Psychological Analogies

Anatolios again: He argues that Augustine’s psychological analogies for the Trinity (memory, intellect, will in one mind, eg) do not represent a retreat from an inter-personal model of the Trinity. He acknowledges that the love of lovers gives a “sight” of the life of the Trinity. He simply thinks it gives an inadequate sight, since human lovers are not consubstantial in the way the Triune Persons are. It gives inadequate sight too because Scripture itself teaches that the individual human is the “image of God,” the God who says “let us .” So, the psychological analogies give sight of the Trinity, but from a complementary perspective.

Besides, for Augustine knowledge is never merely cognitive, but always volitional.

Love and knowledge are inseparable: “Love requires knowledge, and the native dynamism of human consciousness is that of a loving knowing and a knowing loving.” The turn to the consciousness is thus not really a turn away from the analogy of love, but a transposition of that same analogy into a new key.

But the deepest reason for recognizing the value of the psychological analogies is the fact that for Augustine the triadic human mind is not self-contained. Anatolios quotes Rowan Williams, who claims that Augustine gives us “an account of mental life in which the fundamental category is lack of and quest for an other to love.” Anatolios speaks of Augustine’s analogies as implying the “individual’s innate aptness for [human] relations” and for relationship with God. The mind is ultimately image only when restored in Christ, when memory is memory of God, intellect is thought of God, will desire and love for God. It is image when the mind “intends” God. The mind’s outer-relatedness is grounded in the mind’s inner-relatedness, just as the missions depend on the processions.

In short, the modus interior inverts, turns ecstatic. Augustine’s inward turn is a walk along a Mobius strip where “in” and “out” are different positions on the same path.