An Open Letter to St. Augustine

Note: the modern reader needs to know a few things beforehand in order to fully understand this letter. First of all, the apparent random Scripture quotations are a stylistic device, intended to mimic how 4th century theologians (like Augustine) actually wrote. Of themselves, they import no additional meaning to the arguments presented. Second, this letter is not intended as a polemic against Augustine's Trinitarian theology or to blame him for the faults of the Western church. It simply seeks to point out weaknesses in Augustine's model which was largely adopted carte blanche by Western theologians for a thousand years; and thereby open us up to hearing the voice of Eastern Orthodox Trinitarianism, which in my opinion has a much healthier perspective, especially regarding the person of the Holy Spirit.


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To my dear Augustine, revered saint of the Christian faith,

Greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ from your brothers and sisters of the church in America, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten.

Inasmuch as you have not only endeavored to compose a lengthy treatise on one of our most beloved doctrines of the Christian faith, namely the Trinity, but also invited those who are your fellow lovers of truth to voice their even-handed rebuttals,[1] I will also add my contribution to the matter in question. I do not mind admitting that I have a significant advantage over you since I have the benefit of more than fifteen hundred years of history between our writings, but I concede that you are far and away my superior in godliness, intellect, humility, and consecration to Christ. All your writings have profoundly influenced our Western expressions of Christianity,[2] and your monumental work, De Trinitate, especially shaped Christian thought on the Trinity both in my country and those of my European forefathers.[3] It is precisely because of your enormous influence in this regard that I have taken pen in hand to write this letter to you.

The church down through the centuries is greatly indebted to you for your expression of Trinitarian doctrine. None has expressed the one-ness and three-ness of God quite so well as you:

In that supreme triad is the source of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and wholly blissful delight. Those three seem to be bounded and determined by each other, and yet in themselves to be unbounded or infinite. But in bodily things down here one is not as much as three are together, and two things are something more than one thing; while in the supreme triad one is as much as three are together, and two are not more than one, and in themselves they are infinite. So they are each in each and all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all are one. ... For God is one, and yet he is three. On the one hand the persons are not to be taken as muddled together ...; and on the other, not to many Gods, ....”

Nevertheless, I have this against you;[4] that your conclusions regarding the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, reveal a member of the Godhead who appears less a person than the Father and the Son.[5] I sincerely hope that you will not think that I am putting words in your mouth in this regard, for you make such a statement yourself:

So the Holy Spirit is something common to Father and Son, whatever it is, or is their very commonness or communion, consubstantial and coeternal. Call this friendship, if it helps, but a better word for it is charity. And this too is substance because God is substance, and God is charity (1 Jn 4:8,16), as it is written. But just as it is substance together with the Father and the Son, so is it great together and good together and holy together with them and whatever else is said with reference to self, because with God it is not a different thing to be, and to be great or good, etc., as we have shown above.[6]

I hope not to be too harsh with you, since you, during your lifetime, so faithfully guarded the Christian faith with perseverance and dedication. It seems to me that your doctrine of the Trinity, especially concerning the person of the Holy Spirit, has had detrimental effects on those theologians who have stood on your shoulders down through the centuries.[7] Rather than falling more deeply in love with the Holy Spirit, many of my countrymen (and fellow Christians!) are afraid of Him, finding meaning and direction for their lives via their own frail and human reason instead of seeking the omnipresent and omnipotent Spirit of God. You are certainly not entirely to blame for this, since I do not believe that you were intending to de-personalize that Holy Spirit. More responsibility falls on those theologians who came after you who simply adopted your model straight away and didn’t critique it sufficiently in light of Scripture. But now, having given myself to researching the matter, I believe I understand better why you drew the conclusions you did.

I wish to write to you an orderly account[8] of the factors that led you to de-personalize the Holy Spirit: for the benefit of all who wish to understand such things; and so that I might also be corrected, either by yourself or by others within the community of theological discussion. I beg your forgiveness in the matters for which you feel that I have judged you too strictly. But let us press on in grace and unity, not fearing disagreement, since our Lord Himself included the mind as well as the heart and soul in His expositions of the greatest commandment of Hebrew Torah, to love the Lord your God.[9]

* * *

Firstly, your arguments concerning the Trinity stress the unity of God’s Essence at the expense of the three Persons of the Godhead.[10] This is not entirely unexpected, since you drew from earlier theologians who wrote treatises and convened councils in response to the heresy of Arius and his followers.[11] Indeed, you were doing the same in your treatise as well:

That is why, with the help of the Lord our God, we shall undertake to the best of our ability to give them the reasons they clamor for, and to account the one and only true God being a trinity, and for the rightness of saying, believing, understanding that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of the one and the same substance or essence.

The heretic Arius blasphemed the gospel by preaching that Jesus was created, the son of God, rather than the Creator, God the Son. Later, the Arians also argued along similar lines concerning the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Naturally, the widespread popularity of these ideologies caused great alarm to the fourth century church theologians who preceded you, since they had confessed from the earliest days in the Apostle’s Creed that all three Persons were fully divine – Father, Son and Spirit.[12]

Your predecessors rightly argued that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit equally shared in the Father’s Essence. Just as the Father is fully God, so thus are both the Son and Spirit. Therefore, the substantial theological argumentation of the fourth century focused on the unity of God’s Essence rather than the trinity of Persons.[13] After all, everyone was already confessing the three-ness of God in the creed. God’s one-ness needed to be hammered home to defeat the confusion introduced by Arius. Although the first two major councils concerning Trinitarian doctrine had “settled” the theological issues, much disagreement still remained among the church at large because the canons of these councils were still working their way into the church at large in the time of your writing. You were simply following in the footsteps of your elder brothers, our fathers – Hilary of Poitiers, the Cappadocians, Ambrose, and others.

* * *

Secondly – let not [my lord] be angry, and I will speak[14] – I believe your lack of precision in your exegesis of the Greek language[15] caused you to make unwarranted assumptions in your interpretation of one particular key New Testament text on which you base your pneumatology almost completely.

According to the holy scriptures this Holy Spirit is not just the Father’s alone nor the Son’s alone, but the Spirit of them both, and thus he suggests to us the common charity by which the Father and the Son love each other.[16]

In this statement you have not adequately supported your exegetical decisions, even though you may have been using the best linguistic tools available in the time of your writing. Your own argument for the commonality of the Spirit in both Father and Son rests entirely on the interpretation of the Greek genitive case, expressed as the preposition of in the English text (i.e. – Spirit of the Father, Spirit of the Son).[17] This conclusion assumes that the genitive is properly understood the same way in every instance when used in reference of Spirit to Father and Son, a likely possibility but one that requires further proof in order to be certain. Recent scholarship has shown that, in the New Testament, the genitive case can be used to express over thirty different kinds of specific relationships![18]

More than this, you make an unwarranted ontological leap on this same basis in concluding that the Spirit must be what is common to the Father and Son.[19] Perhaps the use of the genitive implies this, but the burden of proof rests on you to demonstrate it. We cannot infer from the simple use of the genitive case any kind of relationship between the two referents. For example, I could rightly say that I am the son of my father and the son of my mother, but this does not mean that I am something common to my father and mother. Even though I am the son of both, I am a different person entirely than either of them. In and of itself, the grammatical construction of the text does not prove your conclusion.

And here is precisely where I have the greatest problem with your expression of Trinitarian theology, because in taking this step you also diminished the personhood of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Father and Son. If the Spirit is the thing common to Father and Son then He would not be fully equal unless: the Father is also the thing common to Son and Spirit; and the Son is also the thing common to Father and Spirit. You repeatedly offer the caveat that God’s attributes cannot be separated from His essence;[20] but this does not solve the problem of the Spirit’s diminished status in relation to Father and Son, because you have neither affirmed the necessary corollaries nor sufficiently defended your conclusion from Scripture.

So scripture did not say “The Holy Spirit is charity”; if it had, it would have eliminated the major part of this problem. ... We can however find where the Holy Spirit is called charity if we carefully examine the words of the apostle John. After saying, Beloved, let us love each other because love is from God, he went on to add, and everyone who loves is born of God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because love is God (Jn 4:7 [sic]). Here he made clear that he called that love God which he had just said was from God; love therefore is God from God. ... Finally, after repeating this a little later and saying, Love is God, he immediately added, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 Jn 4:16), about which he had said above, In this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit (1 Jn 4:13). He then is the one meant when we read, Love is God (1 Jn 4:8.16). So it is God the Holy Spirit who fires man to the love of God and neighbor when he has been given to him, and he himself is love.[21]

You conclude that the Holy Spirit (Himself specifically) is charity/love based on a triangular equation of the terms God, love, and the verb “abide.” Since the text does not say outright that the Holy Spirit is love, you bear the burden to prove this point. The text simply affirms that “God is love.” Your argumentation does not convince, since the apostle could just as easily be referring to the Father or the Godhead as a whole when he uses the term, “God.” However, I am not completely inflexible on this point. I simply await further evidence.

I know that at this point you would respond with another triangular argument: But the author has already stated that love is from God, and God is love. Therefore, love is God from God. Since the Father is not God from God, but only the Son and Spirit, this cannot be the Father or the Godhead but must refer specifically to either the Son or Spirit.[22] Once again, this entire argument rests on a single element of Greek grammar, the preposition ek (translated from in English). In general this preposition means “from, out of” but can be used to express various nuances of meaning, including temporal, locative, even cause-effect relationships.[23]

Your argument requires further development to demonstrate that the preposition ek, as John uses it in this context, carries the same meaning as when we speak of the Son and Spirit as being “God from God.” The apostle may very well mean something entirely different. In the previous verse, he utilizes the exact same grammatical and syntactical construction[24] when he says, “We are from God” (1 Jn 4:6). If we followed your argument all the way through, we would be obliged to affirm, at the very least, that the apostle himself was also love and therefore also God! Certainly he does not mean to say this, since this conclusion bears no Scriptural support whatsoever.

Therefore, two of your most fundamental propositions concerning the Holy Spirit (expressed in the two words common and charity in reference to Father and Son) still require further grammatical proof in order to be considered viable options for interpreting the text in 1 John. I do not say this to fault you in any sense; perhaps you were working with the best data available to you at the time. As I said at the outset, I have the advantage of over fifteen hundred more years of scholarship and therefore much more data to reference when making interpretive decisions concerning the relevant biblical texts. But for whatever reason, your weakness in the Greek language caused you to jump to unwarranted conclusions, concerning the interpretation of the 1 John text especially, and subsequently to de-personalize the Holy Spirit in your Trinitarian theology.

* * *

Thirdly, I wish to describe to you how I believe your vision of the Trinity was somewhat clouded by the Greek philosophers you called the Platonists (whom we now call the Neo-Platonists), especially Plotinus, the father of Neo-Platonism. It seems to me that Neo-Platonic thought provided a framework for your expression of Trinitarian theology.[25]

Plotinus accepted a kind of metaphysical trinity and even used some of the same terms as the Cappadocian Fathers, even speaking of the three hypostases.[26] He called his three metaphysical principles The One (a.k.a. “Good”), The Intelligence (a.k.a. “Being”), and the Soul. For Plotinus, the ontological basis of all physical reality lay in a disembodied Intelligence, and below this Intelligence a universal Soul that animates the individual soul in every physical body. Like Aristotle, he realized that a cosmic Intelligence could not stand alone but required a final cause, which he simply named “The One” (i.e. – “Good,” devoid of all substance and above the Intelligence).[27]

Even though I am removed from your cultural situation by many centuries and several thousand miles, I believe that you followed Plotinus in seeing contemplation as the nexus between the worlds of the physical and metaphysical.[28] You wrote that the mind is made in God’s image and therefore the part of the body by which humanity connects with God.[29] In comparison to the witness of Scripture, such a view seems to downplay the role of the Holy Spirit, “active as the one who brings the creature into union and communion with God and with other creatures.”[30] The difference is subtle; however, the two metaphysical dynamics travel in opposite directions.

Thus, in your search for examples of simultaneous one-ness and three-ness, you looked for it in the human mind. You believed you were basing this conclusion on Scripture, since mankind is created in the image of God and now we see in a mirror, dimly.[31] Having already come to your exegetical conclusion about the Spirit being the commonality between the Father and Son, you then buttressed this conclusion in your psychological model of the Trinity by comparing the Spirit to the psychological will.[32]

Such a comparison makes sense in light of the first two arguments already presented, that you were being intentional to explain the one-ness of the Trinity more than the three-ness and that you drew premature conclusions regarding the Holy Spirit on the basis of the 1 John text. I do not believe this influence of Neo-Platonist philosophy caused you to de-personalize the Holy Spirit as much as it gave you a framework by which to express the conclusions you had already drawn (from Scripture) without questioning your presuppositions, specifically in your focus on the unity of the Godhead.

Throughout the New Testament, we find all three Persons of the Trinity being called “He.” We also find God (in the general sense) being called “He.” From thence comes the immense mystery of God – the simultaneous one-ness and three-ness, as you so exquisitely explain in Book VI of your volume. If this is the case, then we may just as easily look for examples of trinity in multiple persons instead of simply one individual. In fact, this may even be preferred: the Incarnation of the Son alone would seem to indicate that God is NOT a single individual but a community, united in diversity.[33] However, you seem to disallow such a possibility, although in doing so you make a compelling point regarding fundamental unity.[34]

Your focus on the individual, paired with the Plotinian primacy of the mind and intellect in metaphysics imported to your theology, did not allow you to adequately question the assumptions you had already made as you developed your doctrine of the Trinity.

* * *

I am troubled that I have prattled on for so long, since the Hebrew sage warns us, let your words be few.[35] Therefore, I must draw this letter to a close. I thank you, dear Doctor of the faith, for your forbearance with me for just a little while as I have disclosed these things to you. I humbly await your gentle reproof concerning any of the matters which I have dared to take up with you, whether it be your focus on the unity of our great and Triune God, your unwarranted conclusions based on the Greek grammar in Holy Scripture, or the influence of the Platonists (as you call them) in your theology.

I have published this letter openly, for the brothers and sisters of the church, so that all who have received the Spirit of God might join together and seek the truth concerning the mystery of the Holy Trinity. We pray fervently that He, God the Holy Spirit, will guide us into all truth and take of what is [Christ’s] and declare it[36] to us; for He searches all things, yes, the deep things of God and teaches us, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.[37] Therefore, let us all seek truth in faith and humility, sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening for the Spirit’s voice, glorifying the Father in all things.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you. Amen.

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[1] St. Augustine, The Trinity, translated, with introduction and notes, by Edmund Hill, O.P. [De Trinitate], The Works of St. Augustine: A translation for the 21^st Century, Volume 5, edited by John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), p.97 (II.Prol.1).

[2] LaCugna summarizes well the impact, for both good and ill, of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology on the global church (especially the West), largely due to his development of the concept of perichoresis which was then included in the Quicumque (a.k.a. the Pseudo-Athanasian Creed). Also, she wisely points out that theologians have often fallen into the trap of reading Augustine out of context. She then goes on to say: “ Augustine’s deep influence on other aspects of Western culture would be difficult to measure exactly. ... Our main purpose here is to understand what was decisively new about the theology of the Trinity formulated by Augustine, and to see how he charted a course for subsequent Western theology that oriented it to the analysis of human consciousness as the method for understanding the Trinity. Two themes are at the center: First is Augustine’s understanding of the intra-trinitarian relations which, as might be expected, are conceived differently than in Greek theology. Second is Augustine’s theo-psychology of the soul created in the image of the Trinity and longing to return to God; here Augustine displays deep affinity with the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (205-270), whose writings he studied through translation by Marius Victorinus.” Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), p.81-82. See also Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. by Paul Burns (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1988), p.68-70.

[3] Many scholars, both Western and Eastern, trace this development of the de-personalization of the Spirit back to Augustine and his psychological model of the Trinity. Augustine’s Lover-Beloved-Love model was the prototype for the next thousand years (or more!) of Western theology yet practically non-existent in Eastern Othodoxy [Yves M. J. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol.I: The Experience of the Spirit, trans. by David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1979), p.85-92]. It most certainly was not Augustine’s intent to treat the Holy Spirit as less personal than Father or Son, but that is the inevitable result of both his exegesis and theology. See Augustine, De Trinitate, p. 209-210; LaCugna, p.81-83, 89-94; Yves M. J. Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol.III: The River of Life Flows in the East and in the West, trans. by David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1983), p.84-85; John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology (New York: Fordham University, 1974), p.168; Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downer’s Grove, InterVarsity, 1996), p.33, 40; David F. Wells, God the Evangelist: How the Holy Spirit Works to Bring Men and Women to Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), p.1, 13.

[4] Revelation 2:4

[5] “Beginning with book 8, Augustine gives the exterior triad of the lover, the beloved, and the bond of love. This is not a perfect analogy for the Trinity because lover and beloved are distinct individuals, and, love must be purified of its external and carnal aspects in order for the soul to ascend higher” LaCugna, p.94. See also Pinnock, p.10, 33, 35, 40; Wells, p.1-2, 13; Congar III, p.84-85.

[6] De Trinitate, p.209-210 (VI.1.7).

[7] “Augustine made a bad move for trinitarian reflection when he proposed a psychological model of Trinity which could not handle relationality in God. He thought of God as a single mind and the Person as aspects of it. The analogy sounds modalistic and even unitarian, thought Augustine did not intend it so. He problem was the idea of the simplicity of God derived from philosophical sources. This notion stood in the way of articulating the social Trinity. An assumption about the unity of God stemming from extrabiblical speculation led him into difficulty.” Pinnock, p.33.

[8] Luke 1:3.

[9] Deut.. 6:4; 10:12; 11:13; 13:3; 30:6, 16, 20; Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-37.

[10] From book I.2, “The purpose of all the Catholic commentators I have been able to read on the divine books of both testaments, who have written before me on the trinity which God is, has been to teach that according to the Scriptures Father and Son and Holy Spirit are in the inseparable equality of one substance present a divine unity; and therefore are not three Gods but one God; although indeed the Father has begotten the Son, and therefore he who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and therefore he who is the Son is not the Father; and the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Spirit of the Father and the Son, himself coequal to the Father and the Son, and belonging to the threefold unity.” De Trinitate, p.69 (I.2.7).

[11] Augustine had exposure to a wide array of sources, including many works of both Christian theology and pagan philosophy. Both Yves Congar and Catherine LaCugna include discussions of Augustine’s source material in their respective books on Trinitarian theology. Augustine’s theological sources include Origen, Tertullian, Hilary of Poitiers, Didymas the Blind, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and his contemporary, Ambrose of Milan. For a discussion of these, as well as Augustine’s Manichean and Neo-Platonist sources, see St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991), p.40, 69, 78, 87, 121; Congar III, p.80; LaCugna, p.81-104.

[12] St. Ambrose of Milan, On the Holy Spirit [Ambrose], trans. by Rev. H. De Romestin, M.A., with Rev. E. De Romestin, M.A. and Rev. H.T.F. Duckworth, M.A. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 10, ed. by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. and Henry Wace, D.D. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), p.117, 130. See also St. Gregory Nazianzen, Select Orations, trans. by Charles Gordon Browne, M.A. and James Edward Swallow, M.A. [Gregory Nazianzen], Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 7, ed. by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. and Henry Wace, D.D. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), p.321.

[13] This is the essential argument of the 4^th century theologians, which especially consumed the first two ecumenical councils at Nicea (325 C.E.) and Constantinople (381 C.E.). See: The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. with gathered notes by Henry R. Percival, M.A., D.D. [Councils], Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 14, ed. by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. and Henry Wace, D.D. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), p.2-7, 162-169; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises, trans. with prolegomena, notes, and indices, by William Moore, M.A. and Henry Austin Wilson, M.A. [Gregory of Nyssa], Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 5, ed. by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. and Henry Wace, D.D. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), p.315-336; Gregory Nazianzen, On the Holy Spirit, p.318-328: Against the Arians, p.328-334; Ambrose, p.93-158; De Trinitate, p.65-90 (Book I), 205-214 (Book VI), 395-437 (Book XV); St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. by Rev. Blomfield Jackson, M.A., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 8, ed. by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D. and Henry Wace, D.D. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), p.1-50; Wells, p.44.

[14] Genesis 18:30.

[15] While being knowledgeable in Greek, you confessed that you did not always like the Greek writings and that even some terminology of the Cappadocians was unclear to you. See De Trinitate, p.196 (V.2.10); Confessions, p. 15-17.

[16] De Trinitate, p.418 (XV.5.27).

[17] Daniel Wallace explains the thorniness of the genitive case: “The genitive case is one of the most crucial elements of Greek syntax to master. Fortunately, for English speakers, many of the uses of the Greek genitive are similar to our preposition “of.” ... At the same time, we should be cautioned that the Greek genitive has some different uses than the English “of” (e.g., comparison, purpose, etc.). ... [The genitive case] has a great deal of exegetical significance, far more so than any of the other cases, because it is capable of a wide variety of interpretations ... The genitive is more elastic than any other case, able to stretch over much of the syntactical terrain. In part this is due to this one form encompassing what are frequently two case-forms in other Indo-European languages (viz., gen. and ablative–the “of” and “from” ideas).” These words alone would give us pause when drawing theological conclusions simply on the basis of one grammatical structure, but Wallace goes on: “Language, by its very nature, is compressed, cryptic, symbolic. One of the areas of great ambiguity in language involves that genitive case. Genitives are routinely used in compressed situations which need to be unpacked. The genitive is typically related to another substantive. But what that relation involves can be quite varied. ‘The revelation of Jesus Christ,’ ‘the love of God,’ ‘children of wrath,’ ‘mystery of godliness’ are all capable of more than one interpretation precisely because “of” covers a multitude of semantic relationships.” And still there is more! “Unlike the nominative and vocative cases (whose structural clues are generally sufficient to show which usage is involved), the genitive case typically requires a rather nuanced examination of context, lexical meanings of the words involved ... and other grammatical features (such as articularity or number). Furthermore, in certain constructions (such as those which involve a ‘verbal’ noun) the meaning possibilities can be somewhat antithetical. ... Because of such divergent nuances, the genitive case requires careful examination.” [Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), p.73-75.] In the text in question, this writer holds Augustine’s conclusions as tenuous based on both semantic ambiguity and contextual considerations.

[18] See Wallace, p.72-136 for an exhaustive discussion of the various uses of the genitive case in New Testament Greek.

[19] Congar offers a helpful development of Augustine’s theology on this point, although this writer disagrees that the Holy Spirit ought to be understood as something common to Father and Son (Congar I, p.77-81). See also Congar III, p.87.

[20] This is one of the major arguments of Book VI. See De Trinitate, p.205-214 (Book VI).

[21] De Trinitate, p.418-421 (XV.5.27, 31).

[22] De Trinitate, p.420 (XV.5.31).

[23] Wallace, p.357-363, 371-372.

[24] hmeiV ek tou qeou esmen, translated ‘We are from God’ (1 John 4:6); h agaph ek tou qeou estin, translated ‘the love is from God’ (1 John 4:7).

[25] Augustine discussed the role of Platonist philosophy (now called Neo-Platonist) in his intellectual journey from the rejection of Manicheism to the acceptance of Christianity. For a brief discussion of this, see Confessions, p.111-132 (Book VII); Congar, p.80-83; LaCugna, p.91-93.

[26] “What, then, are we to say of that which is supremely perfect? It produces only the very greatest of the things that are less than it. What is most perfect after it is the second hypostasis, The Intelligence. The Intelligence contemplates The One and needs nothing but The One. The One, however, has no need of The Intelligence. The One, superior to the Intelligence, produces the Intelligence, the best after The One since it is superior to all the others. The Soul is word and deed of The Intelligence just as The Intelligence is word and deed of The One. But in The Soul the word is obscure, for The Soul is only and image of The Intelligence. Therefore The Soul turns itself to The Intelligence, just as, to be The Intelligence, it must contemplate the One. The Intelligence contemplates The One without being separated from it because there is no other existent between the two of them, just as there is none between The Intelligence and The Soul. Begotten always longs for its begetter and loves it; especially is this so when begetter and begotten are solitaries. But when the begetter is the highest Good, the begotten must be so close to it that its only separateness is its otherness.” Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises from the Enneads, trans. by Elmer O’Brien, S.J. (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1964), p.98.

[27] Plotinus, p.171.

[28] “The Intelligence is beautiful – of all things the most beautiful. ... Wonder seizes upon him who contemplates it, who enters in and becomes one with it. Just as the view of the heavens and the splendor of the stars leads one to think of their author and to seek him out, so the contemplative who has gazed upon the intelligible realm and been struck with the wonder of it should seek its author – should ask who has given it existence, where this author is, and how he authored it. From whom comes such beauty as this, this procession of plenitude? Not The Intelligence, nor Being, but their prior. ... So high its rank, The Intelligence is authentic plenitude and thought. Its prior is neither for if it were, it would not be what it is – the Good.” Plotinus, p.175.

[29] “In the fourteenth book we discuss man’s true wisdom, wisdom that is, which is bestowed on him by God’s gift in an actual sharing in God himself, something which is distinct from knowledge. And the discussion reaches the point of bringing to light a trinity in the image of God which is man in terms of mind; the mind which is being renewed in the recognition of God according to the image of him who created (Col. 3:10) man to his own image, and which thus achieve wisdom in the contemplation of things eternal” De Trinitate, p.399 (XV.1.5). See also De Trinitate, p.212 (VI.2.10), 323-324 (XII.2.4); 328-329 (XII.3.12); 333 (XII.3.20). See also Augustine Through the Ages: An Encylcopedia, Allan D. Fitzgerald, gen. ed., John Cavadini, Marianne Djuth, James J. O’Donnell, Frederick Van Fleteren, assoc. eds., (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p.591; LaCugna, p.91-93; Wells, p.37-39(?); Pinnock, p.33.

[30] LaCugna, p.298.

[31] Genesis 1:26-27; 5:1-2; 1 Corinthians 13:12.

[32] Augustine sees the will as the part of the human psyche which holds two other things together: sensory image and mental image [De Trinitate, p.304-308 (XI.1.2), 312-314 (XI.3.11-13)]; memory and thought/understanding [De Trinitate, p.336-337 (XII.4.25), 364-365 (XIII.6.25-26), 375-376 (XIV.2.6-7)]; and, of course, love (a function of will) which holds together lover and beloved [De Trinitate, p.255 (VIII.5.6), 418-421 (XV.5.27-32)].

[33] LaCugna, p.103.

[34] De Trinitate, p.211 (VI.2.9).

[35] Ecclesiastes 5:2.

[36] John 16:13-15.

[37] 1 Corinthians 2:10, 13.