Current Seminar:
• Augustine's De Trinitate
5/13/2006
Book I, Chapter 4
Br. Dunstan Robidoux, OSB
In chapter 4, Augustine takes up again the notion of form[2.]
which St. Paul had invoked in speaking about Christ's possessing the form of God although this possession does not preclude an incarnation which assumes
a human form. Augustine adverts to Christ having two forms so that he can resolve some apparent contradictions in scripture which had been exploited
by some interpreters in order to argue that Christ was not fully divine and so lesser than God the Father. Parallels are drawn to Old Testament
stories to show that apparent confessions of ignorance in Christ should not be interpreted literally. Christ's apparent ignorance serves as a
pedagogical device since Christ cannot reveal certain things at certain times. While one might argue that, as God, Christ already has a knowledge
of all things, as man or as a person who must work through the conditions and structure of human knowing, Christ cannot reveal things to other human beings
except in an eminently human way: through the many different acts and operations which constitute human cognition. What is revealed must be revealed,
must be done in a manner that is adapted to human knowing so that human beings will be able to understand what is being revealed to them. This
pedagogical requirement thus points to the rationality of Christ's Incarnation as a man since, by entering into human form and human life, it becomes
easier for human beings to enter into the form and life of God which will be brought to a point of culmination in a Beatific Vision (Augustine quoting
St. Paul's 1 Cor 13:12). Christ's visibility gives wicked men an opportunity to see and receive God in their hearts though, in the end, God can
only be seen by the "pure of heart," by persons who lack all guile.
On a methodological note, please note that, in St. Augustine's exegesis of scripture, he avoids trying to take one passage and putting too much emphasis
on it to argue a certain position. In scripture, one finds very many passages which emphasize different things and so, when Augustine looks at
scripture, he collects as many passages as he can and brings them together to argue a certain position. If, for instance, one passage talks about
the Spirit coming from the Father and another talks about the Spirit coming from the Son, he combines them to argue thus that the Spirit comes from both
Father and Son. Father and Son share the same divine nature or substance, the same essence. Augustine collects scriptural passages but in a
way which tries to give each passage its due weight and meaning. No one passage is to be necessarily held against another. And so, as each
passage is allowed to contribute its particular meaning, a comprehensive and coherent theology needs to be developed if all relevant scriptural passages
barring on a particular question are to acknowledged in a way which does not lead to contradictions where the meaning of one passage is pitted against
the meaning of another.
To help understand how Augustine works as a theologian in his study and use of scripture, one might quote an observation that had been made by
Bernard Lonergan pertaining to St. Augustine's work on grace entitled, De gratia et libero arbitrio:
The greatness of St. Augustine does not lie in any mastery of speculative technique, in the exactitude of explicit distinctions, the elaboration of
theorems, the synthetic apprehension of multiple correlations. On the contrary, his genius is precisely that, unaided by these devices of
conscious reflection, he nonetheless is able to maintain a profoundly coherent position, not intermittently but through thousands of pages, not by
oversimplification but by an intense and vital grasp of hundreds of passages from scripture, not by abstract formulation but by relentlessly tracking
down, confronting, and confuting each assertion and each evasion of Pelagian thought.[3.]
Notes:
[2.] St. Paul uses the Greek term morphê when speaking about the "form of God" and, traditionally in Greek,
the term had been used to speak about the form, shape, or figure of whatever has a form, shape, or figure. Morphê refers to a property
that something has but, as can be demonstrated in the exegesis of the New Testament, it designates a characteristic form, shape, or figure which
is possessed by something in an enduring way. See J. B. Lightfoot's discussion in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Philippians: A Revised Text
with Introduction, Notes and Dissertations (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1981), p. 110, pp. 127-133. The characteristic
form that is designated by morphê is to be distinguished from forms or shapes that are constantly changing and which refer to fashions or styles
that vary as changes occur within the popular imaginations which currently reign in any given human culture. The term initially had an empirical
significance since form, shape, or figure can refer to a datum of sense that is directly apprehended by an act of sense. Something possesses a
sensible form, shape, or figure and such a form is encountered by acts of sense before acts of understanding can be enjoyed in a way which can impart a
different meaning or significance to this word. St. Paul would have known that God's form, shape, or figure is nor usually or normally a datum of
sense. As Lightfoot explains in his aforementioned commentary, p. 128, a philosophical meaning for morphê was first attributed to it by
Parmenides (b. ca. 515 BC) when he once used it to refer to "natures" or "essences." However, a non-material significance for morphê
probably first arose with Plato who used morphê to refer to an impress or impression that was exerted on things within the material world through
the agency of a paradigmatic eidos(idea) which exists apart from matter in a noetic heaven which is populated by other ideas that exist in an
unembodied way. However, when Aristotle's theory of insight into phantasm led him to reject Plato's theory of memory as an adequate theory of
human cognition, eidos and morphê came to have the same meaning. The eidos of a thing exists within a thing and not outside
of it. Hence, eidos and morphê have the same meaning. In Aristotle, the morphê of a thing refers to its nature or
essence, or to a definition which specifies a nature or essence; and these things can only be known by acts of the mind or intellect, by nous.
The human senses apprehend material aspects but the mind more deeply grasps a thing's form. Because Aristotle also understands the reality,
being, or substance of a thing in terms of its essence, substance and essence being equivalent, the morphê or form of a thing also refers to its
being: its reality or actuality. A morphê that exists without a body exists as a purely intellectual or purely spiritual reality.
Aristotle spoke of such things as "separated substances," and so the absence of matter or a body helps to explain why Aristotle's understanding of form
lends itself to Christian theological discussion which wants to talk about angels and God as pure spirits although the created form of angels is quite
unlike the uncreated form of God which functions as the principle from which all else comes in both the order of creation and the order of salvation.
Since St. Paul spoke about "form" (as in the "form of God") in the 1st Century AD, more than three or four hundred years after the
development of philosophical or technical meanings for this word, it is to be assumed that St. Paul was not unaware of these other meanings which some
of his readers would have readily understood. To an even greater extent, St. Augustine would have known that morphê does not invariably
refer to a sensible form, shape, or figure which can only be known only through an act of sense.
[3.] Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, eds. Frederick
E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 195.
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