| Chapter 1: | The Augustinian Mutual Love Tradition |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
The human mind ascends to wisdom and attains its closest resemblance of the divine being by remembering, understanding, and loving God.35 The mind’s ability to image God by remembering, understanding, and loving its creator requires the divine grace of the Holy Spirit. In grace, God begins to reform the image of God, which heretofore was debilitated by sin.36 The image reaches perfection when its vision of God—and thus, its remembering, understanding, and loving God—attains full realization in the eschaton.37 The connection between Augustine’s mental triad and Christian spirituality belies Robert Jenson’s judgment that Augustine’s mental images are sheer speculation detached from spiritual formation.38 In contrast, Augustine’s mental triad of remembering, knowing, and loving God bears directly on the devotional life. Mary T. Clark pointed out that one of Augustine’s primary purposes in writing De Trinitate was to show believers the link between their spiritual development and their creation in the image of the triune God. Christian formation and creation in the triune image of God are inseparable because the latter facilitates union with God, which is the essence of the former.39 Believers draw closer and closer to the trinitarian God through the engagement of their spiritual capacities in the contemplation of God. Furthermore, the object of contemplation is not a static monad but a dynamic triune God, which the human mind is able to grasp, albeit imperfectly until the eschaton, precisely because the triune God created human beings for such spiritual perfection.
The relations among the divine persons correspond roughly to the mental triads. However, despite the widespread characterization of Augustine’s trinitarian theology in terms of the psychological analogy, the level of correspondence he saw between the mental triads and the triune God is rather enigmatic. For instance, though he said that the triad of memory, understanding, and love images the Trinity, he rarely, in any direct way, identified the Father with memory, the Son with word (the product of the understanding), and the Spirit with love or will—notwithstanding that these correlations are clearly implied with the illustration of the Son as word and the Spirit as love.40
A common assumption in theological scholarship is that Augustine’s use of the psychological analogies is symptomatic of his interpolation