Current Seminar:
• Augustine's De Trinitate
9/8/2007
Book XIV, Chapters 1-2
David Fleischacker
Man’s wisdom: Worship of God
God’s Wisdom: God
Why the trinity of remembered faith, recollected faith, and love are not the image of God in us.
Faith in eternal things is necessary for gaining eternal life, however, the faith itself is not
eternal. (371)
“As long as we are in the body we are living abroad from the Lord; for we are walking by faith and not
by sight (1 Cor 5:6). It would seem to follow then that as long as the just man is living on faith he may indeed strive and struggle on by this
temporal faith to eternal truth, and yet in his retaining, contemplating and loving of this temporal faith there is not such a trinity as deserves to
be called the image of God, even though he is living according to the inner man; otherwise we would appear to be setting up this image in temporal
things, although it should only be shut up in things that are eternal.” (372)
“From this we conclude that if this trinity is already the image of God, then such an image is not to
be located in things that always are but in things that pass away. But it is intolerable to suppose that while the soul is by nature immortal
and from the moment of its creation never thereafter ceases to exist, its very best attribute or possession should not last out its immortality.”
(372)
The True Image: even remains if unhappy, if distorted.
Answer: Book X, turn to self, not spatially, but intentionally. Turn not to the mind as if absent
from itself, but in terms of its already given presence to itself. “So the only alternative left is that its view is something that belongs to
its own nature, and that when the mind thinks about itself its view is drawn back to itself not through an interval of space, but by a kind of
non-bodily turning round.” (376)
“That is why we were constantly presenting a trinity in this way, placing in the memory that from which
the gaze of thought is formed, treating the actual conformation as the image that is printed off from it, and finding the thing that joins both
together to be love or will. So when the mind views itself by thought, it understands and recognizes itself; thus it begets this understanding
and self-recognition.” (376) “When the mind by thinking views and understands itself, it does not beget this awareness of itself as though it
had previously been unknown to itself; it was already known to itself in the way that things are known which are contained in the memory even when
they are not being thought about.” (376)
“The truth of course is that from the moment it began to be it never stopped remembering itself, never
stopped understanding itself, never stopped loving itself, as we have already shown.” (382)
Book XIV, Chapters 1-2
Kieran Dickinson
Chapter 1
St. Augustine begins Book XIV with a discussion of the nature of wisdom. Citing Scripture, "piety is wisdom" and "the wisdom of this
world . . . is folly." It appears that to be able to discuss wisdom, one must be wise. But since we cannot presume actually to be wise,
perhaps the best we can to is to be lovers of wisdom, i.e., philosophers.
St. Paul draws a distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom, according to St. Augustine, is the knowledge of divine things while
knowledge refers to knowledge of human things. St. Augustine concedes that knowledge is not necessary for salvation. Yet it is valuable
in that it permits one to know "how the godly are to be assisted in [gaining salvation] and how the attacks of the ungodly . . . are to be
met." What is absolutely necessary for salvation is faith. For St. Augustine, this faith includes both faith in eternal things as well as
in certain cases temporal things too, in particular God's work in history through the person of Jesus Christ.
As critical as faith is, ultimately it falls short. "As long as we are in the body we are living abroad from the Lord; for we are walking by
faith and not by sight." 1 Cor. 5:6. One can imagine a faith-trinity of retaining, contemplating, and loving. But such a trinity is
not a proper image of God because it is temporal – we only need or have faith while we are in the body --while God is eternal. "Clearly," says
St. Augustine, "when the human mind sees the faith with which it believes what it does not see, it is not seeing something everlasting." We will
be brought to sight by faith and "[t]hen there will no longer be any faith by which things that are not seen are believed, but sight by which things
that were believed are seen." Therefore, a faith-trinity of memory, observation, and love of faith will be past and done with. Such a
trinity cannot be a proper image of God because it will pass away, while the "image of God," according to St. Augustine, "must be found in something
that will always be."
One could argue that even if faith will be extinguished by sight, still a faith-trinity could be eternal if in place of faith itself is substituted
the memory of faith. In other words, a person in heaven, who in such state walks by sight and not by faith, could recall that he once lived by
faith. According to St. Augustine, such a trinity is not a proper image of God, either. Insofar as it does not exist now, it is not
eternal, and God is nothing if not eternal.
Chapter 2
Leaving behind faith as a possible basis of a trinity that is a proper image of God, St. Augustine considers whether the rational soul could be such
a basis. One distinct advantage of the soul in such regard is that, unlike faith, it is eternal. Moreover, the human soul is rational and
intellectual, like God. This is true even though, admittedly, man's reason and intellect are distorted by sin.
In considering how the rational soul can be the basis of a trinity that is a proper image of God, St. Augustine begins by recalling the somewhat
dubious proposition, from Book 10, that man's mind knows itself. He concedes that it is hard to understand how this is the case in an infant
and settles for the position that "when a human being is able to think about the nature of his consciousness and find out what is true about it, he
will not find it anywhere else but inside himself." Knowledge is already in the mind, so to speak, and it is brought to the surface by thinking,
often but not always involving an act of will.
St. Augustine is perplexed at how the mind can view itself. Eyes see but cannot see themselves. He imagines material analogies to
explain how the mind can view itself – perhaps one part of the mind sees another part of the mind – but concludes that such analogies are
unsatisfactory. "The only alternative left is that [the mind's] view is something that belongs to its own nature, and . . . when the mind thinks
about itself its view is drawn back to itself not through an interval of space, but by a kind of non-bodily turning round." The mind is only in
its view when it is thinking about itself; at other times the mind knows itself implicitly through memory of itself. Thus, there is a trinity of
memory, will that surfaces memory, and knowledge (or understanding) that is begotten by turning attention to the subject matter surfaced from memory.
To avoid possible misunderstanding, St. Augustine goes on to make clear that this trinity is always in existence even when the memory and will are
not actively recalling and thinking about the mind. Otherwise, it would be necessary to assert the false proposition that mind "only remembered
itself, and then came to understand and love itself, when it began afterward to think about itself." To illustrate the point, St. Augustine uses
the example of a musician who is thinking and talking about geometry. It is absurd to say of such a person that he does not understand or love
music because at the moment he is thinking and talking about geometry. Instead, we say that the musician remembers music, understands, and loves
it, even though he is not at the moment thinking about it. "This tells us that in the recesses of the mind there are various awarenesses of
various things, and that they come out somehow into the open and are set as it were more clearly in the mind's view when they are thought about; it is
then that the mind discovers it remembers and understands and loves something too, which it was not thinking about while it was thinking about
something else."
Literature performs the function of recalling to our minds things we know but do not know we know. The reader discovers under the guidance
of reason that statements a writer makes are true, not simply on the basis of the writer's authority but by the reader himself discovering with the
writer that they are true, discovering this either in himself on in truth itself guiding the mind.
Book XIV, Chapter 2
Br. Dunstan Robidoux, OSB
A Note on Three Kinds of Presence or Object in St. Augustine
See Bernard Lonergan, The Incarnate Word, unpublished manuscript translated 1989 by Charles C. Hefling, Jr. from the al Latin of the
De Verbo Incarnato (Rome: Gregorian University Press ad usum auditorum, 1964), pp. 179-182, where, in his explanation, Lonergan
distinguishes three kinds of presence (or three kinds of object): a local, physical or ontological presence or object that exists apart from
cognition (as when one experiences the presence of one’s face which cannot be directly seen by one’s eyes); a presence or object which is the
terminus or term of a cognitional act (whether an act of sense or an act of reason); and a presence or object which is the self-presence or the
self-consciousness of a person who engages in certain acts and who therefore knows that he or she is engaging in certain acts and not other kinds of
acts. Similarly, in the De Trinitate, 10, 3, 12, St. Augustine distinguishes three different meanings for presence or object. In
fact, if one reads Augustine in the De Trinitate, 10, 3, 12, one realizes that this distinction between three kinds of presence or object
originally comes from St. Augustine. Later, in his own day, in the footsteps of St. Augustine, Aquinas, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, 3,
46, 6, spoke about the existence of a third kind of presence or object that a person has: a pre-reflective knowing of self which refers to one’s
self-experience of one’s consciousness. Whether or not anyone comes to a reflective knowledge of one’s self, we normally all have a
pre-reflective knowledge of one’s self that is to be clearly distinguished from what we may come to experience through any act of sense. Objects
of sense can only be known (as experienced) through an operative act of sense. But, if one is not opening one’s eyes to look at anything, no object
can be seen. Nothing is visible. However, outside of a context that is informed by dreamless sleep, one cannot stop having an awareness of
one’s self as a living, conscious being. Self-awareness enjoys a privileged status. It is more constant…it is less easily done away
with.... As an experience or an awareness, it is less variable that an act of sense (or any other kind of conscious act which is directed to
another object) even if one must admit that the quality of one’s self-awareness will vary with what one is doing: whether one is engaged in acts of
sense or in some other kind of act (as in acts of questioning, reasoning, or understanding). While the second kind of object noted above may not
be itself conscious (although it is the term of a conscious act), the third kind of object is always itself conscious because it is a conscious act
which refers to a conscious subject. And so, by acts which are conscious, a subject is conscious and grows in consciousness. Hence, as one
attends to these distinctions, one realizes that a subject is more than just a substance or thing: a being or a person who would be existing as a
subject in only a potential or in an unrealized way. A person can be less than a subject although, through its activity, it is to be identified
with and as a subject. Cf. Lonergan, Incarnate Word, p. 190; p. 198. Given then the special status of self-awareness (its relative
stability and preeminence), a clue is given on where one might best begin for an inquiry that can analogically move toward a better understanding of
the God of Christian belief than would otherwise be possible.
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