fourteen other bishops from the East!*—those fourteen bishops who took part in the Synod of Diospolis in 415, which, ironically, found Pelagius Orthodox. But the fourteen bishops would have condemned Pelagius, Augustine assures his readers, if Pelagius himself had not condemned some theses from his own writings.

Apart from these two lists, there are fifteen other lists of authorities in the two works against Julian. Assuming that the Gregory mentioned in these lists is Gregory Nazianzen, as Augustine established in book 1 of the work Contra Julianum, Augustine names Basil eleven times and Gregory thirteen times. These occurrences of the two names are about as frequent as those of the most-named western fathers: Cyprian is named thirteen times, Ambrose and Hilary twelve times each. Another Greek, John of Constantinople—that is, John Chrysostom—is named eleven times. These six are the most frequent of the twelve names.!° In all these instances,

Augustine names Basil or Gregory without quoting their writings.

The conclusion must be simple: Augustine knew of Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, held them and their writings in high esteem, and invoked them—along with other fathers, Greek and Latin—as authorities who agreed with him against Julian of Eclanum and other opponents.

'SContra Jul. 1.5.19, 1.6.22.

the sake of completeness, the rest are these: Irenaeus (six times), Innocent, the presbyter Jerome, Olympius and Reticius (each four times), and Theodore (once).

Augustine of Hippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen The Textual Approach The surest—if not the most fruitful—approach to the question of Augustine's relation to Basil and Gregory is a consideration of the passages from their writings that Augustine quotes while naming them as the authors. It must be said at the outset that the results are, in one sense, curiously disappointing. Augustine does not quote the great doctrinal works of Basil, such as De Spiritu Sancto (On the Holy Spirit) or Contra Eunomium

(Against Eunomius), or Gregory's theological orations. But then, modern emphasis on these great dogmatic works is precisely a modern prejudice.

It was, to a large extent, German history of dogma from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that focused attention, rather narrowly, on a fairly limited selection of dogmatic writings of the great fathers and tried to see a pattern of continuity running through them: often a pattern of two opposing schools or traditions,"° or a pattern of decline from biblical truth and a growing turn to philosophy or Catholicism.?! But the fathers of the Church had their own interests and, if Basil's or Gregory's comments on the human condition are what interested

Augustine most, then that fact needs to be recognized.

As his controversy with Julian of Eclanum began, Augustine appears to have devoted himself to a research project, trying to find passages in other Christian writers, western and eastern, that demonstrated his thesis: his teaching on the fall and its effects, and on baptism, were not his own invention but the common property of the Church. He began the project around 422, when he wrote his work Contra Julianum. In the case of Basil and Gregory, book 1 of Augustine's Contra Julianum marshals most of the quotations he will use;?? another, extensive quotation from Gregory is found in book 2 of that work. Augustine comes back to these

de Régnon's writings on the distinction between eastern and western trinitarian doctrine providea classic example of misleading or mistaken categories, although de

Régnon was not a Protestant.

?!Often enough, these categories constitute a search for the Deformation that justifies the Reformation.

??For Gregory, see Contra Jul. 1.5.15; for Basil, ibid., 1.5.18 (and 1.5.16-17 for a quotation wrongly attributed to Basil).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE quotations later in the same work, in the Opus Imperfectum, and in De dono perseverantiae (On the Gift ofPerseverance).

BASIL OF CAESAREA When the question of Augustine's quotations of Basil of Caesarea's words in his writings is asked, the results are thin. There are only two examples in Augustine's writings of verbatim citations of Basil's works with the author's name—and, in one of the two cases, Augustine gets the author's name wrong.

The one instance in which Augustine quotes Basil as Basil has its own intrinsic interest. In the course of an extended argument about original sin, Augustine quotes a passage from Basil's homily 1 on fasting. But, he writes to Julian of Eclanum, althougha Latin translation exists,?> he has translated the passage afresh from Greek, word for word, in order to get the exact point. The passage reads:

But hear what pertains to the present matter, what that holy Basil says without any ambiguity about the sin of the first man, which also pertains to us. And even though I found the passage translated, still, for the sake of more careful fidelity to the truth, I preferred to translate it from the Greek word for word. In his sermon about fasting he says:

"Fasting was established in paradise by law. For Adam received the first commandment: 'You shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' (Gen 2.17). But 'You shall not eat' is fasting, and the beginning of the establishment of law. If Eve had fasted from the tree, we would not need this fast. For 'healthy people do not need a doctor, but the sick do' (Mt 9.12).

We have grown sick through sin; let us be healed through penance. Penance without fasting is empty. "The accursed earth shall bring forth thorns and thistles' (Gen 3.17-18). You have been commanded to grieve, not to indulge yourself." And, a little later in the ?3See Clavis Patrum Graecorum §2845. The translator may have been Rufinus, but the attribution is not certain. The translation has been printed only in part, in Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum, vol. 3 (Lyon, 1677), 404-5.

Augustine ofHippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen same sermon, he also says: "Because we have not fasted, we fell from paradise. Hence we should fast, so that we might return there."*4

Augustine again quotes the last sentence just cited in the Opus Imperfectum.*> Augustine's literal translation of Basil's Greek is quite accurate, with perhaps some slight adaptation to Latin style. This passage makes three interesting points, one linguistic and two theological. First, Augustine can in fact translate Basil's Greek. And then, he uses the passage to make two points that support his teachings: fasting existed in paradise before the fall, and penance reverses the effects of sin.

In another instance, Augustine cites Basil's homily 13 on baptism, but he attributes the text to John Chrysostom." The passage, in which Basil is encouraging his hearers to come forward for baptism and not postpone it, reads:

24Contra Jul. 1.5.18 (PL 44.652): "Sed audi quod ad rem praesentem spectat, quid de peccato primi hominis ad nos etiam pertinente dicat iste sanctus sine ulla ambiguitate Basilius. Quod etsi reperi interpretatum, tamen propter diligentiorem veri fidem, verbum e verbo malui transferre de graeco. In sermone de ieiunio: Teiunium, inquit,

'in paradiso lege constitutum est. Primum enim mandatum accepit Adam: 'A ligno sciendi bonum et malum non manducabitis' (Gen 2.17).'Non manducabitis autem, ieiunium est, et legis constitutionis initium. Si ieiunasset a ligno Eva, non isto indigeremus ieiunio. Non enim opus habent valentes medico, sed male habentes (Mt 9.12). Aegrotavimus per peccatum, sanemur per poenitentiam. Poenitentia vero sine ieiunio vacua est. 'Maledicta terra spinas et tribulos pariet' (Gen 3.17—18). Contristari ordinatus es, numquid deliciari? Et paulo post in eodem sermone, idem ipse: 'Quia non ieiunavimus, inquit, 'decidimus de paradiso. leiunemus ergo, ut ad eum redeamus. " Basil wrote in Homilia 1 de ieiunio 3 (PG 31.168A): vynoteta év

T napadsiom évopoleTHOn. Tv apotnv évtoAjy éraPev "Ada "Ano tod EbAov tod yWooket Kadov kai zovnpov od gayeobe. TO d&, od Edyeobe, vnoTEiag éoTi Kai éyxpateiag vopobecia. Ei €vjotevoev Gn0 tod EddAov 7 Eva, od« Gv TadTHS VoV E5edp1200

Tig vnoteiac. OD yap ypeiav éyovow oi ioybpovtec iatpod, GAM ot KaKH¢ éxovtec.

"ExaKOOnpev Sid tig Gpaptiac iaVOpEv Sie Tig pEetavoiac, pEethvoww SE YOpPig VOTEIAS apy). Emucatépatos f yi H KavOac Kai tpiBOAovc &wvatedsi oot. Utvyvacew mpooetayOnc, lu) yap tpv@agv. The next sentence quoted is from Homilia 1 de ieiunio 4 (PG 31.168B):

odK EvnotevoapeEv, éCeméEGoEV TOD Mapadetoov' vyoTEvo@pEV ToIVvoV, Iva mpd¢ avdtov émaverAO@pev.

?2Opus imp. 1.52 (CSEL 85.1.47): "Meus est Basilius, qui cum ageret de ieiunio, 'Quia non ieiunavimus, inquit, 'decidimus de paradiso, ieiunemus ut ad eum redeamus. " = Basil,

Homilia1 de ieiunio 4 (PG 31.168B).

Clavis Patrum Graecorum, §2857, lists this Homilia exhortatoria ad sanctum baptisma but does not mention any Latin translation. rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Rightly does the same blessed John himself, like the martyr Cyprian, take the circumcision of the flesh that was commanded as a sign of baptism. He says: "And see how the Jew does not postpone circumcision because of a threat, because every soul that is not circumcised on the eighth day will be cut off from his people (Gen 17.14). But you," he continues, "put off—not circumcision done with the hand, which is accomplished in the removal of flesh from the body, but you hear the Lord saying: 'Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a man is born again of water and spirit, he will not enter into the kingdom of heaven'" (Jn 3.5).?"

In one other case, Julian of Eclanum cites, as Basil's work, a book that is not his, and Augustine accepts the attribution. In the first book of Contra Julianum, in a passage that Augustine cites from Julian of Eclanum,

Julian had written that he was quoting Basil,"* whereas, in fact, he quoted ps-Basil, Contra Manichaeos.' Basil, Julian maintained, wrote about original sin, but he did not say that the will is corrupted. Augustine does not contest Julian's attribution; he was apparently unfamiliar with the work.

The argument continues into the passage cited above,*° where Augustine ?7Contra Jul. 2.6.18 (PL 44.685-86): "Merito idem beatus Ioannes, etiam ipse, sicut et martyr Cyprianus [see Cyprian, Ep. 64] circumcisionem carnis in signo praeceptam commendat esse baptismatis. 'Et vide quomodo Judaeus, inquit, 'circumcisionem non differt propter comminationem, quia omnis anima quaecumque non fuerit circumcisa die octavo, exterminabitur de populo suo' (Gen 17.14). "Tu autem, inquit, 'non manufactam circumcisionem differs, quae in exspoliatione carnis in corpore perficitur, ipsum Dominum audiens dicentem, 'Amen, amen dico vobis, nisi quis renatus fuerit ex aqua et spiritu, non introibit in regnum coelorum (Jn 3.5)." = Basil, Homilia 13 exhortatoria ad sanctum baptisma 2 (PG 31.428A): 'O "lovdaiog thy mepttopy ody breptiDetat Sia THY Gmerryv, StL

NAA WYN, HtIg Od EpttpNOoEtaL TH HpEépa TH SySoyn EEoAOOpevOjoeta &k Tod Aaod adtijc od dé THY GYElpomoiToV TEptTOL GvaPGrAn Ev TH dmeKdvoet Tijg GapKOG EV TH

Pantiopati terciovpévyy, adtTOd Tod Kupiov &Kovboas. "Apny, &pnv Aéyo piv, ev pu} Tic yevv07 Sv bda70 Kai Mvebpatog, od pu} sicéAOy sic TV Baotrgiav tod Ogod.

*8Contra Jul. 1.5.17 (PL 44.651).

Nello Cipriani, "Lautore dei testi pseudobasiliani riportati nel C. [ul. (1.16-17) e la polemica agostiniana de Giuliano d'Eclano," Congresso internazionale su s. Agostino nel

XVI centenario della conversione: Atti (Rome: Istituto Patristico Augustinianum, 1987) 1.439—49. Cipriani identifies Serapion of Thmuis as the author of the work against the Manichees.

Jul. 1.5.18. rig | Augustine ofHippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen quotes Basil's homily on fasting, and he adds that Julian should read Basil more carefully.*!

Grecory NAZIANZEN Augustine quoted Gregory Nazianzen more often than he quoted Basil, perhaps because he had Rufinus' Latin translation of nine homilies available to him.*? In the first book of his work Contra Julianum, Augustine has great—if generic—praise for Gregory Nazianzen. He writes of Gregory's great name and most celebrated reputation; Gregory's eloquence, he writes, has the merit of great grace, and his works have been translated into the Latin language.*? Shortly thereafter Augustine again praises Gregory's authority, for this reason: what Gregory says is known to all as the Christian faith.*"

Augustine cites passages from five of Gregory's homilies. In each instance, he is citing Rufinus' Latin translation ofthose homilies. The citations are virtually verbatim; they differ from the current critical edition only by a single word here or there.*° 5!One further instance, which perhaps belongs under the category of impressionistic, is this: according to Altaner (see n. 3), Augustine, De Gen. ad lit. 1.18.36, derives from the Latin version of Basil's Hexaemeron 2.6, translated by Eustathius. See the critical edition of Eustathius' translation of Basil, E. Amand de Mendieta and S.Y. Rudberg, eds., Eustathius: ancienne version latine des neuf homélies sur

de Basile de Césarée (Berlin:

Akademie Verlag, 1958).

*Rufinus made his translation in 399/400.

Jul. 1.5.15 (PL 44.649): "Sed non tibi deerit magni nominis et fama celeberrima illustris episcopus etiam de partibus Orientis, cuius eloquia ingentis merito gratiae, etiam in linguam latinam translata usquequaque claruerunt. Sedeat ergo cum istis patribus etiam sanctus Gregorius, et cum eis tuae criminationis inanem patiatur invidiam: dum tamen cum eis contra novitiam pestem vestram, medicinalem proferat et ipse sententiam."

Jul. 1.5.16 (PL 44.650): "An tibi parva in uno Gregorio episcoporum orientalium videtur auctoritas? Est quidem tanta persona, ut neque ille hoc nisi ex fide christiana omnibus notissima diceret, nec illi eum tam clarum haberent atque venerandum, nisi haec ab illo dicta ex regula notissimae veritatis agnoscerent."

The critical edition is Tyranii Rufini orationum Gregorii Nazianzeni novem interpretatio, ed. Augustus Engelbrecht, CSEL 46 (Vienna: Tempsky, 1910). rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Apology for His Flight Of the passages that Augustine cites from Gregory Nazianzen, the most extensive is one from near the end of Gregory's Apologia de fuga

(Apology for his Flight), which he wrote on his return to Nazianzus after his father had ordained hima priest and he had fled back to Basil. The first time Augustine quotes the passage is in book 2 of his work Contra Julianum; this is also the most extensive quotation. In this passage Gregory writes at length of the struggle within a man, which can be won only by a long philosophical—he means ascetical—training. Gregory is saying that he is not yet ready to be a priest. Augustine used the passage to illustrate the effects of original sin.

In his book, In Self-Defense, he says, "I do not as yet make mention of those blows by which we are attacked within ourselves by our own vices and passions and are day and night oppressed by the burning temptations of the body of this lowly state and of the body of death.

In it the snares of visible things entice and arouse us at times in a hidden way and at other times quite openly, and the clay of these dregs to which we cling breathes forth the foul odor of its filth through its larger passages. The law of sin which is in our members resists the law of the spirit, as it strives to take captive the royal image which is within us so that all that has been poured into us by the gift of our original and divine creation becomes his booty. From there, though they govern themselves with a long and uncompromising pursuit of wisdom and gradually recover the nobility of their soul, hardly any summon back and turn back to God the nature of the light which is joined in them to this humble and dark clay. Or if they do this with God's help, they will call both of them back equally, if by long and constant meditation they become used to always looking upward and to pulling up by tighter reins the matter bound to them that always wrongly drags them downward and weighs them down."*° *°Roland J. Teske, trans., Answer to the Pelagians 2, The Works of Saint Augustine, I/24

(Hyde Park, NY: New City, 1998), 341-42. Contra Jul. 2.3.7 (PL 44.677): "In libro quippe Apologetico: Tllorum vero, inquit, 'verberum nondum facio mentionem, quibus intra nosAugustine ofHippo, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen

In the same paragraph, Augustine repeats phrases from Gregory to explain the point he is trying to make:

When the blessed Gregory says, "We are attacked within ourselves by our own vices and passions, and, day and night, we are hard pressed by the burning goads of this body of humility and this body of death," he is speaking as one baptized, and he is speaking about the baptized.

When he says, "by the law of sin that is in our members, fighting against the law of the spirit," he is speaking as one baptized, he is speaking about the baptized.°"

Augustine repeats most of this quotation three more times: twice in the first book of the Opus Imperfectum*® and once in the sixth book of the metipsos propriis vitiis ac passionibus impugnamutr, et die noctuque ignitis stimulis corporis humilitatis huius et corporis mortis urgemur, nunc latenter, nunc etiam palam provocantibus ubique et irritantibus rerum visibilium illecebris, luto hoc faecis cui inhaesimus, coeni sui fetorem venis capacioribus exhalante; sed et lege peccati, quae est in membris nostris, legi spiritus repugnante; dum imaginem regiam, quae intra nos est, captivam ducere studet: ut spoliis eius cedat, quidquid illud est quod in nosbeneficio divinae ac primae illius conditionis influxit: unde vix aliquis fortasse longa se et districta regens philosophia, et paulatim nobilitatem animae suae recolens, naturam lucis quae in se est humili huic et tenebroso luto coniuncta, revocet ac reflectat ad Deum: vel si certe propitio Deo agat, utrumque pariter revocabit; si tamen longa et assidua meditatione insuescat sursum semper aspicere, et deorsum male trahentem ac degravantem materiam sibimet astrictam frenis arctioribus sublevare." = Gregory, Apologetica, oration 2.91 (PG 35.493); in Rufinus' translation, Apologeticus, oration 1.91 (CSEL 46.67—68).

Jul. 2.3.7 (PL 44.678): "Cum dicit beatus Gregorius, 'Intra nosmetipsos propriis vitiis ac passionibus impugnamutr, et die noctuque ignitis stimulis corporis humilitatis huius et corporis mortis urgemur'; baptizatus loquitur, de baptizatis loquitur. Cum dicit,

'lege peccati quae est in membris nostris legi spiritus repugnante'; baptizatus loquitur, de baptizatis loquitur."

imp. 1.67 (CSEL 85.1.71-72): "Audi non Caelestium, sed Gregorium: 'Intra nosmet ipsos, inquit, 'propriis vitiis ac passionibus impugnamur et die noctuque ignitis stimulis corporis humilitatis huius et corporis mortis urgemur nunc latenter, nunc etiam palam provocantibus ubique et irritantibus rerum visibilium illecebris luto hoc faecis, cui inhaesimus, caeni sui fetorem venis capacioribus exhalante, sed et lege peccati, quae est in membris nostris, legi spiritus repugnante.'"

Opus imp. 1.69 (CSEL 85.1.77): ""Legem peccati, quae est in membris nostris, legi spiritus repugnare, dum imaginem regiam, quae intra nos est, captivam ducere studet, ut spoliis eius cedat, quidquid illud est quod in nos beneficio divinae ac primae illius condirig

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE same work.°? In this passage, Gregory writes at length of the internal warfare within a man, vividly depicting the struggle with passions, night and day, secretly and openly. Augustine then insists to Julian that Gregory is speaking as one who is baptized, and about the baptized: that is, the struggle remains after baptism.

Oration on the Nativity ofChrist A shorter passage, one from Gregory's oration on the nativity of Christ, is another favorite of Augustine's. The key sentence of Gregory's, which Augustine cites five times, is, "Venerate the nativity, through which you are freed from the bonds of an earthly nativity." Augustine cites it in the first book of his work Contra Julianum,*° where he continues and cites the following sentence also, the only time he does so; the sentence reads:

"Honor Bethlehem, weak and small, through which the way back to paradise was laid open for you." He paraphrases the first sentence a few parationis influxit. Unde vix aliquis, inquit, 'fortasse longa se et districta regens philosophia et paulatim nobilitatem animae suae recolens naturam lucis, quae in se est humili huic et tenebroso luto coniuncta, revocet ac reflectat ad deum; vel si certe propitio deo agat, utrumque pariter revocabit, si tamen longa et assidua meditatione insuescat sursum semper aspicere, et deorsum male trahentem ac degravantem materiam sibimet astrictam frenis arctioribus sublevare. Haec dicebat beatus Gregorius non inter principia emendationis suae, sed iam episcopus, volens exponere vel potius quae nota sunt admonere, in quali quantoque certamine cum vitiis interioribus, propter corpus quod aggravat animam, constituti sint sancti."

imp. 6.14 (PL 45.1528): "Iam vero beatus Gregorius hoc certamen, quod habemus in corpore mortis huius, sic ante oculos ponit, ut nullus sit huius agonis athleta, qui non se in verbis eius tanquam in speculo recognoscat. 'Intra nosmetipsos, inquit, 'propriis

Vitiis et passionibus impugnamur, et die noctuque ignitis stimulis corporis humilitatis huius et corporis mortis urgemur: nunc latenter, nunc etiam palam provocantibus ubique et irritantibus rerum visibilium illecebris, luto hoc faecis cui inhaesimus coeni sui fetorem venis capacioribus exhalante; sed et lege peccati, quae est in membris nostris, legi spiritus repugnante, dum imaginem regiam quae intra nos est, captivam ducere studet; ut spoliis eius cedat, quidquid illud est, quod in nos beneficio divinae ac primae illius conditionis influxit,"

"Contra Jul. 1.5.15 (PL 44.650): "Idem rursus: 'Venerare, inquit, 'nativitatem, per quam terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberatus es. Honora Bethlehem pusillam et minimam, per quam tibi regressus ad paradisum patefactus est." = Gregory, In Theophaneia, sive Natalitia Salvatoris, oration 38.17 (PG 36.330—31); in Rufinus' translation, De epiphaniis, oration

2.17 (CSEL 46.105). rig | Augustine ofHippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen graphs later.*! He cites the same sentence three times more in the first book of the Opus Imperfectum."

In the same first book of his work against Julian, Augustine also quotes another passage from Gregory's oration on the nativity:

"Just as in Adam," he says, "all of us died, so too in Christ all of us will be brought to life" (1 Cor 15.22). Hence let us be born with Christ, and let us be crucified with Christ, and let us be buried with him in death, so that we may also rise with him unto life. For it is necessary for us to suffer this useful and necessary change: that, just as we lapsed from good things to sad ones, so too we are restored from sad things to better. For where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more (Rom 5.20), so that those whom the taste of the forbidden tree condemned, the cross of Christ might justify with a more abundant grace."4?

"Contra Jul. 1.7.32 (PL 44.663): "Sanctus Gregorius dicit, melius fuisse non excidere a ligno vitae gustu amarissimo peccati, sed emendari nos debere post lapsum. Dicit, nos ex bonis ad tristia devolutos, et vult a tristibus ad meliora reparari; ut quos gustus ligni vetiti condemnavit, Christi crux gratia largiore iustificet. Dicit, venerandam esse nativitatem, per quam terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberamur. Dicit, regeneratione ex aqua et spiritu purgari maculas primae nativitatis, per quas in iniquitatibus concipimur."

Opus imp. 1.52 (CSEL 85.1.47): "Meus est Gregorius, qui cum de baptismo loqueretur, 'Venerare, inquit, 'nativitatem, per quam terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberatus es."

Opus imp. 1.53 (CSEL 85.1.50): "Hoc igitur de ista gratia dicite, ut offensione Christianorum de qua conquerimini, careatis, quod dixit catholicus doctus doctorque Gregorius:

'Venerare nativitatem, per quam terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberatus es. Nullo itaque modo ad istam gratiam pertinere parvulos confitemini, quamdiu negatis eos nativitate coelesti a terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberari."

Opus imp. 1.70 (CSEL 85.1.79): "Itane vero Gregorius, quandodicebat, 'Venerare nativitatem, per quam terrenae nativitatis vinculis liberatus es."

3Contra Jul. 1.5.15 (PL 44.649-50): "'Sicut in Adam omnes, inquit, 'mortui sumus, ita et in Christo omnes vivificemur. Cum Christo ergo nascamur, et cum Christo crucifigamur, et consepeliamur ei in mortem, ut cum ipso etiam resurgamus ad vitam. Necesse est enim nos perpeti utilem hanc et necessariam vicissitudinem: ut sicut ex bonis ad tristia devoluti sumus, ita ex tristibus ad meliora reparemur. Ubi enim abundavit peccatum, superabundavit gratia: ut quos gustus ligni vetiti condemnavit, Christi crux gratia largiore justificet."

Gregory, In Theophaneia, sive natalitia Salvatoris, oration 38.4 (PG 36.315); in Rufinus' translation, De epiphaniis, oration 2.4 (CSEL 46.89-90). rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Oration on Pentecost A third passage, from Gregory's De Pentecoste et de Spiritu Sancto (Oration on Pentecost), is cited by Augustine in his work De dono perseverantiae (On the Gift of Perseverance), written in 428/29. The passage deals with trinitarian theology. It reads:

But to these two,** who should suffice, we also add holy Gregory, a third, who attests that, both to believe in God, and to confess what we believe, is a gift of God, when he says: "Confess a Trinity of one Divinity,

ask you. If you wish it otherwise, say a Trinity of one nature; and God will be invoked, so that a voice might be given to you by the Holy

Spirit... for he will give it, | am certain. He who gave what is first, will give what is second; he who gave the ability to believe, will also give the ability to confess [the faith]?> The point that Augustine makes with the quotation is to reinforce his argument about predestination: both interior belief and external confession are the work of God's grace, not of human effort.

Augustine quotes one further passage from oration 41 on Pentecost in the first book of his Opus Imperfectum. The passage reads: "Through him the stains of the first birth are purged, through which we are conceived in iniquity, and our mothers bore us in sin."*°

"4Augustine has just quoted Cyprian and Ambrose.

49De dono pers. 19.49 (PL 45.1024—25): "Sed his duobus, qui sufficere debuerunt, sanctum Gregorium addamus et tertium, qui et credere in Deum, et quod credimus confiteri,

Dei donum esse testatur, dicens: 'Unius deitatis, quaeso vos, confitemini Trinitatem: si vero aliter vultis, dicite unius esse naturae; et Deus vocem dari vobis a sancto Spiritu deprecabitur': id est, rogabitur Deus, ut permittat vobis dari vocem, qua quod creditis, confiteri possitis. 'Dabit enim, certus sum; qui dedit quod primum est, dabit et quod secundum est; qui dedit credere, dabit et confiteri?" = Gregory, In Pentecosten, oration 41.8 (PG 36.440); in Rufinus' translation, De Pentecoste et de Spiritu Sancto, oration 4.8 (CSEL 46.150).

imp. 1.70 (CSEL 85.1.79): "Itane vero Gregorius, quando dicebat .

. de Christo loquens vel de spiritu sancto 'Per hunc primae nativitatis maculae purgantur, per quas in iniquitatibus concipimur, et in delictis genuerunt nos matres nostrae." = Gregory, In Pentecosten, oration 41.14; in Rufinus translation De Pentecoste et de Spiritu Sancto, oration 4.14

(CSEL 46.158). ri | Augustine ofHippo, Basil ofCaesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen On the Devastation from Hail Augustine also quotes another homily of Gregory's, De grandinis vastatione (On the Devastation from Hail), in the first book of his work against Julian. The passage reads:

"Let the image," he says, "of God wash away the stain of bodily drowning, and let it lift up the flesh joined to itself on the wings of the word of God. And, although it would have been better not even to have neededa cleansing of this sort, but to have remained in that first dignity, to which we also hurry back after our present correction, and it would have been better not to fall from the tree of life by the most bitter taste of sin; still, in the second state, it is fitting to be improved and corrected after the fall rather than to remain in our sins."

To the Citizens ofNazianzus Stricken with Grave Fear Once, in book 2 of Contra Julianum, Augustine quotes another oration of Gregory's: "For when the soul is in labors and trials, when it is hostilely attacked by the flesh, then it takes refuge in God and knows whence it should beg for help.*® The pattern already seen continues: Augustine finds passages in Gregory that support his teaching on the effects of original sin and show that it is the teaching of all the Orthodox fathers. In summary, Augustine uses

Basil to show that the sin of Adam and Eve affected all their descendants, "Contra Jul. 1.5.15 (PL 44.649) "'Imago, inquit, 'Dei labem corporeae inundationis expurget, et conjunctam sibi carnem verbi Dei sublevet pennis. Et quamvis melius fuisset, ne egere quidem hujuscemodi expurgatione, sed in illa prima dignitate permansisse, ad quam et refestinamus, post praesentem emendationem, et melius fuisset non excidere a ligno vitae gustu amarissimo peccati; tamen in secundo loco expedit emendari et corrigi post lapsum, quam in nequitiis permanere.'" = Gregory, De grandinis vastatione, oration

16.15 (PG 35.953-56); in Rufinus' translation, De grandinis vastatione, oration 8.15 (CSEL *8Contra Jul. 2.3.7 (PL 44.677): "His et sanctus Gregorius attestatur dicens: 'Anima namque cum in laboribus fuerit et in angustiis, cum hostiliter urgetur a carne, tunc ad

Deum refugit, et cognoscit unde debeat auxilium poscere." = Gregory, Ad cives Nazianzenos gravi timore perculsos, oration 17.5.2 (PG 35.971-72); in Rufinus' translation, oration 5.1 (CSEL 46.199). ri |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and that the effect of baptism, even in infants, is the forgiveness of sin.

Augustine uses Gregory Nazianzen more extensively, to refute the charge that he, Augustine, had returned to Manicheism: rather, in baptism, sins are forgiven but concupiscence, the effect of sin, remains. Further, Gregory—Augustine contends—wrote clearly of the fall, and of the subsequent need for conversion, new birth in Christ, and baptism.

Conclusion We have seen three approaches to Augustine and the Greek fathers. The impressionistic approach is the most wide ranging, but it cannot offer clear historical certitude. The census approach is textually certain, but it yields little useful knowledge. The textual approach is the most useful starting point, even though the results are disappointing.'"

What are the results?

Augustine knew Basil and Gregory mostly through Latin translations.

This is clearest from his citations of five of the nine homilies of Gregory's that Rufinus translated in 399/400. He did what many scholars have done before and after: he read through the nine homilies and marked passages that he found useful, and that reinforced his own thought—thus his use of Gregory on the effects of original sin, and on predestination. When

Augustine wanted to makea precise point, however, he could translate a sentence or two from Greek.

The works Augustine quoted are not Basil's or Gregory's central works, at least according to modern perceptions. From Basil he quoted a homily on fasting, and one on baptism, which he attributed to John Chrysostom.

From Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine cited an extended passage from Gregory's Apologia de fuga, which he used four times. From another work,

Gregory's Oration on the Nativity of Christ, Augustine cited a short sentence five times; he used it as an aphorism. He also cited three other

fourth possible approach, that is, a study of the indirect influence of Greek fathers on Augustine through Latin writers, such as Hilary and Ambrose, has not been considered here.

Augustine of Hippo, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory Nazianzen homilies of Gregory Nazianzen's. In each case, the passages quoted are intended to show that aspects of Augustine's doctrine are the teachings of the whole Church, East and West.

Preparing this paper brought home to me again another fact: many of us assume that we know who the fathers of the Church are, and in a good sense we do. We have read Quasten, and Altaner-Stuiber, and understand the big picture. We know which works are really important—generally, doctrinal or dogmatic works—and which can easily be passed over— often enough, exegetical and homiletic works and ascetical treatises. However, Augustine and other fathers did not see things that way. Augustine quoted Basil and Gregory, and other Greek fathers, not because they were

Greek but because they taught the catholic truth. Augustine, especially in the late works against Julian, made frequent use of the argument from authority. "Basil is mine," he can boast to Julian. Augustine quoted Basil and Gregory to reinforce his teaching on sin and grace, because that is what he was debating with Julian of Eclanum; in other circumstances, he might well have quoted other passages. Perhaps Augustine's way of reading other fathers on sin and grace might invite all of us to a broader consideration of these teachings.

In any case, just as Augustine wanted Jerome to translate the Septuagint and not the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, so that East and West would read the same Bible, so he invites us to see what East and West have in common, which is surely far more than what divides them. I, for one, am grateful for that invitation.

Making a Human Will Divine:

Augustine andMaximus on Christ and Human Salvation —— BRIAN E. DAtey, SJ | ow much St Augustine may have influenced the theology of St Maximus the Confessor is an open question; the short answer is that we have virtually no direct evidence that there was any influence at all. In many ways, they lived in different worlds.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was a classic by-product of late Roman Africa: superbly educated in Cicero and Virgil; a professional rhetorician, a public figure—first as a well-connected professor on the rise, later as an endlessly busy bishop, sought after by people from all over the West to help them deal with the burning issues of a Latin Christian empire in a moment of late bloom and imminent decay. Maximus (c. 580-662) came from the other, Greekand Syriac-speaking portion of the Roman world, some two anda half centuries later; his education, too, seems to have been outstanding for its time, but was more strictly philosophical—scholastic, we might say, in the style of the sixth century's philosophical "schools" at Athens and Alexandria, rather than literary. (Anyone who has tried to read Maximus' works in Greek knows he was not an accomplished rhetorician!) His Greek lives say he served in the Byzantine imperial administration as a young man, and rose to be first secretary to the Emperor Heraclius at his accession in 610; but they tell us that Maximus soon left the court to become a monk, and spent the rest of his life— despite a wide range of connections of his own—anchored in the ascetiORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE cal solitude of a monastic community.! In the face of the siege of Constantinople by the Persians and Avars in the spring of 626, Maximus and many of his Greek monastic confreres migrated to safety in the West; although the steps of his journey are unclear, he seems to have arrived in North

Africa—since 534 a part of the (now Greek-speaking) Roman empire once again, after a century of domination by the Vandals—and to have eventually settled in a Greek monastery near Carthage." From there, apparently while remaining a simple unordained monk, Maximus became increasingly involved in the politico-religious debates then polarizing the eastern part of the old Roman empire, writing from a base in Carthage, Sicily, or Italy until his return to Constantinople for controversy, trial, and eventual punishment in 652 or 653. Maximus, like Augustine—or like Bernard or Thomas Merton in later centuries—was clearly a "monk of the world": well read and well informed, an international figure. But we do not know much about his reading, or even how good his Latin was, and we have no sure evidence that he looked for local theological inspiration in his land of exile.

Nonetheless, given the breadth of Maximus' knowledge, and the theological themes that engaged him, some fairly profound contact with the thought of Augustine does seem an inviting hypothesis. In a brief essay published in 1982, George Berthold pointed broadly to a numberoftheo- 'For details of Maximus life, see Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds.,

CCSG 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); Greek text and translation in Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Other biographical material has been edited by S.L. Epifanovich in Materialy k izuéeniju Zizni i tvorenij prep.

Maksima Ispovédnika (Materials to Help the Study of the Life and Works ofMaximus Confessor) (Kiev, 1917), 1-25; in English, The Life of our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor, trans.

C. Birchall (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1982). See also Polycarp Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List of the Works ofMaximus the Confessor, Studia Anselmiana, vol. 30

(Rome: Orbis Catholicus, 1952), 1-22. Most other modern biographical treatments rely on Sherwood, but see also the Syriac Vita referred to in n. 2.

?According to the hostile but carefully detailed Syriac life of Maximus by George of Resh'aina, probably a Syrian or Palestinian contemporary and member of Sophronius' clergy, Maximus and his disciple Anastasius first stayed at a monastery of Syrian monks opposed to the regnant neo-Chalcedonian theology, at Hippo Diarrhytus, a port some fifty miles northwest of Carthage; see Sebastian Brock, "An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor," Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1975): 317, 326, and below, 120. rig | MakingaHuman Will Divine logical subjects for which Maximus showed sympathy to what one might think of as typically Augustinian positions—a general sense of the importance of the Roman Church as an unbroken witness to orthodoxy; a sense of the importance of time and history as the locus of human growth, by God's grace, toward freedom and rest; an appreciation of the sin inherited through generation by all the descendants of Adam; even a willingness to explain the western, Augustinian idea of the filioque in positive terms'>— and asks simply, "Would it not have been natural for this thoroughly

Eastern doctor in his 23-25 years' residence in the West to have read and studied the greatest of the Latin doctors?"* For those who admire the achievement and the influence of both thinkers, the strong temptation is to answer yes, but corroborating argument must reach deeply into the thought of both of them to explain why.

The world of the seventh-century monk Maximus was still Roman, in name and even—for much of his life—in geographical location; but the ideas that engaged him, and the culture in which they found their relevance, were clearly Greek. For the century that followed the Council of Chalcedon (451), the empire's officially endorsed version of the Christian confession was summed up in that council's comprehensive profession of faith, incorporating the earlier, essentially trinitarian creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople I, and adding—as a kind of hermeneutical lens for interpreting the "faith of Nicaea"—the famous, carefully crafted affirmation that the one Jesus Christ "must be acknowledged in two natures, without *In Opusculum 10 (PG 91.133-38), excerpted by his disciple Anastasius froma letter of Maximus to Marinus, presbyter of Cyprus, Maximus attempts to give a favorable interpretation of two points in the current pope's "synodical letter" that had been criticized by "those in the imperial city" (Constantinople): that the Holy Spirit proceeds also from the Son, and that the Word was made flesh "as man apart from the ancestral sin" (PG

91.133D9-136A7). Maximus says the second charge, Jesus' freedom from original sin, needs no refutation, presumably because its orthodoxy is obvious, and that the first point, on the origin of the Spirit, is supported by testimonia from the Latin fathers and from Cyril of Alexandria's Commentary on John. He goes on to argue that everyone can only explain such difficult matters of faith within the terms of their own tradition (ibid., 136B12-Co9). It is not clear, however, which pope or which synodical letter Maximus is referring to here. It seems not to be any of the documents collected by the Lateran Synod of 649.

4George C. Berthold, "Did Maximus the Confessor Know Augustine?" Studia Patristica ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE confusion or change, without division or separation—the distinction between the natures having never been abolished by their union, but rather the character proper to each of the two natures being preserved, as they came together in one person and one hypostasis . . ."° But despite the fact that the Chalcedonian formula of faith was constructed to represent terms and conceptions from the two main theological traditions then disputing the identity and ontological structure of Jesus—the followers of Cyril ofAlexandria and those who admired Theodore of Mopsuestia and his intellectual heirs—it was, as a vehicle of compromise, more or less dead on arrival. The large, earnestly devout mass of monks and ordinary faithful in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia saw in its balanced turns of phrase simply learned equivocation, a way of avoiding the full confession that Christ our Savior is God in flesh, which had been engineered by Pope Leo and the secular-minded West.° Within ten years, competing hierarchies had begun to take root in Egypt and Syria; the unity of Greek Christendom had been broken, and with it the social and political unity of the whole eastern empire.

Throughout the rest of the fifth and sixth centuries, emperors tried various approaches to build a new basis for unity in faith among the traditionally Christian peoples of the East: Zeno's Henotikon (474), which implicitly passed over the Chalcedonian formula as a norm of faith; Anastasius I's promotion of anti-Chalcedonian theologians like Severus of Antioch to major episcopal sees; Justinian's more patient and sophisticated attempt—through his own writing as well as through political appointments and legislation—to develop new terminology for the mystery of Christ that would preserve the Chalcedonian formula as the foundation of imperial religious policy, but interpret it in a way that emphasized the Cyrillian side of its ancestry, and made clear that the "one

Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol.

1 (London/Washington: Sheed and Ward/Georgetown, 1990), 86.

a description of the popular reaction to the Chalcedonian formula in the eastern empire, see especially W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1972), especially 50-142. For a description of the period after Chalcedon that is more focused on theological debates, see Patrick T.R. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East, 451-553 (Leiden: Brill, 1979).

MakingaHuman Will Divine hypostasis" of Christ who subsists simultaneously "in two natures'—the personal or grammatical subject of all his acts—is indeed God the Logos, the second person of the Trinity. This new, clarifying reading of Chalcedon, which twentieth-century scholars have come to call "neo-Chalcedonianism," gradually became the dominant model for christological thinking among those groups and social classes who remained in cultural and political contact with the capital, and was officially received as church doctrine—as yet another lens for interpreting "the faith of Nicaea," a codicil to Chalcedon—at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. But as a means of reunifying the empire in a single faith, it also failed; those faithful and bishops who rejected Chalcedon found even this rereading of its formula untrustworthy and refused to budge from their nonconformity.

When the magnetic young general Heraclius, son of the Byzantine exarch of Africa, moved east with his fleet in 610 to oust the ineffective

Emperor Phokas, himself both a usurper and a Chalcedonian sympathizer, the empire was ready for new, concerted efforts at reunification."

Emperor from 610 until 641, Heraclius devoted most of his energies in the first two decades of his rule to military campaigns, and managed to push back the Persians to their borders, and for a few years even to hold the forces of the expanding Arab Muslims to a standoff. But if the eastern empire was to stay together more or less within its old Roman borders, from Mesopotamia west to Egypt, Libya, and North Africa and from the Arabian peninsula north to the Caucasus, it was essential that its peoples reclaim the dominant religious unity that had been lost at Chalcedon.

With the help of his ecclesiastical advisors in Constantinople, notably the Patriarch Sergius and his theological allies, Heraclius was ready, by the late 620s, to make one more try to achieve what emperors since Zeno had failed to accomplish, by finding a formula for speaking of Christ on 'The most recent and authoritative biography of Heraclius in English is Walter E.

Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

On seventh-century Byzantine history, see also A.M. Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, vols. 2-4, trans. Harry. T. Hionides (Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert, 1972, 1975, 1978); J.-F.

Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Averil Cameron, Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), esp. articles IV, V, VII, VII, X.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE which all could agree, and by suppressing any analysis or debate that probed too deeply beneath the surface of the new terminology. The result was "monenergism,' the theory that the single divine activity or energy of God the Word, even in the incarnation, was the origin of all Jesus' thoughts and acts, human or divine. In a somewhat later form, this morphed into "monotheletism," which expressed the same dynamic unity in terms of the single divine will of God the Word, which formed all his actions, as God and as human, into expressions of divine love. Understood in this way, even talk of the two distinct and functioning natures

Chalcedon ascribed to Jesus might seem unthreatening to a traditional eastern piety.® This was the ecclesiastical and political setting in which the monk

Maximus lived and worked. According to his Greek biography, he had been born about 580 of aristocratic parents in the capital, and lived there until, around 613, he became a monk at Chrysopolis, across the Bosporus from Constantinople—the monastery where his opponent, the future patriarch Pyrrhus, would later be abbot. His more recently published Syriac life, written in a hostile vein by a theological critic named George of Reslvaina, tells us a different story: that Maximus wasa Palestinian originally named Moschion, the illegitimate son of a Samaritan father and a Persian slave girl; and that after his parents' deaths, Moschion was brought up from the age of ten in the Old Lavra (or Souka), one of the fourth-century monastic foundations of Abba Chariton in the Judean desert south of Bethlehem, where he received the name Maximus. George tells us that Maximus spiritual father and teacher was an Origenist monk named Pantoleon; in the language of the lives of the Palestinian monks from the sixth and seventh century, "Origenism" seems to have been a code word for the theological style of strict Chalcedonians, who insisted on discussing the mystery of Christ with relentless philosophical subtlety.? Maximus

'For a useful summary of the present state of scholarship on the monenergist and monothelite controversy, with an exhaustive catalogue of documentary sources, a prosopography, and date-lists, see Friedhelm Winkelmann, Der monenergetisch-monotheletische

Streit, Berliner Byzantinische Studien, vol. 6 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2001).

my articles, "The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium," Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1976): 333-69; and "What Did 'Origenism' Mean in the Sixth Century?" OrigeniMakingaHuman Will Divine learned to do this, but he also absorbed the ascetical tradition of the fourth-century Origenist Evagrius Ponticus, and the speculative style of spirituality identified with the Origenists, which appears especially in his earlier ascetic "Centuries."!° Whatever his origins may have been, Maximus seems to have had lifelong sympathies with Chalcedonian christology and the language of the Aristotelian schools, and to have reacted allergically to the new, monenergist line. He also seems to have spent time as a monk in the environs of the capital, first at Chrysopolis and later at Cyzicus, further west on the Sea of Marmara. During those early years he was joined by a disciple, Anastasius, who remained his companion and amanuensis until the end of his life, and who later became his biographer.

The details of Maximus activities in the next two decades are complex and unclear. His ancient Syriac biographer suggests that he remained based in the East until the death of Heraclius in 641, and that he lived for several of those years as a hermit in Palestine, until the Muslim invaders conquered the land in 638. Modern scholars like Devreesse and Sherwood, drawing on the Greek lives and on Maximus' correspondence, agree in placing his emigration to North Africa considerably earlier, at the time of the Persian and Avar invasion of 626, when many of the monasteries near the capital seem to have been emptied. From his letters, we know that Maximus originally hoped to return to his monastery at Cyzicus,'! and that he was at least briefly in Crete, where he held a disputation with some anti-Chalcedonian bishops;!? his correspondence with the deacon Marinus and other ecclesiastical figures in Cyprus suggests he may have stopped off on that island as well. He also may have spent some time in ana Sexta: Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Origen Studies (Chantilly,

France; August 30-September 3, 1993) (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 627-38.

See his Four Centuries on Love, ed. A. Ceresa-Gastaldo (Rome: Verba Seniorum 3, 1993), and especially his two Gnostic Centuries (PG 90.1084-1173); as well as his brief commentary on the Lord's Prayer, all translated with comments by George Berthold, Maximus

Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist, 1985), 33-180. For a detailed analysis of Origenistic themes and parallels in the Gnostic Centuries, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, 2d ed. (Einsiedeln: JohannesVerlag, 1961), 482-643.

"See his letters to Bishop John, the abbot of Cyzicus: Ep. 8 (PG 90.440—46) and 30-31 (PG 90.623-26); Sherwood, 6.

Maximus, Opusculum3 (PG 91.49C); see Sherwood, 5.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Alexandria, since he seems to have had personal contacts in the Egyptian metropolis.'* Whatever his route, Maximus letters suggest he was already in the neighborhood of Carthage, living in a Greek monastic community, by the late 620s,'* and to have lived there—perhaps with some journeys back east in the 630s—until 645, the year of his famous Dialogue with Pyrrhus: studying, reflecting deeply on the mystery of Christ, and corresponding energetically with Greek-speaking church leaders throughout the Mediterranean, to encourage them to resist the new imperial attempts to reconceive the christology of Chalcedon.

In the context of seventh-century imperial policy, Maximus was a rebel and a troublemaker. Although he had assimilated the "neo-Chalcedonian" perspective of the Council of 553 on the key issue of the hypostatic identity of Jesus as trinitarian Logos, his style of argument and theological sympathies lay closer to the more balanced, clearly two-nature approach of Leontius of Byzantium, a "strict Chalcedonian" writer from the sixth-century controversies whom he never mentions by name but whose thought he had clearly assimilated.'° Yet for Maximus and his friends—leaders like the aged Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem and his suffragan bishop Stephen of Dor—the new attempts to reread Chalcedon in terms of a single divine operation anda single divine will in Christ

'5In Ep. 14 (PG 90.533—44), for instance, to the general Peter, who has just moved from Proconsular Africa to Alexandria, Maximus recommends making contact with the deacon

Cosmas. Sophronius, the future patriarch of Jerusalem and an early opponent of the monenergist christology sponsored by the emperor, had been head of the Greek monastery in Carthage himself in the 620s, and spent some time in Alexandria before returning to Palestine. Maximus may have accompanied or visited him at this point. The Syriac life, however, tells us that Maximus had known Sophronius as a young monk in Palestine, and that he later urged Sophronius—perhaps shortly after his becoming Patriarch of Jerusalem—to call for a synod of bishops in Cyprus, contesting the new christological movement, a step that led to the Psephos of Sergius of Constantinople prohibiting further discussion of the energies and wills of Christ: see cc. 7-15, Brock 315-17.

'4See Sherwood 5-7; also Robert Devreesse, "La fin inédite d'une lettre de s. Maxime,"

Revue des Sciences Religieuses 17 (1937): 25-35.

'SMaximus letter 15 (PG 90.543-76), a short treatise on christology addressed to the Alexandrian deacon Cosmas, which Sherwood plausibly dates to the years 634—640, is really a digest of Leontius' christological terminology and arguments, directed against the opponents of Chalcedon who drew their arguments from Leontius' nemesis Severus of Antioch. rig | MakingaHuman Will Divine were simply a revival of the christology of Apollinarius in slightly altered terms.'° Whatever its possibilities for promoting political rapprochement, it was clearly a regressive step in terms of theology.

After the death of Emperor Heraclius in February 641, followed within a few months by the death of his sickly son and successor Constantine III, rule of the empire passed into the hands of an eleven-year-old minor,

Heraclius' grandson Constans II, and was administered for several years by regents. Pyrrhus, Maximus' former confrere, who had been Patriarch of Constantinople since Sergius' death in December 638, had backed the wrong successor in Heraclius' younger son Heracleonas; shortly after Constans' accession, Pyrrhus was banished from the capital on charges of corruption, without being canonically deposed, and was succeeded as patriarch by Paul. Pyrrhus made his way west to Carthage as well, and there joined the growing, increasingly discontented group of Greek émigrés who longed for a new imperial order. It was there, in July 645, that Maximus and Pyrrhus publicly debated the issue of the wills and energies of Christ, in the presence of Gregory, imperial exarch of Africa, who was soon to lead an abortive rebellion of his own. The transcript of their highly technical dialogue, which has all the marks of being authentic, shows Pyrrhus as well informed in all the contemporary arguments for seeing the two natures of Christ as animated bya single divine energy and ruled by a single divine will; yet Maximus, drawing on his stunning abilities of analysis and argument, as well as a peerless mastery of earlier patristic tradition, clearly wins the day. Pyrrhus ends by conceding the inadequacyofthe imperial position promoted by his predecessor and himself and memorialized over Heraclus' name in the imperial Ekthesis of 638.

'6See, for instance, the comments attributed to Pope Martin on excerpts from the "monenergist" writings of Theodore of Pharan, at the third session of the Lateran Synod of 649: Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, 2d series, vol. 1, ed. Rudolf Riedinger (Berlin: De

Gruyter, 1984), 118-33. For Maximus' awareness that the origins of monenergism lay in Apollinarius understanding of Christ, see Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St.Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 128, 144—45. On the life and theology of Sophronius, see Christoph von

Sophrone de Jérusalem: Vie monastique et confession dogmatique, Theologie Historique, vol. 20 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE The long-standing imperial policy of seeking a "soft" reading of the two-natures christology of Chalcedon, in the interests of eastern Christian reunion, seemed to be fatally shaken. Maximus, now the intellectual leader of the opposition, apparently realized that the Latin Church, which had long resisted any modifications to the christology of Leo and Chalcedon, could play a major supporting role in his agenda, even though the current debate over energies and wills had originally found little resonance, positive or negative, in the West. What Maximus' role was in stirring up western opposition to the imperial christology is not entirely clear.

The bishops of the African provinces of Numidia, Mauretania, and Proconsular Africa seem to have taken up the subject in synods during the months that followed Maximus' disputation; letters from the metropolitan bishops of those provinces to the pope, the emperor, and the new patriarch of Constantinople, as well as a letter of Victor, the metropolitan of Carthage, all confirming the necessity of affirming the distinctness of human and divine energies and wills in the incarnate Word, form part of the dossier of documents received in Rome by the Lateran Synod in 649.

At some time before that synod, possibly as early as 646, both Maximus and Pyrrhus seem to have gone to Rome themselves: Pyrrhus to assert his

Chalcedonian credentials in the hope of winning the support of the Greek-speaking Pope Theodore, Maximus to press the Roman authorities to lend their weight to his own anti-monothelite campaign.

In a series of articles connected with the acta of the Lateran Synod,!"

Rudolf Riedinger—who edited the text of the acta, together with those of the Third Council of Constantinople of 680/681, for the series Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum—has developed the hypothesis, based on his own painstaking philological analysis of the Latin and Greek texts of the Lateran Synod and enhanced by computerized statistics, that these are not simply minutes of oral discussion, enriched bya series of relevant documents from the papal archives. Riedinger argues rather that the original text of the acta was Greek, using Greek documents and the Greek text of the Bible as its basic point of reference, and that the Latin version, except

'Riedinger's articles, spanning a period from 1976 to 1996, are collected as Kleine Schriften zu den Konzilsakten des7. Jahrhunderts (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998).

MakingaHuman Will Divine for a few Latin documents derived from outside sources, is largely the work of a single translator, with his own somewhat idiosyncratic approach to Latin style. Riedinger's hypothesis is that Maximus himself was very probably the author of the synodal acts; that he had likely been asked by Pope Theodore, in the years between 646 and Theodore's unexpected death in May 649, to prepare documents on the monenergist/monothelite controversy that would enable the Roman Church to take a definitive, solidly informed position against the imperial policy; and that when

Theodore was succeeded by an Italian, the former nuncio to Constantinople Martin of Todi, the new pope—without waiting to be officially confirmed in office by the emperor—accepted the throne of Peter, and convoked a synod of Latin-speaking bishops from Italy, North Africa, and the Western Islands, for the following October, to affirm Maximus' doctrinal dossier in traditional conciliar form. Despite division into speeches by leading bishops and several magisterial papal allocutions, despite the apparent drama of five sessions of debate and judgment, Riedinger argues that the acta of that synod are essentially a composition of Maximus himself from the years before Martin became pope. Though he suggests in later essays that the bishops who signed the acta may have done so after listening approvingly to the Latin translation of Maximus' work, Riedinger has remained hesitant to go much beyond the conclusion he offers in his first piece on the subject:

Today |i.e., in 1976, after editing the text of the acta] we must conclude from this detailed work that the whole set of acta (except for the originally Latin letters [of Victor of Carthage and Pope Felix II] read in the second session) were composed before the synod began, by Greeks, and afterward translated into Latin. How one then should imagine the events of the synod itself—their historicity—is a question for which my imagination provides no answer. But that the acta handed down to us are a purely literary product (and therefore allow no direct conclusion about the reality that lies behind them) can be concluded from observations ... that can be simply and exactly represented.'®

18"Aus den Akten der Lateransynode von 649," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 69 (1976): 37

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Until now, we have been mainly occupied with Maximus' own life and career as a christological rebel—a prophet, perhaps, proclaiming the full richness of the Nicaean and Chalcedonian faith, in terms that left him, like

Jeremiah of old, swimming against the ecclesiastical stream of his day. Our initial question, however—the question that brings us to this conference—of how much he was influenced by the thought of Augustine in this challenging project, is more difficult to answer. Augustine's christology is not likely, in itself, to have influenced Maximus' thinking in a major way, if only because Augustine's historical position in the development of the Church's christological tradition lay precisely between the first theological resistance to Arianism and Apollinarianism, in the work of the great

Cappadocians, and the outbreak of Cyril's controversy with Nestorius in 429, the year before Augustine's death. Although the person and saving mystery of Christ is never far from Augustine's thoughts!'—although,

Christ, as the embodiment of grace and the living way of humility and service, Augustine reminds us in book7 of the Confessiones, is the boundary line between the satisfactory resolution of philosophical difficulties about God and direct, fruitful access to God in the Church?°—still Augustine's formulation of the ontological and personal structure of Christ tends to be expressed in rhetorical rather than technical or philosophical terms. He only begins to use the vocabulary of "person," "substance," and "nature" after 410, mainly as a result of his growing contact with Latin

Arians, and then only sparingly.?! Nevertheless, Augustine assures us in [Kleine Schriften 23]. Ina monograph discussing at length Riedinger's hypothesis and the evidence he presents, papal historian Pietro Conte suggests the leading bishops mentioned in the acta of 649 may actually have read their own translated speeches at the October gathering, in a carefully scripted dramatization of Maximus' theological argument: I] Sinodo

Lateranense dell ottobre 649 (Vatican City: Pontificia Accademia Teologica Romana, 1989), at 142-48.

'For more on this theme, see David Tracy's essay in this volume.

20See especially Conf. 7.9.13-15 (CCSL 27.101-03), 7.18.24 (ibid., 108), 7.20.26—-21.27

?!See my article, "A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in Saint Augustine's Christology," Word and Spirit9 (1987): 100-17; also "Christology" in Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed.,

Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 164-69, for further references.

MakingaHuman Will Divine book 7 of the Confessiones that he always believed in the full humanity of Jesus, even in his pre-baptismal years, although "the mystery of the Word made flesh I had not begun to guess."

I had only realized from the writings handed down concerning him that he ate and drank, slept, walked, was filled with joy, was sad, conversed, knew that his flesh was not united to your Word without a soul and a human mind ... To move the body's limbs at will at one moment, not another, to be affected by an emotion at one time, not another, to utter wise judgment by signs at one moment, at another to keep silence: these are characteristic marks of the soul and mind with their capacity to change. If the writings about him were wrong in so describing him, everything else would be suspected of being a lie, and there would remain no salvation for the human race based on faith in these books. So because the scriptures are true, I acknowledged the whole man to be in Christ, not only the body of a man, or soul and body without a mind, but a fully human person.?"

In his Epistle 137, to Volusianus—a little treatise on the central paradoxes of the mystery of Christ as faith apprehends it, written in 411 or 412—Augustine emphasizes that the very heart of the redeeming grace claimed by the Christian community is not the suggestion that God has appeared among us as a superman, but the proclamation of Jesus' ordinariness as well as his deity, the joining of two complete, wholly unlike realities, the divine and the human, in a single agent:

He contains in himself the deep treasures of wisdom and knowledge and fills minds with faith in order to bring them to the eternal contemplation of the immutable truth. Imagine if the almighty did not create the man, wherever he was formed, from the womb of his mother, but thrust him suddenly before our eyes! Imagine if he went through no ages from infancy to youth, if he took no food and did not 22Conf. 7.19.25 (CCSL 27.108-09; Henry Chadwick, trans. [Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1991], 128-29).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE sleep! Would he not confirm the opinion of that error, and would it not be believed that he did not in any way assume a true man, and would it not destroy what he did out of mercy if he did everything as a miracle? But now a mediator has appeared between God and human beings so that, uniting both natures in the unity of his person, he may raise up the ordinary to the extraordinary and temper the extraordinary to the ordinary.?°

For Augustine, as for none of the classical philosophers before him, the will is a distinctive, characteristic feature of the human person: the selfdetermining source of motion and action within each of our conscious selves that is intrinsically linked to our intelligence and ability to evaluate the situation in which we live, yet that has an unpredictable dynamic of its own." So it was essential, in his view, that Christ, as Son of God made flesh, have both a complete human will and a complete divine will, different as those may be from one another in natural terms, yet that his human will freely obey the divine. So Augustine writes, in his little treatise Contra sermonem Arianorum (Against an Arian Address) from 417-418:

When we obey God and are said to do his will by that obedience, we do not do it unwillingly, but willingly. Hence, if we do it willingly, in what sense do we not do our own will, unless in the language of Scripture that will is called ours, which is understood to be our own as opposed to the will of God. Adam had sucha will, and as a result, we died in him. Christ did not have such a will so that we might have life in him ... In terms of the Son's divinity, the Father and the Son have

?3Ep. 137.3-9 (CSEL 44.108; The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, II/2, trans. Roland Teske, SJ [Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2003], 217).

especially the treatment of Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 123-32. Dihle writes: "St Augustine interpreted freedomofchoice, traditionally attributed to all rational beings, as the freedom ofwill... The direction of the will, however, is thought and spoken of as being independent of the cognition of the better and the worse. This indeed supersedes the famous Socratic problem of ovdeic &kav Gtaptévet, no one does wrong on purpose. It is not surprising that everything, in the view of St Augustine, depends on voluntas in religious and moral life"

MakingaHuman Will Divine one and the same will, nor can it be different in any way where the nature of the Trinity as a whole is immutable. But so that the mediator of God and man, the man Jesus Christ, would not do his own will, which is opposed to God, he was not only man, but God and man. And through this marvelous and singular grace human nature could exist in him without any sin.?> In his Explanation (Enarratio) of Psalm 93, probably preached in 414, as the Pelagian controversy was just beginning, Augustine presents the two wills that Christ reveals in Gethsemane and on the cross as part of the larger economy of salvation, in which our own wills are healed:

How did our Lord marry two wills (he asks) so that they became one in the humanity he bore? In his body, the Church, there would be some people who, after wanting to do their own will, would later follow the will of God. The Lord prefigured these people in himself. He wanted to show that though they are weak, they still belong to him, and so he represented them in advance in his own person. He sweated blood from his whole body, as a sign that the blood of martyrs would gush from his body, the Church ... He revealed the human will that was in him, but if he had continued to insist on that will, he would have seemed to display perversity of heart. If you recognize that he has had compassion on you, and is setting you free in himself, imitate the next prayer he made: "Yet not what I will, but what you will be done,

Father" (Mt 26.39).2° The Pelagian controversy, in fact, which would begin with the visit of Pelagius and Celestius to Africa in 411, and which would preoccupy

Augustine for much of the rest of his life until his death in 430, was really a controversy about the will: about the ability of the human person, act- ?°Contra serm. 6.7 (CSEL 92.56-7; The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, [/18, trans. Roland J. Teske [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995], 145).

in Ps. 93.19, (CCSL 39.1319; The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/18, trans. Maria Boulding [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002], 395).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ing independently, to become good and holy bya disciplined use of his or her own intelligence and powers of choice. And while Augustine always continued to maintain that we bear full responsibility for the good and the evil we do, and genuinely merit reward or punishment for ourselves through our conscious human acts, he also argued, more and more insistently, that the human will itself needs to be liberated by God's free act of mercy and rejuvenation, by God's sharing his own life and freedom with us through the actions of Christ and the gift of his Holy Spirit: that we need to be divinized, enabled, remade in the image of Christ who has become one of us, if we are to share in the holiness of God. In the end, the model for this restored freedom is the person of Christ himself, whose human freedom is utterly perfect because it has been created in the very act of that humanity's being gratuitously and fully assumed by the Son of God.'7 So Augustine writes, in a powerful and significant passage from his late work De praedestinatione sanctorum (On the Predestination of the Saints), that Christ personally reveals to us what grace is:

The most striking light of predestination and grace is the Savior himself, the very "mediator of God and the human race—the man Christ

Jesus" (1 Tim 2.5). What previous merits, from works or from faith, did the human nature which is in him acquire, that he might be this? Let someone tell me: that man—on what basis did he merit to become the unique Son of God, taken up by the Word who is co-eternal with the Father in a single person? What good deed of his, what kind of action went before this? What did he do beforehand, what faith did he have, what did he pray for, that he might come to this unspeakable degree of excellence? ... Let that fountain of grace be revealed to us, then, in our head, from which it has made itself flow through all his members, according to the measure of each of us. By that grace, by which that human being from his beginning was made the Christ, every single

Contra serm. 6.8, (CSEL 92.58): "The one Christ, then, is both Son of God by nature, and Son of Man, who was assumed in time, by grace. He was not assumed in such a way that first he was created and then assumed, but he was created in the very act of being assumed [ipsa assumptione creatur]."

MakingaHuman Will Divine person is made a Christian from the beginning of his life of faith; from that Spirit, by whom he was born, the Christian too is reborn; by that same Spirit, by which he was so made as to have no sin, there is in us the remission of sins. Clearly God knew in advance that he would do this. This, then, is the predestination of the saints, as it is most obvious in him who is the Saint of saints.78

There are clear parallels here, for anyone who reads widely in the works of both theologians, between Augustine's christocentric understanding of God's sovereign grace and Maximus identification of human salvation with the mystery of Christ's person. Maximus uses, of course, the clearly defined ontological categories of substance and nature, hypostasis and persona, which were so laboriously defined in the course of the controversy before and after Chalcedon; he speaks of human salvation and perfection in the classic Greek patristic language of the "deification" of the activities and faculties of the human person, rather than of grace—a concept Augustine occasionally touches on, but does not develop at such length.?? So Maximus, for instance, writes in 642 to the Cypriot deacon Marinus in Opusculum 7:

If, then, as man, [Christ] has a natural will, he certainly wills in reality those things that, as God by nature, he has fashioned and introduced naturally into his own constitution. For he did not come to debase the nature which he himself, as God and Word, had made, but he came that that nature might be thoroughly deified which, with the good

8De praed. sanc. 15.30-31 (PL 44.981-82).

for instance, the discussion of the eschatological fulfillment of the human pilgrimage in Trin. 14.12.15 (CCSL 50A.442~—443) and 14.19.26 (ibid., 457-58), where Augustine speaks of the mind's promised participation in the life and wisdom of God; also 14.14.20

(ibid., 448-49), where this is called "cleaving to God," and 14.17.24-19.25 (ibid., 455-57), where Augustine describes it as the perfection of the image of God in the human person; and cf. Ep.140.4.11-12 (CSEL 44.162-64); Serm. 192.1.1 (PL 38.1011-12); En. in Ps. 49.1.2 (CCSL

38.875-76), 58.1.7 (CCSL 39.733-35), 146.5.11 (CCSL 40.2129-30). See Gerald Bonner, "Augustine's Conception of Deification," Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 369-86; J. Oroz

Reta, "De Pillumination4 la deification de lame selon saint Augustin," Studia Patristica 27 ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE pleasure of the Father and the co-operation of the Spirit, he willed to unite to himself in one and the same hypostasis, with everything that naturally belongs to it, apart from sin.*°

And in the twenty-second of his Quaestiones ad Thalassium, composed probably in the early 630s when Maximus was still a relative newcomer in Africa, he speaks in his own terms of the divine predestination Paul and Augustine identify with God's economy of salvation, which he too sees as fulfilled in the incarnation:

Since, therefore, ages predetermined in God's purpose for the realization of his becoming human have reached their end for us, and God has undertaken and in fact achieved his own perfect incarnation, the other "ages"— those which are to come about for the realization of the mystical and ineffable deification of humanity—must follow henceforth ... For if he has brought to completion his mystical work of becoming human, having become like us in every way save without sin

(cf. Heb 4.15), and even descended into the lower regions of the earth where the tyranny of sin compelled humanity, then God will also completely fulfill the goal of his mystical work in deifying humanity in every respect, of course, short of an identity of essence with God; and he will assimilate humanity to himself and elevate us to a position above all the heavens.*!

The question we must ask—without hope of a clear answer—is whether Maximus clear identification of the Chalcedonian, two-natured

Christ, who is personally and exclusively a divine person yet expresses his personality fully in two unadulterated, operative natures, and who embodies and begins the work of grace in us, is influenced by what he

Opusculum 7 (PG 91.69-89; Maximus the Confessor, trans. Andrew Louth [London: Routledge, 1996], 185 [altered] ).

Quaestiones ad Thalassium 22 (CCSG 7.157-59; On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press,

MakingaHuman Will Divine may have known of Augustine's pre-Chalcedonian approach to the same mystery. Latin theology from the fifth century on, even into the high middle ages, continued to live in Augustine's intellectual and rhetorical shadow. Pope Leo, whose understanding of Christ set the standard for later western adherence to the Chalcedonian formula, cites Augustine verbatim several times in his Tome to Flavian; Prosper Tiro, the monk from Marseilles who worked in Leo's curia as a theological consultant, was a correspondent with Augustine and a strong supporter of his doctrine of grace in his own early years. Latin theology, in something of a decline for several decades after Chalcedon, went through a new flowering in North

Africa in the sixth century, after the reconquest of the province for the empire by Belisarius in 534. As David Maxwell has lucidly shown in his recent dissertation,*" the early focus of this sixth-century African theology, reflected above all in the works of Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe

(468-533), combined the emerging "neo-Chalcedonian" understanding of the person of Christ—promoted in the west by John Maxentius and the "Scythian monks" who joined in John's crusade—with an Augustinian understanding of humanity's total dependence on the grace of the Holy

Spirit for conversion and perseverance. In his later works, especially his epistle 17, addressed to the Scythian monks in the name of the African bishops exiled with him in 523, Fulgentius not only affirms clearly that the single person of Christ, who died on the cross, is the second personofthe

Trinity, as Maxentius and the Scythians did, but also echoes Augustine in seeing in the incarnation a model for the gratuitous transformation of human nature by the personal presence of the Word, which we call grace.°3 As the sixth century continued, however, African theology became less focused on the problem of grace and increasingly resistant to Justinian's neo-Chalcedonian christology, especially to his campaign to condemn the leading figures of the fifth-century school of Antioch (the Three Chapters), as ratified by the Council of 553. Facundus of Hermiane wrote his

R. Maxwell, "Christology and Grace in the Sixth-Century Latin West: The Theopaschite Controversy" (diss., Notre Dame, 2003).

°3See especially Maxwell, 217-41.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE "Defense of the Three Chapters" between 546 and 548, in response to an imperial decree against the Antiochenes issued in 543; his contemporary,

Liberatus, archdeacon of Carthage, composed his Breviarium in the early 5608, narrating the history and implications of the christological debate for Latin readers, and Victor of Tunnuna, an African bishop exiled by Justinian, wrote another Chronicle narrating the events of the controversy around 566. In 550, a synod at Carthage excommunicated Pope Vigilius, then virtually a prisoner of Justinian's in Constantinople, for caving in to the emperor's program of reshaping official imperial orthodoxy. An African layman named Junilius or Junillus, who had gone to Constantinople to serve as quaestor (treasury official) to Justinian in the mid-54os, translated into Latin a Greek textbook on theology by Paul of Nisibis, an open admirer of Theodore of Mopsuestia, at the request of Bishop Primasius of Hadrumetum. Clearly, there was vivid sympathy for Antiochene theology in sixth-century Africa. So when George of Resh'aina, Maximus' critical biographer, tells us a century later that Maximus and his disciple

Anastasius made contact with a group of Syriac "Nestorian" monks on their arrival in Africa, the detail rings true:

They arrived [George writes] at a monastery at the upper tip ofAfrica, called in Latin Hippo Diarrhytus, where some students from Nisibis were living. The abbot of the monastery was Esha'ya, and there was his son, called Isho. There were about eighty-seven monks there, and they were Nestorians; and when they found that Maximus and Anastasius also agreed in their teaching with Nestorius their master, they received them and agreed with their doctrine. Thus they led astray the whole of Africa .. 34

In fact, Latin Africa had been astray, in this sense, for almost a century.

By the end of the sixth century, Latin education and theological learning seem to have been in decline throughout much of the west. When Heraclius, Patriarch Sergius, and their colleagues tried once again to find

"Brock, "An Early Syriac Life," 19, 317-18, and above, n. 2.

MakingaHuman Will Divine common ground with the opponents of Chalcedon in the language of "one theandric energy" and "one will," the debate—unlike the furor over the "Three Chapters" a century before—was now clearly centered in the Greek-speaking world, carried on by Greek disputants, couched in the terms of Greek philosophy, and argued through the proto-scholastic methods of Greek dialectics. One of Maximus' great achievements was to have marshaled the Latin Church, centered in the see of Rome, in support of the Chalcedonian cause, and to have made clear the dire consequences of the new imperial policy for the Church's faith in Christ.

In this campaign, it seems obvious that to the degree he was aware of Augustine's theological positions, Maximus would have found encouragement and even ammunition in them. In many ways, Augustine was a kindred theological spirit, despite the very different ways in which they approached and articulated problems. Like Augustine, who saw the foundation ofJesus' freedom from original sin and its effects in the fact that he was conceived bya virgin, in a way free from concupiscence,*> Maximus also sees the sinlessness and perfect freedom of Jesus as rooted in his virginal origin, which parallels the creation of Adam in being free from sexual passion.*° Augustine describes the first sin of Adam and Eve as their

"evil will, their inner choice to be guided by their own desires rather than God's commands, which led them to external transgression and to loss of integrity for their descendants.*? Maximus, too, sees "the first sin" as "the fall of free choice (mpoaipeotc) from good into evil,' and the "second sin," which followed it, as the "innocent" or unintended corruption of human nature for its subsequent history.°* And just as Augustine speaks of the remedyofthis inherited sin and corruptibility in terms of the incarnation

35E.g., Serm. 214.6 (PL 38.1069); De pecc. merit. 2.24.38 (CSEL 60.110-11). Augustine describes the effects of Adam's sin as a loss of freedom and self-control handed on by the inescapably passionate character of sexual procreation: De civ. Dei 14.15-19 (CCSL

Quaestiones ad Thalassium 21 (Laga and Steel, 127-29); Ambigua 31 (PG 91.1273D-76D);Ambigua 42 (PG 91.1313CD). See Blowers and Wilken, 109-11. Jesus is, however, in Maximus' view, still subject to "natural passions,' which here presumably means vulnerability and human limitation of knowledge.

De civ. Dei 14.13-14 (CCSL 48.434-36).

ad Thalassium 42 (Laga and Steel, 285; Blowers and Wilken, 119).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE in human flesh of the unchanging, incorruptible Word,*? Maximus explains Paul's phrase that Christ "became sin" (2 Cor 5.21) as indicating the reversal, in the person of Christ, of a destructive instability, an inherited sin, which began in Adam.*° Both theologians see in the Church, as the concrete, sacramental community of faith united in the eucharist, the full present reality of Christ in the world, leading us to the Father. The Church, as Augustine so often puts it in his preaching on the Psalms, is the totus Christus; or, as Maximus suggests in his Mystagogy, "to be and to appear as one body formed of different members is really worthy of Christ himself, our true head ..."4! Both have a positive, if moderately critical, understanding of the leadership the bishop of Rome can offer in solving doctrinal and disciplinary controversies in the wider church.*? Both Augustine and Maximus are respectful, too, but restrained in their attitudes to °°See, for instance, De civ. Dei 21.15 (CCSL 48.781): "God's only Son by nature was made the Son of Man for us by compassion, so that we who by nature are sons of men might become sons of God through him by grace. He, as we know, while continuing changeless, took our nature to himself from us so that in that nature he might take us to himself; and while retaining his divinity he became partaker of our weakness. His purpose was that we should be changed for the better, and by participation in his immortality and his righteousness should lose our condition ofsinfulness and mortality, and should retain the good that he did in our nature ..." Henry Bettenson, trans. (London: Penguin, 1972), 992. This pattern of salvation by "typological exchange" is a favorite topos in Augustine's preaching and writing; see also De cat. rud. 4.8 (PL 40.315).

Quaestiones ad Thalassium 42 (Laga and Steel, 285; Blowers and Wilken, 120): "Just as through one man, who turned voluntarily from the good, the human nature was changed from incorruption to corruption to the detriment of all humanity, so too through one man,

Jesus Christ, who did not voluntarily turn from the good, human nature underwent a restoration from corruption to incorruption for the benefit of all humanity."

4IMaximus, Mystagogy 1 (ed. Charalambos Soteropoulos [Athens, 1978], 199; Berthold, trans., op. cit., 187). For further references to the Church as Christ's body in Maximus, see

Adam Cooper, The Body in St. Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 168. For a full discussion of Augustine's use of the notion of the totus Christusas the hermeneutical key to interpreting the Psalms, see Michael

Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi (Freiburg: Herder, 1997).

"For Augustine's approach to the legitimate and illegitimate uses of papal authority in his day, see my article, "Universal Love and Local Structure: Augustine, the Papacy, and the Church in Africa," The Jurist 64 (2004): 39-63. On Maximus' relationship to the Roman papacy and the Latin Church, see the excerpts in Opusculum 10 (above, n. 3), where he attempts to explain certain accepted Roman doctrines that raised eyebrows in the Greek

Church, and Opusculum 11 on the importance of Rome as maintaining the apostolic tradirig | MakingaHuman Will Divine civil officials, and saw even the Christian emperors not as priests but as secular rulers, called to maintain the civil order with justice and humility, and when necessary to accept the legitimate judgments of the Church.**

If Maximus in fact read widely in Augustine's work during his time of exile in North Africa, or even learned of Augustine's classical positions on the person and natures of Christ, on original sin and redeeming grace, on the Church and the eucharist, the significance of time and history, or the Christian hope for eschatological peace and rest as a Church in God, it seems puzzling that he never alludes to him as an authority, never attempts to interpret his thought as he does that of the Cappadocians or Dionysius the Areopagite, never simply adopts his arguments wholesale as he does with Leontius of Byzantium and other Greek writers of the sixth century. Augustine seems always close, always standing in the wings; but like most ancient authors, Maximus never seems constrained to acknowledge this kinship. Perhaps, since the reading public of his works was mainly Greek, he did not need to do so. But if Maximus is indeed the original author or at least the animating spirit of the acta of the Lateran

Synod of 649, as Rudolf Riedinger argues, it is interesting that even there, in a document prepared for the official use of the Roman Church, Augustine is mentioned seldom, and the florilegium of texts supporting the tion. Bathrellos (above, n. 16), 79, suggests that Maximus' attempts to defend the orthodoxy of Pope Honorius after his death are essentially diplomatic gestures. Hans Urs von

Balthasar, on the other hand, in Cosmic Liturgy, trans. Brian Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003), 44-50, sees Maximus as a figure who genuinely strove to unite the eastern and western Christian traditions structurally as well as intellectually.

See, for instance, Augustine's notable reflections on the propriety of giving a Christian emperor the title "happy" (felix), in De civ. Dei 5.24 (CCSL 47.200): "We Christians call rulers happy, if they rule with justice; if amid the voices of exalted praise and the reverent salutations of excessive humility, they are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men; if they put their power at the service of God's majesty, to extend his worship far and wide . . ." (Bettenson, trans., 220). One of the notable examples of an emperor's

Christian virtue that he offers here is Theodosius humble acceptance of temporary excommunication after he had massacred the citizens of Thessaloniki: ibid., 5.26 (ibid. 202). Maximus' Ep. 10, to John the Chamberlain (PG 91.449-54), which he may have written before leaving Cyzicus in 626, also reflects on the providential reasons that some human beings rule over others, when all are created equal in nature and worth; he insists that the emperor is not a priest in any sense. rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE synod's argument for two natural operations and wills in Christ relies much more on Greek patristic authorities than on Latin ones. Significantly, among the five brief excerpts from Augustine that the acta do offer, to certify the tradition of recognizing two natural wills in Christ, there appears a section of Augustine's Ep. 140 to Honoratus, which Augustine himself entitled De Gratia Novi Testamenti Liber (On the Grace of the New

Testament), a passage that one might mistake for Maximus' own if one did not have the full text elsewhere. Augustine here interprets John's saying that "the Word was made flesh" as promising us a future:

O men and women, do not cease to hope that you can become children of God, because the very Son of God—that is, God's Word—has been made flesh and has dwelt among us. Make your return to him; become spirit, and dwell in him who has become flesh and dwelt among you. For we have no reason not to hope that by participating in the Word, we humans can become children of God, since the Son of God, by participating in our flesh, has become a son of man. We changeable beings, therefore, transformed into something better, become participants in the Word. For the unchangeable Word, not at all transformed for the worse, was madea sharer in flesh through the mediation of a rational soul."4

Both our authors realized that what is at stake in our understanding of Christ, as one person living and acting as Son of God in two natures and substances, characterized by two unmixed sets of operations and determining his behavior by two unmixed wills, is nothing less than the news of our salvation. Christ reveals in himself what Maximus calls

"divinization, and what Augustine calls grace: God's sovereign intervention in our history of sin to change the direction of our lives, to sanctify and liberate our wills that we might choose only the good, to form us into sharers of Christ's body and make us, in his Spirit, sons and daughters of God.

"Augustine, Ep. 140, to Honoratus 4.11-12 (CSEL 44.163).

MakingaHuman Will Divine In 1952, Vitalien Laurent, the distinguished French Assumptionist authority on Byzantine lead seals, published a small study on a seal he had recently catalogued in the Vatican Museum (seal 92), which he dated to the second quarter of the seventh century.*° On one side of the small lead wafer, the size of a quarter, is an inscription in Greek: létpov &20 badtHV ma(tp)ikiov Kai SodKoc: "(The seal of) Peter, ex-consul, of patrician rank and general." Fr Laurent argues, mainly from the titles, that this can only refer to the Peter who was general of the Greek army in Numidia in North

Africa during the 630s and 640s, and whose most notable act was refusing to comply with a command from the emperor, in 632 or 633, to move with his troops to Egypt to resist the sudden tide of Muslim invaders from Arabia.4° Maximus, we know, was well acquainted with this General Peter of Numidia, who seems to have consulted the monk on matters both of doctrine and of ecclesiastical politics; we have two letters from Maximus to him from the mid-630s on the developing crisis in the eastern Church, plus excerpts from a longer treatise, written probably in 642 or 643 and discussing Rome's reaction to the exile of Patriarch Pyrrhus.*" Maximus also dedicated to Peter his Computus ecclesiasticus, on the liturgical seasons. In the account of Maximus' trial in 655, Peter's former treasurer comes forward to accuse the aged monk of influencing the general, twenty-two years earlier, not to lead his army against the Muslims: "and he wrote to you as if he were speaking to a servant of God, having confidence in you as a holy man to inquire whether you would advise him to set out. And you wrote back to him and said not to do such a thing since

God was not pleased to lend aid to the Roman state under the emperor Heraclius and his family.'** Maximus strenuously denies that he ever gave

45Vitalien Laurent, "Une effigie inédite de Saint Augustin sur le sceau du dux Byzantin de Numidie Pierre," Cahiers de Byrsa 2 (1952): 87-95. Laurent later confirmed his identification and dating, in his full catalogue of the Vatican seal collection: Les sceaux Byzantins du médailler Vatican, Medagliere della Bibliotheca Vaticana, vol. 1 (Vatican: Bibliotheca

Apostolica Vaticana, 1962), 85-87.

4eWalter E. Kaegi, Heraclius (above, n. 7), argues from this incident that Heraclius' strategic opportunities were fairly limited, as the Muslim conquest gained momentum: see 225, 233.

47Ep. 13, Opusculum 12. See Sherwood, 39-40, 52.

48Relatio Motionis 1 (Allen and Neal [above, n. 1], 48-51; cf. 52-53; Berthold, trans., 17; cf. 18).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE such advice, and calls for either other witnesses or documentary proof to sustain the charge. He never denies, however, that he had been the general's spiritual advisor.

On the other side of this same seal is a head of St Augustine, labeled Sanctus Augustinus in Latin and depicted not as the lean, intense teacher of the famous sixth-century Lateran fresco in Rome, but as a fairly anonymous bishop: gazing at the viewer, round-cheeked and wearing a soft cap, something like a Renaissance pope. That a Greek general in Maximus' day, commanding imperial troops in the province where Augustine had lived two centuries before, would have a picture of St Augustine on one side of his official seal, probably ought not to surprise us; it might be a sign of personal interest and devotion toward the saint, or simply an emblem of cultural adaptation. Still, if we remember that Peter and Maximus were friends and confidants, and that Maximus treats Peter as someone who shares his own views on christology and the Church, it could well be that Augustine symbolized for both men, if not a source of ideas, at least a locally cherished model of faithful, patient, philosophically enlightened witness to the full richness of the mystery of Christ—the other side, one might say, of their own coin. Only in Byzantine Africa could these two worlds have come together so closely, while remaining so far apart.

Sempiterne SpiritusDonum:

Augustine's Pneumatologyand the Metaphysics ofSpirit —_> a Lewis AYRES Introduction here is, I suggest, something of a tension between two central themes of recent Catholic writing about the relationship between Orthodox and Catholic pneumatologies. On the one hand, a significant body ofhistorical scholarship has attempted to undermine the idea that the debate between Orthodox and Catholic theologies is one between unchanging trinitarian logics fixed in the earliest centuries of Christianity. Instead, such scholarship suggests, it is essential to explore how this dispute (or this series of different disputes) has taken form in different historical contexts.! In the case of the fourth and fifth centuries in particular, one common feature of such scholarship has been the undermining of overly simplistic categories developed in later or modern polemical contexts and used to interpret the theological texts of the first

'The best summary in English of where such scholarship has led is Brian Daley, "Revisiting the 'Filioque': Roots and Branches of an Old Debate: Part One," Pro ecclesia 10 (2001):

31-62; and Daley, "Revisiting the 'Filioque': Part Two: Contemporary Catholic Approaches,"

Pro ecclesia 10 (2001): 195~212. See also Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Makingof a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Chadwick's book does not focus on theological analysis, but it is extremely helpful as an account of the changing shape and focus of the conflict within which the pneumatological disputes considered here are located.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE centuries. Deconstructing such categories has enabled a new attention to the theological dynamics and even experiments of an age before later disputes between East and West began to govern how theologians understood their own traditions. The late André De Halleux's work is, for me at least, seminal in such scholarship.* A number of De Halleux's papers from the 1970s and 1980s deconstruct some of the basic categories used to describe patristic pneumatologies—categories such as "personalism,"

"apophaticism," and "essentialism'—but such deconstruction is done always in the service of a renewed attention to the common sources of East and West.

On the other hand, some Catholic theologians for whom dialogue with the Orthodox churches (rightly) holds a high priority have devoted much energy to finding formulae that interpret the filioque such that the Father's monarchia is clearly upheld and formulae that speak about the Spirit's relationship to the Son in ways that reflect what are taken to be the common concerns of Greek and Latin patristic theologians.' The results have been received well by some Orthodox theologians—perhaps one might say by those who stand (consciously or unconsciously) in the tradition of Bolotov's remarkable pneumatological theses from 1898—but badly received by others, who see any interpretation of the filioque as merely overly subtle justifications for that which remains fundamentally unacceptable.* See especially André de Halleux, "Du Personnalisme en Pneumatologie," in Patrologie et Oecuménisme. Recueil d'Etudes (Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1990), 396-423;

"Personnalisme ou Essentialisme Trinitaire chez les Péres Cappadociens?" Patrologie et Oecuménisme, 215-68. Readers without French should consult his "Towards an Ecumenical

Agreement on the Procession of the Holy Spirit and the Addition of the filioque to the Creed," in Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, ed. Lukas Vischer (SPCK: London, 1981), 69-84.

The legacy of such work is perhaps best seen in a number of recent documents. I think especially of "The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit," issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in 1995; and the "The Filioque: A Church-Dividing Issue?: An Agreed Statement of the North American OrthodoxCatholic Theological Consultation," issued on October 23, 2003.

4V.V. Bolotov, "Thesen tiber das Filioque von einem russischen Theologe," Revue internationale de théologie 6 (1898): 671-712 (French trans., "Théses sur le 'Filioque' par rig | Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit

It is here that the tension of which I spoke appears. The search for ecumenically acceptable formulae always to some extent forecloses debate on the character of patristic pneumatology because it is predicated upon a certainty about the character and intention of that pneumatology—and it seems to me that the scholarship mentioned in my first paragraph suggests that there remains considerable uncertainty about precisely this character and intention. I suggest, then, that our common discussion needs continued opening up and exploration of patristic pneumatology just as much as it needs a focus on the search for new or revised formulae

(and there is, of course, no reason why we cannot have both). Within this common exploration I think it important for Catholic theologians to show how "filioquist" pneumatologies may themselves not just escape the charges frequently laid against them, but even offer considerable resources for thinking beyond the simplifications bred of our mutual and deeply ingrained polemic. Perhaps nowhere is this more so than in the case of Augustine; even as a growing body of scholarship has shown the extent to which Augustine does not fit his characteristic presentation in modern summary, his pneumatology is still frequently misinterpreted.

And so, following a phrase used in the literature for this conference, my aim will be to discuss "possibilities for Augustine's thought to unite rather than divide."

My argument will be that Augustine offers an extraordinarily sophisticated account of the Father as principium of the trinitarian communion of Father, Son, and Spirit as irreducible persons who together constitute

(as he says) the Trinitas quae est Deus. Augustine's vision of the Spirit as the active giving love breathed by the Father as the foundation of the trinitarian communion provides, I will suggest, the wider and essential context within which we must consider those aspects of his pneumatology that are easily taken out of context and used as the basis for unhelpful polemic. un théologien russe," Istina 17 [1972]: 261-92). For rejection of these moves see especially Jean-Claude Larchet, "La Question du 'Filioque}" Le Messager Orthodoxe 129 (1998):

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Commending the Source I want to begin with Augustine's famous account of divine missio as divine revelatio.> While this may surprise, it is,

I suggest, one of the best points of departure for considering Augustine's understanding of the relations between Father and Spirit. Augustine's discussion of what it means to speak about a divine person being sent is founded on the observation that although scripture attributes to the Word the language of moving from place to place, we misunderstand how scripture speaks and draws if we take this language literally. The omnipresent Word is, as Wisdom 8.1 and Psalm 138.8 tell us, always already anywhere that scripture presents as its

Augustine thus argues that each act of "sending" is actually an act of revealing. The sending of the divine persons is a sending intended to move people beyond attention only to what is visible and toward attention to "the hidden eternity of him who is forever present."

Augustine later clarifies the idea of sending as revealing by arguing that while the Son can be said to have been sent in a number of ways, he is only truly "sent into the world" (Jn 17.3) when he becomes man in order to save; true sending into the world is a revelation that effects salvation.®

Augustine also insists that the missions of Son and Spirit reveal not a divine person per se, but that each divine person comes from the Father:

Just as being born means for the Son his being born from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to be from him. And just as for the Holy Spirit his being the gift of God means his proceeding from the Father, so his being sent means his being known to proceed from him.?

recent literature on this topic I have found particularly helpful Luigi Gioia, "God Loved and Known through God in Augustine's De Trinitate" (DPhil diss., Oxford

University, 2005), ch. 4.

4.20.29 (CCSL 50.199): "Sicut enim natum esse est filio a patre esse, ita mitti est filio cognosci quod ab illo sit. Et sicut spiritui sancto donum dei esse est a patre procedere,

Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit Thus, the missions of Son and Spirit reveal the persons in their interconnection with the Father as source; the "hidden eternity" of him who is forever present is the hidden eternity of the Father. The revealing of Son and Spirit as being from the Father may be understood as a revealing both of the goal of our contemplation and of the nature of salvation toward that goal. This may becomea little clearer ifwe turn to a text from the very end of De Trinitate (On the Trinity), book 4. Here Augustine summarizes a long discussion of why the sending of Son and Spirit does not imply their ontological subordination:

Whether for the sake of the visible creature or, better, for the sake of commending to us the source [principium], it was not on account of inequality or difference or dissimilarity of substance that these [testimonies to the sending of the divine persons] are understood to have been put in the scriptures, for even if God the Father had willed to appear visibly through a creature subject to him it would be simply absurd if he were said to have been sent by the Son whom he generated or by the Spirit who proceeded from him.!°

In revealing that they are "from" the Father, Son and Spirit reveal not just that the Father is the principium, but the sort of principium that he is. The Father is the source of two who are in no way different from the Father in what they are; the Father is the source of two with whom he acts inseparably. In the first place this is a revealing of that which will be the object of our contemplation when faith is replaced by sight.'! In the second ita mitti est cognosci quod ab illo procedat." My translations are based on that of Stephen

McKenna in Fathers of the Church, vol. 45, although I have adapted his version whereI felt it necessary.

'Tbid., 4.21.32 (CCSL 50.205): "Sive enim propter visibilem creaturam sive potius propter principii commendationem, non propter inaequalitatem vel imparilitatem vel dissimilitudinem substantiae in scripturis haec posita intelleguntur, quia etiam si voluisset deus pater per subiectam creaturam visibiliter apparere, absurdissime tamen aut a filio quem genuit aut ab spiritu sancto qui de illo procedit missus diceretur."

'!For contemplation as the goal of Christian life see ibid., 1.10.20. It is important to note that Augustine understands this vision as one of Christ in union with the Father in the Spirit. See e.g. ibid., 1.12.30-31.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE place, it is a revealing of the structure of salvation itself; to accept salvation for Augustine is to grasp in humility (whether or not this is understood at the level of explicit cognition) that God acts without mediation through Son and Spirit to enable our return. Thus, in De Trinitate book 4,

Augustine argues that Christians must understand the sending of the Son as resulting not from the Son's subordination, but from the Father's care for us in the Son so that we may be drawn into the communion of Father and Son, a communion that is an eternal association of love (dilectionis societatem).!* And so, while Augustine's strong insistence on the role of the Father as principium here is of importance, it is of greater importance that this account of divine mission sets an agenda for the rest of our discussion; the task of understanding Augustine's mature pneumatology may be cast as a task of understanding how he sees scriptural testimony to the Spirit as revealing the Father as principium of the trinitarian communion and life into which we are drawn.

",.. the essence is nothing other than the Trinity itself"

Before we can turn directly to Augustine's mature pneumatology we need to explore Augustine's understanding of how Father, Son, and Spirit constitute the divine essence. This discussion will then provide a backdrop to the specific treatment of the Spirit's role in the remainder of the paper.

Books 5 to 7 of the De Trinitate offer just about the only extended discussion in Augustine's corpus of whether we can apply genus and species terminology to the Trinity. In a close study of Augustine's argument, Richard

Cross has recently argued that Augustine understands the structure and implications of such language well, but consciously rejects its usefulness.

Augustine does so because he assumes that the use of any specific noun (such as "person") implies the possibility of also using a generic noun

(such as "animal").'> Thus "essence" cannot function as a generic term !2Tbid., 4.9.12; cf. ibid., 4.19.25-20.27.

!Richard Cross, "Quid tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit anda "person" specifically; we cannot, for example, say that there are three essences because there are three persons, although we can say that Peter,

James, and John are also three animals. Alternatively, "essence" is not a species term because the divine essence is not divisible into individuals.

For Augustine the divine essence simply does not admit of such division.

Now, Augustine's strong insistence on the indivisibility of the divine essence travels along with, and in part results from, his description ofeach divine person as the fulness of God as well as being the fulness of God with the other divine persons. In De Trinitate book 6 Augustine writes:

(7.9) Nor since he is a Trinity [trinitas] is He, therefore, tripartite [triplex]; otherwise the Father alone or the Son alone would be less than the Father and the Son together. Although, to tell the truth, it is difficult to see how one can speakofthe Father alone or the Son alone, since the Father is with the Son and the Son with the Father always and inseparably, not that both are the Father or both the Son, but because they are always mutually in one another and neither is alone .. . (8.9)

In God himself, therefore, when the equal Son adheres to the equal Father, or the equal Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son, God does not thereby become greater than each one separately, for there is nothing whereby that perfection can increase. But he is perfect whether the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit; and God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is perfect, and, therefore, he is a Trinity rather than tripartite.!4 in De TrinitateV and VII, Harvard Theological Review 100.2 (2007): 215-32. Cross refers to Irénée Chevalier's Saint Augustin et la pensée grecque. Les relations trinitaires (Fribourg: Collectanea Friburgensia, 1940) to justify the idea that Augustine's rejection of this terminology is based on an actual knowledge of Cappadocian discussion. Berthold Altaner's refutation of Chevalier (see the series of short papers collected in his Kleine patristische

Schriften (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1967]) shows the great unlikeliness of this possibility, but Cross' main point still stands: Augustine understands such language and rejects it.

Whether any of the Cappadocians endorses such language without reservation is a distinct question; my own sense is that their significant qualifications of the language are consistently underplayed in the scholarship.

"Trin. 6.7.9-8.9 (CCSL 50.237-8): "Nec quondam trinitas est ideo triplex putandus est; alioquin minor erit pater solus aut filius solus quam simul pater et filius-quamquam non ri |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE The unity of God is here understood by reflecting on what it must mean for the Father (who is wisdom and justice and goodness itself) to beget one who has "life in himself" (to use the terms of Jn 5.26). This cannot mean that the Son (or the Spirit) has anything of what it is to be God by participation; the Son no more "shares" in the Father's essence than the three persons "share" in a common essence if "share" indicates a mode of participation. The Father generates the Son as one who is irreducibly all that it is to be God and thus is necessarily perfect God in himself, and necessarily "person" or "agent," not "thing" (I will return to this emphasis shortly).!° Yet, to speak in these terms is, as Augustine recognizes in the middle of this passage, ridiculously artificial because the Father generates Son and breathes Spirit such that there is an irreducible unity. This we know because the Bible tells us so, but it also seems, for Augustine, to fit well with what the language of divine simplicity demands of us. In generating a Son who fully "shares" his simple perfect essence, the Father generates one who is both fully all that he is and yet, paradoxically, the Son is necessarily at one with the Father in the simplicity of that essence.!° Augustine invenitur quomodo dici possit aut pater solus aut filius solus cum semper atque inseparabiliter et ille cum filio sit et ille cum patre, non ut ambo sint pater aut ambo filius, sed quia semper in invicem neuter solus ..

. In ipso igitur deo cum adhaeret aequali patri filius aequalis aut spiritus sanctus patri et filio aequalis, non fit maior deus quam singuli eorum quia non est quo crescat illa perfectio. Perfectus autem sive pater sive filius sive spiritus sanctus, et perfectus deus pater et filius et spiritus sanctus, et ideo trinitas potius quam triplex." Cf. ibid., 15.17.28.

'5For these connections, other than the material in Trin. already quoted, see also Civ.

11.10 (CCSL 47.330): ".. et utrumque hoc cum spiritu suo unus Deus est, qui spiritus Patris et Filii Spiritus sanctus propria quadam notione huius nominis in sacris litteris nuncupatur. Alius est autem quam Pater et Filius, quia nec Pater est nec Filius, sed alius dixi, non aliud, quia et hoc pariter simplex pariterque incommutabile bonum est et coaeternum."

'oT have explored this particular point at greater length in my Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 15. In his paper in this volume, Fr John Behr also notes the same distinctive feature of Augustine's theology. He claims also that Greek Nicaeans are consistent (and more biblical) in seeing the Father as the one true God. I would suggest, first, that this clear opposition remains to be proven: it may well be so, but I would want to see a far more extensive study to demonstrate that this is so and that this is not at all compromised by the insistence in Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen that terms which describe the essence must be rig | Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit was the first pro-Nicaean to argue that each of the persons is the fulness of God as well as that fulness with the others, and it constitutes one of the most important of his contributions to the theology of the Trinity.'"

Thus, in his mature writing Augustine neither views the mystery of the Trinity being both three and one by imagining the Trinity as an intelligible simple reality who must somehow be also divided, nor by imagining the Trinity as (in the terms of many modern critics) a simple reality with "internal" divisions constituted by relations. The first option would destroy the unity of the divine essence and miss the point that each irreducible divine person is the fulness of the indivisible God. The second option simply does not reflect Augustine's language. Whatever a doctrine of "subsistent relations" implies or does not imply, the language of persons as relations is alien to Augustine.'* Augustine certainly emphasizes that the names of Father and Son, for example, are spoken relative (relative) to one another, but this is only to emphasize a pattern of scriptural predication. Augustine, in fact, states clearly that "every essence which is spoken of in relation is certainly something besides that relation."!? used univocally of God. At the same time, however, it is clear enough that Orthodox liturgical practice of a later era certainly permits prayer addressed to the Trinity as a whole. No doubt we will take up these questions again in a future debate. For the moment, see our exchange in Harvard Theological Review 100 (2007).

'7Showing that other pro-Nicaeans do not use a given argument is always difficult. But to see some of the different tactics that pro-Nicaeans used to answer the charge that they were teaching three gods—one context where Augustine's argument might have been deployed—see for example Basil, De Spiritu Sancto 18.44—45; Gregory Nazianzen, Or.

31.13-20, Gregory of Nyssa, Abl. In none of these texts do we find Augustine's tactic.

'8This does not mean that I think the notion of"subsistent relations" itself falls prey to the charges sometimes leveled against it. For an excellent discussion of the doctrine as found in Thomas Aquinas see Gilles Emery, "Essentialisme ou personnalisme dans le traité de Dieu chez saint Thomas d'Aquin?" Revue Thomiste 98 (1998): 5-38 (English trans. in The Thomist 64 [2000]: 521-63).

Trin. 7.1.2 (CCSL 50.247): "Omnis essentia quae relative dicitur est etiam aliquid excepto relative." Included in this discussion should also be Tract. Ev. Jo. 39.4 (CCSL 36, 347):

"...videte enim si non quasi apparet numerus, pater et filius et spiritus sanctus trinitas. Si tres, quid tres? Deficit numerus. lita deus nec recedit a numero, nec capitur numero. Quia tres sunt, tamquam est numerus; si quaeris quid tres, non est numerus. hoc solo numerum insinuant quod ad invicem sunt, non quod ad se sunt... non est quid dicam tres, nisi patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum, unum deum, unum omnipotentem. Ergo rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Instead of these options, Augustine imagines the Trinitas quae est Deus as the one God constituted by Father, Son, and Spirit, each of whom is perfectly God in themselves. As he writes in Ep. 120: "[h]old with unshakable faith that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a Trinity and that there is, nonetheless, one God, not that the divinity is common to these as if it were a fourth, but that it is itself the ineffably inseparable Trinity . .."?°

Or: "[i]t remains, then, that we should believe the Trinity is of one substance, in the sense that the essence is nothing other than the Trinity itself"?! For Augustine, then, there is nothing in God other than the three persons. But this is the same as saying that there is nothing other than the divine essence, because the persons eternally constitute the divine essence as one.

Although Augustine is resistant to the use of genus and species terminology for the persons, he does accord each of the persons, as fully God, something analogous to the rational and desiring life that constitutes the human being as imago Dei. Thus, even the two sections of De Trinitate book 15 that attempt to show by analogy how intellegentia helps us reflect on the Son and voluntas on the Spirit are both prefaced by an extended insistence that each divine person is its own memory, intelligence and will.?? Yet, Augustine is equally clear that we fail to understand how this language can be applied to Father, Son, and Spirit unless we see both that divine persons experience no lack in their desiring and knowing—they are the good itself and for them knowing and being are the same—and that the divine persons are united such that they constitute one substance and will, and that they act inseparably.

While it is important to see how thoroughly Augustine sees the persons as constituting the divine essence, much is missed if we do not also unum principium." There is no count-noun applicable to the three; only the referential terms Father, Son, and Spirit allow us to use number in this context.

20 Ep, 120.2.12 (CSEL 34/2.715): "nunc vero tene inconcussa fide patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum esse trinitatem et tamen unum deum, non quod sit eor'um communis quasi quarta diuinitas, sed quod sit ipsa ineffabiliter inseparabilis trinitas . . ."

?'Ibid., 120.3.17 (CSEL 34/2.719): "restat itaque, ut ita credamus unius esse substantiae trinitatem, ut ipsa essentia non aliud sit quam ipsa trinitas."

?2 Trin. 15.7.12, 15.17.28.

Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit explore how Augustine envisions this "constituting" to be the product of the persons acts toward each other. One of the most important developments in his mature theology is an increasingly thoroughgoing interpretation of scriptural passages that appear to describe acts of the persons toward each other as descriptions of constitutive acts by which the persons are what they are. In other words, intra-divine "acts" are intrinsic to the act by which the Father constitutes the communion of Son and Spirit.

One of the clearest examples of such exegesis is provided by his mature reflection on John 5.19 ("the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing"). The text is a puzzling one for proNicaeans both because it seems to provide evidence against a conception of inseparable operation and against the idea of the Son's equality of power with the Father. In his mature interpretation of the passage Augustine argues that we must move beyond the material and spatial imagery used by the text and grasp that the Son's "seeing" of the Father is his being; the Son sees not as an accidental act, but that eternal act of seeing constitutes what it is to be the Son." Because the persons are unchangeable there cannot bea literal sequential seeing of a succession of acts performed by the Father; the Son's seeing is necessarily essential to the Son's being.*4 Moreover, this seeing is identical with his eternal generation from the Father. Such exegetical moves complement Augustine's insistence that each of the persons is the fulness of God as well as being that fulness with the others because they deepen Augustine's account of how the communion of the persons is constituted by their mutual acts. The persons exist only in relation, and not as sharers in a common stuff, but through the act(s) of origination that give(s) rise to their propria as acts. Once again, however, it is intrinsic to Augustine's argument that the scriptural material he uses to explore these acts both enable our growth in knowledge and yet, at the same time, indicate to us where we fail in under- ?3We should, at this point, remember Augustine's insistence that there is no passive potency in God. Talking of the Aristotelian categories, he writes at Trin. 5.8.9 (CCSL 50.216):

"Quod autem ad faciendum attinet fortassis de solo verissime dicatur; solus enim Deus facit et ipse non fit, neque pattitur quantum ad eius substantiam pertinet qua Deus est."

Tract. Ev. Jo. 18.10; 20.8 (CCSL 36.208): " .. videre Filii, hoc est natum esse de Patre."

See also the extensive discussion at Tract. Ev. Jo. 21.4.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE standing; that which we might see as accidental in human life is simply essential to what it is to be a divine person.

In the following passage from book 15 Augustine brings together his insistence that the persons must each be their own memory, intelligence, and will with his account of the persons as defined by their acts toward each other:

The Word, therefore, the only-begotten Son of God the Father .. . is wholly the same as the Father, and yet is not the Father, because this is the Son, and that is the Father. And, therefore, he knows all that the Father knows; but for him to know is of the Father, as also to be is of the Father ... And therefore, the Father, as though uttering himself, begot the Word, equal in all things to himself... [commenting on Jn

5.19] God the Father, therefore, knows all things in himself, and he knows all things in his Son, but in himself as himself, and in the Son as his word, the word which is spoken concerning all those things which are in himself. In like manner, the Son also knows all things, namely, in himself, as those which were born from those which the Father knows in himself, but in the Father, as those from which were born, what the Son himself knows in himself. The Father and the Son, therefore, know each other mutually, but the former by begetting, the latter by being born. And all the things that are in their knowledge, in their wisdom, in their essence, each of them sees simultaneously, not partly or singly, ... and nothing is there which he does not see."°

25 Trin. 15.14.23 (CCSL 50.495-7): "Verbum ergo dei patris unigenitus filius .

. est hoc omnino quod pater, non tamen pater quia iste filius, ille pater. Ac per hoc novit omnia quae novit pater, sed ei nosse de patre est sicut esse. Nosse enim et esse ibi unum est. Et ideo patri sicut esse non esta filio ita nec nosse. Proinde tamquam se ipsum dicens pater genuit verbum sibi aequale per omnia. Nouit itaque omnia deus pater in se ipso, novit in filio, sed in se ipso tamquam se ipsum, in filio tamquam verbum suum quod est de his omnibus quae sunt in se ipso. Omnia similiter novit et filius, in se scilicet tamquam ea quae nata sunt de his quae pater novit in se ipso, in patre autem tamquam ea de quibus nata sunt quae ipse filius novit in se ipso. Sciunt ergo invicem pater et filius, sed ille gignendo, ille nascendo. Et omnia quae sunt in eorum scientia, in eorum sapientia, in eorum essentia unusquisque eorum simul videt, non particulatim aut singillatim ... nullum est quod non semper videt." For a direct statement of the failure of any analogy between human and divine persons see ibid., 15.13.22. ri | Augustine's Pheumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit

This passage adds one further layer to Augustine's exegesis of John 5.19:

Son and Spirit can only be likened to intellectus and voluntasifwe remember that they are also irreducible persons constituted by their mode of relationship to the Father. Thus, here, the Son is not understood as the act of intellectus within the Trinity, nor as the Father's own wisdom or knowledge (as is the case in some earlier Nicaean theologies and in Augustine's earliest work). The Son's being and being from the Father is still identical with his seeing of the Father, but Augustine also wishes to say that the Son knows all things in himself as a gift from the Father and in the Father as the source of all he knows. Similarly, the Father eternally knows himself as the source of all that he eternally chooses to know in the Word. This modification to his reading of John 5.19 is shaped by the necessity of predicating on each of the divine "persons" the rational qualities we take to mark our own status as imago Dei, if the persons are to be understood as truly irreducible. Interestingly, the passage is also important in showing us how far Augustine is from conceiving of the persons as notional acts within the divine life. Each divine "person" must be their own intellectual life—understood as an immediate presence, not as a sequential movement into knowledge—constituted by the mutual knowledge of Father,

Son, and Spirit.?° This knowledge is, to emphasize one of the key points of the last two paragraphs, also an ordered knowledge, in the sense that the patterns of mutual knowing are those established from eternity by the Father.?7

further discussion of ibid., 8-15, see my "Memory, Intelligence and Will in Augustine's Trinitarian Theology,' in The Mystery of the Trinity in the Fathers of the Church, ed.

Lewis Ayres and Vincent Twomey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 37-64.

de Halleux has offered an extensive critique of the idea that Augustine and the Cappadocians can be encompassed under a division between "essentialism" and "personalism." I hope this section of my argument has further indicated the uselessness of the distinction by emphasizing that Augustine's own account of the trinitarian communion established from eternity by the Father itself bears many of the hallmarks that supposedly mark the Cappadocians as "personalist." I hope it is clear, however, that Augustine's focus on the trinitarian persons as constituting the divine essence and as themselves possessing

(or rather, being) the attributes of rational, desiring life is always analogical or perhaps anagogical: the discussion of the three as agents is always accompanied by emphasis on ways in which they transcend that which we know in ourselves of the personal. Andrew Louth,

"Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers," Augustinian Studies 33 ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE The examples I have given in this section of the paper to establish

Augustine's account of the trinitarian communion have mostly concerned the relationship between Father and Son; it is time now to see how

Augustine's mature pneumatology completes his account of this communion as eternally established by the persons' mutual relationships.

Sempiterne Spiritus Donum I want to begin with two texts, separated by around a decade. In book6 of De Trinitate, Augustine writes as follows:

Whether [the Holy Spirit] is the unity between [Father and Son], or their holiness, or their love, or whether the unity because he is the love, it is obvious that he is not one of the two. Through him both are joined together; through him the begotten is loved by the begetter, and in turn loves him who begot him; in him they preserve the unity of spirit through the bond of peace, not by a participation, but by their own essence, not by the gift of anyone superior to themselves but by their own gift. . .28

In book 15 of the same work, we find:

(2002): 1-16, is one ofa very small number ofmodern scholars—especially Orthodox scholars—to read Augustine as in any sense a "personalist" (though see the conclusion to this paper). I disagree with his reading, however, because he does not take sufficient account of this analogical or anagogic quality, and because he does not give sufficient weight to the way in which Augustine understands the mutual relationships of the three as an ordered mutuality described in scripture. See also, below, n. 35. I discuss the question of Augustine's "personalism" in some detail in my Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2009).

6.5.7 (CCSL 50.235): "Sive enim sit unitas amborum sive sanctitas sive caritas, sive ideo unitas quia caritas et ideo caritas, quia sanctitas, manifestum est quod non aliquis duorum est quo uterque coniungitur, quo genitus a gignente diligatur generatoremque suum diligat, sintque non participatione sed essentia sua neque dono superioris alicuius sed suo proprio servantes unitatem spiritus in vinculo pacis. ... Spiritus ergo sanctus commune aliquid est patris et filii, quidquid illud est, aut ipsa communio consubstantialis et coaeterna ..." rig | Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit

Nor because they give and he is given is he, therefore, less than they, for he is so given as the gift of God that he also gives himself as God.

For it is impossible to say of him that he is not a master of his own power, ofwhom it was said: "the Spirit breathes where he will"... there is no subordination of the Gift and no domination of the givers, but the concord between the gift and the givers."?

Before we come directly to the character of the trinitarian communion discussed here, it will be helpful to think for a moment about the exegetical foundations of Augustine's paralleling of the titles "love" and "gift." Augustine's mature account of the Spirit's proprium is shaped by a complex exegetical matrix. The best way to examine that exegesis is via

Augustine's reflection on the Spirit as the Spirit of Father and the Spirit of Son. This theme takes on importance in Augustine's corpus for the first time in books 5 to 7 of De Trinitate, and it does so there as Augustine reflects on the oddity of the name Holy Spirit.°° Because Father, Son, and Spirit are all holy and all spirit, scripture must use these terms in two distinct ways. In the first place, the terms are individually used to designate each person of the Trinity, and thus the Trinity itself can be called "Holy

Spirit." In the second place, scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit in particular by this combination of terms, inviting us into reflection on one of the most complex of trinitarian mysteries. The name "Holy Spirit" is important, Augustine argues, because it draws our attention to the fact that the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of both Father and Son. Nevertheless, neither the name "Holy Spirit," nor the parallel designation "Spirit of" reveals to us the sort of relationship implied between the Father and his Spirit or the *Ibid., 15.19.36 (CCSL 50.513): "Nec quia illi dant, ipse datur, ideo minor est illis. Ita enim datur sicut dei donum ut etiam se ipsum det sicut deus. Non enim dici potest non esse suae potestatis de quo dictum est: Spiritus ubi vult spirat ... Non est illic conditio dati et dominatio dantium sed concordia dati et dantium." lbid., 5.11.12. This focus on the Spirit being "of" Father and "of" Son is not evident in the summary of trinitarian theology at ibid., 1.4.7-6.13. The statement (without any supporting exegesis) that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son first appears at ibid., 4.29. Discussion of the relevant texts first occurs at ibid., 5. The first statement of the summary principle or extended exegesis outside ibid., appears to be at Tract. Ev. Jo. 9.7, although this text may slightly pre-date or post-date the composition of Trin. 4-7.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Son and his Spirit. That relationship only becomes clear when we reflect on the title "gift." The distinction between "giver" and "gift," however, alongside the description of the Spirit as the Spirit "of Father" and "of Son,' lets us know that we are talking about the relationship between three irreducible realities, Father, Son, and Spirit; Spirit does not refer merely to an aspect or intrinsic property of Father and Son.*!

While, as Augustine himself knows full well, the title "gift" itself is used by scripture of that which is given to Christians for their salvation,**

Augustine contends that the Spirit is eternally gift on the basis of further links that he suggests scripture invites us to draw.** These links are stated with greatest clarity in book 15 of De Trinitate, and it may be only in writing this book that he finally saw the full matrix oflinks he wishes to draw.

The term "gift" is used, Augustine tells us there, because the Spirit is also love.*4 That which the Father gives us is the Spirit of his Son (Gal 4.6), but the gift of the Spirit is the Spirit, and the Spirit is love (Rom 5.5).°°

"Love, like "Spirit," is a term that may be predicated of all three persons, but which, Augustine argues, scripture uses so that when we grasp that the love which the Spirit gives is the Spirit, we will understand that the love which we receive is the love with which Father and Son love each other. The clarity that we find in book 15 over the hesitancy of book 5 probably resulted from an increasingly strong commitment to this exegetical link; we are seeing Augustine's pneumatology still in the course of development.

*lAgain, ibid., 5.11.12.

See e.g. ibid., 5.16.17 (CCSL 50.224): ... sempiterne Spiritus donum.

ibid., 15.18.32. The linking of love, Spirit, and gift is first discussed extensively in Defide et symb. 9.19 (AD 393).

"Love and the Trinity," sees Augustine as arguing that the Spirit is a uniting love because of his conception of the role of love among Christians. This then enables him to see Augustine's procedure as a misuse of oikonomia as theologia. Such a reading seems to me to miss the complexity of Augustine's arguments that the salvific actions of the persons are also a revealing of their eternal natures. At the same time I would suggest there is far more to draw our attention in Augustine's understanding of the complex ways in which scripture speaks of the Spirit, inviting us to make connections that only become apparent as we are drawn into the process of sanctification.

Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit This exegetical structure is complex, but it is so for Augustine because scripture invites Christians into a meditation on the Spirit that takes them to the heart of their faith. As I suggested in the first section of the paper,

Augustine sees the revelation of the Spirit's role in the economy as an invitation for us to reflect on the character of salvation as the process of being drawn into the divine communion itself; what it is to be given the gift of the Spirit is most deeply understood when that act of giving is seen as a sharing in the love that constitutes the trinitarian communion. Augustine knows full well that here we are straining the eyes of faith toward the outer rim of what may be seen of the divine communion this side of the judgment, but such straining is itself essential to the life of faith.*°

This exegetical excursus sets the stage for us to examine how Augustine envisages the Spirit not only as bond and love but also as personal.

Through him both are joined together; through him the begotten is loved by the begetter, and in turn loves him who begot him; in him they preserve the unity of spirit through the bond of peace, not by a participation, but by their own essence, not by the gift of anyone superior to themselves but by their own gift...

Father and Son maintain their "unity of spirit" and "bond of peace" not through any participation in an underlying reality nor by receiving a gift of unity from above (the reference here being, I think, to the unity of Christians in the body of Christ). Rather they maintain this unity by their acts of giving and loving; the Father giving and loving as the one who begets, the Son giving and loving the one who begot him. The mutual love of which Augustine speaks is thus a love identical with the eternally constitutive acts that are what it is to be Father and Son; their love is their essence because in God there is nothing accidental. When Father and Son give this love, what they give is what it is to be Father and Son; it is their

my "Augustine on the Rule of Faith: Rhetoric, Christology, and the Foundation of Christian Thinking," Augustinian Studies 36 (2005): 33-49; see also the paper by Carol

Harrison in this volume.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE own gift and (being God) necessarily a gift of themselves. And so, if the Spirit is love, that love must be the fulness of God, fully wisdom and truth and life and power; that love must, hence, be an active giving gift, it must be an irreducible divine "person."*"

When Augustine writes that Father and Son preserve their unity through their own substance, he most emphatically does not mean that Father and Son are one because they both participate in a common essence mistakenly identified with the Spirit; he means that Father and Son are one in communion through the personal reality of the Spirit given in the begetting of the Son and returned by the Son as an act constitutive of what it is to be Son. But even this sentence does not capture Augustine's point because it misses his emphasis on the Spirit as both gift and giver; we can also say that Father and Son are one because the Spirit gives himself in the begetting of the Son and gives himself as the Son's love for the Father.

In the thirty-ninth of Augustine's In Evangelium Johannis tractatus (Tractates on the Gospel ofJohn), probably written in the same few years as he was finishing the De Trinitate, we find:... [if] many souls through love are one soul, and many hearts are one heart, what does the very fountain of love do in the Father and the Son? ... If, therefore, "the love of God [which] has been poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" makes many souls one soul and many hearts one heart, how much more does [the Spirit] make the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit one God, one light, one principium?*® °7My language here owes something to Rowan D. Williams, "Sapientia and the Trinity:

Reflections on the De trinitate, in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T.J. Van Bavel, ed. B.

Bruning, et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990) =Aug(L) 40-1 (1990-91), vol. 1, 317-32, at 327-28: "The Spirit is 'common' to Father and Son not as a quality characterizing them equally, an impersonal attribute, but as that active divine giving, not simply identical with the person of the Father, which the Father communicates to the Son to give in his turn... the Father, in eternally giving (divine) life to the Son, gives that life as itself a 'giving' agency, for there is no pre-personal or sub-personal divinity; he gives the Son the capacity to give that same giving life . .."

Iam less convinced by Williams' applying to the Spirit as such than by his account of dilectio as always love in search of an object.

Ev. Jo. 39.5 (CCSL 36.348): "si... multae animae per caritatem una anima est, Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit

Only in his mature writing does Augustine make this specific link between the function of the Spirit in the Christian community and the Spirit's function within the communion of the Trinity. He does so three times in his In Evangelium Johannis tractatus and a few more times, mostly in directly anti-Arian contexts, although not in the De Trinitate itself.*° The infrequency of its use perhaps belies its significance in grasping the central theme of Augustine's mature pneumatology; the Father breathes the Spirit as the one who actively constitutes Father, Son, and Spirit (note, not merely Father and Son) as the one God.

Whether we use the term "substance" or "essence" in contrast to person in trinitarian discourse, our implicit assumption is all too easily that essence names something non-personal; for Augustine, this cannot be because the essence is the communion of persons. It is at this point that I think we see to the heart of how Augustine envisages the Father as principium. It is not simply that the Father gives rise to a communion of three who are equal. The Father gives rise to a communion constituting the essence of God and defined by his act or acts of generation and spiration.

The Father breathes the Spirit in the same act in which he generates the Son, and the Son is the Son because the Spirit is the essence of Father and Son as active giving love.*° The Father is eternally the fulness of God—on et multa corda unum cor; quid agit ipse fons caritatis in patre et filio? nonne ibi magis trinitas unus est deus? Inde enim nobis caritas venit, de ipso spiritu sancto, sicut dicit apostolus: caritas dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per spiritum sanctum qui datus est nobis. Si ergo caritas dei diffusa in cordibus nostris per spiritum sanctum qui datus est nobis, multas animas facit unam animam, et multa corda facit unum cor, quanto magis pater et filius et spiritus sanctus, deus unus, lumen unum, unumque principium?"

Tract. Ev. Jo. 14.9, 18.43 Serm. 47.21, 229G.5.6 (s. Guelf. 11); De symb. ad cat. 2.4; Ep.170.5, 238. 2.13 and 16. For discussion see M.F. Berrouard, "La premiére communauté de Jérusalem comme image de l'unitéde la Trinité. Une des exegeses augustiniennes d'Act 4, 32, in Homo

Spiritalis. Festgabe fiir Luc Verheijen (Wirzburg, 1987), 207-24.

40This sentence finds an interesting parallel in Thomas Weinandy, The Father's Spiritof Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 69. See also 50: "If the Spirit is the love in whom the Father begets the Son and so conforms himself as Father and conforms the Son as Son, then to say 'God is Love' is not a statement about God's generic nature, but specifies the very heart of the Trinitarian life and designates that it is the Spirit that makes the life of God Trinitarian." My account of Augustine parallels this account even if Augustine does not offer discussion of the Father "conforming himself" in any way. rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE this as we have seen Augustine is clear—but the Father is also the fulness of God with Son and Spirit.

To what extent can we say that the generation of Son and spiration of Spirit determines the being of the Father? If the Father's essence is the love he shares with the Son and which is returned by the Son, then surely something along these lines must be said? But I do not know of a text in Augustine's corpus that even broaches this possibility.

I suspect that, for Augustine, beginning such a discussion would allow a certain temporal dimension to insinuate itself into our conception of the Trinity; there is no act of generation followed by a secondary consequence. The best we can say is that the Father from eternity is the fulness of God and is so as the act of giving rise to Son and Spirit as the communion that is the fulness of God.

Filioque After all this delay, we come to what many readers may have expected to be the main act of the show. In book 15 of the De Trinitate, Augustine famously writes:

Only he from whom the Son was begotten and from whom the Spirit principally [principaliter] proceeds, is God the Father.

have added principally therefore because the Holy Spirit is also found to proceed from the Son. But the Father also gave this to him, not as though he already existed and did not yet have it, but whatever he gave to the only-begotten Word, he gave by begetting him. He so begot him, therefore, that the common gift should also proceed from him, and that the Holy Spirit should be the Spirit of both.*!

Augustine, I suspect, would endorse much of what Weinandy intends by arguing for the thesis that the Father begets the Son in the Spirit.

4! Trin. 15.17.29 (CCSL 50.503): "Et tamen non frustra in hac trinitate non dicitur verbum dei nisi filius, nec donum dei nisi spiritus sanctus, nec de quo genitum est verbum et de quo procedit principaliter spiritus sanctus nisi deus pater. Ideo autem addidi, princiAugustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit

It is, of course, commonly remarked that this passage offers us an archetypal statement of Augustine's insistence that his account of double procession finds at its core a restatement of the Father's principium within the Trinity. But I think it equally important that we see the extent to which this passage is simply an extension of the ideas we have explored so far.

Exegetically the foundation of Augustine's discussion of procession is the matrix of texts drawn together by his mature consideration of why the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Ontologically, his understanding of the Spirit's procession rests on his sense of the character of the divine persons as each the fulness of God and the atemporality of the divine being. The Father's begetting of the Son is identical with the establishment of the communion of Father, Son, and Spirit because in the begetting of the Son the Father gives his love (or substance), thus eternally establishing the Son as lover of the Father and the Spirit as the personal giving love of Father and Son.

His argument is further refineda little later in book 15:

And he who can understand in that which the Son says: "as the Father has life in himself, so he has given to the Son to have life in himself} that the Father did not give life to the Son already existing without life, but so begot him apart from time that the life which the Father gave to the Son by begetting is co-eternal with the life of the Father who gave; let him understand that, just as the Father has in himself that the Holy

Spirit should proceed from the Father, it is so to be understood that his proceeding also from the Son comes to the Son from the Father. For if whatever he has, the Son has from the Father, then certainly he has from the Father that the Holy Spirit also proceeds from him.*? paliter, quia et de filio spiritus sanctus procedere reperitur. Sed hoc quoque illi pater dedit

(non iam exsistenti et nondum habenti), sed quidquid unigenito verbo dedit gignendo dedit. Sic ergo eum genuit ut etiam de illo donum commune procederet et spiritus sanctus spiritus esset amborum." For a seminal discussion of pneumatology in book 15 see, Basil

Studer, "Zur Pneumatologie des Augustinus von Hippo (De Trinitate 15.17.27-50)," in Mysterium Caritatis: Studien zur Exegese und zur Trinitiitslehre in der Alten Kirche, Studia

Anselmiana, vol. 127 (Rome: Pontifico Ateneo S. Anselmo, 1999), 311-27.

" Trin 15.26.47 (CCSL 50.528): "Et qui potest intellegere in eo quod ait filius: Sicut habet ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE At the end of book 15, Augustine quotes from his own ninety-ninth tractate on John a passage that draws out a further consequence:

But of him, of whom the Son has it that he is God, he has it, of course, that the Holy Spirit also proceeds from him. And because of this the Holy Spirit has it from the Father himself that he proceeds also from the Son, just as he proceeds from the Father.

Together these passages only reinforce what we have seen, but they do perhaps also show that in his final extensive attempt to develop this theme

Augustine emphasizes that the communion established comes into being at all stages through the Father's eternal act."4 The constitution of the Son as image, truth, wisdom, and power isthe constitution by the Father of the

Son as the one who sees all in the Father and of the Son as the one who loves the Father in the Spirit. For the Spirit to proceed from the Son is for the Father to establish the Spirit as the active giving love that joins the three from eternity in a consubstantial union.

In the atemporal context of the divine communion, questions of whether the Son mediates the Spirit or acts as secondary cause become extremely difficult to pose, and it is perhaps no accident that Augustine offers no discussion of the question. The Father generates the Son in the act to which he gives rise to the trinitarian communion in the Spirit, the Spirit is given to the Son in order that the Spirit will come forth from the Son; but this both gives and does not give the Son a role in the constitution of the Spirit. It does give because the Father does not give to the Son a Spirit as it were "fully formed" who then comes in some subsequent act pater vitam in semetipso sic dedit filio vitam habere in semetipso non sine vita exsistenti iam filio vitam patrem dedisse sed ita eum sine tempore genuisse ut vita quam pater filio gignendo dedit coaeterna sit vitae patris qui dedit, intellegat sicut habet pater in semetipso ut et de illo procedat spiritus sanctus sic dedisse filio ut de illo procedat idem spiritus sanctus et utrumque sine tempore, atque ita dictum spiritum sanctum de patre procedere ut intellegatur quod etiam procedit de filio, de patre esse filio. Sienim quidquid habet de patre habet filius, de patre habet utique ut et de illo procedat spiritus sanctus."

431bid., 15.27.48 and Tract. Ev. Jo. 99.8.

447 say "final" because we do not find extensive attempts to explore this theme in the late anti-"Arian" works.

Augustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit from the Son; the Spirit is eternally breathed as the love who eternally comes into being as the love given and returned. And yet, the Spirit comes from the Father as personal and active giving love who gives himselfin the Son to the Father and does so at the Father's breathing. If, and here I suspect Augustine would say that the eyes of faith simply fail, the Son forms the Spirit's hypostatic existence, he does so because this is the manner in which the Father breathes forth the Spirit.*°

Thinking with Professor Ratzinger In a festschrift article from 1974, the then Professor Ratzinger expands on some implicit themes in his 1953 dissertation to offer an account of the ways in which he sees Augustine's pneumatology contributing to the emergence ofa fully trinitarian and Christian metaphysic.*° Ratzinger argues first that the identification of the Spirit as shared by Father and Son

"Tt is, | suggest, instructive to note a hiccup in Augustine's treatment of the Father as principium in the Trinity. In his discussion of the Spirit in the Defide et symb. of 393 Augustine remarks that we say the Spirit is from the Father so that we are not seen to introduce more than one principium in the Godhead. Principium here seems fairly clearly to mean an active causal source. At the same time, from early on Augustine insists that the Trinity must be one principium in relationship to creation. But in book5 of Trin. we find a fairly convoluted discussion of the use of the term in the intra-trinitarian relations. The Father is principium of the Son as his begetter, and of the Spirit as his giver—proceed here being interestingly interpreted as meaning giver. Because the Son gives the Spirit as his own essence, and because he has "life in himself, the Son must also be described as the Spirit's principium. But in the same way as Father and Son are one God we must say they are the one principium of the Spirit. The most interesting aspect of this passage is that it is not repeated: by book 15, around ten to fifteen years later, Augustine resorts to the language we saw above: speaking of the Father as principium, and of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father principaliter, and emphasizing that the Father gives it to the Son that the Spirit proceeds from him also. This choice seems intentional. See also Contra Max. 2.5: "dicis vos spiritum sanctum competenter honorare ut doctorem, ut ducatorem, ut illuminatorem, ut sanctificatorem; Christum colere, ut creatorem; patrem cum sincera devotione adorare, ut auctorem. Si auctorem propterea dicis patrem, quia de ipso est filius, non est autem ipse de filio; et quia de illo et filio sic procedit spiritus sanctus, ut ipse hoc dederit filio gignendo eum talem, ut etiam de ipso procedat spiritus sanctus..."

46Joseph Ratzinger, "The Holy Spirit as Communio: Concerning the Relationship of Pneumatology and Spirituality in Augustine," Communio 25 (1998): 324-37. rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and as irreducible person affirms the fully personal nature of the Trinity as communion:

The mediation of Father and Son comes to full unity not when it is seen in a universal ontic consubstantialis but as communio...The dyad returns into unity in the trinity without breaking up the dialogue. Dialogue is actually confirmed in this way.

A mediation back into unity which was not another person would break up the dialogue. The Spirit is Person as unity, unity as Person.*"

Ratzinger then argues that this clarity affects a shift in the "metaphysics of Spirit." Describing God as Spirit (Jn 4.24) is no longer to describe an opposition between spirit and matter, but between the Spirit within the trinitarian community and the world. Describing God thus both personalizes the nature of Spirit and results in the consequence that to know the nature of Spirit one must know the Holy Spirit:

Only one who knows what "Holy Spirit" is, can know what Spirit means. And only one who begins to know what God is, can know what spirit means. Furthermore, only one who begins to have an idea of what Holy Spirit is, can begin to know who God is.*8

Professor Ratzinger was,I think, partly right. Augustine not only offers one of the most sustained attempts in this period to conceive of the Trinity as irreducible unity without resorting to notions of an underlying

"stuff? but also one of the most sustained pro-Nicaean attempts to understand the communion of the three persons as the result of the Father's eternal act. Augustine's trinitarian vision suggests ways of understanding the Father's role as principium that penetrates to the heart of what it means to speak of God as love; from eternity the Father gives fully of himself to establish a communion in the Spirit of love.*? I think we can also

Here we see a good example of the tension with which I began. In the interests of ecuAugustine's Pneumatology and the Metaphysics of Spirit say that in Augustine's mature texts the hard work of divine metaphysics is done through trinitarian categories. It is not that we no longer find en passant discussion ofwhat it means for God to be immaterial, non-spatial, and so forth, but that the discussions that seem to have the most profound ramifications for how we understand the divine being focus on how we understand the divine life to be shared by the divine persons.

And yet a corrective must, I suggest, be offered.°° Professor Ratzinger is willing at least to allude to personalist language to describe Augustine's trinitarianism, and it might seem that much of my own argument is consonant with his fundamental picture. However, even as it is certainly true that Augustine offers an account of the inter-personal constitution of the trinitarian communion very different from what modern summary accounts would lead one to expect, it is also the case that Augustine sees good application of personal and agential language to Father, Son, and Spirit as inseparable from a growing attention to the ways in which the divine "persons" transcend human personhood. Because the Father has established a communion of true unity in which the Trinity is one substance, will, and power, and because of the character of the communion established from eternity by the Father, in which all that is essential to the persons is shared, we are unable to understand the character of a divine person in the abstract. Augustine's "personalism" is always analogical or anagogical; and for him this approach is demanded of us by the most basic dynamics of pro-Nicaean theology. Indeed, the very character of divine love itselfisunknown to us; the more we allow our trinitarian faith to guide our interpretation of that which we think we experience, the more the eternal presence that is divine love is seen to transcend all that menical rapprochement Catholic theologians have, rightly, come to emphasize that the Latin procedere encompasses two Greek terms that Orthodox theologians wish to keep separate: Exnopevo, used for the Spirit's coming from the Father and mpoinutt, used to describe the Spirit's mission and eternal manifestation from the Son. And yet too much focus on such terminology draws our attention away from considering what we mean when we assert the Father's principium in the Trinity. Augustine may well find himself dealing with an ambiguous term in procedere, but his use of it enables one of the most suggestive theologies of the Father's principium.

would not also want to speak quite so easily of "an" ancient metaphysic, but that is a separate question.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE we thought we knew.°! The character of the communion that is the Trinity is the object of our contemplation and yet—for now—constantly beyond us.

This is not to deny that the divine life is, for Augustine, fundamentally intelligible. That it is so quite probably has its origins in his early antiManichean and anti-skeptical reception or appropriation of Platonic themes. For Augustine the intelligibility of the divine life guarantees that the created order is itself intelligible and that there may be progress in knowledge of God. This last point is of great importance here; God's intelligibility does not guarantee that God may be comprehended in this life, but that the possibility of growth toward vision, growth toward the point at which faith is replaced with sight, is possible. Appropriate exploration of the trinitarian communion is, for Augustine, always experienced as an awareness of the failings of the progress we have made, but that awareness is its most productive when it is also an awareness of our need for grace if we are to traverse the route of Christ's person and come to understand his human nature as a revealing of the Word through whom and in whom all things were created. Our not knowing thus receives a peculiarly Christian cast, and we are returned to the connections between Augustine's mature pneumatolgoy and his account of Christian life as one given shape through the Spirit's gift.

bounds of discussion about whether Augustine can fairly be described as "apophatic" have been set by Vladimir Lossky's "Les éléments de 'Théologie négative' dans la pensée de saint Augustin," in Augustinus Magister, vol. 1 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes,

1954), 575-81 (English trans., "Elements of'Negative Theology' in the Thought ofSt. Augustine," SVTQ 21 [1977]: 67-75). Lossky argues that ultimately Augustine is not fully an "apophatic" theologian because he does not yet understand God to be beyond being. This is fine as far as it goes and certainly gives a technical sense to the term desperately lacking from much modern usage. Lossky does not, however, ask whether the variety of rhetorical techniques used by pro-Nicaeans in the late fourth and early fifth centuries (none of whom

I suspect, pace David Bradshaw, are at all consistent in their reading of Republic 509B) to undermine the certainties of predication that scripture sometimes seems to allow prefigure much of what comes, with Ps.-Dionysius, to define the apophatic.

Calling upon God as Father:

Augustine and the Legacy ofNicaea —e— JOHN BEHR he past century was not a good one for Blessed Augustine: during its course, he was subject to increasingly severe criticism for his trinitarian theology. This misfortune occurred as the socalled "de Régnon paradigm"—that the Greeks began with the three and moved to the unity, while the Latins began with the one before treating the three—migrated from a temporal to a spatial horizon. What was, for Théodore de Régnon himself, a diachronic development—from the patristic period, culminating in the Cappadocians, to the scholastic period, beginning with Augustine—became, at least in English-speaking scholarship, a geographic distinction pitting the Greek East against the Latin

West,! and in so doing assumed features characteristic of broader concerns in the twentieth century, especially the primacy of the "person": the personalism of the Greeks emphasized the priority of the person over nature, while Latin essentialism subjugates the person to nature. That Augustine admitted bewilderment, whether real or rhetorical, at the Greek distinction between ousia and hypostasis, seems only to confirm this picture, even if it has been drawn as a result of other considerations.*

Arriving in the West in the early part of the century, it is perhaps not surprising that Russian Orthodox émigré theologians, wanting to empha- 'Cf. Michel R. Barnes, "De Régnon Reconsidered," Augustinian Studies 26.2 (1995): 51-79.

That this bewilderment might be rhetorical, as Augustine reflects on the applicability of analogies for the Trinity, is suggested by R. Cross, "Quid tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De TrinitateV and VII,' Harvard Theological Review

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE size the distinctiveness of their own theological tradition and its superiority to that stemming from Augustine, had recourse to this framework.

Vladimir Lossky, explicitly basing himself on de Régnon, argued that the filioque formula was but the necessary outcome of the Latin approach to the Trinity, although his main foil was not Augustine himself but the Aquinas of neo-scholasticism.* More recently, Metropolitan John

(Zizioulas) has claimed that this approach makes ovoia rather than bxdotaotc the ultimate reality and causal principle in the being of God, so betraying the insight of the Cappadocians that it is the person, specifically the Father in a trinitarian communion with the Son and the Spirit, who is the ground of all being.* Nor are such claims limited to Orthodox theologians. Following the lament of Karl Rahner that most Christians are "mere monotheists" and his call to pay closer attention to the economic dimensions of trinitarian theology, and therefore also to its scriptural groundings, the last decades of the past century saw a renaissance of interest in the Trinity.° Such works have invariably taken their lead from Rahner to return to a "Greek" approach, which, it is believed, does more justice to the scriptural account of salvation history and opens up a horizon in which the value of the person can become fully apparent, in a social model of trinitarian communion.° With this agenda driving inquiry, Augustine has inevitably faired poorly. In one popular account, the reader is informed already in the opening pages, before any serious work is done, that "Augustine inaugurated an entirely new approach. His starting point was not the creedal and biblical sense of the monarchy of the Father, but the divine essence shared

Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius (London: James Clarke, 1957), 58. For Lossky's use of de Régnon, see

Barnes, "De Régnon Reconsidered," 57-58, although his claims about the extent of Lossky's dependence on de Régnon have since been challenged by Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 181 n.101.

"John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985), 88.

Rahner, The Trinity, trans. J. Donceel (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Burns and Oates, °For the problems inherent in this social model, see Karen Kilby, "Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with the Social Doctrine of the Trinity," New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 432-45.

Calling upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea equally by the three persons."" The familiar lineaments are starkly drawn, only the details need to be shown. Arguing against a similar popular supposed opposition, this time between Greek and Semitic patterns of thought, James Barr cautioned that the very simplicity of such caricatures, which are readily understandable before one acquires any serious knowledge of either Greek or Semitic literature (or in our case, the writings of the Cappadocians and Augustine), should give us pause before assuming that these are either self-evidently true or have any basis in historical reality. He further notes that the effect of this caricature is that students are less likely to study the Greeks for themselves with any seriousness, instead simply finding in them the straw-man that they have been led to expect.®

In our case, however, it is the Greeks who are being studied (though one would often do well to question the results), while Augustine's trinitarian theology has yet to be seriously explored by any twentieth-century Eastern Orthodox writer.

Against this general tendency, nevertheless, there have appeared more recently new voices arguing that the situation is, if truth be told, not so bleak. Michel Barnes and Lewis Ayres, in particular (though there are others), have argued that Augustine, in fact, shares many features of trinitarian theology with the Cappadocians, so that there is a generally recognizable "pro-Nicaean" trinitarian theology common to both Greek and Latin traditions, despite the variations not only between them but also within them.° Augustine's contribution, therefore, is not a radically new

7Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco:

HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 10.

8James Barr, Old and New in Interpretation (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 34-38.

addition to Barnes, "De Régnon Reconsidered," see also his "Rereading Augustine's Theology of the Trinity,' in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed.

S.T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O'Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 145-76.

From Lewis Ayres, see "The Fundamental Grammar of Augustine's Trinitarian Theology," in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honor of Gerald Bonner, ed. R. Dodaro and G. Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 51-76; "'Remember That You Are Catholic' (Serm. 52.2):

Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God," Journal of Early Christian Studies 8.1 (2000):

39-82; and Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For other voices questioning the supposed opposition between eastern and western trinitarian theology, see Rowan Williams, "Sapientia

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE turn, but a deepened, more clearly articulated expression of a common body of inherited belief.

Two constant elements of this reassessment are Augustine's deployment of the doctrine of inseparable operations and a more complete understanding of the simplicity of God. Ayres has pointed to the importance of a usually ignored early text, Augustine's letter to Nebridius (from AD 389, three years after Augustine's conversion), which attempts to answer the question why it was that the Son alone, and not the Father or the Spirit, is said to have become incarnate. Augustine's answer is to point to how the Catholic tradition teaches the inseparability of the three persons:

For the union of persons in the Trinity is, in the catholic faith, set forth and believed, and by a few holy and blessed ones understood, to be so inseparable that whatever is done by the Trinity must be regarded as being done by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit together; and that nothing is done by the Father which is not also done by the Son and the Holy Spirit together, and that nothing is done by the Holy

Spirit which is not done by the Father and by the Son, and nothing is done by the Son which is not also done by the Father and the Holy

Augustine does not argue for the inseparability of the activity of the three persons, but simply assumes it as part of the inherited tradition. One can indeed find many earlier writers, eastern and western, from Ambrose to Gregory of Nyssa, who state this principle explicitly.!! Regarding the question that then arises—why do we speak, as we indeed do "in our mysteries and sacred rites," of the Son becoming incarnate, and not the Father or the and the Trinity: Reflections on De trinitate, in Collectanea Augustiniana: Mélanges T.J. van Bavel, ed. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J. van Houlin (Leuven: Leuven University

Press, 1990), 317-22; David B. Hart, "The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis, in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, ed. S. Coakley (Oxford: Blackwell,

Cf. Ayres, "Remember That You Are Catholic," 46-49.

Calling upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea Spirit—Augustine admits that it is a subject so vast "that it is impossible either to give a sufficiently clear statement or to support it by satisfactory proofs."!? Ayres suggests that Augustine's answer involves reformulating the question so that it becomes not "why the Son became incarnate," but "why we must speak as ifthe Son alone works in the incarnation, shifting the focus from "a consideration of God to a consideration of how God may inculcate knowledge of God in us."!? Using the analogy of the three aspects of any given thing—that it is, that it is this or that, and that as far as possible it remains as it is—Augustine argues not that each person can be aligned to any of these aspects but that "there is nothing in which all have not a part."'* What appears initially as the work of the Son alone is, upon further reflection, the revelation of the Father in the Son through the Spirit who guides us into this truth. In this way, as Ayres puts it, the incarnation is "the basic plot of a divine action or drama in which the Father, as the one principle, sends the Son to provide knowledge or understanding and the Spirit to provide a lasting delight in that understanding."!> This is a dispensation aimed at educating our fallen minds, moving them to the perception of the inseparable action of the Trinity as understood by the holy and blessed ones.

This doctrine of the inseparability of operations, a fixed part ofAugustine's early theological apparatus, is itself inseparably bound up with the doctrine of divine simplicity. In his treatise De fide et symbolo (On the Faith and Creed), written four years after his letter to Nebridius, Augustine asserts we must believe that:

The Trinity is one God, not that the Father is the same as the Son and the Spirit, but that the Father is Father, the Son is Son, and the Holy

Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and this Trinity is one God, as it is written:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord" (Deut 6.4).'° Ep. 11.2.

!3Ayres, "Remember That You Are Catholic," 50, 51.

'SAyres, "Remember That You Are Catholic," 53-54. l6De fide et symb. 9.16.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE While calling upon the Trinity as the one God, we are also to affirm that each is God. As he puts it a little later:

We should call the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit God; not three gods, but that the Trinity is one God, neither diverse in nature but of the same substance; neither that the Father is sometimes the Son, and sometimes the Holy Spirit, but that the Father is always Father, the Son is always Son, and the Holy Spirit always the Holy Spirit.!7

Each is truly God; this is to be maintained against all attempts at subordinationism. Yet the three are the one God, the bedrock of scriptural monotheism, while remaining what they are, so avoiding any suggestion of modalism.

How this is to be understood is explained most fully in the account of divine simplicity presented in books 5 to 7 of De Trinitate (On the Trinity). The central point of this doctrine is that in God all qualities are identical with his essence—it is not one thing for him to be and another thing for him to be wise: "in God to be is the same as to be wise."!* But, lest we end up concluding that the Son, as begotten, is necessarily other in essence than the unbegotten Father, Augustine points out that not everything said of God is directly predicated of his substance, for besides talking about God according to substance, we may also talk about him according to relation: when we speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we are speaking in terms ofhow they relate to each other, a mode of speech other than asserting that God is good, great, wise, and so on.

Even with this distinction, there remains the question, however, of whether each person is called "God" singly, or whether the term should only be used when speaking of the three together. In answering this conundrum, Augustine points out that "every being which is spoken of relatively, is something apart from that relation": in his example, a master is still a man even when deprived of his possessions.'® It is, therefore, not "Tbid., 9.20.

Calling upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea The real distinction of the persons is not subjugated to the divine essence: as Augustine says elsewhere, "the Trinity is of one substance and the essence is nothing else than the Trinity itself??5 Neither the three nor the one are primary, person against nature or nature over person, but the simultaneity of both, the one in three and three in one, the triune communion of the trinitarian God. This, it is claimed, is a theological grammar common to pro-Nicaeans east and west.*°

While the two alternatives of the so-called "de Régnon paradigm" may have been reconciled, there nevertheless remain some fundamental questions—questions not so much of the grand order of metaphysical or ontological claims regarding the ultimate ground of reality, nor even the grammar by which we speak of such things, but, much more prosaically, concerning the employment of the term "God." St Gregory the Theologian knew that he was on unchartered, and even unscriptural, territory in using the term "God" of the Holy Spirit, even if it can be argued that scripture does so in other words.'" Augustine, on the other hand, does not seem to be aware that he is using the term "God" of the Trinity in a radically new manner, one that is not only different but also problematic. The concern of the Cappadocians, following Athanasius, Origen, and Irenaeus, was not the implications of how one affirms that each divine person is God and the one God, singularly and collectively, but the reverse: to affirm that the one God is Father. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote to Peter,

"The identifying sign of the particularity with respect to hypostasis" of the Spirit "is to be made known after the Son and with him, and to subsist from the Father"; the particularity of the distinguishing marks of the Son is that he "alone shines forth in an only-begotten mode," while "the God over all alone has as the special property of his hypostasis that he is the Father and subsists from no cause."?* Two centuries earlier Origen also had argued that the very name of God is "Father"—a fatherhood defined

25 Ep. 120.3.17: ut ipsa essential non aliud sit quam ipsa trinitas.

2°Ayres, "Fundamental Grammar,' 59.

?7Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 31.1.

of Nyssa, Ep. Pet. 4. Cf. J. Behr, The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE not by the more general relationship of this God to creation, but by virtue of his relationship to the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, the one who reveals the name of God as Father."° The relationship to the Son is constitutive of the one God being the Father. This continual emphasis on the one God as Father goes back to the Pauline assertion that formed the architecture of later creeds: for Christians, he says, "there is one God and Father ... and one Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 8.6). The one God confessed by Christians in the first article of the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople is unambiguously the Father.

It is necessary to be clear and precise about what is being asserted here: it is not the claim that the Father is God only by virtue of the presence of the Son. This would be the reductio ad absurdam to which Augustine reduces his opponents' exegesis of 1 Cor 1.24.°° But Augustine himself overlooks the fact that in this verse Christ is said to be the power and wisdom not of the Father but of God, just as Christ is the Son of God, not simply of the Father. It is this fatherhood of God to his Son, Jesus Christ, that is being pondered by the earlier writers and enshrined in the creeds.

God is who he is by virtue of his relation to his Son. Another way of putting this would be to say that the monarchy that is so frequently spoken about with regard to Cappadocian trinitarian theology is not simply the monarchy of the Father, but the monarchy of the one God as Father, the Father of an eternally present Son, consubstantial with him, and the Spirit who proceeds from him, without whom he cannot even be thought let alone addressed.

These two ways of approaching the Trinity have resulted in very different theological idioms. We have become so accustomed to speaking of "the triune God" or "the trinitarian God"—the one God who is three— that we find it difficult not to think of the Trinity whenever we read the word "God," despite the fact that such terms are simply not found within the Greek writers of this period (and it is difficult to think how to construe "triune" in Greek). Later Byzantine writers do come to speak of "the Origen, ComJn 19.28; Cf. J. Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001),

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE The consequences of this development also need to be seriously explored—for instance, in the way in which Augustine subtly revises, in accordance with his understanding of God as Trinity, the principles of scriptural interpretation in the opening books of De Trinitate dealing with the Old Testament theophanies, and elsewhere. For instance, in his treatment of Christ's words in John 17.3, "that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent," Augustine comments that we "are to understand that [Christ] too is the one true God because the Father and the Son are one true God. The meaning, then, is 'that they may know the one true God, that is, you and the one you sent, Jesus

Christ," This is, to say the least, rather strained.

Perhaps the most serious consequence arises with regard to the question of whom it is that Christians call upon as Father. Augustine suggests an answer to this when he considers whether the names Father, Son, and Spirit can be used of the Trinity together. The term Spirit is used of God more generally (cf. Jn 4.24), and so the Trinity as a whole can be called

"spirit." On the other hand, the Trinity can in no way at all be called "son."

But regarding the term Father, Augustine states:

The Trinity cannot in the same way be called Father, except perhaps metaphorically, in respect to the creature, on account of the adoption of sons. For that which is written, "Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord" [Deut 6.4] is not understood as excluding the Son or excluding the Holy Spirit, and this one Lord we rightly call our Father as well because he regenerates us by his grace.*?

Although it is qualified as metaphorical, the fatherhood of the Trinity is not simply that of the Creator to the created, but of the Trinity with respect to those adopted as sons, regenerated by his grace. Augustine cerEn. in Ps, 85.21 (cited in Studer, Grace of Christ, 139).

Trin. 5.11.12: "non sic dici potest trinitas pater nisi forte translate ad creaturam propter adoptionem filiorum. Quod enim scriptum est: Audi, Israhel: dominus deus tuus dominus unus est, non utique excepto filio aut excepto spiritu sancto oportet intellegi, quem unum dominum deum nostrum recte dicimus etiam patrem nostrum per gratiam suam non regenerantem."

Calling upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea tainly knows that the addressee of liturgical prayer is the Father.*4 But if his account of divine simplicity drives us to call upon the Trinity as "Father" when saying the Lord's Prayer, rather than addressing the one

God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Holy One of Israel, as "Father," adoptively in the Son by the power of the Spirit, then there is something seriously amiss; Christians would indeed be "mere monotheists" despite the "triune" nature of the one God they call upon. There is something seriously difficult and troublesome about Augustine's trinitarian theology from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. But perhaps what is needed is not simply a return to the supposedly "Greek" pole of the socalled "de Régnon paradigm, nor to bring together its alternatives, as if these were the only possible options, but to reach back to the scriptural grammar, preserved in the creeds, which precedes such oppositions and defies being bound by them.

"Cf. Studer, Grace of Christ, 143-44.

Idipsum: The Name of God . according toAugustine a a JEAN-Luc MARION The Question of the Names of God o Christian theologian can escape the question of the names of God. Whether one addresses it explicitly (in the footsteps of several Cappadocian fathers and, above all, Dionysius) or implicitly (as did the defenders of orthodoxy against Arianism) is not of great importance. What matters is facing the difficulty itself: to name the unnamable, and to name it as such. But since, by definition, one cannot name the unnamable by using a name, it must be acknowledged, right from the outset, that in a sense all names are suited to name God, precisely since no name can adequately name him. The endless multiplying of divine names represents the first, indispensable step in establishing them.

Even though he is not considered a major theoretician of the divine names, there can no longer be any doubt that St Augustine was perfectly aware of the issue and did not avoid the question." "Deus vero multipliciter quidem dicitur, magnus, bonus, sapiens, beatus, verus et quidquid

'The editors would like to thank Dr Christophe Chalomet, who provided an English translation of Professor Marion's essay prior to the conference.

?This was demonstrated if only by Vladimir Lossky, "Les éléments de 'Théologie négative' dans la pensée de saint Augustin," Augustinus Magister, vol. 1 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1954); and Deirdre Carabine, "Negative Theology in the Thought of Saint

Augustine," Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale 59 (1992) (against, among others, Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence. II. The Way of Negation. Christian and Greek,

Theophaneia [Bonn: Hanstein, 1986]).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE aliud non indigne dici videtur" (There are multiple ways of speaking of God, [as] great, good, wise, blessed, true and anything else which does not appear to be said in an unworthy manner).? What is remarkable about this sentence is that, beyond the enumeration of names, it provides the very principle for that enumeration and for its indefinite character (indéfinition): since no name can express God as such, all names—each in its own way—are suitable, only as long as they name him in a worthy manner. But how is this worthy manner determined? What is its scope and, more importantly, what hierarchy is established between the names it generates?

These questions arise clearly in the great, solemn invocation of God and his names at the beginning of the Confessiones (Confessions):

Summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et justissime, secretissime et praesentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime, stabilis et incomprehensibilis, immutabilis, mutans omnia, numquam novus, numquam vetus, innovans omnia et "in vetustatem perducens superbos et nesciunt" [Job 9.5]; semper agens, semper quietus, colligens et non egens, portans et implens et protegens, creans et nutriens et perficiens, quaerens cum nihil desit tibi ..

. Et quid diximus, Deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta, aut quid dicit aliquis, cum te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt.

(Supreme, utmost in goodness, mightiest, all-powerful, most merciful, and most just, most secret and most present, most beautiful and strongest, ever enduring and incomprehensible, unchanging and changing everything, never new, never old, making all things new and "guiding the proud to old age, and they do not know about it" [Job

9.5]; always active, ever at rest, gathering without needing anything, supporting, filling, and protecting, creating, nourishing, and perfecting, seeking even though you lack nothing... And what have we thus said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness, or what says anybody who °Trin. 6.7.8 (BA 15.488). ri ] Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine says something about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you, for they remain silent even as they chatter.)*

This extraordinary text shows first, with utter precision, the definite characteristics of any speculative theology worthy of its name: (a) The divine names can be said according to both the positive way (kataphasis— predication) and the negative way (apophasis—negation); (b) but neither the apophatic nor the cataphatic way is valid in itself, for God transcends the negation as well as the predication; (c) a new kind of enunciation, a new language game must therefore be chosen, which no longer consists in affirming or negating something (the names) about something

(God)—since neither one nor the other is a "thing"—but which consists in saying to God the names with which we can aim at him (le viser), positively or negatively; this game only takes place in praise, with its invocation (in the vocative case) of God as... Without this final way, which neither merely names (nomme) nor negates (dénie) but which de-nominates (dé-nomme), we do not know, as St Augustine explicitly concludes, what we say when we say whatever we say "about you" (de te).° With regard to God, in order to speak of him it is not sufficient to affirm or to deny something about him. What matters is to speak to him, and thus to speak in the mode of praise. The Confessiones, thus, begin with praise:

""Magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde .. ? Et laudare te vult homo,... et tamen laudare vult te homo" ("You are great, Lord, and truly worthy to be praised .. 2" And man wishes to praise you, ... and nevertheless man wishes to praise you).° Similarly, the Confessiones end in the mode of praise: "Laudant te opera tua, ut amemus te, et amemus te, ut laudent te opera tua" (Your works praise you so that we love you, and we love you

4 Conf. 1.4.4 (BA 13.278ss).

my "In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of Negative Theology," in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1999); also In Excess: Essay in the Saturated Phenomena, trans. R. Horner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003).

1.1.1 (BA 13.272), quoting Ps 47.1, 95.4, 44.3. It is, in fact, a sort of third-degree praise: a praise that quotes a psalm, which praises God by declaring him worthy to be praised.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE so that your works praise you).' In that precise sense, the Confessiones represent, from beginning to end, a tremendous treatise of speculative theology.

It should also be noted that the list of names selected for this praise reveals two other decisions made by St Augustine. Right from the beginning, it is clear that God cannot be named by one single name. Why so?

Because praising God means praising him as...and this "as" implies a distance, so that there can be no pretension ofhaving reached a univocal conceptual definition; but also, more importantly, this praise is directed to God who, by definition, transcends all definitions and is indeed praised as incomprehensibilis. Second, we should note that, in such a lengthy praise, not only is God never understood as "being," in one way or another, but even the very term "being" is absent.® Yet the majority of commentators do not hesitate to state that St Augustine defined God through esse, in other words that he led to the "discovery of God-Being," of "God the absolute Being," or even to one of "the Christian ontologies of being."°

Could it be that St Augustine himself was not fully coherent, that he did 7Conf. 13.38.48 (BA 14.516).

8st Augustine always rejected the idea that God may be determined by substance:

"Manifestum est Deum abusive substantiam vocari, ut nomine usitatiore intelligatur essentia, quod vere et proprie dicitur; ita ut fortasse solum Deum dici oporteat essentiam," Trin.

7.5.10 (BA 15.538), quoting Ex 3.14. For"... nihil in eo [Deo] secundum accidens dicitur, quia nihil ei accidit; nec tamen omne quod dicitur, secundum substantiam dicitur. In rebus enim creatis atque mutabilibus, quod non secundum substantiam dicitur, restat ut ut secundum accidens dicatur. [...] In Deo autem nihil quidem secundum accidens dicitur, quia nihil in eo mutabile." Trin. 5.5.6 (BA 15.432). It is thus not possible, stricto sensu, to speak of a substantia in relation to God, but it is perhaps possible to speak of his essentia:

"substantia, vel, si melius dicitur, essentia Dei." Ibid., 3.10.21 (BA 15.318), see also ibid., 5. 2.3

respectively, Emily Zum Brunn, "Lexégése augustinienne de 'Ego sum qui sum et la 'métaphysique de lExode'," in Dieu et l'étre. Exégéses d'Exode 3.14 et de Coran 20.11-24

(Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1978), 142; Goulven Madec, Saint Augustin et la philosophie notes critiques. Collection des études augustiniennes, vol. 149 (Paris: Institut d'études augustiniennes, 1996), 39; and Etienne Gilson, L'étre et l'essence (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948, here

1962), 45. Despite the care with which the first two scholars distance themselves from the third on the topic of the "metaphysic of Exodus," the three of them remain in complete agreement in attributing to Augustine the naming of God as being. See also David Bradshaw's book Aristotle East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and his contribution to this volume. rig | Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine not successfully harmonize the primacy of being in God with the denomination of God through divine names? Or is it rather the expression of a constant difficulty among modern readers, who do not hesitate, even with regard to St Augustine, to locate the de-nomination of God within the horizon of being and even within the metaphysics of being qua being?

The Usual Answer It cannot be denied that St Augustine often links God and being. He does so on the basis of at least three arguments.

The first one comes from scripture: St Augustine is part of a tradition, since Justin, which favors the name that God gave to Moses: "Sum qui sum," according to Exodus 3.14.!° Among the many uses of this verse it is possible to emphasize one that gave to it a clear philosophical thrust:

"Cum ad sanctum Moysen ita verba Dei per angelum perferantur, ut quarenti quod sit nomen ejus ... respondeatur 'Ego sum qui sum'... tanquam in ejus comparatione, qui vere est quia incommutabilis est, ea quae mutabilia facta sunt non sint, vehementer hoc Plato tenuit et diligentissime commandavit" (When the words of God reach holy Moses through the angel, so that to his question concerning his name ... the answer was

"Tam who! am'"...,as if, when compared to him who truly is because he is immutable, the things which do change were not, this was vigorously defended and recommended with the greatest possible care by Plato).!' St Augustine underlines the fact that the expression of Exodus 3.14 becomes all the more a proper name since no attribute is added to complete the tautology: "Non ait et ibi: Ego sum Deus; aut: Ego sum mundi fabricator, aut: Ego sum omnium rerum creator, aut: Ego sum ipsius populi liberandi propagator; sed hoc tantum Ego sum qui sum" (He does not say here,

J am '0See M. Harl, "Exode 3.14 chez les Péres Grecs des quatre premiers siécles," in Dieu et "Civ, 8.11 (BA 34.270-72). See also another perfect echo of this argument: "Sed haec omnia terrena, volatica, transitoria, sicomparentur illi veritati, ubi dictum est 'Ego sum qui sum) totum hic quod transit, vanitas dicitur." En. in Ps. 143.11 (PL 37.1863) and De vera rel.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE God; or, Iam the maker of the world; or, I am the creator of all things; or, I am the leaderofthe liberation of the people. He only says, Iam who I am).'?

The tautology of being becomes, in its singularity and rarity, something akin to the proper name, or at least the name par excellence, of God:

"Quae vero proprie de Deo dicuntur, quaeque in nulla creatura inveniuntur, raro ponit Scriptura divina; sicut illud quod dictum est ad Moysen:

Ego sum qui sum et Qui est misit me ad vos. Cum enim esse aliquo modo dicatur et corpus et animus, nisi proprio quodam modo vellet intelligi, non id utique diceret" (For scripture does not often say things that are properly said of God and which cannot be found in any creature, like this, which is said to Moses: Iam who I am, and The one who is has sent me to you. Since, in fact, being also pertains in a sense to the body and the soul, scripture would not have spoken in that way if it had not intended it to be understood in the proper sense).!? However, since this name is primarily a biblical name, even if it acquires an ontological meaning in relation to Plato or Aristotle, that should not be a sufficient argument to impose on Augustine being itself as a divine name.

This is especially clear when we consider that St Augustine favors the naming of God through the proclamation of being and brings it to an extreme expression: "Bonum est, quidquid aliquo modo est: ab illo enim est, qui non aliquo modo est, sed est est" (Everything that is in one way or another is good: for it is from him who is not in a certain way, but who is is).!4 Here, undoubtedly, God is, if not being, at least the fact that he is,

"Tract. Ev. Jo. 38.8 (PL 35.1679). Fora list of the forty-seven passages in which St Augustine comments on Exodus 3.14, see A.-M. La Bonnardiére, reprinted in Brunn, 164.

'9Trin. 1.1.2 (BA 15.90). See also, with the same interpretative line, En. in Ps. 49.14 (PL 37.575) and 82.14 (PL 37.1055).

'4Conf. 13.31.46 (BA 16.514). I follow the edition by Knéll and Skutella, also used by the BA. Augustine, Confessions, trans. J. O'Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),

3.411, who assumes this reading refers to St Paul according to De Magistro 5.14 (BA 6.48):

"Ergo, ut ea potissimum auctoritate utamur, quae nobis carissima est, cum ait Paulus apostolus 'Non erat in Christo est et non, sed est in illo erat' (2 Cor 1.19), non opinor, putandum tres istas litteras, quae enuntiamus cum dicimus est, fuisse in Christo, sed illud potius quod istis tribus litteris significatur." Gilson based his interpretation on this text. See his

"Notes sur létre et le temps chez Saint Augustin," in Recherches Augustiniennes 2 (1962):

205-23. As early as 1932, Gilson took this non-biblical expression to be a "Nom divin que nous a enseigné Dieu lui-méme." L'esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932) rig | Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine and he alone is this fact of being. This identification is sometimes reinforced through the addition of ipsum esse to esse: "Considera igitur, quantum potes, quam magnum bonum sit ipsum esse, quod et beati et miseri volunt" (Consider therefore, as much as you are able, to what extent being itself is a great good, since both those who are happy and those who are unhappy want it).!° In other words: "Sic sum quod sum, sic sum ipsum esse, Sic sum cum ipso esse ut nolim hominibus deesse" (In this wayIam who | am, in this wayI am being itself, in this way I am with being itself, so that I do not want human beings to be without it).'° Clearly the ipsum esse seems here to be above all the object of desire of those who are not themselves being. It seems to be the figurative expression of Sum qui sum when it becomes the object of desire among those who are not God. But what manifests itself as desired precisely belongs to being, to being itself.

More than that: there is, beyond this first emphasis from est to ipsum esse, a further emphasis from ipsum esse to idipsum esse: "Deum ergo diligere debemus, ... quod nihil aliud dicam esse, nisi idipsum esse" (therefore we must love God, ... of whomI will say nothing else than that he is being itself).!7

Or: "Cum ab ea [i.e. immutabilis res, veritas] est aversus [i.e. animus], idipsum esse minus habet" (And when the spirit turns away from it

[i.e. the immutable reality, truth] it possesses less being itself).!* What characterizes the One whose name consists only in the name of Exodus

3.14 is being or, better, being itself. Thus it seems not only legitimate but even necessary to interpret this ipsum esse (especially when it is empha- (the quote comes from 1943/1969, 53, n. 2). This rather surprising double est could be compared to another: "Est enim est, sicut bonorum bonum, bonum est" En. in Ps. 134.4

1SDe lib. arb. 3.7.20 (BA 6.362). St Augustine writes about "id quod summe est" shortly after this quote.

7.7 (PL 38.66). See also: "Deus ..., cui profectio ipsum esse, unde essentia nominata est, maxime ac verissime competit" (God ... to whom it is suitable in the greatest and truest way to assign being itself, from which essence receives its name). Trin. 5.2.3 (BA

15.428). Also: "Et non est ibi aliud beatum esse, et aliud magnum, aut sapientem, aut verum, aut bonum esse, aut omnino ipsum esse" (And in this case [i.e. God], being happy is nothing else than being great, or wise, or true, or good, or quite simply being itself). Trin. 6.7.8

'7De mor. ecc. 1.14.24 (BA 1.172).

18De immor. an. 7.12 (BA 5.190).

Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine same thing," the following is added: "You are indeed Being in its supreme degree." How can we explain this addition of Being to the simple Latin words summum es? The fact is, the translator understands idipsum so resolutely in the sense of ipsum esse that, even when constrained by philology to translate it literally as the same thing, or the same, that is, without any ontological import, the ontological claim remains intact and, to complete itself, is added in the following sentence, so that it may be maintained at all cost and survive. It is thus subtly reintroduced in the invocation of God, as an additional epithet Being for the otherwise selfsufficient Summe enim es... ("For you are supremely ...").

These slips in translations are, of course, not purely fortuitous, nor are they caused by inattention on the part of the translators, who are otherwise consistently excellent. On the contrary, they result from too much earnestness, not on the philological but on the conceptual level: the (neo-)Thomist de-nomination of the most proper name of God determines their understanding of the Augustinian de-nomination of God's name in such an indelible way that they do not refrain from correcting the latter through the former. And they do so with a perfectly clear conscience, as one of the best among them unambiguously admits: "It was our conscious decision to leave in the translation the Latin expression

Idipsum. This, as we obviously see, is the technical term similar to the Ego qui sum and the Who I am of Exodus, a term which, understood in a metaphysical sense, defines God as he defines himself: being in the fullest sense, immutable, eternal being. The best translation in French thus seems to be:

Being itself?*! It is quite clear: the translation of idipsum that conflates it with ipsum esse is not based on the text nor on St Augustine's theology but on an interpretation*? of the term "in a metaphysical sense." The whole

words are from Aimé Solignac as he was translating a fragment of En. in Ps.

1215 (on which I comment infra IV, n. 36) in his note on the Idipsum in Conf., BA 14.550

(my emphasis). See the reservations made by Madec (n. 29), who nevertheless imagines that there is "a passion for Being which Augustine seeks to share with the Christian community"

(Saint Augustin et la philosophie, 75). One can hope that St Augustine had other, more important passions to share: for instance, the passion for the Passion.

for instance M.-F. Berrouard (in an otherwise useful note on "Idipsum" in BA 71 [Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1993], 845): "Augustin qui avait médité sur ce mot [idipsum] dés

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE allows Augustine to de-nominate God strictly without imposing any determination—especially any ontological or metaphysical determination—on him. The use of idipsum is rooted in a tradition that is older and more biblical than the ipsum esse, and yet the ipsum esse, among modern commentators, overshadows it. Idipsum cannot be equated with ipsum esse, nor does it anticipate it; it resists and dismisses it in advance.

Let us turn to the central text, the commentary on Psalm 121, in order to further define the characteristics of the idipsum2° We find four steps in this text, and so we make four comments. The first step is: "Quid est idipsum? Quomodo dicam, nisi idipsum? Fratres,si potestis, intelligis idipsum.

Nam ego quidquid aliud dixero, non dico idipsum" (What is idipsum, the thing itself? How shall I say it, if not by saying idipsum? Brothers, if you are able, understand idipsum. For whatever else I will have said, I will not say the idipsum). The idipsum, thus, remains radically and definitively apophatic; it does not provide any essence, does not reach any definition, but only expresses its own inability to speak of God. Its own privilege comes, paradoxically, from this obvious lack of signification, which allows it to de-nominate without the pretension to define.

Hence a second step: "Conemur tamen quibusdam vicinitatibus verborum et significationum perducere infirmitatem mentis ad cogitandum idipsum. Quid est idipsum? Quod semper eodem modo est, quod non modo aliud, et modo aliud est. Quid est ergo idipsum, nisi quod est? Quid est quod est? Quod aeternum est. Nam quod semper aliter atque aliter est, non est, quia non manet; non omnino non est, sed non summe est" (Let us nevertheless strive, through various approximations of words and significations, to steer the weakness of our mind to the thought of the idipsum. What is the idipsum? It is always in the same way, it is not different here and different there. What then is idipsum, if not that which is? What is that which is? That which is eternal. For what is always different and again different is not, because it does not remain; not that it is absolutely not, but it is not supremely). On the basis of his definitive apophasis, the idipsum can nevertheless define itself, but througha strict negative defi- °°En. in Ps, 121.5 (PL 37.1621-22).

Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine nition: it is in a mode that is different from ours or from any creature: it is in the mode of immutability. The difference between the idipsum and everything that is not the thing itself does not directly have to do with being (or non-being), but in the ways of being—mutable or immutable.

As such, being does not characterize the idipsum, which, if it did, would be wholly reduced to an ipsum esse; being characterizes it only as a sign of immutability, as a name for immutability, nomen incommutabilitatis.*°

And it is only in a third step (that is, with a long delay) that we come to Exodus 3.14:

Et quid est quod est, nisi ille qui, quando mittebat Moysen, dixit illi:

Ego sum, qui sum? Quid est hoc, nisi ille, qui cum diceret famulus ejus Ecce mittis me; si dixerit mihi populus: Quis te misit?, quid dicam ei?, nomen suum noluit aliud dicere quam Ego sum qui sum; et adjecit et ait: Dices itaque filiis Israél: Qui est misit me ad vos. Ecce idipsum: Ego sum qui sum; qui est, misit me ad vos. Non potes capere: multum est intelligere; multum est apprehendere.

(And what is it that is, if not the one who, when he sent Moses, said to him: Iam who I am? What is this, if not the one who, when his servant said Behold, you send me;if the people ask me: who sent you? what shall

I tell them?1 did not want to say another name than I am who I am; 40"Jam ergo angelis et in angelo deus dicebat Moysi quaerenti nomen suum Ego sum qui sum. Dices fillis Israél: Qui est misit me ad vos. Esse nomen est incommutabilitatis.

Omnia quae mutantur desinunt esse quod erant et incipiunt esse quod non erant. Esse verum, esse sincerum, esse germanum non habet nisi qui non mutatur." Serm. 7.7 (PL

38.66). Jean Pépin develops his argument (that the esse means ultimately eternity vs. mutability) in the following way: "Da due brani emerge che, per Agostino, idipsum significa innanzitutto identita, immutabilita, permanenza; poiché sonoi caraterri dell'essere, il termine designera l'essere in possesso di questi carrateri, ma non essere primo intuitu; non tradurrei petanto 'essere', preferendo 'Videntico' o 'immutabile' Del resto, idipsum non indica, in senso stretto, lEssere, ma Dio in quanto Bene immutabile" (in Sant' Agostino. Confessioni. Testo criticamente riveduto e apparati scritturistici di Manlio Simonetti [Fondazione

Lorenzo Valla, 1997], 5.181). He quotes De vera rel. 21.41 (BA 8.80): "idipsum, id est naturam incommutabilem" and Trin. 3.3.8 (BA 15.282): "Idipsum quippe in hoc loco (Ps 121.3), illud summum et incommutabile bonum intelligitur, quod Deus est." rig |

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE and he added and said: Tell thus to the sons of Israel: The one who has sent me to you. Behold this idipsum: I am who I am; the one who is has sent me to you. You cannot grasp it: there is so much to understand, so much to comprehend.) Not only does Exodus 3.14 enter the picture only after the idipsum and following its apophasis, so that the idipsum in a sense includes and gives its meaning to Sum qui sum, without becoming identical with it or fading away in it.4! More importantly, translating Sum qui sum in the sense of an ipsum esse, which would make being the most proper name of God, proves no longer possible. Sum qui sum, therefore, does not contribute to the establishing of the "metaphysic of Exodus," by fading away in the ipsum esse. Rather, it characterizes the divine immutability in contrast to the finite mutability of everything else: "Et quis magis est, quam ille qui dixit famulo suo Moysi Ego sum qui sum et Dices filiis Israél: qui est, misit me ad vos?... Et ideo sola est incommutabilis substantia et essentia, qui Deus est" (And who is greater than the one who said to his servant Moses I am who I am and Tell the sons of Israel: who is it who sent me to you?... And thus the only immutable substance and essence is the one of God).'* God is therefore not being, but the immutable one, whose immutability is characterized by an equivocity without measure of being.

There follows a fourth step, an even more surprising one since it refers Exodus 3.14 not only to God the creator but directly to Christ, God in kenosis: "Quid enim debes tenere? Quod pro te factus est Christus, qui ipse est Christus; et ipse Christus recte intellegitur: Ego sum qui sum, quo modo est 'in forma Dei'. Ubi 'non rapinam arbitratus est esse Deo' (Phil

2.6), ibi est idipsum. Ut autem efficiaris tu particeps in idipsum, factus est '!Another text clearly indicates this reversal of roles: "Sublatis de medio omnibus quibus appellari posset et dici Deus, ipsum esse se vocari respondit; et tanquam hoc esset ei nomen Hoc dices eis, inquit, Qui est, misit me ad vos, Ita enim ille est, ut in ejus comparatione ea quae facta sunt, non sint. Ilo non comparato, sunt; quoniam ab illo sunt; illi autem comparata, non sunt, quia verum esse, incommutabile esse est, quod ille solus est." En. in Ps.

Trin. 5.2.3 (BA 15.428). See Exodus 3.14, which is the basis for the following sentence:

"Est enim vero solus, quia incommutabilis" (Trin. 7.5.10 [BA 15.538]).

Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine ipse prior particeps tui, et "Verbum caro factus est' (Jn 1.14), ut caro participet Verbum" (What must you hold [to be true]? That for you he became Christ, since he himself [the idipsum] is Christ; and Christ himself is rightly understood [as] I am who I am, in the mode in which he is

"in the form of God." Where "he did not consider being equal to God as something to be exploited," there he is the idipsum. Therefore, so that you too are made a participant in the idipsum, he first made himself a participant of you, "and the Word became flesh," so that the flesh may participate in the Word).* If the idipsum is able to become incarnate and to go through the kenosis, if it is able to give itself, participating in the human, it becomes clear that its function and characteristic are not related to being, at least in the sense in which metaphysics later understood the term, that is, all the way to the point of including it in an ontology. Only because he had first reestablished the sum qui sum (and therefore also the ipsum esse) in its original soteriological meaning could St Augustine unfold the idipsum even in the person of the humiliated servant, Christ the Savior.

The most proper name of God, idipsum, is thus blatantly apophatic, emphasizing his transcendence through the privilege of immutability; the ipsum esse is interpreted by the Sum qui sum (and not the other way around), beyond the scope of being, but with an eye to divinization through Christ. This radical biblical exegesis confers on it a radically theological status, to the point where the idipsum is equated with the Sanctus: "idipsum et idipsum et idipsum, sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Deus omnipotens.""4

Sum Qui Sum and God's Immutability The essential point, thus, has to do with the status and the function of immutability. For the Augustinian esse, embedded as it is in the idipsum, is redirected so as to be of service to immutability. When the esse appears

43En. in Ps, 121.5 (PL 37.1621f). This is the text on which our four steps are based.

"Conf. 7.7.7 (BA 14.352).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE in order to de-nominate God, it immediately designates him as the immutable: "Esse, nomen est incommutabilitatis."4° The difference between the immutable and the mutable becomes, if not an ontological difference, at least a difference in the ways of being, and one that shapes everything that is (tout l'étant) througha distinction that is equally original, and perhaps even more original (originaire): the distinction between the creature and the Creator. "Cum enim Deus summa essentia sit, hoc est summe sit et ideo immutabilis sit, rebus quas ex nihilo creavit, esse dedit, sed non summe esse, sicut ipse est" (For, since God is supreme essence, that is, since he is supremely and therefore also immutably, he gave being to the things which he created from nothing, but not supremely as he himself is).4° The hierarchy of beings (étants) is apparent and is expressed in the hierarchy of immutability, rather than in strict ontological terms.

When compared to the ego sum qui sum, for all the things that are not absolutely, i.e. that are not immutably, even though they are, in the end, it is as if these things are not: "tanquam in ejus comparatione, qui vere est quia incommutabilis est, ea quae mutabilia sunt non sint?*" A point is reached at which the idipsum can be designated directly through immutability, without any mediating determination coming from being.

"Et tu es idipsum valde, quia non mutaris" (you, you are radically the thing itself, because you do not change).** Or: "non sunt idipsum quod Deus, et inest quaedam mutabilitas omnibus" (they [i.e. the created things] are not the same as God, and a certain mutability is present in all of them).'? Or again: "non sunt idipsum, id est naturam incommutabilem" (the thing itself, that is the immutable nature).°° And finally: "In idipsum quid ait,

4Serm. 7.7, quoting Exodus 3.14, and continuing with: "Esse, nomen est incommutabilitatis. Omnia enim quae mutantur, desinunt esse quod erant et incipiunt esse quod non erant. Esse verum, esse sincerum, esse germanum non habet nisi qui non mutatur" (PL

vera rel. 22.41 (BA 8.80). See the commentary on ego sum qui sum exclusively in temporal terms, ibid., 49.97 (BA 8.166—-68). There remain, of course, some ambiguous texts, as for instance: "Sed aliae quae dicuntur essentiae sive substantiae, capiunt accidentia,

Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine nisi quod mutari non potest?">! God says of himself sum qui sum, for he reveals himself first as eternal, and not in any other way. In other words, aeternum qualifies esse, not the other way around.*? St Augustine thus accomplishes something very obvious: according to his reading, Exodus

3.14 does not lead to the ipsum esse of a "metaphysic of Exodus," because ego sum qui sum is understood through the idipsum of Psalm 121.3, i.e., through the identity of the thing itself. The idipsum, as seen in the apophasisbrought forth by the difference between mutable and immutable, blurs the difference between beings (étants) and perhaps even delegitimizes any interpretation of the distance between creature and Creator within the horizon of being.

There remains a difficulty, however, for at least one text by Augustine clearly seems to interpret the distance between God's eternity and the mutability of creatures in terms of being.

Aeternitas ipsa Dei substantia est; quae nihil habet mutabile; ibi nihil est praeteritum quasi jam non sit; nihil est futurum, quasi nondum sit.

Non est ibi nisi Est; non est ibi Fuit et Erit; quia et quod fuit, jam non est; et quod erit, nondum est; sed quidquid ibi est, nonnisi est. Merito sic misit Deus famulum suum Moysen. Quaesivit enim nomen mittentis se... Ego sum Quis? Qui sum. Hoc est nomen tuum? Hoc est totum quod vocatis? Esset tibi nomen ipsum esse, nisi quidquid aliud, quibus eis fiat vel magna, vel quantacumque mutatio. Deo autem aliquid ejusmodi accidere non potest; et ideo sola est incommutabilis substantia vel essentia, qui Deus est, cui profectio ipsum esse, un de essentia nominata est, maxime ac verissime competit" (But the others, which are called essences or substances, have accidents through which comes a change, great or small. But to God nothing of this kind can happen; there is thus only one substance or essence which is immutable, and it is God, God to whom belongs being itself (from which the name essence comes from) in the supreme and truest way). Trin. 5.2.3 (BA

15.428). Or: "Nam sicut omnino tu es, tu sis solus, qui es incommutabiliter et scis incommutabliliter et vis incommutabiliter." Conf. 13.14.18 (BA 14.458). On these texts and their relatively ambiguous character, see Brunn, 144—46.

is a broad consensus on this point. Werner Beierwaltes, "Deus est esse—esse est Deus," in Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 1972), 5-82; Brunn,

150f; Madec, 72f. ri | Idipsum: The Name of God according to Augustine "aeternitas ipsa Dei substantia" in order to oppose the two doctrines:

"Their conclusions, just like their starting-points, are not the same. To be sure, they are both turned toward the same God, and it is the same God which is named using the same name, but whereas St Thomas always sought to prove the existence of a supreme Esse or subsisting act of existence, St Augustine above all attempted to emphasize the necessity to explain the distorted esse which confronts us in experience through a supreme Vere esse.">4 Let us note: it is not certain that their starting points for the divine names were the same. Moreover, it is not certain that Augustine had any vere esse in mind.°*° But, in any case, Gilson's thesis clearly shows what he sees as the ontological inadequacy of St Augustine, since, even when St Augustine does not—as in the last quote—redirect the ipsum esse toward the idipsum, he does not reach the "supreme Esse." This antagonism is explicitly confirmed in what remains Gilson's most important work, The Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (original title: Le thomisme). There the very same principle, an "aeternitas, ipsa Dei substantia," quoted from the same passage in St Augustine's work, is used as the clearest proof of "the ultimate limitations of his ontology,' compared to the principle "Deum est suum esse" of St Thomas, who "underscored in such a clear way the decisive step which his ontology represented."

Indeed, by maintaining the "varying degrees" present in the "ontology of essences,' St Augustine showed himself unable "to bridge the gap separating the being of essence and the being of existence," that is, to entrust the preservation of God's immutable transcendence to the ipsum esse itself conceived as actus essendi (which is what Gilson meant by "existence").

Nowhere does he question the legitimacy of speaking about ontology in relation to St Augustine (or even, indeed, in relation to St Thomas as well),

"Gilson, Introduction a létude de saint Augustin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1st ed. 1929; 3d ed. 1949), 26-27. Brunn agrees with Gilson's conclusion: "La découverte du Dieu-Etre ne constitue encore qu'une connaissance imparfaite et éloignée," 144.

not that something which is produced by commenting on the text but which is not present in the text? Just like the "absolute Being" that is supposed to be in Conf. 7.10.16

(according to Madec, 39), where in fact we see an intrinsic relation between eternity and charity (not between eternity and being): "o aeterna veritas et vera caritas et cara aeternitas!" (BA 13.616).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE when in fact St Augustine does not know that word, which appeared more than ten centuries later. And indeed, St Augustine would not have used it, since even the ego sum qui sum is not related to a question about being.

The reason for it is not that "the philosophy of Augustine lagged behind his theology,'*° but rather because his philosophy is not separated from his theology. He does not differentiate between these two terms, since he ignores both. The ontological insufficiencies that Gilson and many others with him see in St Augustine in fact reveal the fundamental inadequacy of their ontological questioning of a thought that unfolds within a completely different horizon than the horizon of metaphysics. What is at stake for St Augustine is something very different than the Seinsfrage. Even when he discusses the ipsum esse, St Augustine is never concerned with being. It could be that he was, alongside many others, an exception to the rule that Gilson established perhaps with too little caution: "There is only one God, and this God is being; that is the cornerstone of any Christian philosophy.'®" St Augustine, a Christian par excellence and a Christian who thinks, does not think about "being" as God, so that he is able to think about God outside the realm of philosophy.

Suggestions for a Conclusion From this short inquiry, some conclusions may be drawn, more as suggestions for further questioning than as firm statements.

St Augustine does not anticipate any ontological naming of God and, in particular, especially not on the ipsum esse, as seen within the "meta- °°Le Thomisme. Introduction a l'étude de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, 1945), respectively 195, 196, 75, 127, 196.

Lesprit de la philosophie médiévale, 51. And if one wishes to attenuate such pronouncements by saying: "Lidentification de Dieu et de I'Etre est certainement un bien commun de la philosophie chrétienne, comme chrétienne. Mais l'accord des penseurs chrétiens sur ce point n'empéche pas que, comme philosophes, ils ne se soient divisés sur l'inteprétation de la notion d'étre" (123), then one would rather have to say that Christian thinkers differ on the question of being only when they address it first of all as Christians, coming froma different starting point.

The Hidden and the Manifest:

Metaphysics after Nicaea —— > a Davip BENTLEY HART I his essay, I must confess, is intended only as a tentative approach to what I take to be an inherently elusive critical object; and hence the investigations it comprises are necessarily somewhat hesitant and incomplete, and may ultimately prove no more than suggestive of inquiries that might be taken up in the future. My principal interest lies in what I want to call "Nicaean ontology"; but I am aware not only of the invincible vagueness of such a concept but of the impatience I am likely to provoke from scholars who would argue that no general ontology can be extracted from Nicaean dogma, or from the theology of the Nicaean party, and that theologians such as the Cappadocian fathers,

Hilary of Poitiers, and Augustine never aspired to be what we call "thinkers of Being." Even so, however, it seems undeniable to me that the early development of the Christian understanding of God implicitly involved a metaphysical revision of certain prevailing understandings of being; and that, as the trinitarian debates of the fourth century unfolded, and as dogmatic definitions took shape, and as those debates and definitions were clarified in the next century, inevitably certain elements of a Christian "narrative of being'—or narrative of the relation between the being of the world and the being of God!—also became clear for the first

'In phrasing the matter thus, I hope I indicate how my concerns differ from those of ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE time and received either explicit or implicit expression in the thought of the first generations of Nicaean theologians. This I find fascinating for a number of reasons, but most particularly because, as one considers how this new, Christian vision of reality announced itself in the thought of the greatest early champions of Nicaean theology, one begins to see that many of them were responding to the same conceptual revolution—not always consciously, and yet almost inevitably in the same way. And this, in a broad sense, is the guiding theme of my argument.

Before proceeding, however, I should pause to note that the immediate context of this essay is a conference on the Eastern Orthodox understanding of Augustine's theology, conducted by eastern and western

Christian scholars together, and convoked in the hope that their shared efforts might help to dispel certain of the misunderstandings haunting relations between the "Greek" and "Latin" traditions. This is a project admirable in its ambition, obviously, but also one that innumerable obstacles conspire to thwart. In any modern engagement between Christian East and Christian West, we begin from the long history of an often militant refusal—on both sides—of intellectual reconciliation; more to the point, we begin from very different theological grammars, and with terminologies that can achieve only proximate correspondences, and from within conceptual worlds whose atmospheres are not perfectly congenial to one another's flora, and froma settled tradition of mutual (and frequently willful) incomprehension. All too often, moreover, this incomprehension takes the depressing form of a simple and deplorable failure of imagination: an inability to appreciate that, in order to understand another intellectual tradition, rooted in a different primary language, it is

Jean-Luc Marion (intra), and why my argument is in no way incompatible with his. The question that concerns me is not how the fathers came to "denominate" God "within the horizon of being" or "within the metaphysics of being qua being." Rather, my interest is in the question of how "being" had to be reconceived by Christian thinkers within the horizon of the relation between the transcendent God and creation; and my conviction is that the development of Christian thought led inevitably to the dissolution of the idea of "being" as a metaphysical "object" within the economy ofbeings and rendered the very idea of "being" analogical between God and creatures, and for that very reason impotent to comprise the difference dividing them.

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea not enough to translate its terms into one's own dialect and then proceed to interpret them according to the rules of one's own tradition. And the consequence of this is that, as often as not, "ecumenism" between East and West consists in little more thana relentless syncope of category errors: the drearily predictable alarm and indignation with which traditional

Thomists find that Gregory Palamas, transposed into Thomas' Latin, is not a Thomist; the deep and slightly macabre delight with which earnest

Palamites discover that Thomas, read through Palamite lenses, proves to be no Palamite; arch dismissals of eastern understandings of grace as "semipelagian" by doctrinaire Augustinians; the reckless intensity with whicha particular kind of Orthodox polemicist fixes upon some single principle found somewhere in Latin theological tradition—like "subsistent relations" or "created grace"—violently misinterprets it, and then uses it to diagnose a fundamental deformity in western theology that must estrange it forever from the wellsprings of Orthodox truth; and so on. Perhaps this kind of thing is inevitable when a conversation arises between two traditions that claim to possess the sole, incontrovertible truth of things. It would be humbling indeed to discover that many of our most finely wrought systems of thought possess many accidental elements, peculiar to our particular cultural sensibilities or native tongues, or that perhaps our ways of depicting the truth to ourselves might be only partial and corrigible approximations to a truth that others, under extremely different forms, have approached with equal or better success.

More terrible yet is the possibility that many of our differences will prove to be only differences of sensibility and language, and not of substance at all, thus reducing our systems to relative expressions of the truth, rather than the pristine vehicles of truth we wish them to be.

Whatever the case, however, an honest consideration of Augustine in relation to the eastern fathers should be able to provide a fairly powerful solvent, either of false distinctions or of false accords. For, whatever else may be true about Augustine, it is certainly the case that the profoundest differences between eastern and western tradition are to a very great degree the result not only of differences of language but of the uniquely pervasive influence of Augustine's theology in the Latin West, and of the ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE almost complete absence of its influence in the Greek and Syrian East.

And, of course, on some matters these differences are quite real, substantial, and irreconcilable. The theology of grace of the late Augustine, his increasingly intransigent extremism regarding the creature's "merit," his hideous theology of predestination and original guilt, his conviction that genuine trust in the purity and priority of grace obliged him to affirm the eternal damnation of infants who died unbaptized—in short, the entire range of his catastrophic misreading of Paul's theology (attributable only in part to bad Latin translations)—is all very far from what a modern

Orthodox Christian is likely to recognize as the Church's faith. It imbues the works of Augustine's senescence with an inexpungible tincture of tragic moral idiocy, one that he bequeathed to broad streams of Catholic and Protestant tradition. This, however, is not really very important, since that aspect of Augustine's thought has fewer defenders than it once did; and, really, charity dictates that it should probably be disregarded as the product of intellectual fatigue. Rather, the issues that truly demand our attention are of another kind altogether, and concern areas of Augustine's thought where, in various times and places, scholars both western and eastern have believed they perceived vast and ultimately unbridgeable fissures between "Greek" and Augustinian thought—of a kind that make rapprochement between our traditions, theological or dogmatic, quite impossible—regarding the very nature of God as Trinity, the relation of created being to divine being, and the limits of what we can know of either. These, at any rate, are the topics that concern me here. I wish to speak of "Being" and of God, of the Trinity and of our ability to know

God, in the theology of Augustine and of the Greek fathers, Gregory of Nyssa in particular. But I wish to pursue these topics very much at the margins of the debates that have often preoccupied both Catholic and Orthodox theologians in recent years, for the simple reason that I believe that very many of the large and now standard claims often advanced regarding the divergence of our traditions on these matters, in form, content, or intent, are unsustainable, in light either of history or of reason; and that our debates all too often concern only differing and frequently tendentious reconstructions of the Christian past.

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea not univocal between the two usages; in fact, the word "being" does scant justice to the full spectrum of terms it is often called upon to represent: ens, esse, essentia, existentia, [actus] essendi, dv, Ov, odcia, civat, and so forth. When the Greek fathers spoke of God as Being—as, that is, 10 6vtwc év or ov (etc.)—or when Latin theologians, patristic or mediaeval, spoke of God as ens, actus essendi subsistens, or esse (etc.), they were speaking of God as the transcendent source and end of all things, whose being is not merely the opposite of nonbeing, and in whom there is no unrealized potential, deficiency, or change. But it is precisely in this sense that God is also (to use the venerable Platonic phrase) éxékewwa. tij¢ odoiac: "superessential," "supersubstantial," "beyond being." That is, he wholly transcends "beings," and discrete "substances," and the "totality of substances," and the created being in which all beings share; and no concept we possess of beings or of being makes it possible for us to comprehend him.

Thus, as Maximus the Confessor says, both names, "Being" and "notbeing," at once properly apply and properly do not apply to God: the one denotes that he is the cause of the being of all things, and the latter that he is infinitely beyond all caused being; but neither should be mistaken for a "description" of what he is." In this, Maximus is following the PseudoDionysius, who says that Being is a proper divine name insofar as God is

eit 6 dv ("He who is"), the source of all that exists, present within all things, around and within whom all being abides, in whom all things participate, and within whom the exemplars of all things eternally preexist as a simple unity; but he is not in any sense a being: he is not contained by—but rather contains—being, and so, with regard to his own essence, should properly be called not-being.* In Augustine's terms, God is the plenitude of being, without which nothing is,? but such is his transcendence as the One Who Is that, by comparison to him, those things that are are not! (which obviously represents only a semantic, not a conceptual, shift). It may be momentarily—but only momentarily—arresting to note

7Maximus, Mystagogia 1 (PG 91.664AC).

8Ps.-Dionysius, De divinis nominibus 5.1-8 (PG 3.816B—824C).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE that Thomas, in deference to God's own pronouncement out of the burning bush,'' prefers to identify "Being" (or, rather, "to be," or the subsistent act "to be") as the more proper "name" of God; but, again, "being" has many acceptations and, as Thomas' metaphysical designation for God, it signifies that same perfect transcendence of and supremacy over created being that, say, Palamas describes in his remarks upon Exodus 3.14.!? In either case, there is no conceptum univocum entis to span the divide between divine and created being, and thus the true distinction to be drawn is not one between two incompatible ways of naming God, peculiar respectively to West and East, but between two forms of the same name, corresponding to two distinct moments within what I would be content to call the "analogy of being" (though that is a term that frequently excites controversy).

II I think it fairly uncontroversial to say that, in the intellectual world of the first three centuries before Nicaea, especially in the eastern half of the empire, something like a "Logos metaphysics" was a crucial part of the philosophical lingua franca of almost the entire educated class, Pagan,

Jewish, Christian, and even Gnostic (even though the term generally preferred was rarely "logos"). Certainly, this was the case in Alexandria: the idea of a "derivative" or "secondary" divine principle was an indispensable premise in the city's native schools of trinitarian reflection, and in the thought either of "Hellenized" Jews like Philo or of the Platonists, middle or late. And one could describe all of these systems, without any significant exception, pagan and Jewish no less than Christian, as "subordinationist" in structure. All of them attempted, with greater or lesser complexity, and with more or less vivid mythical adornments, to connect the world here below to its highest principle by populating the interval

''Thomas is also, of course, following John of Damascus: Defide Orthodoxa 1.9.

"Gregory Palamas, Triads 3.2.12.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE enly powers; and only through the mediation of an inferior Logos is anything of him revealed. What, of course, was distinctive in Arianism was the absence of anything like a metaphysics of participation that might have allowed for some sort of real ontological continuity (however indeterminate) between the Father and his Logos; consequently, the only revelation of the Father that Arius' Logos would seem to be able to provide is a kind of adoring, hieratic gesture toward an abyss of infinitely incomprehensible power, the sheer majesty of omnipotent and mysterious otherness.'*

The God (6 @6c) ofArius is a God revealed only as the hidden, ofwhom the Logos (Ogg 6 Adyoc) bears tidings, and to whom he offers up the liturgy of rational creation; but, as the revealer of the Father, his is the role only of a celestial high priest, the Angel of Mighty Counsel, the coryphaeus of the heavenly powers; he may be a kind of surrogate God to the rest of creation, but he too, logically speaking, cannot attain to an immediate knowledge of the divine essence.

Even, however, in late-antique metaphysical systems less ontologically austere than Arius', in which the economy of divine manifestation is understood as being embraced within some sort of order of petoy or wtetovoia, the disproportion between the supreme principle of reality and this secondary principle of manifestation remains absolute. Hence all revelation, all disclosure of the divine, follows upon a more original veiling.

The manifestation of that which is Most High—wrapped as it is in unapproachable darkness, up upon the summit of being—is only the paradoxical manifestation of a transcendence that can never become truly manifest: perhaps not even to itself, as it possesses no Logos immanent to itself. It does not "think"; it cannot be thought. This, at least, often seems to be the case with the most severely logical, and most luminously uncluttered, metaphysical system of the third century, that of Plotinus. For the One of Plotinus is not merely a unity, not merely solitary, but is oneness as such, that perfectly undifferentiated unity in which all unity and diversity here below subsist and are sustained, as at once identity and difference. Plotinus recognized that the unity by which any particular thing is

4] am largely persuaded by the portrait of Arius that Rowan Williams paints in his Arius:

Heresy and Tradition, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002).

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea what it is, and is at once part of and distinct from the greater whole, is always logically prior to that thing; thus, within every composite reality, there must always also be a more eminent "act" of simplicity (so to speak) that makes its being possible. For this reason, the supreme principle of all things must be that One that requires no higher unity to account for its integrity, and that therefore admits of no duality whatsoever, no pollution of plurality, no distinction of any kind, even that between the knower and the known. This is not, for Plotinus, to deny that the One is in some special and transcendent sense possessed of an intellectual act of self-consciousness, a kind of "superintellection" entirely transcendent of subjective or objective knowledge.'> But the first metaphysical moment of theoria— reflection and knowledge—is of its nature a second moment, a departure from unity, Nous "prismatic" conversion of the simple light of the One into boundless multiplicity; the One itself, possessing no "specular" other within itself, infinitely exceeds all reflection. Nor did philosophy have to await the arrival of Hegel to grasp that there is something fundamentally incoherent in speaking of the existence of that which is intrinsically unthinkable, or of "being" in the absence of any proportionate intelligibility: for in what way is that which absolutely—even within itself—transcends intuition, conceptualization, and knowledge anything at all? Being is manifestation, and to the degree that anything is wholly beyond thought— to the degree, that is, that anything is not "rational" to that degree it does not exist. So it was perhaps with rigorous consistency that the Platonist tradition after Plotinus generally chose to place "being" second in the scale of emanation: for as that purely unmanifest, unthinkable, and yet transfinite unity that grants all things their unity, the One can admit of no distinctions within itself, no manifestation to itself, and so—in every meaningful sense—is not (though, obviously, neither is it not not).

In truth, of course, even to speak of an "ontology" in relation to these systems is somewhat misleading. Late Platonic metaphysics, in particular, is not so much ontological in its logic as "henological," and hence naturally whatever concept of being it comprises tends toward the nebulous.

See Plotinus, Enneads 6.7.37.15—-38.26; 9.6.50-55.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE "Being" in itself is not really distinct from entities, except in the manner of another entity; as part of the hierarchy of emanations, occupying a particular place within the structure of the whole, it remains one item within the inventory of things that are. Admittedly, it is an especially vital and "supereminent" causal liaison within the totality of beings; but a discrete principle among other discrete principles it remains. What a truly ontological metaphysics would view as being's proper act is, for this metaphysics, scattered among the various moments of the economy of beings.

One glimpses its workings now here and now there: in the infinite fecundity of the One, in the One's power to grant everything its unity as the thing it is, in the principle of manifestation that emanates from the One, in the simple existence of things, even in that unnamed, in some sense unnoticed medium in which the whole continuum of emanations univocally subsists. But, ultimately, the structure of reality within this vision of things is (to use the fashionable phrase) a "hierarchy within totality," held together at its apex by a principle so exalted that it is also the negation of the whole, in all of the latter's finite particularities.!° What has never come fully into consciousness in this tradition is (to risk a graver anachronism than any I have indulged in hitherto) the "ontological difference"—or, at any rate, the analogy of being. So long as being is discriminated from the transcendent principle of unity, and so long as both figure in some sense (however eminently) within a sort of continuum of metaphysical moments, what inevitably must result is a dialectic of identity and negation. This is the special pathos of such a metaphysics: for if the truth of all things is a principle in which they are grounded and by which they are simultaneously negated, then one can draw near to the fulness of truth only througha certain annihilation of particularity, through a forgetfulness of the manifest, througha sort of benign desolation of the soul, progressively eliminating—as the surd of mere particularity—all that lies between the One and the noetic self. This is not for a moment to deny the reality, the ardor, or the grandeur of the mystical elations that Plotinus describes, or the fervency with which—in his thought and in the thought l6Tbid., 6.7.17.39-433 9.3.37—403 cf. 5.5.4.12-16; 11.1-6.

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea of the later Platonists—the liberated mind loves divine beauty.'" The pathos to which I refer is a sadness residing not within Plotinus the man, but within any logically dialectical metaphysics of transcendence. For transcendence, so understood, must also be understood as a negation of the finite, and a kind of absence or positive exclusion from the scale of nature; the One is, in some sense, there rather than here. To fly thither one must fly hence, to undertake a journey of the alone to the alone, a sweetly melancholy departure from the anxiety of finitude, and even from being itself, in its concrete actuality: self, world, and neighbor. For so long as one dwells in the realm of finite vision, one dwells in untruth.

Ill What exactly, one might justly ask, does any of this have to do with Nicaean theology? The answer, simply enough, is that the doctrinal determinations of the fourth century, along with all of their immediate theological ramifications, rendered many of the established metaphysical premises upon which Christians had long relied in order to understand the relation between God and the world increasingly irreconcilable with their faith, and at the same time suggested the need to conceive of that relation—perhaps for the first time in western intellectual history—in a properly "ontological" way. With the gradual defeat of subordinationist theology, and with the definition of the Son and then the Spirit as coequal and coeternal with the Father, an entire metaphysical economy had implicitly been abandoned. These new theological usages—this new

Christian philosophical grammar—did not entail a rejection of the old Logos metaphysics, perhaps, but certainly did demand its revision, and at the most radical of levels. For not only is the Logos of Nicaea not generated with a view to creation, and nota lesser manifestation of a God who is simply beyond all manifestation; it is in fact the eternal reality whereby

God is the God he is. There is a perfectly proportionate convertibility of ''There are rather too many passages on this mystical eros in the Enneads to permit exhaustive citation; but see especially 6.7.21.9—22.32; 6.7.31.17—-31; 6.7.34.1-39} 6.9.9.26-56.

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea transcendent God alone who makes creation to be, not through a necessary diminishment of his own presence, and not by way of an economic reduction of his power in lesser principles, but as the infinite God. In this way, he is revealed as at once superior summo meo and interior intimo meo: not merely the supreme being set atop the summit of beings, but the one who is transcendently present in all beings, the ever more inward act within each finite act. This does not, of course, mean that there can be no metaphysical structure of reality, through whose agencies God acts; but it does mean that, whatever that structure might be, God is not located within it, but creates it, and does not require its mechanisms to act upon lower things. As the immediate source of the being of the whole, he is nearer to every moment within the whole than it is to itself, and is at the same time infinitely beyond the reach of the whole, even in its most exalted principles. And it is precisely in learning that God is not situated within any kind of ontic continuum with creation, as some "other thing" mediated to the creature by his simultaneous absolute absence from and dialectical involvement in the totality of beings, that we discover him to be the ontological cause of creation. True divine transcendence, it turns out, transcends even the traditional metaphysical divisions between the transcendent and the immanent.

This recognition of God's "transcendent immediacy" in all things, it should also be said, was in many ways a liberation from a certain sad pathos native to metaphysics; for with it came the realization that the particularity of the creature is not in its nature a form of tragic alienation from God, which must be overcome if the soul is again to ascend to her inmost truth. If God is himself the immediate actuality of the creature's emergence from nothingness, then it is precisely through becoming what it is—rather than through shedding the finite idiomata that distinguish it from God—that the creature truly reflects the goodness and transcendent power of God. The supreme principle does not stand over against us (if secretly within each of us) across the distance of a hierarchy of lesser metaphysical principles, but is present within the very act of each moment of the particular. God is truly Logos, and creatures—created in and through the Logos—are insofar as they participate in the Logos' power to ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE epiphenomenon of something infinitely greater than the medium of its revelation, and not merely a glimpse into the "antechamber of the essence"; rather it is a mysterious knowledge of the Father himself within the very limitlessness of his unknowability. But, then again, the God who is the infinite source of all cannot be an object of knowledge contained within the whole; and, if the Logos is equal to the Father, how can he truly reveal the Father to finite minds? And if—as became clear following the resolution of the Eunomian controversy—the Spirit too is not the economically limited medium of God's self-disclosure, but is also coequal with the Father and the Son, and is indeed the very Spirit by which God's life is made complete as knowledge and love, power and life, how can he reveal to us the Father in the Son?

These questions are made all the more acute, obviously, by the quite pronounced apophatic strictures that all post-Nicaean theologians—

Augustine no less than his Greek counterparts*4—were anxious to impose *4Here, obviously, I am in agreement with the argument of Marion (intra) and not with that of Bradshaw (intra). 1 do not think, moreover, that the two positions are equally plausible. Bradshaw's argument not only misrepresents Augustine's clearly stated positions, but involves erroneous interpretations of the few Augustiniantexts that Bradshaw himself cites.

For instance, he adduces Serm. 117—as austerely apophatic a text as one could hope for— as proof that Augustine believed the human mind capable of a direct knowledge and comprehension of the divine essence; but the single sentence he mistranslates from the sermon

(from 117.5) he has also removed from its context, within which it indicates exactly the opposite of what Bradshaw suggests. What Augustine is actually saying is that "God is an object of the mind, to be thought about, while a body is an object for the eyes, to be seen"; but this he asserts only in order then to argue that, even so, unlike some finite object of the senses, God is forever and entirely incomprehensible and inconceivable for the finite mind, and so the mind—and then only the pure mind—can do no more than stretch out to touch him; this alone is knowledge of God. Here, as elsewhere, Augustine emphatically denies that any creature can grasp or intuit or understand God in himself. He is, in short, saying nothing that was not also said by Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor (vide infra in text), the Pseudo-Dionysius, and a host of other eastern writers. Bradshaw's argument is remarkably similar to that of Phillip Cary in his Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000); in this book Cary also avers that Augustine believed the human mind capable of comprehending God's essence as an object of cognition, and he too cites (as his sole solid corroboration) this same sentence from Serm. 117, similarly wrenched from its context—which obliges Cary then to argue that all the statements of divine incomprehensibility in the surrounding text do not actually mean what they seem to mean (57-67). To abstract a single "incriminating" phrase from its surroundings, howrig

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea upon their language. As Augustine repeatedly affirms, every kind of vision of God in himself is impossible for finite creatures,?> none can ever know him as he is,"° nothing the mind can possibly comprehend is God,?" God is incomprehensible to anyone except himself,?® we are impotent even to conceive of God," and so when speaking of God we are really able to do so properly only through negation.*° And yet he also wants to say that, ever, as a kind of counterweight not only to mountains of controverting evidence from other sources by the same author, but to the explicit argument of the very text from which it has been taken, and within which it has a different meaning than that being ascribed to it, is simply irresponsible scholarship. By the same token, Bradshaw, like Cary, not only relies preponderantly upon the Sol. in his exposition of Augustine's thought—a very early and in many ways unrepresentative text—but burdens Augustine's language in that text with interpretations it simply will not support. Bradshaw even appears to repeat Cary's error of reading the Latin word intelligibilis as having the same connotations as the English word "intelligible," which it certainly does not; intelligibilis, like vontucdg in Greek, primarily means "possessing a spiritual or rational nature": simple, incorporeal, immortal, and so on; hence both the Greek and Latin fathers were as one in ascribing to God a noetic or intelligible—rather than an aesthetic or sensible—nature (for "God is Spirit").This notion that there is a greater kinship (or more perfect likeness) between rational creation and God than there is between material creation and God is simply ubiquitous in patristic sources.

Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, for example, both rejected the existence of any genuine material substrate to the physical world, and claimed that the physical universe is a confluence of intelligible or ideal properties, because both accepted the principle that an effect must resemble its cause, and so deduced that even the sensible realm must ultimately be reducible to intelligible elements. It is true, of course, that in the Sol. Augustine uses the Platonic image of God as the Sun or the Light of the intelligible world and of the intellectual realm (1.1.3; 1.9.16)—which is hardly a metaphor alien to eastern patristic tradition— and says that reason can "demonstrate God to the mind as the Sun demonstrates itself to the eye" (1.6.12), and states that "God is intelligible, not sensible" (1.8.15); and it is also true that in this early text Augustine speaks of the vision and knowledge of God (those things so plentifully promised by scripture) in tones comparable in hopefulness—if not in boldness—to certain phrases from the sermons of Gregory of Nazianzus. But nowhere in the Sol. is there any suggestion that one can "know" God in the sense of "comprehending God in his own nature and essence," nor does the text provide any warrant for ignoring or dismissing the innumerable statements in Augustine's writings explicitly denying the possibility of such comprehension.

>See, for example, Trin. 2.16.27; Tract. Ev. Jo. 124.3.17; Contra Max. 2.12.2.

27 Serm. 52.63 117.5.

in Ps. 80.12. rig | ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE even in failing to comprehend God in himself, we are led by the Spirit truly to see and know and touch God. Similarly, Gregory of Nyssa denies that any creature is capable of any Oewpia of the divine essence, and yet wants also to say that, in stretching out in desire toward God, the soul somehow sees God?! and attains to a Oewpia TOV GOEwprtov, a vision of the invisible? Gregory even speaks of David as going out of himself really to see the divine reality that no creature can see, and remaining ever thereafter unable to say how he has done this.** Maximus, who raises the "Greek" delight in extravagant declarations of apophatic ignorance to its most theatrical pitch, nonetheless makes it clear that his is an apophaticism of intimacy, born not from the poverty of the soul's knowledge of God, but from the overwhelming and superconceptual immediacy of that knowledge. The mind rises to God, he says, by negating its knowledge of what lies below, in order to receive true knowledge of God as a gift, and to come ultimately—beyond all finite negations—to rest in the inconceivable and ineffable reality of God.** When the mind has thus passed beyond cognition, reflection, cogitation, and imagination, and discovers that God is not an object of human comprehension, it is able to know him directly, through union, and so rushes into that embrace in which God shares himself as a gift with the creature,*° and in which no separation between the mind and its first cause in God can be introduced.*°

If this language of knowing God in a condition of insuperable unknowing seems at times little more than paradox, or to promise nothing more thana (logically impossible) affective experience of God totally devoid of concepts, what we must at all costs avoid doing is allow ourselves—solely for the sake of convenience—to impose later medieval systems of thought on the patristic texts, in the hope of thereby dispelling the difficulties with which they present us: either, as was once common among Catholic scholars, to read Augustine unreflectively through *!Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Moysis 2 (Gregorii Nysseni Opera [hereafter, GNO] 7.1, 87).

*Idem, In Canticum Canticorum 11 (GNO 6.326).

*4Maximus, Ambigua (PG 91, 1240C-1241A).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE creatures, reveals ever more of himself and yet always infinitely exceeds what he reveals.** Whether, however, this is how Palamas understood the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies is more than a little debatable.*? What is beyond debate is that, for many contemporary Palamites—I have in mind especially Vladimir Lossky—the distinction is something altogether more (for want of a better term)

of course, renders it rather paradoxical to claim (as Bradshaw also does) that, for Gregory, the divine names apply only to the divine energies and not to the divine essence. Logically, if the divine energies are genuine manifestations of God, however limited, then whatever names apply to the energies also necessarily apply to the essence, even if only defectively, immeasurably remotely, incomprehensibly, and "improperly." It is true, of course, that for Gregory our words name God only as he acts toward us, and that all of our words fall infinitely short of God (this is true for Augustine as well). But it is an oversimplification to suggest that, for Gregory, the divine names do not refer to God in himself, even if we can never grasp what those names properly mean, given their infinite convertibility with one another in God's transcendent being. For all of the Cappadocians, we come to know anything of God only through his operations (or energies, if one prefers the Greek word); but none of them ever suggests that what is revealed of God therein is true of the energies alone (the Cappadocians were not Nominalists.) Gregory, certainly, has no notion of the divine energies as concretely other than or really distinct from God in himself— indeed, he explicitly rejects such a notion (Contra Eunomium 1 [GNO 2, 87])—and I doubt it would have occurred to him or any of his contemporaries to speak of what belongs only to God's "energies" or "operations," even if the words we use of God are, from our side, names of those operations. And much the same is true, certainly, of eastern patristic theology in general. John of Damascus, for example, argues that, while the "names" or "attributes" proper to God himself apply to the divine essence, we must not imagine that they are true of God ina plural way, which we could then understand; in God, who is infinitely simple, all of these attributes are one and identical with one another, and if we think of them in a composite fashion then we think of them as something outside his nature or as mere energies (which they are not); at the same time, as discrete predications, the positive names we apply to God "describe" God's nature, but still cannot "explain" God's essence to us (De fide Orthodoxa 1.9). John goes on to say that those attributes proper to "the whole God" (as opposed to the trinitarian relations) are attributes of the essence—which, nonetheless, we never understand in itself, just as we never understand the essence of anything merely by knowing its attributes (ibid., 1.10). For the fathers of both East and West, I think it fair to say, genuine apophaticism is not reducible to the arid dialectics of "the Wholly Other," but flows from a fruitful awareness of the impotence of our words and concepts before the infinite simplicity of God.

in fact, a question impossible to settle. If the texts attributed to Palamas are indeed all the work of his hand, then it is quite likely that no one will ever be able convincingly to explain what Palamas meant by the distinction of essence and energies in God, since it is not at all clear that Palamas himself knew what he meant. rig | The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea dialectical, and altogether more inviolable.*° Even all of this, however, is 4°T suspect it is this tendency in modern Orthodox scholarship that has recently given rise in certain (primarily American) circles to the fanciful idea that there has always been some great difference between eastern and western patristic traditions regarding the nature of divine simplicity. In his essay (intra), Bradshaw chides Augustine for asserting that, in God himself, the divine essence and divine attributes are identical; but this is a point on which all of the significant eastern fathers certainly agreed (see, for instance, the passages adduced from John of Damascus in n. 38 above). The denial of such an identity would reduce any idea of divine transcendence to absurdity. That God—in his essence—is not merely good, but goodness itself, and is not merely true, but is truth itself (and so on), is an affirmation simply inherent in any understanding of God as the source of all contingent things, who does not participate in some source of goodness or truth (etc.) beyond himself, who is not composite, who possesses no unrealized potential, and who is all that he is ofhimself alone; and, as the Damascene says, it is solely because God's attributes are, properly speaking, convertible with one another in the simplicity of his essence that we cannot comprehend what they are in him. As for the claim that for Gregory of Nyssa the identity of God with his attributes, as well as their identity with one another, is true only at the level of the energies, it is difficult to see how this can be demonstrated from Gregory's texts or, for that matter, defended logically. And Bradshaw is making an unwarranted leap in assuming that, when Augustine affirms the identity of the divine essence and the divine will

(again, an assertion with which none of the eastern fathers would disagree), he must mean that the particular determinations of God's will in time are aspects of the divine essence; this is no more an implication of Augustine's thought than it is of Maximus' belief that the eternal Jogoi of all things (which are not just forms, but creative intentions) dwell from everlasting in the Logos. Augustine's view does not differ significantly from Gregory of Nyssa's, as expressed in the first chapter of the Oratio catechetica: that we must assert that the divine will must be the same as divine goodness and commensurate with divine omnipotence, for otherwise we would introduce complexity and mutability into the divine simplicity; or, as John of Damascus says, God is one essence, one Godhead, one power, one will, etc. (De fide

Orthodoxa 1.8). In fine, God's will is not something dependent on realities "beyond" himself or limited by finite potencies, but encompasses the whole span of his power and being, and is therefore perfectly free; all that God wills belongs naturally (though not necessarily) to that one eternal act whereby he wills his own goodness. I am unsure why Bradshaw suggests that Augustine's claim that God wills all things in a single eternal act is alien to eastern tradition (again, see John of Damascus, Defide Orthodoxa1.9). And, as for whether such a belief accounts for Augustine's understanding of predestination, I tend to think just the opposite is true: that the theology of praedestinatio ante praevisa merita is a betrayal of the principle of the identity of divine will and essence, because at some level this theology introduces into God's determinations a purely arbitrary moment that cannot be reconciled with the idea that, in God, all acts ofwill are perfectly in concord with his nature. I doubt, moreover, that a close reading of the Sophist would have altered Augustine's thinking. In dismissing Augustine's equation of real being with perfect unity, Bradshaw is confusing a number of different issues. Again, "being" is not a univocal term; but insofar as "being" means the subsistence of a particular thing, it is an idea that certainly necessarily entails that rig T | The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea formed, from glory to glory, into the likeness of Christ; and perhaps no word in that passage more perfectly captures the essence of that answer than the single, somewhat amphibologous participle katomtp1Copevot: either "beholding in a mirror" or "mirroring" or both—"speculating,"

"reflecting," "reflecting upon." At the risk of reducing an immense diversity of theological impulses and tendencies to a small set of abstract principles,I think it possible to identify two distinct but inseparable moments within Nicaean thought regarding our knowledge of the trinitarian God: first, the recognition that the interior life of this God is one of infinite and "reflective" intelligibility—from everlasting, a life that is always already

Logos and Spirit—and, second, the affirmation that we know God by being admitted to a finite participation in that intelligibility, through our transformation by the Spirit into ever purer reflections of the Logos in whom the depths of the Father shine forth. That is to say, we know God by being drawn into the mystery of his own trinitarian act of self-knowledge, which yet remains ever infinitely beyond us. The medium of God's revelation, therefore, is God himself; and the site—the matter—of that revelation is the living soul. As Augustine says, what we know of God we know through an image directly impressed upon our nature.*! Or, as Gregory of Nyssa says, human nature is a mirror, capable of bearing the impress of whatever it is turned toward," created to reflect its divine archetype within itself and to communicate that beauty to the whole of creation; and the soul comes to know God only insofar as it looks to Christ and thereby becomes what he is,'* adorned with his beauty."4 Revelation is sanctification, and the mind knows the Father in the Son by becoming itself an ever truer image of that Image.

The indiscerptibility of these two principles, in the theologies of both East and West, can be illustrated quite vividly by a fairly straightforward comparison between the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and that of Augustine, one that comes into focus for me principally arounda (so to speak)

41 Trin. 14.15.21; En. in Ps. 4.8.

"Gregory of Nyssa, In Canticum Canticorum 4 (GNO 6.104).

'3[bid., 2 (GNO 6.68).

44Tbid., 15 (GNO 6.440).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE matched set of quotations to which I find myself repeatedly returning.

The first is from Gregory's De Anima et Resurrectione (On the Soul and Resurrection): "the divine nature exceeds each [finite] good, and the good is wholly beloved by the good, and thus it follows that when it looks upon itself it desires what it possesses and possesses what it desires, and receives nothing from outside itself";4> and this line of reflection that Gregory takes up again a few lines below: "the life of that transcendent nature is love, in that the beautiful is entirely lovable to those who recognize it (and the divine does recognize it), and so this recognition becomes love, because the object of his recognition is in its nature beautiful."*° The second, much longer quotation is from book 6 of Augustine's De Trinitate:... the Son is from the Father, so as both to be and to be coeternal with the Father. For if the image perfectly fills the measure of him whose image it is, then it is coequal to its source... [Hilary of Poitiers] has, in regard to this image, employed the name "form" on account, I believe, of its beauty, wherein there is at once such harmony, and prime equality, and prime similitude, in no way discordant, in no measure unequal, and in no part dissimilar, but wholly answering to the identity of the one whose image it is...

. Wherefore that ineffable conjunction of the Father and his image is never without fruition, without love, without rejoicing. Hence that love, delight, felicity or beatitude, if any human voice can worthily say it, is called by him, in brief, use, and is in the Trinity the Holy Spirit, not begotten, but of the begetter and begotten alike the very sweetness, filling all creatures, according to their capacities, with his bountiful superabundance and excessiveness.*7 451dem, De Animaet Resurrectione (PG 46.93): "Emet 58 navt0c &yabod énéxeta f Oeia ovotc, TO 5é GyabOv Gya0® eirov advtac, 516 TodTO EavTi PAémovoe Kat 6 éyet, OEAEt, kai 6 OéAe1, Eyer, oddEéV TOV EEMMEV Eig EaVTIV Seyopevn."

'Ibid. (PG 46.96): "H te yap Car) ths Gv@ Pboews Gym Eotiv, EmEtdi) TO KAAOV Gyamntov navtwc Eoti Tois YtV@oKOvOl (ytvVo«eEt SE EXVTO TO OEiov), 1] 5E yvGotg Gyan yivetat, dvOtt KaAdV goTL PUGEL TO YIWHOKOLEVOV."

47 Trin. 6.10.11: "Imago enim si perfecte implet illud cuius imago est, ipsa coaequatur ei, non illud imagini suae. In qua imagine speciem nominavit, credo, propter pulchritudinem, ci ] The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea

And this, according to Augustine, leads us to say that: "In that Trinity is the highest origin of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight. Therefore those three are seen to be mutually determined, and are in themselves infinite."** Admittedly, Augustine is speaking here directly about the Trinity, while Gregory is merely speaking with a trinitarian grammar (to appreciate the full profundity of which one must seek supplementary arguments from other of his works). But what these passages reveal is that, for both theologians, God's one act of being God is also that one, eternal, "speculative" act by which he knows and loves the fulness of his own essence.

As Augustine takes such pains to argue, it is not the case that the Father merely begets his image, wisdom, and being in the Son, while remaining something apart; he already is wisdom and being—he already knows and is—and begets his image not by reduction or alienation, but as the perfect expression of his essence: and hence he eternally begets, of his nature."

Or, as Gregory argues—from the opposite direction, as it were, but with the same end in view—the Son is the eternal image in which the Father contemplates and loves his essence, and thus the Father can never be conceived of without his Son, for "if ever the brightness of the Father's glory did not shine forth, that glory would be dark and blind."*° And this "infinite speculation," if one may phrase it that way, is for Gregory that one original act of knowledge in which each of the divine persons shares: the Only Begotten who dwells in the Father, sees the Father in himself, while the Spirit searches out the depths of God.>! God himself is, as it were, an ubi iam est tanta congruentia, et prima aequalitas, et prima similitudo, nulla in re dissidens, et nullo modo inaequalis, et nulla ex parte dissimilis, sed ad identidem respondens ei cuius imago est... . Ille igitur ineffabilis quidam complexus patris et imaginis non est sine perfruitione, sine charitate, sine gaudio. Illa ergo dilectio, delectatio, felicitas vel beatitudo, si tamen aliqua humana voce digne dicitur, usus ab illo appellatus est breviter, et est in trinitate spiritus sanctus, non genitus, sed genitoris genitique suavitas, ingenti largitate atque ubertate perfundens omnes creaturas pro captu earum."

48Tbid., 6.10.12: "In illa enim trinitate summa origo est rerum omnium, et perfectissima pulchritudo, et beatissima delectatio. Itaque illa tria, et ad se invicem determinari videntur, et in se infinita sunt."

Gregory, Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii (GNO 2.355).

>'Tdem, Contra Eunomium 2 (GNO 1.340).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE eternal play of the invisible and the visible, the inaccessible depths and heights of the Father made radiantly manifest in the infinite impress of his beauty, God "mirroring" himself and so knowing himself by pouring himself out wholly in the Son and Spirit. And it is from the Trinity's own eternal "circle of glory">? that the logic of created being unfolds: creation, one could say, is another inflection of an infinite light, receiving that light as the very gift of its being. There are not, then, discrete moments of being's dispensation within a scale of which God is somehow "part": he does not lie beyond the economy of manifestation as the essentially unmanifest mystery whose solitude is inverted and so distorted in all that lies below him. Rather, God himself is the immediate source of every moment of finite reality: its hidden depths, its manifest surface, its rational structure, its beauty. Creation is only as the answer of light to light, a gracious "overflow" of the self-donating movement of the Trinity, existing solely as the manifestation—the reflection—of the splendor of a God whose own being is manifestation, recognition, and delight.

For Augustine, this understanding of God bears especially plentiful fruit when he (as famously he does) employs metaphors such as memory, understanding, and will, or mind, love, and knowledge, in order to understand the way in which the three persons of the Trinity are each wholly

God and yet distinct within the single act of God's being. When, for instance, the mind knows and loves itself, each moment of that single act is in itself what it is, and yet each entirely indwells and reveals and is the life of each of the other two.

But when the mind knows itself in these three, and loves itself, there remains a trinity: mind, love, knowledge; nor are they confused with one another by any sort of intermingling, even though each is single in itself and entire in the totality, either each one in the other two or the other two in each, but in any case all in all.

idem, Adversus Macedonianos: De Spiritu Sancto (GNO 3.1, 109); Contra Eunomium1 (GNO 1.217—18).

3 Trin. 9.5.8: "At in illis tribus cum se novit mens et amat se, manet trinitas, mens, amor, notitia; et nulla commixtione confunditur quamvis et singula sint in se ipsis et invicem tota in totis, sive singula in binis sive bina in singulis, itaque omnia in omnibus."

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea Which is to say, with a somewhat infuriating precision, that:

They are, moreover, within one another, for the loving mind is within love, and love is within the knowledge of the lover, and knowledge is within the knowing mind. Thus each is in the other two, because the mind that knows and loves itself is within its own love and knowledge, and the love of the mind that loves and knows itself is within the mind and its knowledge, and the knowledge of the mind that knows and loves itself is in the mind and its love, because it loves itself as knowing and knows itself loving. And thus also each pair of these is within the third of them, for the mind that knows and loves itself is within love always along with its knowledge, and within knowledge always along with its love, and love and knowledge are simultaneously present within the mind that loves and knows itself."

And these images acquire richer hues as Augustine attempts to form remote analogies by which to think of the trinitarian processions from the life of the mind. When the mind knows and approves itself, he says, this knowledge is its "word," because it is a knowledge exactly adequate to and identical with what it knows (ut ei sit par omnino et aequale atque identidem) and thus constitutes a perfect and equal likeness, for the begotten is equal to the begetter (et estgignenti aequale quod genitum est).°° And when the mind knows and loves itself, the object of that love and knowledge— which, like every object known or loved, "co-generates" that knowledge or love*°—is one with the source from which that knowledge or love flows:

"And this is a certain image of the Trinity, the mind itself and its knowl- >4Tbid.: "In alternis autem ita sunt quia et mens amans in amore est et amor in amantis notitia at notitia in mente noscente. Singula in binis ita sunt quia mens quae se novit et amat in amore et notitia sua est, et amor amantis mentis seseque scientis in mente notitiaque eius est, et notitia mentis se scientis et amantis in mente atque in amore eius est quia scientem se amat et amantem se novit. Ac per hoc et bina in singulis quia mens quae se novit et amat cum sua notitia est in amore et cum suo amore in notitia, amorque ipse et notitia simul sunt in mente quae se amat et novit."

9.12.18: " .. omnis res quamcumque cognoscimus congenerat in nobis notitiam sui; ab utroque enim notitia paritur, a cognoscente et cognito." rig | The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea it is not the same thing to be and to be wise, then the Son is one of his qualities, not his offspring, and then he will no longer be absolute in his simplicity.'°° And for Augustine it is not merely the simplicity of the divine nature, but the paternal monarchia that is at stake: if... it is the Son who makes the Father wise [and] if in God it is the same thing both to be and to be wise, and in him essence is Wisdom, then it would not be the Son who has his essence from the Father, which is the true state of things, but rather the Father who has his essence from the Son, which is both supremely absurd and supremely false.°!

Gregory, admittedly, does at one point appear to argue the opposite—that the Father can never be conceived of without his Son, for were he alone he would have no light, truth, wisdom, life, holiness, or power°*—but, read in context, this claim has nothing to do with the sort of crudely mechanical concept of the Trinity that Augustine is attacking; indeed, it is precisely such a concept that Gregory is rejecting. More importantly,

Augustine is not in any way denying that there is a distinct paternal or filial or spiritual modality or idiom; Augustine is nota tritheist, who believes

God to be a confederation of three individual consciousnesses, any more than Gregory imagines God to be a composite of separable functions.

Both, however, find themselves on this point running up against the limits of language with particular force.

In any event, for both theologians the hiddenness of God the Father— unlike the inviolable singularity of the One—is always already also a fully commensurate disclosure of the Father in the Son and Spirit. God the infiTrin, 7.1.2: "... siet pater qui genuit sapientiam ex ea fit sapiens neque hoc est illi esse quod sapere, qualitas eius est filius, non proles eius, et non ibi erit iam summa simplicitas."

15.7.12: "si... filius patren sapientem facit. ... Et si hoc est deo esse quod sapere et ea illi essentia est quae sapientia, non filius a patre, quod verum est, sed a filio potius habet pater essentiam, quod absurdissimum atque falsissimum est."

°Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 3.1 (GNO 2.32).

should perhaps, however, note the irony that, if either of these positions can be said to be more reminiscent of the Palamite position (if only obliquely), it is Augustine's.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE nitely hidden is also God the infinitely manifest. Creation, moreover, belongs entirely to this mystery: not as the immeasurably remote consequence of a departure from the One, a final negation of an original negation, but as a peaceful emergence into the light of God of that which in itself is nothing, anda finite expression of and moment within God's eternal act of love and knowledge.® And for both Gregory and Augustine, the relationship of creatures to God—inasmuch as neither thinks in terms of some secret ground of identity along a continuum of substances, or thinks of God as some ineffably remote substance at the other end of that continuum—lies in the immediate and simple relation of the image to that which it reflects. Nor, then, are creatures images simply in the sense that they constitute mere signs of the power of God to cause finite effects. If they were, no created image would be more a likeness of God thana dissemblance, no more a participation than an alienation; creatures then would be mere univocal instances of a single creative event, and no "image" would constitute a nearer or more appropriate analogy of God's nature than another. The image of God in creation—and in rational natures in particular—must be an actual communication of the light of God's own inward life, his own eternal Image of himself within the trinitarian mystery. It is, so to speak, a created reprise of the movement of God's being as God, coming to pass within beings who have no existence apart from their capacity to reflect his presence.

It is possible, then, to affirm both that the Father infinitely exceeds all finite knowledge and that, in mirroring Christ within ourselves we are somehow being conformed to the Father's coequal manifestation of himself to himself: the very "splendor of his glory," his "form" and "impress," in seeing whom we truly see the Father. We can become images of God because God is always already, in himself, Image.°° When either Gregory or Augustine speaks of divinization—which neither tends to do as frequently as other of the fathers—it is typically understood as a greater and °4See Gregory of Nyssa, De Perfectione (GNO 8.1.188-89). No theologian rang more magnificent changes on this theme, of course, than Maximus the Confessor, but that is a topic for another time.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ian taxis. Insofar, says Augustine, as we know God, we are made like him, however remotely; and when we know God, and properly love this knowledge, we are made better than we were, and this knowledge becomes a word for us, and a kind oflikeness to God within us."? And it is only thus that the coinherence within us of memory, understanding, and will is raised to the dignity of the divine likeness; the mind is the image of God not simply when it remembers and understands and loves itself, but only when it is able to remember and understand and love him by whom it was made; and in this way, says Augustine, the mind participates in the supreme light.'? And it is the Spirit who makes the Son visible in and to us, and who through the Son reveals the Father. As Gregory writes, "there is no means whereby to look upon the Father's hypostasis save by gazing at it through its stamp [yapaxtip], and the stamp of the Father's hypostasisis the Only Begotten, to whom, again, none can approach whose mind has not been illuminated by the Holy Spirit.'"4 As Augustine says, we are images of the Word who became flesh, created through him, and as we become ever more resplendent likenesses of him, he reveals to us who the Father is; he is light, born of a Father who is light, and in becoming a man he established that perfect "exemplum" that refashions us after the divine image; and the Spirit, as the supreme charity conjoining Father and Son, is that love that subjoins us to the Son and Father.'° And Gregory speaks in nearly identical terms: when, he says, Christ prays that his followers might be one even as he and his Father are one and coinhere in one another, and says that he has given his followers the same glory his Father has given him, he is speaking of the gift of the Holy Spirit; indeed, that glory is the Spirit, the glory that the Son had with the Father before the world was made,'° the "bond of peace" or "bond of unity" (so like the 2 Tbid., 9.11.16.

[bid., 14.12.15: "Haec igitur trinitas mentis non propterea dei est imago quia sui meminit mens et intelligit ac diligit se, sed quia potest etiam meminisse et intellegere et amare a quo facta est."

74Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Eustathium: De Sancta Trinitate (GNO 3.1.13).

76Gregory of Nyssa, Tunc et Ipse Filius 21-22; In Canticum Canticorum 15 (GNO 6.466-68).

The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea Augustinian vinculum pacis or vinculum caritatis) by which Father and Son dwell in one another, and by which we dwell in God when the Son breathes the Spirit forth upon us."" And, for Gregory, this process of sanctification is one in which a kind of "trinitarian" structure intrinsic to human existence becomes an ever purer mirror of the Trinity. The Spirit meets us, successively, in our practice, word (Adyoc) and thought (év0vwwtov), the last of these being the principle (4pyiktepov) of all three; for mind (dtévoia) is the original source (&pyt) that becomes manifest in speech, while practice comes third and puts mind and word into action.

Thus the Spirit transforms us, until "there is a harmony of the hidden man with the manifest";"* and thus, one might say, the Spirit conducts the trinitarian glory upward into our thought, making our own internal life an ever fuller reflection of God's own "circle of glory."

Here, however, I shall draw to a close. As I announced at the beginning of this essay, my ambition has been only to makea tentative initial move in the direction of investigations that require more searching attention than I can grant them here. I can, though, offer a summary of the themes upon which such investigations, it seems to me, might proceed. First, that Christian trinitarianism as developed in the fourth century did most definitely involve, however implicitly, a new kind of metaphysics, one that was—perhaps for the first time in western thought—fully "ontological" in its structure. Second, that with this revision of prevailing models of reality came also a new understanding of the nature of divine transcendence, one that finally liberated the thought of God (and of his hiddenness) from the metaphysics of mere ontic supremacy. Third, that with the idea of God's life as truly trinitarian—in which Logos and Spirit are not secondary or lesser moments within a divine economy, but the actual being of God as God—came a new, more mysterious, but far richer understanding of the relation between God in himself and the image of God reflected in created being. Fourth, that this relation, so understood, at once promises us a far more intimate knowledge of God than previ77Idem, Tunc et Ipse Filius, 22; In Canticum Canticorum 15 (GNO 6.466-67).

78Idem., De Perfectione (GNO 8.1.210-12): "ovpga@viay sivat tod Kpvatod &vOpmmov MPG TOV Patvoptevovy." Cf. idem, Adversus Macedonianos (GNO 3.1.98-99).

Augustine the Metaphysician —e—— Davip BRADSHAW i { ygoal in this paper is to situate the thought ofAugustine in relation to the tradition of classical metaphysics, particularly the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. In many ways this is a familiar project, for scholars have long pursued the many hints left by Augustine himself in relating his thought to these sources.

However, my particular emphasis will be on the differences between the way Augustine responded to the legacy of Greek philosophy and the way the Greek fathers met the same challenge.! I believe that many of the theological differences between Augustine and the Greek fathers can be traced to the different ways in which they responded to this common heritage.

Although they both made extensive use of classical metaphysics, they did so in different ways, which sometimes are complementary and sometimes are in conflict. Recognizing precisely where the two resulting bodies of thought mesh and where they do not is a difficult task, but surely the right way to begin is by seeing them both in relation to their common sources.

First we must have clearly in view some basic points in the natural theologies of Plato and Aristotle. Although Aristotle came second chronologically, his thought is more readily grasped than the rather fragmentary suggestions of Plato, so I shall take it first. The Prime Mover described in Metaphysics Lambda is a being whose ovota (essence) is actuality or évepyeta (activity).? This is true in three distinct but related

'In referring to the Greek fathers throughout this paper, I shall have in mind primarily the Cappadocian fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, John Damascene, and Gregory Palamas, although similar ideas can also be found in many less wellknown authors.

Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.6 1071b20.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE senses.° First, since the Prime Mover is posited to explain motion it cannot itself be subject to motion, and thus it is pure actuality in the sense of having no potentiality to change or to be acted upon. Second, because its activity of causing motion must be continuous and eternal, it can have no unrealized capacities to act; everything it can do it already does and has done from all eternity, all at once and as a whole. Finally, the Prime

Mover is self-thinking thought, a being whose "thought is a thinking of thinking.'4 This means that it is €vepysia in the sense of activity as well as that of actuality, for its substance is nothing other than the self-subsistent activity of thought.

The third point is the most difficult and controversial. It is most plausibly understood as meaning that the Prime Mover's thinking embraces all possible intelligible content; after all, if it did not there would be a kind of thinking in which the Prime Mover could engage but does not, and it would in that respect fail to be fully actual. In saying that the Prime Mover

"thinks itself" what Aristotle means is that, precisely because its act of thinking is fully actual, this act is identical to its object, for there is nothing other than the object—no unrealized potency—constituting the act as what it is. (The Prime Mover is in this respect sharply different from human intellects, which are distinct from both their act of thinking and their object of thought because they include a vast range of unrealized potencies.) Given the identity of the Prime Mover's thought with its object, a remarkable result follows: the Prime Mover not only thinks all possible intelligible content, it is all possible intelligible content, existing all at once as a single eternal and fully actual substance. Aristotle does not draw this conclusion explicitly, but later commentators, beginning with Alexander of Aphrodisias, did so, and it became a fundamental ingredient in the synthesis of Plato and Aristotle executed by the Neoplatonists.

This conclusion points to a further important role of the Prime Mover.

For Aristotle the intelligible content of something is the cause of its being.

what follows see in more detail my "A New Look at the Prime Mover," Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2001): 1-22, incorporated as chapter 2 of Aristotle East and West:

Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

'Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.9 1074634.

Augustine the Metaphysician This is because the question of why something exists is, as he understands it, the question of why a given parcel of matter constitutes the item which it does, and the answer to that question is its form.® It would seem to follow that since the Prime Mover is the totality of all possible intelligible content, existing at the highest level of actuality, it is the cause of the being of all things—not as their creator, but as their formal cause. Although

Aristotle says little on this point directly, that his thought leads in this direction was again recognized by Alexander, as well as by the Middle Platonist Alcinous, who began the process of incorporating Aristotle's theology within Platonism.®° This implication was given particular emphasis by Plotinus, who took the Prime Mover as the model for the second hypostasis of his own system, Intellect. Plotinus, however, was fully comfortable (as Aristotle was not) with the Platonic distinction among degrees of reality. He typically says not that Intellect is the cause of the being of sensible objects but that it is being, 16 dv. Its objects of thought—with which it is identical in a relationship of unity in multiplicity—he refers to not only as ta vonta, the objects of intellect, but also as ta évta, the things that are.'

In Aristotle, then, particularly as he was interpreted in late antiquity, we find a picture of God as fully actual and eternal intellect, one who simAristotle, Metaphysics 7.17; cf. Charles Kahn, "Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Ancient Greek Philosophy," Philosophies of Existence: Ancient and Medieval, ed. Parviz Morewedge (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 7-17.

°See Aristotle East and West, 66-72.

7The question of how the Prime Mover (or Intellect) can be simple, although its objects of thought are many, is another bit of unfinished business that Aristotle left for Plotinus.

Aristotle remarks that the Prime Mover is "without parts and indivisible" (1073a7) and later he adds that its object of thought is incomposite (1075a5—10). Yet, as we have seen, its thinking embraces all possible intelligible content. Aristotle's solution would seem to be that its object of thought is actually one but potentially many; that is, it is one as thought by the Prime Mover, but many in that it can be resolved into a multiplicity of separate truths. See

Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303-6. Plotinus adopts a similar approach in describing the relationship between Intellect (vobg) and its objects of thought (t& vonta). He offers a numberofanalogies, such as that Intellect knows the intelligibles in the way that one who has mastered a science understands it as an integral whole, although it can be analyzed into a multiplicity of theorems, or that Intellect is to the intelligibles as a seed to the multiplicity of its powers

(Enneads 5.9.6, 8). This is the relationship that I refer to as "unity in multiplicity."

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ply in virtue of his activity of thought constitutes the being of the sensible world. It is not hard to recognize in this picture the source of what later came to be called cataphatic theology. If God is the intelligible structure of sensible objects, he is not only their being but also their unity, life, wisdom, beauty, and other perfections. This is a step that Aristotle did not take, but it is a reasonable extrapolation from his thought, one that again can be found in Plotinus. For Plotinus the perfections of sensible objects are simply ta évta, the things that are. Christian thinkers would later ring many variations upon this theme. In the Cappadocians the perfections of creatures are the divine energies or the "things around God"; in Dionysius the Areopagite, the divine processions; in Augustine and Aquinas, the divine ideas; in Maximus the Confessor, they are the divine Aoyou; in Gregory Palamas, they are again the divine energies. However important the differences among these formulations, they are all recognizably ways of describing how God is present within creation as its ontological structure.

Let us turn now to Plato. If Aristotle is the father of cataphatic theology, Plato is the father of apophatic theology. Precisely how he came to be understood in this way is a complicated story, which has been well told by others.® At the risk of oversimplification,I shall focus on just a few key texts. The first is the Myth of the Sun in the Republic. There we learn that the Good is that which gives being to the Forms, although it is "beyond being in dignity and power."' Later Platonists read this statement in light of the close association between being and intelligibility that had been integral to Greek philosophy at least since Parmenides. They inferred that the Good must be beyond intellect (vovc) as well, in that it is not intelligible or an object of thought (vontov). Obviously this does not mean that it cannot be spoken of or thought about at all. It means that the Good is not subject to vénotc, the specific kind of thinking that "divides reality at the joints" by conforming itself to, and thereby becoming isomorphic

'For example, John Dillon, The Transcendence of God in Philo (Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1975); Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence, 2 vols. (Bonn: Hanstein,

1986); Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition, Plato to Eriugena (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995).

Plato, Republic 5o9b.

Augustine the Metaphysician different ways of adapting—while, of course, radically modifying—the Plotinian synthesis. Since our subject here is Augustine, I will describe the approach of the Greek fathers only briefly.

I have mentioned that the "things that are" of Plotinus, the diversified content of the thought of Intellect, become in the Greek fathers the "things around God, the divine processions, or the divine energies. These are seen neither as creatures nor as ways in which the divine essence is diversified and grasped by our limited human understanding. The diversity among them is real and would exist even if we did not. The simplest way to describe them is to say that they are actions that God performs. (Activity is, of course, the original meaning of "energy, évépyeta.) Yet in saying this, one must not assume that they are distinct from God in precisely the same way that a creature's actions are distinct from that creature. The divine processions or energies are actions which manifest God, and in so doing constitute his presence to that which receives the manifestation. The source of this idea lies more in the Bible than in philosophy, and particularly in the two intertwining themes of the divine glory and the divine "working" or "operation" (as évépyeia in the Bible has generally been translated).!° However, in articulating it the Greek fathers drew freely on existing philosophical vocabulary, including the resonances that évepysia had received from its use in the Plotinian theory of emanation, and later the notion of a procession

(1po0d60c) as it appears in Proclus.'"

That is the cataphatic side of their thought. They were just as emphatic in insisting that, much like the One of Plotinus, God possesses no form and is beyond any conceptual determination. Already in Clement of Alexandria, since God is infinite he is "without form or name," the names we give him being based on his powers.'* The Cappadocians adopt this

'6See my "The Divine Energies in the New Testament," SVTQ 50 (2006): 189-223, and "The Divine Glory and the Divine Energies," Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006): 279-98.

The notion of the "things around God" is not philosophical but can be found in the Hermetica; see Aristotle East and West, 132, 166-67, as well as 182 (on mp00d0¢) and 74-96

(on évépyeta and emanation). | have summarized the philosophical and semantic evolution of évépyeta in "The Concept of the Divine Energies," Philosophy and Theology 18

18Clement, Stromata 5.12 (PG 9.121B).

Augustine the Metaphysician time, nor different now from what it used to be."*° Although the emphasis here is certainly on temporal homogeneity, the phrase "identical with itself throughout" indicates that Augustine also has in mind homogeneity of qualities or intelligible structure. Presumably, in an incorporeal being such as God, this would mean the absence of distinctions such as those of essence and accident or genus and differentia. A little later he goes so far as to identify being and unity. He also adds, on this basis, that things attain being insofar as they attain order:

Those things which tend toward being, tend toward order, and in attaining order, they attain being, so far as it can be attained by creatures. Order reduces whatever it orders to a certain harmony. To be, however, is nothing but to be one. And so, to the extent that a thing acquires unity, to that extent it has being.*!

For creatures, then, being and unity are a matter of degree, and both have to be achieved through the attainment of order.

Finally, De vera religione (On True Religion) follows up on the further association of God, as perfect being and unity, with truth. God is "the uncreated and most perfect form ... the one truth ... the first and highest essence."*? As the work progresses, we find more specifically that God as Truth is the second person of the Trinity, and that the second person is not only Truth, but also Unity (or One, unum).°> More precisely, the Father is Unity and the Son, as his perfect likeness, is also Unity:

We can understand that there is something so resembling the sole Unity and principle of all unity that it coincides with it and is identical with it. This is Truth, the Word that was in the beginning, the divine

mor. ecc. 2.1.1. Translation from The Catholic and Manichaean WaysofLife, trans.

D. Gallagher and I. Gallagher (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, °?De vera rel. 11.22, trans. Burleigh, op. cit.

Augustine the Metaphysician thought." He concludes that the One is formless (&veideov)** and that our awareness of it is not by knowledge or thought (vénotg), but by "a presence superior to knowledge."*? Elsewhere he adds that even the name

"One" ought not to be taken to indicate something like a Form of Unity, but is only a way of denying multiplicity, and must itself ultimately be negated.*° He also explicitly distinguishes the "one" which is predicated of the Forms, inasmuch as each Form is a unity, from the One which is

It is plain that Augustine has taken with Plotinus the first step, that of recognizing the dependence of being on unity, but that when it comes to the question of whether Being and the One are the same, he gives a different answer. Why? The reason must surely lie in the particular way in which he came to believe in the Christian God. The realization that truth exists, and exists more fully than material objects, led Augustine to two simultaneous conclusions: that God is Truth, and that being is perfect wholeness or unity. Since God is perfectly and fully real, "He Who Is," he is thus not only Truth but also Unity. Apparently Augustine believed that he had been preceded in this discovery by the Platonists—Plotinus, Porphyry, or both—whom he understood as teaching that God as Truth is Intellect, and God as Unity is the One. In Christian terms these are, respectively, the Son and the Father.'? Augustine parted ways with the Platonists primarily in rejecting the hierarchical relationship between Intellect and the One, as well as its implication that the One is "beyond Intellect" and "beyond being." For Augustine, since the Father and the Son are consubstantial, each must be in some sense Truth, Unity, and Being, although for various reasons we may appropriate these names to one or the other.

"As an aside, we may note that Augustine also extended these metaphysical correlations to the Holy Spirit. The Father is the source of measure (mensura) or unity (unum), the Son ofform (species), the Holy Spirit of order (ordo), and this triad, which is to be found in all creatures, is a vestige of the Trinity. See De beata vita 4.34—35; De vera rel. 7.13, 55.113;

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE We have here, then, a second and quite different way of appropriating Plotinian metaphysics. This time trinitarian doctrine is present directly rather than implicitly, in the straightforward correlation of the One with the Father and Intellect with the Son.** The greatest change from Plotinus consists not in collapsing the distinction of hypostases, but in rejecting the hierarchical ranking that allows the One and Intellect to differ in respect to being, unity, and intelligibility. It is a highly significant corollary of this that Augustine also rejects apophaticism. As he remarks in one of his sermons, "God is for the mind to understand, as body is for the mind to see."** It is true that he frequently states that God exceeds the capacities of human thought or speech.*° Nonetheless, on the key question of whether

God is intrinsically an object of intellect—that is, of vonotc, understood as the kind of thinking that conforms itself to the nature of the object known—his answer is consistently affirmative.*°

I stated earlier that the philosophical differences between Augustine and the Greek fathers help to explain many of their theological differences. In the space remaining| will focus on just one example of how this is so. It is an issue that has sometimes proven to be contentious in confrontations between the two traditions, and therefore deserves careful attention: that of divine simplicity.

There are two separate arguments in Augustine for divine simplicity.

The first is that God must be identical to his perfections, for otherwise he would possess them by participation and so would be inferior to that in which he participates. This argument can be found at several points in the De Trinitate."" The other argument, which is in the De civitate Dei, is that *3See Civ. 10.23 and 10.28. Porphyry spoke of the One as the Father and of Intellect as vovg matpikdc, the Intellect of the Father. Augustine faults Porphyry not for making these identifications but for failing to leave room for the Holy Spirit. Another precedent was MariusVictorinus, although Victorinus retains Plotinian apophaticism regarding the Father (or the One) and thereby flirts with subordinationism; cf. Aristotle East and West, 108-14.

43See Deirdre Carabine, "Negative Theology in the Thought of Saint Augustine,"

Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 59 (1992): 5-22, incorporated as The Unknown God, 259-77. See also the contribution by Jean-Luc Marion to the present volume.

46See further Aristotle East and West, 226-29.

47 Trin. 5.10.11, 7-1.25 15.5.7:

Augustine the Metaphysician since God is absolutely and without qualification, for him to live, to understand, to be blessed, and to enjoy his other perfections is the same as to be; thus the divine nature "is the same as itself" and "is what it has."4*

Whereas the first of these arguments is at home in any broadly Platonic metaphysics, the second depends specifically on Augustine's conception of being as undivided wholeness. Only the second leads to the distinctively Augustinian conclusion that the divine essence is identical with the divine attributes as well as with the divine esse, and that all of these are identical with one another. Indeed the first argument (the denial of participation) is also to be found in Gregory of Nyssa.*? Gregory is just as emphatic as Augustine in affirming that God is Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, and the other divine perfections; yet, since he also holds that the divine names are names of the divine energies rather than the divine essence, he must be understood as asserting these identities at the level of the energies.*° That is, they are names for God as he is manifest in his activity. What he clearly does not mean is that God's attributes are identical to his essence, as is held by Augustine.

Among the identities that Augustine infers from divine simplicity is that God is identical with his own will.°! By this he must mean God's expressed and determinate will, and not merely the will as a faculty, for to take the identity as applying only to the will as a faculty would introduce a distinction in God that would compromise his unity. This is presumably why Augustine holds that whatever God wills he wills in a single eternal and immutable act, of which divine actions occurring in time are merely the consequences.°* The implications of identifying the divine essence with the divine will are immense. One is that it becomes very hard to see how God could will differently than he does, for in doing so one allows that God's essence could be different. The issue here is not precisely divine freedom, for free48Civ. 8.6, 11.10.

of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 1.235, 276, 285-87.

Aristotle East and West, 161-65.

°2Conf. 12.15, Civ. 12.17, De Gen. ad lit. 4.23-25.

Augustine the Metaphysician has no cause and that God cannot be affected.°" It seems highly plausible (although it cannot be proven) that Augustine's interpretation of the biblical texts on predestination was at least partly determined by these prior philosophical commitments.

These are a few examples of how Augustine's philosophical views spill over, as it were, into his theology. Obviously any thorough comparison of Augustine and the Greek fathers would have to take account of how similar issues are treated in the Greek tradition. That is a large project on which I have attempted to make a beginning elsewhere.**

Ultimately, however, in assessing Augustine's particular way of appropriating classical metaphysics, we ought to focus primarily not on its theological implications but on its intrinsic philosophical value. Here I would like to end with a simple but, as it seems to me, highly significant observation. This is that even Plato ultimately moved away from the identification of being with undivided wholeness that is typical of the middle dialogues. In the Sophist he argues that the Forms blend or partake of one another, so that all partake of the Form of the Different, and even nonbeing "is" inasmuch as each of the Forms is not the others.*? On such a view, to be is not simply to be one, for each of the Forms truly is, yet its being is constituted partly by its relations to the others. Thus Plato himself provides grounds for rejecting any straightforward identification of being with unity. One can only speculate how the subsequent history of philosophy might have been different ifAugustine's fertile and perceptive mind had encountered the Sophist.

the articles by Cousineau and Teske (above, n. 53), and for divine impassibility see °8See, besides the book and articles referred to above, my "Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers," The Thomist 70 (2006): 311-66.

Sophist 256d-e.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Postscript It became clear during the initial presentation of papers that David Bentley Hart and I disagreed on several aspects of the topic at hand. Since the points at issue between Professor Hart and myself are of fundamental importance,I have appended this postscript to address his concerns.

First let me mention, in order to set it aside, a point where Professor Hart seems to undermine his own position as much as my own. This is his assertion that to speak of either the knowability or unknowability of the divine essence is "pious nonsense." If this were true it would make the dispute between us largely pointless, for our dispute concerns in part the interpretation of such language, and there is little point in disputing about the meaning of nonsense. I also note that Professor Hart freely speaks of the divine essence, not only when interpreting the fathers, but also in his own voice, as in his assertion that God "in his essence" is goodness itself, truth itself, and so on. Surely it would be strange if modern theologians were to be permitted to use such language, while the fathers are not.

Admittedly, however, these points are merely ad hominem. As regards the substantive issue,I do not find the reason Hart adduces for rejecting such language persuasive. In speaking of the divine essentia or oboia one certainly does not posit a "reality prior to, apart from, or more original than the paternal apy)"; after all, if one did, then the very assertion that the Son is 6uoovotoc with the Father would be suspect. The best way to take these terms is as I suggested above: as referring to God as he is known to himself, as distinct from how he is manifested. So far as I can see, this is a meaning equally acceptable to East and West, and neutral as regards the points at issue between Hart and myself. It also carries no anti-trinitarian implications, for God may very well (and does, in the Christian view) know himself to be Trinity. I shall therefore set aside the charge of "pious nonsense" as misguided.

Turning now to the substance of the dispute, I shall first deal with our differences regarding divine intelligibility, and then turn to some broader issues, Augustine the Metaphysician

It is clear that Professor Hart and I do not interpret Augustine's sermon 117 in the same way. Here is the passage at issue, as translated by Edmund Hill, O.P., in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Augustine has been describing how the Word, not being spatially extended like sensible objects, is "not less in his parts than in his totality" He continues:

But you are quite unable to imagine or think of such a thing. And such ignorance is more religious and devout than any presumption of knowledge. After all, we are talking about God. It says, and the Word was God (Jn 1.1). We are talking about God; so why be surprised if you cannot grasp it? | mean, if you can grasp it, it ist God. Let us rather make a devout confession of ignorance, instead of a brash profession of knowledge. Certainly it is great bliss to have a little touch or taste of God with the mind; but completely to grasp him, to comprehend him, is utterly impossible.

God belongs to the mind, he is to be understood; material bodies belong to the eyes, they are to be seen [ad mentem Deus pertinet, intelligendus est; ad oculos corpus, videndum est]. But do you imagine you can completely grasp, or comprehend, a body with your eyes? You most certainly can't.

I mean, whatever you look at, you are not looking at the whole of it. When you see someone's face, you don't see their back while you see their face; and when you see their back, you don't at that moment see their face. So then you don't see things in such a way as to grasp or comprehend them whole ...

[The rest of the paragraph elaborates on this point.| So then, brothers and sisters, what can we say about that Word?

Look, here we are, saying about material things staring us in the face, that we cannot take them all in, grasp them totally, by a look. So what mind's eye will be able to grasp God, take all of him in? It is enough to touch his fringes, if the mind's eye is pure. But if it does touch upon him, it does so with a kind of immaterial and spiritual touch, but still does not embrace or comprehend him all; and that too, if the mind is pure.°°

117.5. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, part 3, ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Augustine's language here is deliberately paradoxical, involving at least two sharp rhetorical reversals. First, he asserts that God cannot be fully grasped or comprehended, and then he summarizes this assertion, surprisingly enough, in the formula that God intelligendus est. Apparently,

God is for the mind alone to understand, and precisely for that reason is not fully intelligible or comprehensible. That is the first reversal. Given that the rest of the sentence contrasts God as intelligendus with sensible body as videndum, one might suppose at this point that Augustine intends a fundamental contrast between the mind, which can never fully comprehend its object, and the senses, which do so. However, such a conclusion would be premature, for we quickly find that the senses do not comprehend their object either. Augustine takes this as strengthening his point: neither the mind nor the senses fully comprehend their object, so how could anyone hope fully to comprehend God? Only when it is pure can the mind aspire to "touch upon him ... with a kind of immaterial and spiritual touch."

Now if Professor Hart's point is that this passage alone does not clearly distinguish Augustine's position from that of the Greek fathers, I agree.

The entire passage is reminiscent of the second of Gregory Nazianzen's theological orations, which similarly hammers home the unknowability of God by stressing the deficiencies in our knowledge of sensible beings.

On the other hand, the passage does not provide particularly strong evidence for a principled apophaticism either, for it places the unknowability of God more or less on a par with that of sensible objects. To be sure, it does so for rhetorical reasons: its thrust is that, given that we do not really comprehend sensible objects, how can we hope to comprehend

God, who so vastly transcends them? This argument is fine as far as it goes.

But it leaves untouched the more difficult question of in precisely what sense God really is intelligible, despite the failures of our own attempts to comprehend him. In particular, it says nothing about whether the angels or the blessed in heaven, who are free from the limitations of our present earthly ways of knowing, might have a far more adequate cognition of Sermons, vol. 4, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1992), 211-12 (PL

Augustine the Metaphysician God than we do here. It is on these questions, and not the relatively uncontroversial issue of whether God can be fully comprehended by creatures, that I think there is a substantive difference between Augustine and the Greek fathers.

Perhaps I ought not to have cited the sermon at all without going into these complexities.°! However,| did not cite it as proofof a substantive difference, and certainly not as my "sole solid corroboration." I cited it merely to illustrate (via the striking application of intelligendus to God) a difference that is clear on other grounds. To repeat what is said above, I maintain that Augustine rejected apophaticism in the specific sense of the denial that God is an object of vonotg and I take this rejection to be simply a corollary of the particular way in which he collapses the distinction between the One and Intellect of Plotinus, so that terms such as Truth,

Form, and Being, which were for Plotinus applicable to Intellect but not to the One, become for Augustine straightforwardly applicable to the divine essence.°* Since Professor Hart wishes for further evidence, however, I will gladly provide it, as I have already done elsewhere.°* The clearest evidence comes from Augustine's discussion of the beatific vision. Hart seems to regard the belief in an eschatological vision of the divine essence as a specifically

Thomistic doctrine, or at best as a"Thomistic interpretation" ofAugustine, and therefore as belonging to those "medieval syntheses" that we ought to avoid. He says this without any reference to Augustine's actual writings on ¢'Hart also has a fair point in observing that I ought to have translated the sentence I quoted from this sermon literally rather than relying on Cary's paraphrase—although, had

I done so, it would have made no difference to my argument.

it is not true that | rely preponderantly upon the Sol., as even a casual reading of my essay will confirm. It is also not true that intelligibilis primarily means "possessing a spiritual or rational nature." The entry for this term in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae indicates that its original meaning was the same as that of"intelligible" in English, and that this meaning remained current throughout late antiquity. The sense Hart cites arose in Christian Latin in the late fourth century, so that in Augustine either meaning is possible. One could quibble over particular occurrences, but | am not sure what difference it would make, particularly since Hart himself, in the same footnote, renders the term as "intelligible."

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE the subject. When one turns to those writings, one finds that the essential elements of the Thomistic view are already present. Augustine regards

Moses (in Exodus 33) and St Paul (when he was taken up into the "third heaven," 2 Cor 12.2) as having been granteda distinctive form of the vision of God known as "intellectual" vision. Unlike corporeal theophanies, dreams, and prophetic visions, intellectual vision has as its object "that form by which God is what he is," or equivalently, "the very substance of God.' Sucha vision is available only to one who has been taken up out of the body, as were Moses and St Paul, presumably (although Augustine is not fully explicit about this) because the senses introduce corporeal images that would obscure or constrict the vision.°° The angels and the blessed in heaven enjoy this sort of vision permanently, although for the blessed it will be fully complete only after the resurrection of the body.°°

In light of these texts, I do not see how it is possible to say, as does Professor Hart, that for Augustine "every kind of vision of God in himself is impossible for finite creatures." The intellectual vision is precisely a vision of "God in himself"; that is the point of distinguishing it from visions of corporeal theophanies and the like, which Augustine regards as mediated. I also do not see how it is possible to deny that there is a real difference on this issue between Augustine and the Greek fathers.°7 It is not my purpose at present to argue that one side is more right than the other, but only to insist that their difference ought not to be glossed over or ignored.

Gen. ad lit. 12.26.54-28.56, 34.67-36.69; Ep. 147.31-32. For the quoted phrases (speciem scilicet, qua deus est quidquid est, and ipsa Dei substantia) see 12.28.56 and 147.31; cf. the discussion in Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (New York: Harper and Row,

5De Gen. ad lit. 12.27.55, Ep. 147.31; cf. Ad Simpl. 2.1.1.

De Gen. ad lit. 35.68-36.69; Ep. 147.32. The point about completion after the resurrection is a difference between Augustine and Aquinas; cf. Aristotle East and West, 256.

the classic discussion of the doctrine of the Greek fathers (including their interpretation of the biblical texts cited by Hart) see Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973).

have discussed the eschatological vision in Maximus and Palamas in Aristotle East and West, 192-95, 236. Incidentally I believe that Palamas would endorse the notion of the "receding horizon" as the boundary between the divine essence and energies, for, like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus, he envisions the state of the blessed as one of perpetual progress; see Triads 1.3.22, 2.2.11.

Augustine the Metaphysician I also disagree with Hart regarding what Augustine means in identifying God with his own will.

I am not sure what more I can do here than repeat what I stated earlier, that to interpret the identity as applying only to the will as a faculty, and not to God's express and determinate will— which I take to be Hart's view—introduces a distinction between what

God is and what God has (namely, a certain express and determinate will) of the sort that Augustine explicitly denies. Since Hart himself insists on divine simplicity in the strongest terms, I am surprised that he does not see the point. Note as well that Hart insists repeatedly that God can possess no "unrealized potential."

This is the familiar doctrine of God as actus purus. On sucha view, there is again no way to distinguish other than notionally between God's will as a faculty and the expression of that will in a particular determinate set of choices, for the simple reason that to do so would require positing choices that God could have made but did not, and these would constitute an unrealized potency.®* Surely it is no accident that Aristotle, who originated this way of thinking about God, did not ascribe to God anything like free choice. Professor Hart seems to think that the view of God as possessing no unrealized potential was commonly held among the fathers of both East and West. Perhaps it is present by implication in Augustine, but I know of no grounds for ascribing it to the Greek fathers, and Hart provides no evidence to the contrary.

That brings me to our numerous differences regarding the Greek fathers. I cannot discuss them all here, but will limit myself to the points

Professor Hart makes in response to my essay. He alleges that "logically, if the divine energies are genuine manifestations of God, however limited, then whatever names apply to the energies also apply to the essence," so that I am wrong to "claim . . . that, for Gregory, the divine names apply only to the divine energies and not to the divine essence." If this is indeed a logical entailment it was apparently lost on Gregory, for Gregory states explicitly that the divine names indicate or signify (onpaivew) the divine energies and not the divine nature.©' Perhaps by "apply" Hart has in mind something different from what Gregory means by onpaivev, but if so, he

problem is closely related to that mentioned above, n. 56.

Aristotle East and West, 163-64.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE should explain the difference. Hart also seems to think that I present Gregory as saying that "the divine names do not refer to God in himself? But I did not say this. Certainly for Gregory the divine names refer to God, and he presents a carefully reasoned analysis of the semantics of @&d¢ to explain how this is possible.

am not sure what would be added (unless emphasis?) by saying that they refer to "God in himself?"

Professor Hart also presents John Damascene as arguing that the names or attributes of God "apply to the divine essence" but are not "true of God in a plural way,' since they are all "identical with one another."I find these statements confusing, partly because I am unsure what to make of the notion of applying to the essence, and partly because I do not know what it means to be "true of God in a plural way." What John actually says is that names such as "good" and "just" follow the nature (xapéxovtat ti Pvoet). | take this to be his way of adapting the notion, familiar from the Cappadocians, that such names signify "the things concerning the divine nature" (t& nepi tiv Oetav pvdow)."° It is precisely the fact that these names indicate

(onpaivew) or reveal (SnAobv) only the things concerning the divine nature, and not the divine nature itself, which John cites as explaining how they are compatible with divine simplicity. He most certainly does not say that they are identical with one another, whether "in God" or elsewhere.

Naturally, then, I am unconvinced by the bald claim that for the Greek fathers "the divine essence and divine attributes are identical."Iknow of no texts where they say such a thing, and quite a few where they deny it.7!

Iam also puzzled by the claim that Gregory in the Oratio catechetica identifies the divine will and the divine goodness, and that John Damascene identifies the divine essence, Godhead, power, and will. Gregory says nothing of the sort; he merely says that the divine will "wills whatever is good, which is hardly to say that the will is the same as the attribute of goodness."* Likewise John says only that "there is one essence, one good70See ibid., 207-8.

71See ibid., 161-69, 180-82, 189-91, as well as other texts discussed by Lossky, The Vision of God.

72More precisely, "whatever is good, this it also wishes, and, wishing, is able to perform, and, being able, will not fail to perform"; Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica 1, trans.

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, 5.476.

Augustine the Metaphysician ness, one power, one will, one energy, one authority, one and the same, I repeat, not three resembling each other.""> Here he merely denies that each person of the Trinity has an essence, goodness, or other attributes distinct from that of the others; he says nothing about the relationships among the essence and attributes.

There are many other points where Professor Hart and I disagree, but to address them all here would go too far afield. In closing let me thank

Professor Hart for his stimulating remarks.

73John Damascene, Defide Orthodoxa 1.8, trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series Deprofundis: Augustine's Reading of Orthodoxy a CAROL HARRISON cc rthodoxy,' either in the upper or lower case, is something of a loaded term. It is for this reason that, in the subtitle of this paper, I have deliberately attempted to turn the remit of the present volume on its head and, instead of talking about "orthodox readings of Augustine,"

I would like to talk about "Augustine's reading of orthodoxy." It goes without saying that this will always be in reference to orthodoxy in the lower case. By investigating what Augustine thinks orthodoxy is, I would like to ask whether he is indeed orthodox in his own terms. The title of the paper is an attempt to hint, with more than a passing nod to the Psalms, that the aspect of orthodoxy I would like to pursue, both in elucidating and then evaluating Augustine's use of the term, is what I would like to call its "dark side."

Orthodoxy—right opinion or belief—is something that has more often than not emerged, and been consciously formulated and articulated, in the context of conflict; when opinions or beliefs that have threatened to undermine it have been identified, opposed and effectively despatched, with a clear definition of what is believed to be right or true.

In this sense, statements of orthodoxy often take the form of rules of faith, creedal formulas, canonical rules, or other short, memorable summaries of what is held to be the true faith against heretical misinterpretation and distortion. To ask what is orthodox is, then, in some sense, to ask for a definition, for a statement, for a clear, fixed, unmovable, and unmoving articulation of what the faith of the Church is. If we asked this question of ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Augustine, we would find ample material in his works to establish a firm, clear, comprehensive answer. He spent most of his life articulating and fiercely defending orthodoxy, the true faith, against all comers—Manicheans, Donatists, and Pelagians among them. He did so convinced that the true faith was to be found in the Catholic Church,! founded upon the twofold authority of its divinely inspired scriptures? and of the divine grace, which it mediates througha tradition that originated in Christ, is passed on in unbroken succession through its apostles to its bishops, is formulated in its councils, creeds, and canons, and is above all present in its sacraments. The universality of the Church, its antiquity, and the fact that it enjoyed the general consent of human beings only sealed its claim to orthodoxy—to be the right faith.* So far so good: scripture, tradition, the Church, and its sacraments.

This is what we might rightly expect as an answer to how Augustine understood orthodoxy, but neither the question of what orthodoxy is, nor the answer, is quite so straightforward. I would like to suggest that if we look, not beyond, but within the seemingly monolithic, immovable, and immutable fixity of this sort of orthodoxy we will find a darker side: an unavoidable undercurrent of ambiguity, difficulty, and obscurity; of fluidity, change, and flexibility that, unless it is acknowledged and consciously appreciated, can only lead to unexplained conflict, disagreement, and potentially dangerous fractures and divisions. The image that comes to mind is of the plates that make up the earth's surface: they seem fixed, and on the basis of that reassuring fixity we describe them, allocate names to places, create maps and atlases, identify geological characteristics, and so on. Yet we are all aware that these vast plates are slowly, inexorably, moving and changing (perhaps more aware than ever, given global warming, but that is not really my point here); that at any minute they might erupt or clash to change things forever; that the earth is temporal, mutable, and can undergo dramatic transformations. More often than not, however, we choose to ignore it.

2Ep. 147.4; Civ. 11.3.

Ep. 186.33; De util. cred. 31.

De profundis: Augustine's Reading of Orthodoxy With this image in mind I would like to move on to examine the undercurrents, as it were, of Augustine's reading of orthodoxy. What we called the "dark side" of orthodoxy—its inherent ambiguity, fluidity, and potential for change—is perhaps nearest the surface in the first of the unquestioned authorities to which Augustine, like all the fathers, appeals: the scriptures. Whenever Augustine wishes to confirm or establish the truth of any belief—whether it is indeed "orthodox"—his first response is to turn to the scriptures and to defend and argue his case from them. But the truth of the scriptures is far from clear or fixed; in fact they are a prime example of what it means to have divine treasure in earthen vessels: the divine Word incarnate, eternal truth expressed in temporal, mutable, corporeal form. The truth is often found well below the surface; it is more often obscured by the words in which it is expressed than revealed by them; it needs to be sought out by means of figurative interpretation, analogy, metaphor, typology, allegory; it resists the rationalistic grasp of the proud and is accessible only to the tentative search of the humble. This is indeed shifting ground. In book 12 of the Confessiones (Confessions),

Augustine admits that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible (and perhaps not desirable), to attempt to ascertain the specific truth of a particular passage, or what single meaning its author intended to convey; different individuals might find a different truth or meaning in any one passage, and each of the meanings they find is acceptable so long as they do not contradict the double commandment of love of God and neighbor.' The potential that each passage of scripture has for meaningful and true interpretation—or improvisation—on the basic themeofthe double commandment loosens up the notion of orthodoxy as something essentially fixed and unmoving and shifts the emphasis to the very much more flexible and creative idea that, like a jazz scale, according to which the players will then improvise on a particular set of notes, there are certain "rules of thumb" or "rules of faith" that the interpreter must indeed observe, but they are rules that effectively enable him or her to freely improvise on the particular details of scripture to arrive at new, shifting, diverse meanings,

4 Conf. 12.25.35; De doc. 1.39.44.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE which, nevertheless, resonate with the faith and do not diverge from its truth—in other words, which are orthodox. What might emerge from these improvisations—as we all know from our reading of patristic sermons—can, at best, be exhilarating, illuminating, and surprising, and at worst, disconcerting, digressive, and depressing.

The second authority to which Augustine and the fathers appeal to establish what is orthodox is, of course, the Church and the divinely given grace and teaching, which originates in Christ and which the Church transmits through its tradition and sacraments. In many respects Augustine understands it in the same manner as the scriptures, and it shares many of the characteristics that we have described as belonging to the "dark side" of orthodoxy: the divine truth that the tradition of the Church hands on, or mediates, and the sacramental grace that it bestows are something that is given to us through temporal, mutable, corporeal means. Its truth and grace are not something we possess, but something given, which we must receive by hearing, reading, interpreting, and participating. How we do this is not always clear or straightforward. The tradition or teaching of the Church is something that is at once divine but, like scripture, is mediated to us through frail, faltering, fallible human beings. They can differ, or we can differ in our interpretation of them, but again Augustine maintains that what is important is not to diverge from Christ's teaching, summed up in the double commandment of love of God and love of neighbor. Cyprian, like the Donatists, may have erred in advocating rebaptism of heretics, but unlike them he did not break with the tradition of the Church but rather remained within the unity of charity, and therefore remained orthodox, despite his uncomfortable disagreement with the bishop of Rome. In other words, there might well be difficulties, disagreements, and differences, but so long as they resonate with the double commandment they are still comprehended by right faith, or orthodoxy.° Augustine is clearly aware that, far from being fixed or unmoving, orthodoxy, or right faith, is something that, while given to us by God in °De bap. contra Don. 1.18.28-19.29.

De profundis: Augustine's Reading of Orthodoxy scripture, the tradition, and sacraments of the Church, is defined by its alterity; it only emerges insofar as we participate in it and receive it. We do this by listening to God in prayer, hearing him in scripture and the preacher, participating in the liturgy, receiving the sacraments, loving our neighbor, and above all loving God by confessing our complete and utter dependence upon his grace. In other words, right faith/orthodoxy is not something fixed, which we can claim to know or possess or impose, as Augustine accuses the Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians of doing, but something that we are given and receive only through relation to, and participation in, the unity of love that constitutes the Church, where God is present and is mediated to us. Like a piece of improvisation, true faith emerges and is defined only by being performed, communicated, shared, and received by and with others. It is something of an understatement to observe that Augustine's thought is profoundly "social"; suffice it to say that for him human beings are only insofar as they relate to God and to one another. Human beings are by definition relational, and their life is always—from Adam and Eve in Genesis, who were intended to found a society, to the City of God in this life and the life to come—a social one.®

To return to our earlier analogy: like the earth's plates, human society might appear, from our perspective, to be always the same: immovably fixed, settled, and definable. But in truth it is always slowly but inexorably shifting and changing, as its members take account of the past, accommodate themselves to the present, and anticipate the future, receiving, assimilating, transposing, and improvising upon the tacit, everyday customs, habits, consensus, and traditions that make it what it is. The temporal, culturally determined nature of human society and its beliefs is something Augustine demonstrates an acute consciousness of in many of his works. Against the Manichees it allows him to understand and exonerate the behavior of the patriarchs as simply "of their time"' in De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching), it determines the way in which he thinks the Christian must approach the interpretation of scripture

(conscious of the weight of pagan learning, tradition, and custom; able to Civ. 12.28.1, 19.5; De bono conj. 1.1.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE identify and use aspects of it useful to a Christian culture and reject those inimical to it);* it informs the way in which we articulate what we believe and understand (in a language that only succeeds in communicating anything at all because human beings agree, by custom and common consent, upon what it means);? in De civitate Dei (City of God) it imposes a particular understanding of the interrelation between human action and divine providence in sacred and secular history. Augustine is well aware that the constantly shifting, fluid, and flexible nature of human society means that orthodoxy or right faith must be creatively and imaginatively re-thought, reformulated, and improvised. In other words, it must be expressed in a manner in which it will resonate with its hearers—both

Christian and non-Christian—if it is not to become arcane, offensive, obscure, or unintelligible.

Perhaps most important, for Augustine, is the fundamental principle that all human reality and all human belief or opinion, if they are to be rightly valued and held, must be treated as provisional and open ended, and be constantly directed toward their source and end in God. They are, by definition, signs (signa) or pointers to a reality or truth (res) that lies beyond them and must therefore never be taken as an end in themselves, or enjoyed for themselves, but must always be used and referred toward

Belief or opinion is right, or orthodox, only if it knows itself to be belief and opinion and not knowledge; if it is exercised in humility rather than pride; if it is oriented in hope and love toward what it does not yet see or understand. The whole thrust of Augustine's thought is eschatological. Here we have only temporal, mutable, and corporeal signs that are inevitably ambiguous, obscure, and difficult. The best we can do is rightly believe that they are created and inspired by God and, if they are thus heard and seen, they serve to inspire our love and desire for him. It is not without reason that whenever Augustine sets out to give a formal statement or description of what orthodox faith or life is—in book 1 of De doctrina Christiana, in De catechizandis rudibus (On Teaching the Unin8See esp. De doc. 2.19.29—42.63.

!°For a theoretical statement see book 1 of De doc.

De profundis: Augustine's Reading of Orthodoxy in Eden, it is now unattainable, in the Church or elsewhere, in this life, and must be sought in faith, hope, and love for the life to come; and against the Pelagians and the philosophers, that while eternal, immutable, incorporeal truth was once accessible to us, it is no longer; that whereas we had once known and participated in the truth, this is now lost to us without God's gracious incarnation, revelation, and inspiration. Orthodoxy, or right faith, for Augustine, is a matter of faith, hope, and love for what we do not yet possess rather than the certainty of knowledge, vision, or perfection attained. Controversy certainly prompted Augustine into formulating the true faith or orthodoxy, systematically and clearly, but it is a clear and systematic statement of the ever present "dark side"—of creation's and the creature's dependence and contingency upon their Creator for their being and their continuation in being. What Augustine has done is to provide us not with a topography of the earth's surface but of the dark, shifting, and unsettling undercurrents of human sinfulness and divine grace we would rather choose to ignore.

In concluding this paper I would like, briefly, to mention one other meaning of orthodoxy that has been mentioned a number of times in this volume and which bears directly on what we have just said: orthodoxy is, of course, not only right faith (recta fides) but also right praise (recta jubilatio/laus). We have seen that the difficulty, obscurity, and ambiguity of the dark side are best encountered in faith, hope, and most especially, love.

One might also add, on a rather more optimistic note, that the best and most appropriate expression of this faith, hope, and love is undoubtedly praise: the wordless praise of jubilation for that "which cannot be uttered." Right faith leads inevitably to right praise.

"En. in Ps. 99.5. Cf. 32.1.8; 65.2; 94.4. e >) e e Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism a a Davip TRACY Introduction: Augustine in Fragments? n an essay on Wittgenstein and Nietzsche,' Erich Heller developed an interesting dual metaphor: understanding some thinkers is like climbing Mont Blanc; understanding other thinkers is like exploring an ancient city like Rome. First, Mont Blanc: the journey can be tedious, sometimes through detours, always tough. But once you have managed to reach the summit, you know exactly where you are. The surrounding territory lies before you as a clear, ordered, coherent panorama. Heller's philosophical examples for this mountain imagery are nicely chosen:

Aristotle and Kant. One can easily add theological examples: Thomas Aquinas, Gregory Palamas, John Calvin—difficult, disciplined, deeply impressive, orderly, coherent, panoramic thinkers all.

On the other hand, a never-completed understanding of an ancient city isa good metaphor for understanding a very different kind of thinker:

Plato, Pascal, Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Gregory of Nyssa, Martin Luther, and, surely, Augustine. Years of studying the texts of Augustine is indeed like getting to know an ancient, crowded, labyrinthine city—a city like Rome with layer after layer of history, with individual neighborhoods often defining an era (for example, Renaissance Rome

'Erich Heller, "Ludwig Wittgenstein," in Encounters, ed. Melvin Lasky (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1965), 376-92.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE manifests itself in the Via Giulia and a few Renaissance palaces here and there—all surrounded by Baroque and Risorgimento and contemporary times). One never really knowsa city like Rome. One can take walk after walk for years; one can study interminable books of history, art, philosophy, and theology; one can consult ancient, medieval, Renaissance,

Baroque, Risorgimento, and contemporary maps. Despite all that work, any honest explorer of Rome (even a native) is always unsure if one has really understood Rome. One is never quite sure where one is in relationship to the ever-shifting whole named Rome. In my judgment, Heller's city metaphor seems particularly appropriate for those very rare thinkers who are also great artists or, if you prefer, those very rare artists who are also major thinkers: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Gregory Nazianzen, surely; but especially Plato and Augustine. The thought of these thinker-artists will never yield to a single Mont Blanc panorama.

After great and sustained labor, one may believe that one has reached something like an adequate vision of the basic set of distinctions, definitions, and ordering structures that constitute the great work of an Aristotle, a Thomas Aquinas, a Kant. But does anyone wish to announce that she has understood all the fragments, resolved all the seeming contradictions, unfolded all Augustine's tropes and topics in his often astounding lateantique Latin rhetoric? Augustine is singular: both thinker and artist, rhetorician and dialectician, at times a gently dialogical and fiercely polemical writer, a contemplative and full-time pastor. Karl Jaspers states that no great thinker was ever as busy with the world's business as Nicholas of Cusa; he forgot Augustine.

Reading Augustine will always disclose new alleys, new diggings (in Augustine's case, newly discovered sermons and letters), new readers, ever new admirers and detractors, new methods of scholarship to shift an emphasis for interpreting Augustinian texts. For example, there is an important difference in understanding Augustine on God from the emphasis (perhaps overemphasis) on Augustine's Platonism from the Courcelle period of scholarship of the 1950s? to the present scholarly

?Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les "Confessions" de saint Augustin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ever, again like all of us, Petrarch glimpsed only one part of that crowded city. Augustine is a teeming, overcrowded city; he is not a clean, welllighted mountaintop.

Theological students must also labor with Augustine's polemical texts, those very influential, perhaps—dare | suggest it, too influential—texts: against the skeptics, the Manicheans, the Donatists, the Arians, the Pelagians, and, in the De civitate Dei, even against the formerly honored Platonists. And yet alongside these famously polemical texts there exist also the more serene, the deeply dialogical, and mostly non-polemical early writings from Augustine's leisure year at Cassiciacum. Those early dialogical writings are not only fascinating in themselves; they are also deeply suggestive of the kind of dialogues Augustine may well have continued to write if he had not been forced to leave his life of otium (contemplative leisure) and his companions both at Cassiciacum and in his rural retreat at his home in Thagaste. For Augustine was, in effect, coerced into a bishopric and its enormous pastoral duties. The time of dialogues with likeminded companions was over. His pastoral life as priest, then as bishop, had begun.

Once Augustine became a baptized Christian this classically trained rhetorician realized he did not know the Bible at all well. His only childhood memories here were of catechesis and Monica's lessons. As an adult he held to a dismissive "cultured despiser" view of the Bible compared to Virgil, Horace, and Cicero. The Platonist allegorical sermons of Ambrose of Milan freed Augustine to read the Bible with new and eager eyes. Moreover, the books of "some Platonists" freed Augustine from his earlier materialistic view of the world. Thus altered, the newly baptized Augustine was ready to become more and more a biblical theologian. One result of Augustine's turn to the Bible has been to lead many contemporary interpreters (I among them) to find certain of his biblical texts far more important than his more polemical works:° the sermons, the sermoncommentaries, initially the commentaries on Paul, then the sermon-commentaries on 1 John and the Sermon on the Mount, the commentaries on Bible de Tous les Temps, vol. 3 of Saint Augustin et la Bible, ed. A.-M. La Bonnardiére

(Paris: Beauchesne, 1986).

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism Genesis, and his incomparable commentary on the Psalms. In these sermons and biblical commentaries, Augustine's passionate intelligence and full rhetorical genius are ablaze.

Augustine the thinker and artist, therefore, does not yield to a single vision from the beginnings of his writings at Cassiciacum through his

Retractiones (Retractions) and his anti-Julian of Eclanum texts at the end.

In that sense, even when we possess full texts, what we possess are in fact fragments of some larger whole, at once elusive and overdetermined. In Augustine, the texts themselves have become fragmentary: sometimes complementing one another; sometimes merely stranded next to one another like sunken ruins; sometimes seeming to contradict one another.

For example, it is not easy or perhaps even desirable to try to render coherent all of Augustine's positions on free will.° There are still other fragments in Augustine's texts that are more like verbs than nouns. Such fragments are not merely fragments of a larger whole by means of which, as with the German Romantics, nostalgia is evoked for some lost whole

(in this case, some lost totality called "true" Augustinianism). Rather, as Walter Benjamin shows with other texts' (in his case, principally Trauerspiel, kabbalistic texts, Kafka, nineteenth-century Paris) there are certain texts that, even when we possess the whole text, are fragmentary in their explosive power to shatter any temptation of totality (Augustinianism again) or some final once-and-for-all "true" interpretation. Only period pieces yield to a once-and-for-all interpretation—classics never. There are

Augustinian fragments (perhaps more accurately named frag-events*) that dissolve, implode, or explode to manifest unforeseen new meanings not easily assimilable to other fragments. All true readers of Augustine live for a while with one or another fragment—sentences, metaphors, images, at times whole texts, as frag-events.

for example, the seeming contradictions between the early text, De lib. arb., and Retr.

?Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

In a forthcoming work entitled This Side of God, I have a chapter distinguishing the Romantic notion of fragment from one I defend as frag-event.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Some Augustinian images and phrases as frag-events have haunted his readers for centuries: pondus meum, amor meus ("my weight is my love");?

[s]ero te amavi ("late have I loved you");'° quaerebam quod amarem, amans amare ("I searched for something to love, in love with loving");"! and most unforgettably the Augustinian strain that has haunted western cultures for centuries: /t/u excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te ("you move us to delight for praising you, for you formed us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you").!?

If one views Augustine's texts as an ancient, layered, crowded city, one also may understand better how certain famous longtime visitors

(tourists need not apply) to the Citta Augustiniana tended to embrace one fragment, one neighborhood—the one that exploded for them as the central clue they had long sought. Thomas Aquinas loved Augustine with a purity of will peculiar to that serene thinker. As one example, Thomas sharpened brilliantly the more intellectualist moments in Augustine's trinitarian analogy of God.!? On the contrary, Cornelius Jansen stated that he read most ofAugustine several times but he read the anti-Pelagian writings thirty times! Calvin also read the anti-Pelagian writings with frightening attentiveness. Hans Urs von Balthasar read De vera religione

(On True Religion) even more than Confessiones as a less subjective Augustinian text that discloses how Augustine found true religion in Christianity's disclosive, beautiful forms.'* Bernard Lonergan read Augustine's early dialogues over and over before he turned to Thomas Aquinas and after that composed his own cognitional theory in Insight.!° Reinhold

'3Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. David B. Burrell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 93-112.

'SRichard M. Liddy, Transforming Light: Intellectual Conversion in the Early Lonergan (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 50-74.

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism is why, after all, we find it necessary to speak of early and late Wittgenstein; early and late Heidegger; early and late Karl Barth; early and late Karl Rahner, et al.

As contemporary receptions—often intellectual revivals—show, the thinkers of an ever-elusive fragmentary vision disclosed in a work alwaysin-process seem more helpful in our fragmented and fragmentary day: note the distinct philosophical retrievals of Plato's Good beyond Being in Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch; note the surprising new turn in many western theologians to Gregory of Nyssa; note new ways that Martin Luther is now interpreted—from traditional grace-sin perspectives to the unio Christi (even deification!) interpretations of Luther by the new

Finnish School.?? No reading of any great classic can ever prove definitive.

Classic texts are fragmentary. Period pieces are all too unitary.

Augustine's Theocentrism and Christomorphism In some event, epiphany, or manifestation or through the "hints and guesses"? afforded to each of us by fragments that affect our lives, one can become more receptive to naming the Real anew: the Void, the Open, the Good, God.?* Today many major thinkers (not only Christians, Jews, and Muslims) find that the Real somehow discloses itself for our naming. The only name that we can create through reason alone for the Real is a name at the limits of the possible, i.e., at the limits of reason (e.g., God as a limitconcept for Kant). Many modern philosophers can persuasively argue for the reasonable-ness of belief in naming the Real, God. Other philosophers argue for the reasonableness of naming the Real as the impersonal Good beyond Being (Murdoch), or as the Open (Heidegger), or as the Void (Nietzsche). But very few contemporary thinkers, on the basis of reason alone, presume to name the Real. The Real must somehow disclose itself for our

?2Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998).

phrase is T.S. Eliot's in The Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 30.

?47 analyze these four namings of the Real in the aforementioned This Side of God.

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism through faith in the revelation of Jesus Christ. One can, I believe, reformulate Augustine's point this way: only by naming Jesus of Nazareth (i.e., the Jesus whose words, actions, and sufferings are narrated in the gospels) the Christ can we name God. Through faith in Christ the Christian names

God as Love-Trinity in and through naming Jesus as the Christ. In Augustine's own words, to name God truly (i.e., as trinitarian love) is possible only by moving through Christ the man (i.e., Jesus) (per Christum hominem) to Christ as God (ad Christum divinum). In Augustinian christology, the Form Christ gathers all other forms to name God: per Christum hominem ad Christum divinum. Augustine's theology is theocentric through and through. At the same time, Augustine's theocentrism is constituted in and through his emphatic christomorphism.

Even those theologians who do not admire Augustine's De Trinitate as much as I do must admit that to understand the heart of Augustine's theology in its full theocentrism, we are very fortunate to possess not only the fragments of the other trinitarian reflections throughout Augustine's oeuvre but his one fully systematic treatise: on the Real as God wherein God is Love, i.e., is Trinity. This trinitarian theocentrism is also just as profoundly christomorphic. For Augustine, only through the Form of forms, the incarnate Mediator, Jesus Christ, do Christians adequately learn to name God as Love, as Triune.

And yet there remains a problem in understanding Augustine's christology: viz., that unlike in his treatise on God, De Trinitate, Augustine did not write a single treatise on christology. And yet his christology, although never finalized systematically, is nevertheless the central Form that throughout his work in-forms and trans-forms all Augustine's theology: on God, on creation, on grace, on eschatology, on ecclesiology, on anthropology.

Moreover, a similar search is needed to gather all the fragmentary forms in Augustine's multiple texts on the Spirit.2? Otherwise, we erroat Milan and in Ostia with Monica, see Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism:

Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 228-38.

an example here see Eugene TeSelle, "Holy Spirit," in Augustine through the Ages:

An Encyclopedia, ed. A. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism

Christological Fragments In histories of doctrine and histories of theology Augustine's christology is usually described as a traditional mediatorship christology. In terms of the person of Christ, Augustine's christology is often further described as Chalcedonian avant la lettre: Augustine died in 430 ce; Ephesus occurred in 431 (he had been invited); Chalcedon in 451. The descriptions ofAugustine's christology as Christ the mediator are, of course, accurate. Without the technical terms of Chalcedon, Augustine's understanding of the person of Christ was proto-Chalcedonian (i.e., one divine person in two natures). Augustine always held to the definition of Nicaea. In fact, Augustine, in fidelity to Ambrose in his strong anti-Latin Arian position of Ambrose, also consistently (most notably perhaps in the early anti-Arian books of his De Trinitate) stood fast against the characteristically Latin

Arian position. There can be no doubt that Augustine held a strong Nicaean christology and a strong mediator christology.

But should that be the end of a discussion of Augustine's christology?

On the one hand, there is no single Augustinian treatise on christology; on the other hand, christology is the most pervasive reality in all his works. Christ the mediator for Augustine is Christ the incarnate Godman, above all Christ the Form of both true God and true humanity. As the Form of Forms, Christ in-forms all reality, trans-forms all theology.

Christ the Form is not only incarnational but, as in Augustine's too often ignored theology of the cross (for example, in the Enarrationes in Psalmos), is also Christ as Cruciform Form. Augustine, in the Psalms commentarysermons, dares to speak of Deus crucifixus. The cruciform Christ form not only in-forms and trans-forms all theology (in harmony with the kenotic incarnation) but shatters and fragments any christology that may be tempted to remain only a traditional mediator christology. Jesus Christ the mediator, Christ the Form of Forms, Christ the kenotic incarnate God,

Christ the Fragmenting Cruciform, Christ the risen one, are the indispensable foundations of Augustine's christology. Even that complex, however, is not Augustine's whole christological edifice. His fuller christological edifice can be built up only by gathering the varied christologiAugustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism pagan neo-Platonists after Plotinus, Augustine through his christology of Christ, the one mediator, simplified the Platonic issue of mediation rather than complicated the neo-Platonist problem of mediation from the overflowing, emanating, impersonal One/Good of Plotinus. Augustine could thus simplify the problem since, as a Christian, he held to a kenotic personal God who so loves the world that God the Father with the Spirit sends the Son the divine love in creation (not emanation) and salvation

(by Jesus Christ as mediator). Christ bestows God's kenotic love to creatures who have soiled through sin the already gifted (kenotic) love of God in creation. In that theological sense,*° humans are wounded and deeply damaged but nevertheless have not lost their essence as still imago Dei (an image of God). God's love, both ecstatic and kenotic, is rendered present in and through the ultimate, singular, sufficient mediation, viz. the personal mediator Jesus Christ, the incarnate God-man One. The "pagan" neo-Platonists complicated the problem of mediation by ever more mediations of emanation. Augustine solved the problem of mediation for Christian Platonists through Christ the One Mediator.

As Pierre Hadot's works have demonstrated,*! all the ancient philosophers and theologians (whether Stoic, Epicurean, Aristotelian; whether pagan, Jewish [Philo], or Christian Platonist) held that philosophy-theology was never a purely theoretical discipline, as it often is in modernity.

Theory and practice were rarely divorced in ancient thought, as they regrettably still are for many, probably most, philosophers in modern western philosophy and theology. Some scholars hold that this separation of practice and theory (philosophy as a way of life; philosophy as a theory of life) began when western medieval theology moved from the monasteries to the universities. Yet this claim requires more nuanced distinctions—distinctions that are not separations, as the scholastics nicely said.

For example, Thomas Aquinas, for whom Augustine always remained the principal theological authority, developed distinctions that were not sep- *°Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity: Christian Theology in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

5!Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a WayofLife: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. A. Davidson (London: Blackwell, 1995).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE arations, including the distinction, not separation, between theory and practice. Moreover, Thomas' great contemporary at the University of Paris, Bonaventure, can be interpreted as correlating the new Franciscan spirituality of creation to traditional Augustinian interiority as well as to the achievements of high scholasticism. As a result, in Bonaventure's more scholastic works, and even more so in his other works (especially his

Itinerarium mentis in Deum), Bonaventure's medieval theology does not separate theory from practice, spirituality from theology. Unfortunately, however, these fatal separations occurred in western theology from the nominalists of the late medieval period through the strangely eclectic sixteenth-century univocal theoretical philosophy of Suarez to much modern philosophy, including the Suarezian Thomism of modern western neo-scholasticism. That Suarezian influence in the neo-scholastics was unfortunate. In fact, neo-scholasticism, the once all-powerful modern Catholic philosophical and theological force, seemed to believe, as Bernard Lonergan once observed, in clear and distinct ideas and very few of them.

Paradoxically, the neo-scholastics were far less interested in Augustine than Descartes was. For them Augustine was an "inspiring" but merely rhetorical thinker. As Pierre Hadot expresses it: in separating philosophy

(or theology) as theory from philosophy or theology as a way of life, most modern western thought lost the concern with specific spiritual practices so characteristic of all the ancient schools. Even more importantly, "modern" theology ignored what Bernard McGinn names the third form of medieval theology—the lay theologies often written in the vernacular, especially by the medieval women mystics. By way of contrast, in eastern

Christian thought, with its contemplative character and its liturgical grounding, this fatal modern western separation of theory and practice rarely occurred.*? The sustained contemporary western Christian interest in Orthodox theology since the great Catholic theologians of ressourcement (Daniélou, de Lubac, Congar, von Balthasar, et al.) is partly due to the need, among western theologians, to learn how much Orthodox the- *2In Orthodox theology this separation does occur in neo-Palamite theology.

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism ology, even in modernity, managed not to separate theory from practice, nor theology from spirituality.

The fact of the separation of theory and practice and the attendant loss of a contemplative moment in much western theology has also occasioned, in my judgment, serious repercussions in modern western theological interpretations of Augustine's theology of Christ as mediator. For example, the problem of many modern Catholic theological readings of Augustine had the opposite difficulty to liberal Protestant near-reductions of Christ's person to Christ's work. In fact, many Catholic theologians interpreted Augustine's christology as almost exclusively concerned with Christ's person (the mediator) and its proleptic relationship to Chalcedon. Among Catholic interpreters, soteriological concerns, the main focus of liberal Protestant interpreters since von Harnack, were quietly shifted to Augustine's theology of grace.

Fortunately, what has occurred in our day is a remarkable shift of emphasis in contemporary Augustinian scholarship from Augustine's relationship to his theoretical side of neo-Platonism to his deeply doctrinal, i.e., Nicaean, concerns as well as a new emphasis on the richer christology to be found in Augustine's biblical commentaries and sermons.

This new emphasis in Augustine can be found in his commentaries and sermons De sermone Domini in monte (On the Sermon of the Mount), In Evangelium Johannis tractatus (Tractates on the Gospel of John), In epistulam Johannis ad Parthos tractatus ( Tractates on the First Epistle ofJohn) as well as his christological readings of the Old Testament not only in the more familiar Augustinian readings of Paul for his theology of grace but, even more so, in Augustine's development of his fuller christology of the person and the work of Christ in, especially, his Enarrationes in Psalmos.

In addition, the recent scholarly attention to Augustine's sermons and letters (aided, of course, by the recent discovery of further sermons and letters as well as the hope, with the aid of modern technology, for yet further discoveries) has also enriched interpretations of Augustine's christology as Christ as mediator. Christ's mediatorship in Augustine is more complex than either earlier modern Catholic or modern Protestant and modern

Orthodox readings had acknowledged.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE In sum, thanks to contemporary Augustinian scholarship, all theologians, even non-specialists in Augustine like myself, have been driven to reread the relevant polemical works (especially the Latin anti-Arianism works) as well as to reread with more scriptural and doctrinal eyes the three classic Augustinian texts—Confessiones, De civitate Dei and De

Trinitate. Theologians are also now driven to read, often for the first time, the many letters, sermons, and the biblical commentaries to understand the fuller contours of Augustine's christology. There are multiple ways to illuminate not only Christ's person as mediator but Christ's work. In Augustine, Christ is both the way to God and the homeland longed for.**

In still other texts we can also find Augustine interpreting Christ as both the external and the interior teacher as well as Christ as both the physician and the medicine taken. In addition, in one of Augustine's most striking metaphors for the Church, the Church is the hospital where we receive the mediator-physician's medicines (the sacraments, preaching, spiritual counseling, and actions guided by the ordo caritatis).

Augustine as bishop learned the Bible more fully in order to preach to his people and to trans-form himself Christianly. We should also remember that his sermons were preached to very ordinary people, the largely illiterate congregation of provincial Hippo. One can observe this busily pastoral side of Augustine in the older but still very informative work of Professor van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop.** More recently, one can also observe Augustine the pastor in the new appendix in the new edition of Peter Brown's famous biography, Augustine ofHippo.*° In a characteristically modest moment of scholarly self-correction, Brown comments that the newly discovered sermons and letters of the old Augustine in his episcopal role as caring, compassionate pastor for his people calls into serious question the harsher portrait of the late Augustine that he (Peter

Christ as both way and homeland in Goulven Madec, La Patrie et la voie. Le Christ dans la vie et la pensée de saint Augustin (Paris: Desclée, 1989).

van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. Brian H. Battershaw and G.R. Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961).

Brown, Augustine ofHippo: A Biography, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 441-73.

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism ideal, whether for Stoic or Platonist or even for some ancient Christians.

To repeat: Augustine had once hoped to live, converse, and write with his friends at Cassiciacum and at rural Thagaste. Nonetheless, after Augustine became priest and bishop, all that changed. Without abandoning the ideal of contemplative interiority, Augustine modified that contemplative ideal considerably (presumably at great personal price). He did so not for his own sake but in order to serve his people every day, all day before returning to the monastery-like companionship of his priestly colleagues. Later

Christians named this now familiar Christian spiritual way "contemplation-in-action." Through his dual love of the contemplative ideal and of ceaseless pastoral activity in the world Augustine was one of the earliest

Christian proponents of this option. Pondus meum, amor meus.

In his Psalms commentaries and sermons, moreover, Augustine states (in his commentary on Psalm 140.7)** that two texts provide the key for understanding all scripture: Paul, as Saul, hearing the voice "why do you persecute me?" and Matthew 25 on the test beyond all beliefs in doctrines, the final Christian test of action for others, especially the poor, the oppressed, the marginal, the hungry, the naked, the mad, the possessed, the imprisoned.

In his ever developing christology, Augustine consistently believed that we are led by Jesus Christ as mediator, teacher, and healer—not so much to become "deified" (Augustine is relatively sparse in his use of this familiar eastern Christian language) but to become adopted sons and daughters of Christ by discipleship per Christum hominem ad Christum divinum.

There is one final, surprising, perhaps even shocking fragment in Augustine's fuller christology.*° Augustine was often driven to dark christologi38En. in Ps. 140.7 (Exposition of the Psalms [Enarrationes in Psalmos], 121-150, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/20, trans. Maria Boulding [Hyde

Park, NY: New City Press, 2004], 306).

alia, see Augustine's remarkable reflections on the difference between Paul's welcoming of death and Christ's (as God-man, not only as human) sadness and suffering in facing death in Gethsemane. Augustine's Latin has a rhetorical intensity not captured in the otherwise accurate translation. "Iste gaudet coronandus, et tristis est ille coronaturus: gaudet sic apostolus, et dicit Christus Dominus noster: Pater, si fieri potest, transeat hic calix.

Sed tristitiam sic assumsit quomodo carnem. Nolite enim putare quia hoc dicimus, non fuisse tristem Dominum. Si enim hoc dixerimus, quia non erat tristis, cum evangelium

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE cal reflections. Augustine dares to speak of Deus crucifixus; the Christum divinum emerges through the afflicted, human Jesus. The form of Christ is cruciform; the cruciform shatters and fragments all Christian complacency, including Augustine's earlier more sanguine mediator christology.

Conclusion: The Unstoppable Christological Drive of Augustine Augustine's christology—at least the very abbreviated version I formulate and articulate above—can be constituted only by gathering many Augustinian christological fragments into a tentative interpreted unity. Of course, this is only a beginning. Even if my readings are persuasive, these interpretations would, of course, only serve to initiate a study of Augustine's full christology. Above all we need extended theological reflection on how, exactly, Augustine's per Christum hominem ad Christum divinum christology allied to his pneumatology leads to naming of the Real as the trinitarian God who is Love.

There are some further implications of Augustine's christology for contemporary thought. Here are a few:

Augustine's christology addresses the Void named by so many contemporary thinkers as their principal concern. What other early Christian thinker was so obsessed with the void-producing question, unde malum?"° dicat: Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem, ergo et quando dicit evangelium: Dormiuit

Jesus, non dormiuit Jesus; et quando evangelium evangelium dicit: Manducauit Jesus, non manducauit Jesus..." En. in Ps. 93.19 (CCSL 39.1320-21). "Paul rejoices at the prospect of being crowned, yet Christ, who is to crown him is saddened. The apostle is jubilant, while

Christ our Lord is praying, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me [Mt 26.39]. But he had taken that sadness upon himself in the same way as he had taken flesh.

I do not mean that the Lord was not truly sad: do not take my words in that way. If we were to say that his sadness was not real when the gospel testifies, My soul is sorrowful to the point of death, we would have to assert likewise that when the gospel says, 'Jesus slept, he did not really sleep, and when it says, 'Jesus ate, he did not really eat [Mt 26.38]." Exposition of the Psalms 73-98,

The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, III/18 (Hyde Park, NY:

New City Press, 2002), 397.

Gillian R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Other Power strong enough to save us from the negative Void within, that nihil we self-destructively seem unable not to seek (non posse non peccare).

Nor is Augustine irrelevant to a Heideggerian option on naming the Real as the Open. For all the Romantics and, in a strikingly new way, for the later Heidegger, the power of the Real as the Open is disclosed by every work of art. After Being and Time Heidegger abandoned Augustine and moved to a new mode of contemplative thinking (Heidegger called it meditative thinking as distinct from calculative thinking). Heidegger's later philosophical thought—no longer Christian but still religious through and through—certainly no longer rested in God (as the Augustinian thinking of his early seminars did), nor did his later thought rest in the Void of Being and Time (i.e., Death replaces God as our destiny). The Void-Death—the end of all possibility for Dasein—must be appropriated resolutely. The Real for the Heidegger of Being and Time, more than he admitted perhaps even to himself, was the Void opened up to authentic

Da-sein to be appropriated as the Real of one's own death. After his further Void-inflected Nietzsche work, the later Heidegger emerges; his late turning to the Real as the Open manifested and hidden through the artwork, the "clearing" and ultimately, I believe, through a western Heideggerian form of Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

I cannot avoid the temptation of a brief "what if" reflection here. What if Heidegger had continued his reading of Augustine after Being and Time and had read, among other Augustinian texts, the Genesis commentaries for their disclosure of what he sought: an Open disclosing the goodness of infinite differences of each and every reality—for Augustine each real being created by a kenotic loving Creator God? Of course, Heidegger did not continue to read Augustine. Even if he had, he probably would not have found it persuasive at all. After all, God was dead for Heidegger from his Nietzsche interpretation forward. Nevertheless, the contemporary discussion on the best name for the Real—the Void, the Open, the Good or God—would have been greatly enhanced,I suggest, if the full complexity of Augustine's theocentrism and christomorphism were more fully comprehended by the once Augustinian Heidegger. Given the enormous influences of Heidegger (and Nietzsche behind him) in postmodern

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism thought, a continued Augustinian moment could have been very fruitful for postmodern thought. Augustine is still present among the secular postmoderns—Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Lyotard—but never as deeply and pervasively as in the early Heidegger.

Despite Augustine's reputation in our culture as "pessimistic," Augustine's final word is more accurately described as hope-ful rather than either optimistic or pessimistic. Optimism and pessimism, if they are virtues at all, are purely natural ones. Optimism and pessimism are positions largely dependent less on choice than on one's temperament, one's society and one's personal and historical fate. It is perhaps impossible not to be pessimistic after the evil, the slaughters, the horrors of the twentieth century. In a natural sense, Augustine was what William James*! named

"a sick soul" (restless, conflicted, convalescent). In that sense, Augustine was a natural pessimist. But Augustine never was—save possibly at Cassiciacum—what James named the alternative human type, a "healthyminded" optimist.

In his Christian conversion Augustine turned (or more accurately, as he would insist, was turned by God's grace) from his natural sick-souled pessimism to a faith working through love. After his acceptance of priestly and episcopal duties, whatever optimism was present at Cassiciacum retreated into the cave of his memory. Existentially, Augustine was always convalescent. Intellectually, he was restless. At the same time, Augustine discovered in Christianity what he most needed: a faith that gave, as gift, a genuine, transforming hope. Christian hope is neither optimism nor pessimism. A faith that may empower one to act compassionately for others as Jesus is narrated to have done (a major concern of Augustine's sermons) is no minor matter. A faith that grants hope on behalf of the hopeless is worth noticing after the century we have just survived and the future we cannot imagine. Augustine's hard-won hope is his greatest gift to the contemporary discussion. And yet even hope is not Augustine's final word. A large part of the greatness ofAugustine's sermons and commentaries on the Psalms is that in Augustine, as in the Psalms themselves

4!William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in The Works of William James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 71-139.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE (more than any other biblical book), one finds all the affects of life itself: lamentations, jubilation, thanksgiving, praise, wonder, teaching, anger, mercy, faith, hope, love. Without his Christian conversion Augustine, the most varied, the most affect-laden of great thinkers, may have found himself torn into a thousand pieces. In the Psalms (the leitmotif of the Confessiones as well) Augustine found his home. There it becomes clear that Augustine's hope was accompanied by the rarest of contemporary experiences: authentic joy—not fear, not a facile happiness but inexplicable, rare joy, an experience as rare and gifted as love. Joy, like Love, cannot be achieved. It happens.

I will end with a passage from Augustine, again from his wondrous work on the Psalms. Here Augustine recalls (perhaps from memories of his own rural youth) the wordless chant of workers in the field, the chant then named jubilum:

Do not worry, for he provides you with a technique for singing. Do not go seeking lyrics, as though you could spell out in words anything that will give God pleasure. Sing to him in jubilation. This is what acceptable singing to God means: to sing jubilantly. But what is that? It is to grasp the fact that what is sung in the heart cannot be articulated in words.

Think of people who sing at harvest time, or in the vineyard, or at any work that goes with a swing. They begin by caroling their joy in words, but after a while they seem to be so full of gladness that they find words no longer adequate to express it, so they abandon distinct syllables and words, and resort to a single cry of jubilant happiness. Jubilation is a shout of joy; it indicates that the heart is bringing forth what defies speech. To whom, then, is this jubilation more fittingly offered than to God who surpasses all utterance? You cannot speak of him because he transcends our speech; and if you cannot speak of him, yet may not remain silent, what else can you do but cry out in jubilation, so that your heart may tell its joy without words, and the unbounded rush of gladness not be cramped by syllables? Sing skillfully to him in jubilation.

in Ps, 32 (Enarrationes in Psalmos [Expositions of the Psalms], 1-32, III/15, 401). 1 was first alerted to this wonderful quotation some years ago in the chapter on Augustine

Augustine's Christomorphic Theocentrism An amazing memory in the cavern of Augustine's memoria: the wordsaturated rhetorician here remembers not words but a time when he is silent and listened to others' jubilum. He listens not only in hope but in jubilating joy.

A joyful Augustine—that is a side of him that even Peter Brown did not much notice. Augustine's move in naming God is ultimately beyond all language ofpredication into the language of praise and ultimately jubilating wordless joy, that cicada-like humming beyond speech: Per Christum hominem ad Christum divinum; per Christum divinum ad Deum Trinitate (through Christ the man to Christ as God; through Christ as God to God as Trinity). titled "The Clamour of the Heart," in Rowan Williams' The Wound of Knowledge: Christian

Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1979). For another fine reflection on Augustine's spirituality, see the Introduction to Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings, in The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. Mary T.

Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 1984).

"Heart in Pilgrimage": StAugustine as Interpreter of the Psalms —e— ANDREW LOUTH y argument in this paper is that the obstacles to a true appreciation of St Augustine by the Orthodox are fundamentally the same as the obstacles faced by western Christians. And also that the remedy in both cases is the same. That might seem very surprising, but I hope I shall be able to convince you of its truth. The problem with understanding Augustine—both for the East and for the West—is that we think we understand him perfectly well already. Virtually no one comes to Augustine with no preconceptions: that, at least, is my conclusion after nearly forty years of teaching early Christian doctrine, including Augustine, to undergraduate students in England. For Christians of the western tradition, this is because he has been so influential. Scholasticism and the Reformation would be inconceivable without Augustine. But which Augustine? He wrote an enormous amount, so much that his biographer, Possidius, said of his works, that "there are so many that there is hardly a student who has been able to read and get acquainted with them all"?

The Augustine who governs our preconceptions tends to be the Augustine of the great controversies. First of all, there is Augustine the 'This essay doubled as the 2007 Orthodoxy in America Lecture and the keynote address for the conference. The mission of Fordham's annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture is to bring the insights of the Orthodox tradition to a broader, non-academic audience, which often includes Orthodox and non-Orthodox students and lay persons.

?Possidius, Vita 18.9, F.R. Hoare, trans., The Western Fathers (London: Sheed & Ward, ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE "Doctor of Grace," the champion of the grace of God against the Pelagians, someone who elaborated a doctrine of grace that has left later theologians debating whether he allowed any room for human free will at all. Certainly, he is one who shored up his doctrine of grace with a doctrine of original sin, indeed of original guilt, so that all human beings come into the world worthy of damnation, forming a massa peccati.

Augustine also pressed his understanding of the priority of grace to the point of elaborating a doctrine of predestination, even a doctrine of "double predestination," whereby human beings are created by God either for election or damnation, regardless of the kind of lives they may live. Or, secondly, there is the Augustine who opposed the Donatists, those North African Christians who maintained that the Catholic

Church in North Africa had ceased to exist as a Church, owing to its collusion with bishops who had forfeited grace by their cowardly behavior during the great persecution at the beginning of the fourth century— nearly a century before Augustine's own engagement with the Donatists.

This Augustine developed a doctrine of the Church that sees it as forming a mixed community of saints and sinners until the last judgment, with sacraments that are valid, whatever the moral state of the minister, for it is Christ himself who is the true minister of the sacraments. In the controversy with the Donatists, Augustine was eventually driven to accept the use of persecution against recalcitrant Donatists. And then there is the Augustine who spent the best part of a decade of his early manhood as a Manichee. Despite his eventual return to the faith of his childhood, and of his mother, there were those, even in his lifetime, who claimed that Augustine was still a covert Manichee, sharing their hatred of the body and sex. There is also the Augustine of the major works—De civitate Dei (The City of God) and De Trinitate (On the Trinity). The De civitate Det is often treated as a quarry for the political ideas of the western middle ages, while it is in his treatise De Trinitate that many Orthodox are determined to find the Augustine who, in his doctrine of the Trinity, effectively broke the unity of the Una Sancta—the "One, Holy

Church'—by his endorsement of the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, the filioque.

"Heart in Pilgrimage": St Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms It is not easy for us, Christians of either the East or the West, to get behind these enormous preconceptions, and many might ask, why should we?—Augustine is the doctor ofgrace, and that is what is important about him. But if we follow these preconceptions, we are very soon reading

Augustine in the light of later theology, making him take sides in subsequent controversies that he never envisaged. If one actually starts to read

Augustine, even the Augustine of the controversies outlined above, one quickly finds oneself in the presence of someone with a quick intelligence, who thought on his feet, whose ideas are more often tentative, not definitive, who was constantly exploring what it meant to confess Christ, to seek to follow him, to be a member of his body, to submit to the transforming effect of the grace of the resurrection. These controversies occupied Augustine's time, and certainly shaped his thinking, but the fundamental reality of Augustine's life as a priest and bishop was as the pastor of the Catholic Christian community in Hippo. It was there that day by day he prayed with his congregation, preached to them, celebrated the eucharist as their bishop. For roughly thirty-five years that was his principal, daily concern. Once a bishop, he never left North Africa, but spent his whole time there, mostly at Hippo, though also in Carthage; he preached several times a week, and many of those sermons have been preserved for us, though many more have been lost. It has been estimated that Augustine must have preached about 8,000 homilies, of which 546 survive; if you add to them the homilies on the Psalms, and the Gospel and First Epistle of John, the total of surviving sermons comes toa little over 1,000, which is about one-eighth of his preaching.' But this is a good deal, and it is here, I think, that we find the heart of Augustine. It is here that again and again scholars over the last half-century have sought to discover the "hidden Augustine," the priest and pastor.

So what I want to do in this essay is to peer behind these preconceptions, and simply listen to Augustine the preacher and pastor. In this way,

Christians of both western and eastern traditions can find themselves in the presence of a father of the Church, one whose voice speaks with °See Goulven Madec, La Patrie et la voie (Paris: Desclée, 1989), 115-16.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE authority from the heart of the Una Sancta. In particular, it is Augustine as commentator on the Psalms that I want to explore with you, for in his

Enarrationes in Psalmos (Enarrations on the Psalms), we have a complete series of reflections on the Psalms, mostly in the form of homilies given to his congregations. Here, I think, we find the heart of Augustine: a "heart in pilgrimage," to borrow a phrase from the English poet and priest,

Why these reflections on the Psalms? Several reasons come to mind.

The first is that the psalms are fundamental to the consciousness of the Church: they are constantly quoted from the New Testament onward; they have become the backbone of the Church's regular—daily and weekly—pattern of prayer; in many contexts it came to be expected that Christians would learn the whole psalter by heart: the second canonofthe

Seventh Ecumenical Synod, for example, requires that any candidate for the episcopate should know the psalter by heart. Augustine shared this sense of the importance and centrality of the psalter; Possidius tells us that, on his death bed, Augustine "ordered those Psalms of David which are especially penitential to be copied out and, when he was very weak, used to lie in bed facing the wall where the sheets of paper were put up, gazing at them and reading them, and copiously and continuously weeping as he read."* His Enarrationes in Psalmos, the title given them by Erasmus, were put together by Augustine with some deliberation. Most of the homilies were actually preached to a congregation, either at Hippo or at Carthage, more than a third of them in a single year: 412. These homilies were supplemented by others that were never preached, so far as we know, but were dictated, so that, together with the preached homilies, the whole of the psalter is covered. The homilies on the first thirty-two psalms seem to have been composed as a kind of exercise in sustained reading and commentary, just after his ordination as a priest. Various others seem to have been dictated toward 420, with the explicit intention of completing the Enarrationes in Psalmos, includinga set of thirty homilies on the long

Psalm 118 (119 in the Hebrew enumeration). This evident desire to present 4Possidius, Vita 31.2 (242).

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE mercy and act against justice; and there seems to be mercy in them and not judgment; sometimes, however, they want to adhere to strict judgment, and they lose sight of mercy. God, however, neither loses the severity of judgment in the goodness of mercy, nor in judging with severity does he lose the goodness of mercy."

However, Augustine says we must observe the order: mercy first, and then judgment. "If we distinguish these two by times, we shall perhaps find that now—modo, for the time being—is the time of mercy, while the time of judgment is future." Why, he asks? First of all, look to God, the Father.

Remember what the Lord has said: "Be like your heavenly Father ..

. Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes the sun rise on both good and bad, and rain to fall on the just and the unjust."§

Behold mercy. When you see the just and the unjust looking at the same sun, enjoying the same light, drinking from the same fountains, watered by the same rain, filled by the same fruits of the earth, breathing the same air, having equally the world's goods, do not think that God is unjust, who gives these things equally to the just and the unjust.

For it is the time of mercy, not yet the time of judgment. For unless God first spares us in mercy, he will not find those he can crown in judgment. It is therefore the time of mercy, when the patience of God leads those who sin to repentance."

This is how Augustine sets the scene for his interpretation of the psalm: we are living in the time of mercy; there awaits us the time of judgment.

He continues this contrast between mercy and judgment by drawing a contrast between the Latin verbs donare and reddere (to grant and to give back, or to recompense). The time of mercy is the time of donare, the time of gifts; the time of judgment will be the time of reddere, the time of rec7En. in Ps. 100.1.

"Heart in Pilgrimage": St Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms The next verse reads: "I will sing psalms [psallam] and understand in the way of purity [via immaculata], when you come to me.' It is only in the way of purity, Augustine comments, that we can sing psalms and understand. "If you want to understand, sing in the way of purity, that is, work for God in gladness [in hilaritate].'!> What, then, Augustine asks, is this way of purity (or "life of purity": the text now reads vita, instead of via)? He answers his question by quoting the next verse: "I walked in the innocence of my heart, in the midst of my house." "This way of purity begins in innocence, and also reaches its end in it." But what is meant by innocence, Augustine's interrogation of the text continues? The Latin word innocentia suggests something not harmed or not harmful: from the verb noceo, to harm. And, Augustine remarks, "there are two ways in which someone can cause harm: either by making someone unhappy

[miserum], or by deserting someone in their unhappiness; for you do not want to be made unhappy by another, nor do you want to be deserted by another, if you are unhappy." There is a play of words here, very important for grasping Augustine's sequence of ideas: the play between misericordia, mercy, and miser, unhappy, pitiable, miserable. Mercy, misericordia, is what those who are miseri need: the time of misericordia is the time of the miseri; it is also the time of the nocentes, those who harm others and reduce them to being miseri. The nocentes do this in two ways: by active harm—by violence, oppression, robbery, covetousness, calumny— by what Augustine calls generally studium malevolentiae; and by neglecting the needy, despising the tears of the unhappy. Either way, the one who does this alienat cor suum—makes his heart strange to himself. If we ask who is innocent, the answer is: "One who neither harms another nor harms himself. For one who harms himself is not innocent." And Augustine goes on to comment, "But if someone corrupts himself, if he overthrows God's temple in himself, what do you expect, that he will be merciful to others, and spare the miserable? He who is cruel to himself, could he be merciful to another? The whole of justice therefore can be reduced to the single word: innocence." So, "the one who wants to harm

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE others has first harmed himself; nor can he walk about, because there is no 'where' [quia non est ubi]. For all wickedness is subject to narrowness: only innocence is broad, where it may walk about." The freedom to walk can only be exercised in the space provided by innocence of heart; there one is free to walk "in the midst of my house." Augustine picks up on this and comments:

He says the "midst of his house'—or the Church itself; for Christ walks about in it—or his heart, for our heart is our interior house, as he expressed it when he said above: "in the innocence of my heart."

What is the innocence of his heart? The midst of his house. Whoever does evil in this house is driven outside it ..

. Whoever does not have a peaceful heart cannot freely dwell in his heart ...!4

And Augustine goes on to cite the example of the paralytic whom the Lord healed, telling him to "take up his bed and go into his house": "he takes up his bed and rules his body; now he goes into his house, enters into his conscience; now he finds broad place [latam], where he walks around, sings, and understands."

Note how this exegesis turns on the idea that the wicked person has damaged himself, has driven himself out of his heart, which has become too narrow to inhabit. In contrast, the innocent harms no one, and finds within himself a broad space, where he can walk about in freedom.

There follows a series of verses in which the one who "sings of mercy and judgment" expresses his attitude toward those who "work iniquity"

(facientes praevaricationem), the "crooked heart" (cor pravum), the proud, and those whose heart is insatiable. The psalmist will have nothing to do with them: he hates them; he will drive them away; he will not eat with them. Augustine is at pains to make sure that such hatred is not misunderstood. The psalmist "hates those who work iniquity" (facientes praevaricationem: the Latin praevaricatio has a very different meaning from our English "prevarication'—it means deeply culpable evil). "But," says

"Heart in Pilgrimage": St Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms Augustine, "you must hate the prevaricators, not the men. There is one man the prevaricator, but see that he has two names—man and prevaricator: God made man, man made himselfa prevaricator; love in him what

God made, drive away in him what he has made of himself"! Or, a little later on: "Behold the good persecutor persecutes not man, but sin."!®

Mention of the cor pravum provokes a discussion of prayer, which is only true prayer—prayer from an "upright heart" (cor rectum)—if it wants what God wants. Augustine considers, briefly, Christ's prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, and his expression of "sadness, even unto death."

Augustine comments, "But what was that voice, save the sound of our weakness?"—Christ, as head of the body, gives expression to the groaning of the members. When he comes to consider the psalmist's refusal to eat with the proud and those with insatiable hearts, Augustine considers the counter-example in the gospel, where Christ eats with the proud pharisee, how the prostitute wept at the Lord's feet and caused the pharisee silently to blame Christ's ignorance of the woman's nature. Augustine comments,

"How did he know that Christ was ignorant, unless he suspected that he did not know, because he did not push her away? Because, if it had been him, he would have repelled her. The Lord, however, not only knew that the woman wasa sinner, but as a physician saw that the wounds of that proud man were incurable." Christ could use the meal with the proud man at least to warn him of the danger of his pride. For us, Augustine warns, "Beware, lest in their banquets you are caught in the snares of the devil."!7

Augustine finally comes to the last verse of the psalm: "In the morning I put to death all the sinners on the earth" "This is a dark saying," he remarks, "we do well to pay attention, for it is the very end of the psalm."!®

The psalmist gives his reason in the final words: "that I may utterly destroy from the city of the Lord all workers of iniquity." So, Augustine comments, there are workers of iniquity within the city of the Lord, but that is, as we

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE well know, because it is still the "time of mercy"; but the morning will be the time of judgment; then the workers of iniquity will be destroyed. If morning is the coming time of judgment, then the present time of mercy is night, and the theme of night, nox, leads to this reflection:

For at the present, while you do not see my heart and I do not see yours, it is night. You sought I do not know what from someone. You did not get it; you thought yourself despised, but maybe you were not despised; for you do not see the heart—and suddenly you blaspheme.

In the night pardon is to be given you when you go astray. Someone loves you, I do not know who, and you think that he hates you; or he hates you, and you think that he loves you; but whatever it is, it is night.

Do not fear, trust in Christ; in him grasp the day. You can think nothing evil of him, for we are sure and certain that he cannot be deceived.

He loves us. Of ourselves, however, we cannot yet be certain. For God knows our love for one another; we, however, even if we love one another, who knows how such love works out among us? Why does no one see the heart? Because it is night. In this night temptations abound. It is, as it were, of this night that the psalmist says, "You have placed darkness and made night; in it all the beasts of the forest move.

The young lions [catuli leonum| roar after their prey and they seek their food from God." In the night the young lions seek their food.

Who are these young lions? The princes and powers of this air, the demons and the angels of the devil. How do they seek their food?

When they tempt. But they do not come near it, unless God gives them power, for thus it is said: "they seek their food from God." The devil sought Job to tempt him. What food? The rich, the fat, the just man of God, to whom the Lord bore testimony and said: "a man without blame, he was a true worshipper of God." He sought him to tempt him, seeking food from God. And he accepted that he should be tempted but not crushed, purified but not oppressed, or perhaps not purified but proved. However, those who are tempted are sometimes handed over for some secret reason into the hands of the tempter, because, perhaps, they are delivered over to their desires. For the devil harms no "Heart in Pilgrimage": St Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms one, unless he receives power from God. But when? In the night. What does this mean: in the night? In this time .. .!°

"This time," to which Augustine refers, is the time of mercy. But this time will pass, and in the morning will come the time of judgment. And what is meant by "in the morning"? Augustine ends his sermon with these reflections:

What is: in the morning? While the night is still passing. Why does he still pardon? Because it is the time of mercy. Why does he not always pardon? Because "of mercy and judgmentI shall sing to you, O Lord."

Brothers, let no one delude himself: all who work iniquity will be put to death; Christ puts them to death in the morning, and destroys them from his city. But while it is still the time of mercy, let us hear him.

Wherever he calls out through the law, through the prophets, through the psalms, through letters, through the gospels. See that he is not silent, that he pardons, that he distributes mercy. But beware, because the judgment is to come."° The voice of Augustine the preacher is a fascinating voice. It unfolds the message of the psalm witha sense of great respect for the intelligence of his people. He does not try to fob them off with generalizing morality, nor does he make light of the difficulties of the psalm. Even in looking at a single psalm, we recognize several guiding themes: it is Christ's voice we hear in the psalm, and part of what is meant by understanding the psalm is learning how to join our voice to Christ's; the Christ singing in the psalm is Christ the head of the Church, of which we are the members; in this sense, the Church links this time of trial and temptation with the future time ofglory, when Christ will be revealed as judge; finding Christ in the psalm also leads, in both minor and more important ways, to finding the gospel reflected in the psalm. Above all, perhaps, we hear in this homily, the voice of St Augustine the pastor, who had a deep understandIbid.

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE ing of the darkness of the human condition. This sense of the darkness of the human condition lies behind his concept oforiginal sin, and the frailty of the human will, but here, Augustine does not systematize this insight: it remains an insight, based on human experience, an insight we find, expressed in very similar terms, in the Macarian Homilies, for instance. At this level, of pastoral concern and psychological insight, we can all—

Christians of both western and eastern traditions—find a voice that has still a great deal to say to us all.

Index Italicized titles of works in the index are Augustine's unless otherwise specified.

150 Chapters (Palamas) 64-67, 72-79 of post-Nicaean theologians 208-10 Aquinas and Thomism Adam and Eve Barlaam of Calabria and exegesis of1Cor 15.22 95 Bradshaw's reading 230, 247~48 original sin and 30, 88, 97-98, 103 in East-West dialogue 193, 210=11, as social beings

277-78 will of 114-15, 121-22 Lossky's assessment 25,154 Against a Sermon of the Arians 114 names of God and_ 174, 178-79, 186-89, Against Beccus (Palamas) 67,77 198, 24256, 248n66 Against Eunomius (Basil of Caesarea) 87 subsistent relations 135n18 Against Julian 86-87, 90-92, 94-95, Tracy's assessment 263, 264, 268, 272 97-98 Arian heresy, 199-200, 206, 266, 275 Against Maximinus 84-85 Aristotle 227-32, 249 Akindynos, Gregorios 55n46, 71-72 ascetic tradition 31~32, 92, 101~2, 107 Alcinous 229, 232 Athanasius of Alexandria 31,161 Alexander of Aphrodisias 228-29 Augustine of Hippo (Brown) 280-81 Altaner, Berthold 112, 12n4, 81n1, 82, Augustine the Bishop (van der Meer)

91n31, 133N13 Ayres, Lewis 22n47, 38, 139n26, 155-57, Ambrose of Milan 14, 86, 156,266, 160, 161n26, 265n3 Ambrosiaster Azkoul, Michael 30n62, 68 Anastasius (disciple of Maximus the Confessor) 107,120 Baldwin II, Latin king in Anastasius I, Byzantine emperor 104 Constantinople 44 Ancestral Sin, The (Romanides) 30-32 baptism Andronikos II, emperor 46, 49, 53, 56-57, Augustine's quote from Basil 89-90 of infants 30—31, 260 angels 171, 242, 246, 248, 302 original sin and 87, 94, 98 Apollinarius 109 Barlaam ofCalabria 68-72 Apologia de fuga (Gregory Nazianzen) 92,

Barnes, Michel 0, 71, 1531, 1543, 155 Barr, James 155 apophatic theology 208-14, 246-47 Basil of Caesarea 81-91 of modern Orthodox Behr, John 11n1, 22n47, 38, 134n16, 161n28, theologians 25-26,33 162n29, 196n6 names of God and_ 169, 178-83 being. see also divine essence; human Plato and 230-32 beings

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE in Ayres' examination 137-39, 146, Cassian, John 1n2 148-49 Cassiciacum, 266, 267 in Bradshaw's reading 236-39, 241 cataphatic theology 169, 230 exegesis of Exodus 3.14 171-74, 181-83, Catherine II, the Great 19-20 185, 198, 235, 272 Catholic Church and theology. see also in Greek philosophy 29, 228-32, 243 Aquinas and Thomism in Hart's "Nicaean ontology"

191-226 Donatists and 254, 256, 257, 292 in Marion's examination of idipsum 39, eastern theologians and _17, 32, 39, 64, 170-89 127=29, 151n49, 194, 278 in Zizioulas critique 35-36, 154 Lateran councils 110, 123—24, 207 Being and Time (Heidegger) 269, 286 liberal Protestant interpreters post-Reformation debates 21,87 Berthold, George 102 "Centuries" (Maximus the Confessor) 107 Bessarion, Cardinal Johannes 55-58 Chalcedon, Council of (451) 103-5, 275 Bible. see scriptures Charles of Anjou 44-45, 48, 49 body (human) Chevalier, Jean 83 eastern fathers and 65, 92~93 christology 95, 182-86, 22325, 271-89, Jesus humanity and 113, 115, 301 298, 303 Manicheans and_ 285, 292 Chalcedon (451) and 103-110, 117-21 vision of God and 208n24, 240, 245-46, of Gregory Palamas 66,77

Maximus the Confessor and 112-24 Bolotov, V.V.

Church community 254, 256-57, 280, 292 Bonaventure unity of Trinity and 143-45 Bradshaw, David 29n62, 38, 68n24, 70, City of God 240-41, 258, 265, 266, 292 71n34, 72N39, 152n51, 170n9, Clement of Alexandria 233 208—9n24, 211-12, 213n40 communion, within the Trinity 132, 137, Brown, Peter 270, 280, 289 143=45,148, 150-52, 154, 160 Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich 21-25 Confessions 37, 82, 112-13, 168-70, 175-76,

Byzantium. see also individual emperors 234-35, 255, 265, 288 exposure to Augustine 12-16 Congar, Yves relations with West 43-45, 56-57,

Constans II, Byzantine emperor 109 Constantinople Callahan, John F. 83

Council of 381 103,162, Calvin, John 24, 268 Council of 553 13, 105,108 Cantacuzene, John 55 De Trinitate translated in 43-49 Capita 150 (Palamas) 64-67, 72-79 Maximus the Confessor in 102 Cappadocian fathers Constantinopolitan Creed 52,162 and Augustine compared 22~23, 31-32, contemplation 161-62, 195, 274 "contemplation-in-action" in Ayres' argument 155 of the Trinity 131-32, 152 and Greek philosophers compared 230, Contra Beccum (Palamas) 67,77 233-34 Contra Eunomium (Basil of Caesarea) 87 in Lienhard's examination 81-82 Contra Julianum 86~87, 90, 91, 92, 94~95, in Zizioulas critique 36, 154 97-98 Carthage, 102, 108, 109, 293 Contra Maximinum 84-85 Index

Contra sermonem Arianorum christology absent in conversion of Augustine 235-36, 239, divine essence in 132—36, 216-17 266-67, 270, 285, 287-88 divine simplicity in 158, 240 creation exegetical methods in 164 Augustine's christology and 272-73, 277 first translation into Greek 12, 15, 41-61

God's being and 218, 222 influence of 292 God's immutability and 184-85 Nicaean theology in 84, 265 God's willand 242-43 teaching on the Spirit 131-32, 140-49 in Logos theology 199-200 used by eastern fathers 16, 64-79 Nicaean theology and 205-6 De vera religione 237-38, 268 in Palamite theology 77,79 deification. see theosis (deification) credal statements Delumeau, Jean 70 in1iCor 8.6 162 Demacopoulos, George 31n66 Chalcedon and 103~—4 Demetracopoulos, John 66-67 in De Trinitate 52 Derrida, Jacques 269, 287 filioqueand 128n2 Descartes, René 34,278 orthodoxy and 253, 254 Dialogue with Pyrrhus (Maximus the Cross, Richard

Confessor) 108 Cruciform Christ (Tracy) 275, 283-84 Didymus the Blind 83 Cyprian of Carthage 256, 260 Dionysius the Areopagite 26, 189, 230 Cyril of Alexandria 61,104 divine energies in Greek fathers 211-13, 230, 241, Daley, Brian 39, 123n42, 1271 248n67 Daniélou, Jean in Greek philosophy 37, 228-29, 233-34 De Anima et Resurrectione (Gregory of Hart's claim 211; Bradshaw's Nyssa) 216 reply 249-51 De catechizandis rudibus 258-59 monoenergist controversy 106-11, 121 De civitate Dei 240-41, 258, 265, 266, 292

"neo-Palamite" theology and 25~35, 38, De doctrina christiana 257-58 De dono perseverantiae 96 divine essence. see also trinitarian theology Defide et symbolo 157-58 in Aristotle 228-29 De Halleux, André in De Trinitate (On the Trinity) 132-36, De libero arbitrio

143—45,.148 de Lubac, Henri 39, 278 de Régnon's thesis re-evaluated 22n47, De Magistro 153-54, 195-96 de Man, Paul divine simplicity and 157-61, 206, De moribus ecclesiase catholicae et de 240-44, 250 moribus Manichaeorum 236-37 identical to divine attributes 241-42 De Mundo (pseudo-Aristotle) inseparable operations 156-57 De praedestinatione sanctorum 116 knowledge of God and 244 de Régnon, Théodore 22n47, 71, 87n20, in Marion's examination of 153-54, 155N9, 161, 163, 165, 195-96 idipsum 170-89 De sermone Domini in monte in modern Orthodox critiques 22-26, De Spiritu Sancto (Basil of Caesarea) 87 75-76 De Trinitate (On the Trinity) divine providence

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE Dominicans 44, 46 Augustine's christology and 282, 287 Donatists 254, 256, 257, 260, 266, 292 mutability and 258-61 double predestination 24, 281, 292 Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) 13, 105, Duns Scotus 68 filioque 13-15 East and eastern theology. see also in Ayres analysis 130-32 individual theologians in Barlaam of Calabria's writings 71 anti-western views in 28, 37-38, 68 in De Trinitate 50, 54-61, 146—49, 196, Augustine and 11-19, 42, 155,165,

192-94, 291-93 East-West relations and 23—24, 42, commonalities with West 127-29, 127-29 192~98, 244 evidence in Contra Maximinus 84-85 de Régnon's thesis and 22n47, 71, Lossky's understanding 154.

87n20, 153-54, 155N9, 163, 195 Maximus the Confessor and 103 hesychast controversy and 70-71 Michael VIII Palaiologos and 42 union efforts with West 16, 41—42, 45, Russian sophiology and 21, 23=24 55) 123n42 First Ecumenical Council (325) 103=5, 162, western medieval theology and 277-79 203, 265, 275, 276 westernization in Russia and Fisher, Elizabeth 38, 70n32 Greece 19-20, 27-28 Flasch, Kurt 69 Ecumenical Councils Flogaus, Reinhard 1520, 38, 55,-cited in Nicaea (325) 103—5, 162, 203, 206, 265, notes on pp. 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 755

275, 276 76 and 77 ConstantinopleI (381) 103, 162, 206 Florence, Council of (1438-39) Chalcedon (451) 103-5, 275 Florensky, Pavel

Constantinople II (553) 13, 105,108 Florovsky, Georges 25, 26-30, 32, 35 Nicaea II (787) 294 Forms emanation, Plotinian theory of 233, Augustine's christology and 273, 275 276-77 Platonic 232, 238-39, 243 Enarrations on the Psalms 115,274, 275, Foucault, Michel

279, 294-95 Fourth Crusade 41~45 Enchiridion 77,259 Fourth Ecumenical Council 103-5, 275 energies. see divine energies Franciscans 44,45 Enneads (Plato)

Orthodoxe Saint Grégoire Zo Ephesus, Council of (431) 12 free will and freedom. see also Pelagian eschatology 258-59 controversy essence. see divine essence of Adam and Eve 121, 267 eucharist 122,123 divine will and 241-42 Evagrius Ponticus 107, 270, 293 innocence and evil, problem of 285, 300-302 in modern Orthodox critiques 26-27, Exodus 3.14, exegesis of 171-74, 181-83, 185,

30-32, 36 198, 235, 272 Fulgentius of Ruspe, Bishop 119 fulness, of Father, Son, and Spirit 133-36, Facundus of Hermiane 119—20 145-46 faith Furst, Alfons

Fyrigos, Antonis 71 in De Trinitate 141-42 Ratzinger's reflection 150 generation, of Son 84-85, 137, 145-46, 195 human beings. see also knowledge of God;

Gennadios II Scholarios, patriarch of sin and grace; theosis (deification); Constantinople 55,59, 72n42 will, human George of Resh'aina 106, 120 fourfold nature of word in 74,75 Germanos III, patriarch of human nature of Christ 106, 110, 113~15, Constantinople 46 152, 183, 275 gift, Spirit as 141-43 image of God in 65, 136, 220, 222-24, Gilson, E.

Good incarnation theology and 156-57, in modern philosophy 271-72 281-82 in Platonism 230—31, 236, 272 orthodoxy and grace. see sin and grace social nature of faith

Greek fathers. see individual fathers humility of Christ 281-82 Gregorios Akindynos 71-72 Gregory1 (the Great), Pope 1n2 idipsum, Marion's examination of 167-89,

Gregory Nazianzen (the Theologian) 61, 81-88, 91-95, 161, 246, 249-50, image of God (imago Dei) 65,136, 220, Gregory of Nyssa 156, 161, 194~96, 207, 222-24, 277 210, 234 immutability of God 181-83, 236, 238, Augustine and 81, 83, 215=25,

253-61 Gregory Palamas 16, 25, 55, 64-79, 193, In Evangelium Johannis tractatus 144-45, 210-11, 230 Gregory X, Pope 45 incarnation theology 156-57, 281-82 Gutiérrez, Gustavo innocence 299-300 inseparable operations 156-57 Hadot, Pierre 277, 278 intellect, in Greek philosophy 228-33, 234, Harrison, Carol 39, 143n36, 277n30 238-39, 240 Hart, David Bentley 2247, 38, 156n9, Irenaeus of Lyons 30n63, 161, 270 244-51 Heidegger, Martin 269, 286-87 James, William

Henotikon (Zeno) 104 Jerome Heraclius, Byzantine emperor 105,107, Jewish Logos theology 198 109, 120—21 John, Gospel of hesychasts. see Gregory Palamas John 5.19

137-39 hierarchy prologue 199113, 235—36, 237-38, 245, for Platonists after Plotinus 202-3 trinitarian theology and 184, 239-40 John Chrysostom 31,86 Hilary of Poitiers 86,191 John Maxentius 119 Hinze, Bradford 1n1 John of Damascus 212n38, 213n40, Hippo 280, 293-94, 295 250-251 Holobolos, Manuel 44, 46—48, 49,53 John Scotus Eriugena 26 Holy Spirit John VI Laskaris 44—45

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE John XII Kosmos 58 Louis IX, "the Pious" 45 joy, Augustine's pessimism and 287-89 Louth, Andrew 34n74, 39, 82n4, 118n30, judgment, in Psalm 100 (101) 295-303 139N27, 14235 Jugie, Martin 64 love Julian of Eclanum 31, 86-87, 88, 90, 99, in Augustine's christology 132, 148, 267, 285 272-74, 277, 282, 284 Justin Martyr 30n63, 171 in Augustine's pneumatology 64, 65n6, Justinian, Byzantine emperor 104, 119-20,

73N43, 74, 76, 129, 140-51 of God and neighbor 255, 256, 259, 282, soul's orientation toward 223~24, 257, knowledge of God 258, 261 in Arius system 200 transcendent essence and 204, 216-20 eschatological nature of 152, 157, 258-61

Trinity as (Bulgakov) 22-23 God's unknowability and 208-14, Luther, Martin 246-47 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 269, 287 Gregory of Nyssa and 210—11, 215~25, 234-36 Macarian Homilies in neo-patristic school 25-26, 33-34 Manicheans 254, 257, 260, 266, 285, 292 Nicaean theology and 205-8, 210-15 Mantzarides, Georgios 69n28 in Plotinus' system 201 Marion, Jean-Luc 39, 192n1, 208n24, 211, Kristeva, Julia 269, 287 24045, 260 Kydones, Demetrios and Prochoros 15-16, Maritain, Jacques

18, 55-58 Mark of Ephesus Martin IV [need title] 49 Lacan, Jacques Martin of Todi, Pope 1 Lateran Synod (649) 110, 123=24 Maximus the Confessor 101-12, 117—26, Latin 197, 206, 207, 210, 234 Cappadocian settlement in 84 Maxwell, David 119 Planoudes' translation of De McGinn, Bernard

Trinitate 42-61 mediator, Christ as 279-82 use in tsarist Russia mercy, in Psalm 100 (101) 295-303 Laurent, Vitalien metaphysics 149-52 Lavriotes, Maximos 72n42 Bradshaw's examination 227—43 Leo I, Pope 104, 119 Hart's examination 191-226 Leontius of Byzantium 108, 123 Marion's examination 177-80, 183, 188 Liberatus, archdeacon of Carthage 120 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 227-29, 231 Lienhard, Joseph 38, 83n7 Meyendorff, John 64~65, 66n10, 6869, 71 Lison, Jacques 73-74 Michael VIII Palaiologos 15, 41-49 Logos theology 198-207 monarchy, within the Trinity 162-63, 195, Lonergan, Bernard 268, 278

Lord's Prayer 107n10, 165 Monica (Augustine's mother) 266, 272 Lossky, Vladimir 25-26, 28, 33, 71, 154 195, monoenergist controversy 106—11, 121

Monologia. see Soliloquiorum (Soliloquies) Léssl, Joseph 73-74 monotheletism 106—11, 115-16 Index Moses, Prophet 171=74, 181-83, 248 On the Predestination of the Saints 116 Mount Athos 16,17 On the Sermonof the Mount 279 Murdoch, Iris

On the Soul and Resurrection (Gregory of Mystagogia (Photius) Nyssa) 216 Mystagogy (Maximus) 122 On the Teacher mystical elations (Platonists) 202-3 On the Trinity. see De Trinitate (On the mystical theology 25-26, 33-34 Trinity) On the Universe (pseudo-Aristotle) names of God On True Religion 237-38, 268 Augustine's christology and 272-73 One in Greek fathers 233-34, 241, 249-50 in Greek philosophy 200-203, 206-7, Marion's analysis of idipsum 167-89 231-32, 234, 238-40, 272, 276-77 in modern philosophy 271-72 lacking in Gregory of Nyssa and "neo-Chalcedonian" christology 105, 108, Augustine 220-21 119-20 Open, in modern philosophy 271-72, 286 neo-patristic school 24-27 Opus Imperfectum 88,89, 93-94,95 Neoplatonists 228-29, 276-77 Orations of Gregory Nazianzen 87, 94~-98, neo-scholasticism

Nestorians 120 Origen and Origenists 106-7, 161-62 Nicaea original sin 24, 86, 103, 260-61, 304 Council of (325) 103—5, 165, 203, 206, and ancestral sin compared 30-32 265, 275, 276 Cappadocians and 88, 92—94, 96-98 exiled Byzantine court in 43-44 Maximus the Confessor and 121-22 "Nicaean ontology" (Hart) 191-226 Ottoman Turks 17-19 Nicholas I, Pope

Palamas, Gregory 16, 25, 55, 64-79, 193, Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain 17-19, 210-11, 230 Papanikolaou, Aristotle 2142, 23n48, Niebuhr, Reinhold 268-69 25n51, 2756, 35n76, 154n3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34, 271-72, 286 Papathomopoulos, Manoles 49. nihilism 34, 68, 286 Parastron, John 44, 45 North Africa 102, 107, 119 Parmenides (Plato) 230-31, 232 Numenius pastor, Augustine as 280-81, 288, 293-304 Ogerius Boccanegra (the Paul, Apostle 194, 214-15, 248, 279, 281-82,

Protonotarius) 44, 47, 48 On Christian Teaching 257-58 Paul of Nisibis 120 On Divine Humanity Pedalion (Rudder) 18-19 On Free Will 242 Pelagian controversy 254, 257, 261, 266, On Teaching the Uninstructed 258-59 285, 292 On the Catholic and Manichean Ways of absent in Romanides' thesis

Life 236-37 eastern church and 11-12 On the Faith and Creed 157-58 monothelite controversy and 115-16 On the Gift ofPerseverance 96 Synod of Diospolis and 86 On the Holy Spirit (Basil of Caesarea) 87 person and personhood

ORTHODOX READINGS OF AUGUSTINE divine essence and 132-39 Prosper Tiro divine simplicity and Protestant theology 21,32~33,.194, 279 within the Trinity 151 Psalms, exegesis of 179-80, 183, 283, in Zizioulas critique 36 287-88, 294-304 Peter 1,the Great 19-20 Pseudo-Dionysius 197 Peter of Numidia, General 125-26 purity 208n24, 245-46, 299-300 Petrarch, Francesco 265-66 Pyrrhus, patriarch of Constantinople 106, Philo of Alexandria 198, 232, 272 109-10, 125 Philokalia philosophy 28=29, 35~38, 87, 265—69, Rahner, Karl 39, 154, 163, 271 277-78. see also metaphysics; One; rationalism 34—35,.255 individual philosophers Ratzinger, Joseph 149-52 Photius, patriarch of Reale, Giovanni

Constantinople 13-15, 24 redemption Planoudes, Maximus (Manuel) 15, 16 Reformation 21, 24, 69 translation of De Trinitate 41-61,64 Regulae 259 Plato and Platonists 152, 198, 201-3, 227, relation, of the persons in Trinity. see also

230-32 filioque Augustine and 234~36, 239, 243, 266, in Ayres examination 132-46 276-77, 285 in Behr's examination 158-62 Courcelle's scholarship in Nicaean theology 204-5 Plotinus 200—201, 227, 229-30, 232-33 Palamas' use of Augustine 77-78 Augustine and 234-35, 238-40, 242, in Zizioulas critique 35-36 247, 265, 272, 276-77, 282 Republic (Plato) 230, 236, 272 Greek fathers and plurality Retractiones (Retractions) 267,270 absent in Plotinus' system 201 revelation trinitarian theology and Augustine's christology and 272-73 pneumatology. see Spirit Gregory of Nyssa and 222-24 Pogdin, Ambrose in Logos theology 200 Porphyry 265, 276 role of Spirit and Son 130-32, 208-10, Possidius 291, 294 214, 224-25 praise 169-70, 174-75, 261, 288-89 Riedinger, Rudolf 110-11, 123 prayer 135n16, 257, 294, 301. see also praise Rigotti,Gianpaolo 49 of Jesus in Mt 26.39

72n42 Lord's prayer 107n10, 165 Roman Catholic Church. see Catholic predestination 96, 116~18, 243, 292 Church and theology in Reformation theology

Romanides, John 28~35, 37, 38, 65n4, Romanides' critique 30-32 68-69, 71n35 Prime Mover 227—29, 232 Rudder 18-19 principium within the Trinity 77-78, 129,

Rule for Monks 259 131-32, 145-47, 150, 195-96 Russell, Norman 72 procession. see also filioque Russian Orthodoxy in Greek philosophy 233 Augustine added to Synaxarion

Proclus 233,276 theological trends in 19-27 Index sacraments 254, 256-57, 292 Institute 22, 28 scholasticism 25-26, 29-30, 34, 277-78 Staniloae, Dumitru 36n79 scriptures Stephen of Dor 108 Augustine's conversion and 266-67 Stoic theology

Augustine's use of 255-56, 257-59, Studer, Basil 147n41, 159n22, 165n34, 276, 277-84 281n36 authority of 254 Suarez, Francisco exegesis of Psalms 179-80, 283, 287-88, subordinationist theology 203-8 294-304 Symposium (Plato) and Greek philosophy 233-34 Synaxarion, Augustine added to Second Council of Lyons (1274) 45 Synod of Diospolis (415) 86 Second Council of Orange (529)

Second Ecumenical Council (381) 103, Taoism 272, 286 162, 206 Tertullian Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople 105, Theodore I, Pope 110, 11 10813, 120-21 Theodore of Mopsuestia 104, 120 sermons of Augustine 293-95 Theodosius II, Byzantine emperor

Seventh Ecumenical Council theological orations (Gregory Severus of Antioch 104 Nazianzen) 87, 94~98 signs (signa) 258, 260 Theophanes of Nicaea 72n42 Simon, Richard zo theosis (deification) 25,37 Simon of Constantinople 44,46,48 Gregory of Nyssa and 223-25 sin and grace 113-19, 124, 254, 256-57, 279, Maximus the Confessor and 116-18, 124 282, 285-86. see also original sin; in "neo-Palamite" theology 26-27, Pelagian controversy 28-30, 33-35 in exegesis of Psalm 100 (101) 300-302 Thomism. see Aquinas and Thomism modern Orthodox critiques 21, 24, 25, Three Chapters (Council of 553) 13, 19 26-27, 29-32, 37, 68 Tillich, Paul

Sinkewicz, Robert E. 65,73 Tome to Flavian 119 Slavophile movement 20-21, 37 Tractates on the First Epistle ofJohn Soliloquiorum (Soliloquies) 16, 18, 236 Tractates on the Gospel of John 144-45, 279 Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeevich

Tracy, David 39, 11219, 260 sophiology 21-24, 25 tradition, in Augustine's teaching 256-57 Sophist (Plato) 243 transcendence of God 151-52, 169-70, 183, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem 108 187, 197-207, 225, 288 Sopko, Andrew 72n42 trinitarian theology. see also christology;

Spirit. see also filioque De Trinitate (On the Trinity); filioque Ayres analysis of Augustine's Ayres analysis 127-52 pneumatology 127-52 Behr's analysis 153-65 Holy Spirit asa term 141~42, 150 Cappadocians and 83-84, 96 pneumatology lacking in De Greek philosophy and 234, 237-40 Trinitate 273-74 Hart's "Nicaean ontology"

194-226 role in revealing God 208-10, 214, "pro-Nicaean"

135, 150—52, 155 224-25 Russian sophiology and 21-24 St Sergius Orthodox Theological in Zizioulas critique 35~36, 154

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