The Trinitarian Vision of Jonathan Edwards and David Coffey By S ...

and will can be named only singly, yet each term presupposes the activity of the other two. For instance, a person cannot recall an event from the memory without the simultaneous act of the understanding and the will. The recall of an event belongs properly to the memory, but it involves the acts of the understanding and the will as well. Applied to the temporal work of the triune God, although the Son was the subject of the Incarnation, the Incarnation also includes the work of the Father and the Spirit. Thus, the mental triad illustrates the compatibility between the confessional statement that inseparable operations infer inseparable divine nature—that is, Augustine’s doctrine of divine unity—and the biblical attribution of certain acts to a single divine person.⁴⁵ In Letter 120, Augustine remarked that “it remains for us, then, to believe that Trinity is of one substance and that the essence is nothing else than the Trinity itself.”⁴⁶ Near the end of book 15 of De Trinitate, Augustine stated:

Moreover, the doctrine of inseparable operations assumes a doctrine of unity that takes the three divine persons as the irreducible datum of divinity, and therefore, it does not imply that God is ultimately a self-related monad.

Without doubt, Augustine’s use of the mental triads exerted remarkable influence in Western trinitarian thought. Yet the important influence of Augustine’s mental triads lies not so much in that subsequent theologians borrowed his mental constructions with exact precision but in that the intellectual faculties and operations of the human soul became a standard framework for illustrating the immanent processions and relations among the divine persons.