Leithart
What is Augustine’s de Trinitate about? Luigi Gioia ( The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate 
” Love comes first because the inner life of the Trinity is a life of love ( dilectio ) and the substantial unity of the Trinity is a unity of love. Through the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son dwell in each other.” This is the point of Augustine’s endorsement of the filioque : “because he is the common charity through which the Father and Son love each other and are united to each other, although proceeding principally from the Father, the Holy Spirit derivatively proceeds from the Son as well.”
Love comes first in incarnation as well: “the incarnation is not simply a union between divine and human natures. It is rather the act through which the Son extends his personal union of love with the Father in the Holy Spirit to the human nature he assumes.” Because love exists only in loving, “the love which unites the Son to the Father from all eternity becomes Christ’s love by actually informing his whole life, by being ‘translated,’ so to speak, in all his deeds, words, and in his obedience even unto death on a cross . . . . Christ’s death on the cross is acceptable to his Father because it is the ultimate seal of his justice, i.e. of his love for the Father in the Holy Spirit, and restores for humanity the possibility of becoming again, in Christ, a sacrifice acceptable to the Father, again in the Holy Spirit.”
Because the incarnation is an extension of divine love, it is eloquent:
“The Son’s Spirit becomes Christ’s Spirit and, after his resurrection, he is sent to constitute us believers in Christ. This corresponds to the Spirit’s inner Trinitarian identity. Just as he unites the Father and the Son, so he joins us to Christ and to each other, through a unity of love . . . The eloquence of the Incarnation and of Christ’s sacrifice, that is the persuasion entailed by the ‘how much’ ( quantum ) he loved us and ‘in what state ( quales ) were those he so loved, heals our pride and our despair and converts our covetousness into charity.”
Love comes first because it is the final reconciliation of us with this world, the union of uti and frui : “we only love in the love-Holy Spirit through which the Father and Son love each other, enjoy ( frui ) each other . . . . neighbour and even the self can be ‘enjoyed’ in God, insofar as they are loved out of God.”
Because love comes first , there is no space for a philosophy independent of Christ: “Any pretension to independent philosophical enterprise – ‘philosophizing without Christ’ – overlooks the crucial condition of knowledge: love. Knowledge is either impaired by covetousness or freed and thus made possible by God’s graciously given love. There is no distinction, for Augustine, between natural and supernatural levels of knowledge, no possibility for reason of carving out a field where it could fulfill its role autonomously. His epistemology rests on the impossibility of neutrality for the will, neither turning itself towards God nor averting itself from him, but simply ignoring both options. Charity stands in the end as the only condition for an harmonious cognitive life. Only charity restores knowledge and enables philosophers to yield to the injunction which resumes philosophical enterprise as a whole, namely ‘Know thyself.’”
Love comes first because love is what constitutes and reconstitutes the image of God. To be the image of God is to be “constituted by a threefold fundamental dependence on him.” That image “reaches its fulfillment when this dependence in being, knowledge, and love becomes conscious and is converted into worship, i.e., ac-knowledged, thankful dependence. At heart, the acknowledgement of this dependence consists in love, in dilectio ,” the dilectio that is the life of God.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In