Current Seminar:
• Augustine's De Trinitate
7/15/2006
Book III, Chapters 1-2
Ron Vardiman
Augustine begins by again emphasizing his desire for kind readers who are also frank critics. He then recapitulates Book II with
its conclusion that the appearances and manifestations of God in the Old Testament were either of God as Trinity, or a particular person
of the three as might be indicated by the context.
The second part of Augustine’s inquiry asks whether the forms under which God appeared were created ad hoc in the most
appropriate visual aspect, or whether angels in some physical guise spoke for God, or perhaps changed their own bodies into some
particular physical shape. As to the angels, Augustine admits no knowledge of the two possibilities, but regards the answer as unimportant,
though he seems to assume that angels could have physical bodies (which would be dominated by their spirit), a view which is no longer held.
He then goes in to a long discourse to show that God is in any event the cause of all things whether natural or miraculous, whether
performed directly or through angels or human beings. Indeed, for some particular purpose God may allow demons (or their human servants)
to perform some miraculous act, as when the Pharaoh’s magicians turned their staffs into serpents. Chapter 2 is a lengthy digression on this
last point, using the mistaken science of Augustine’s day to reinforce the above point that God controls all that occurs.
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