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

The Mental Triads

The psychological analogies are a significant feature of Augustine’s trinitarian theology. Augustine drew on the mental images to illustrate the Trinity because Scripture records that human beings were created in the image of God. Augustine rejected an interpersonal or relational view of the image of God because he interpreted “man” in Genesis 1:26 as the creation of the individual person Adam. If the image of God consists of three individuals in relationship, then the passage of Scripture, which identifies the image as one individual, is incongruent. Thus, on the basis of his interpretation of the biblical creation story, Augustine believed that the image of God resides in the individual and not in the relations among three individuals.¹⁷ The identification of Scripture as the primary reason that Augustine sought an image of the Trinity in the human soul stands in contrast to the common view that the mental images reflect Augustine’s underlying commitment to Neoplatonism.¹⁸ Augustine believed that the intellectual soul is that aspect of human nature that mirrors God.¹⁹ Because God is Trinity, then the image must in some way, albeit through a glass darkly, image the triune nature of God.²⁰ Augustine found the mental triads an effective way to illustrate individuation within an essence without division or multiplication of the essence.²¹

In De Trinitate, Augustine proposed three mental triads which illustrate the ways that human intellectual nature images the Trinity. The first such triad is that of the mind knowing and loving itself and is found in De Trinitate, book 9. However, the mental image of book 9 is the fruit of Augustine’s conclusions reached in book 8. At the end of book 8, Augustine suggested that the principle that God is love implies that God is a Trinity (1 John 4:8). The importance that he assigned to the principle “God is love” challenges the common assumptions that he fixated on divine unity and that relational trinitarian categories emerged only later in the work of Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure.²² Augustine suggested that love implies lover, beloved, and love itself.²³ In other words, love implies plurality. In book 9, Augustine turned his attention to discerning an example of the triune nature of love in the creature that comes closest to imaging the Trinity—that is, the intellectual human nature.