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Pro-Nicene prosopology and the church in Augustine's preaching on John 3:13

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

Adam Ployd
Adam Ployd*
Affiliation:
Eden Theological Seminary, 475 East Lockwood Avenue, St Louis, MO 63119, USAaployd@eden.edu
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Abstract

John 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. If the only one who ascends to heaven is the one who descended, namely Christ, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent? To unpack Augustine's solution to this problem, this article explores his use of John 3:13 in his anti-Donatist sermons of 406–7. Here Augustine uses the grammatical method of prosopological exegesis both to identify and to solve the problem of Christ's solo ascent. Prosopology asks of a text, ‘Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? And about whom is he speaking?’ in order to parse the sometimes ambiguous personae within a dramatic scene. Through this method, Augustine affirms that Christ is indeed speaking about himself alone, but the reflexive subject of Christ includes the church who is his body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’. Building on the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship, I argue that this use of John 3:13 to espouse the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his body. Based on this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ, Augustine then uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for damning themselves by separating from the body of Christ. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into his complex subject that we are incorporated. Separation from that unity is separation from the singular grammatical subject who ascends as Christ to the Father. Thus, Augustine's grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis to solve the problem of John 3:13 connects the pro-Nicene affirmation of Christ's revelation of the Father to an anti-Donatist defence of the necessary unity of the church. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's vision of the church.

Keywords

AugustinechristologyDonatistecclesiologyexegesisTrinity

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 253 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

In this article I explore the use of John 3:13 – ‘No one has ascended to heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven’ – in Augustine's anti-Donatist sermons from December 406 to May 407.Footnote 1 This seven-month period, after the Edict of Unity (405) but before the definitive Council of Carthage (411), includes the first sixteen tractatus on John and the ennarationes on the Psalms of Ascent.Footnote 2 John 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine because it seems to deny the ascent of Christians to heaven by limiting such a journey to Christ alone. Augustine overcomes this challenge through a creative use of prosopological exegesis which incorporates the church into Christ's singular grammatical subject.

By tracing his use of this method for preaching on John 3:13 in 406–7, I argue that Augustine's anti-Donatist emphasis on the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and I will show how this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his Body. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's anti-Donatist ecclesiology.

This investigation proceeds in three steps. First, I clarify what is meant by prosopology and demonstrate that it is a guiding motif in Augustine's preaching on the Psalms of Ascent. Second, I demonstrate how his interpretation of John 3:13 in these sermons is grounded in this grammatical practice. Finally, I tie this grammatical exegesis of John 3:13 to Augustine's use of that verse throughout these sermons to illustrate the salvific purpose of our incorporation into Christ.

Prosopology and the Psalms of Ascent

The first step of my argument is to clarify what is meant by prosopology and demonstrate how it serves as a guiding motif for Augustine's interpretation of the Psalms of Ascent. Prosopology is an identification of the dramatis personae, a practice derived from the grammaticus and originally used to interpret Homer, Plato, Vergil and other poetic/dramatic texts. Prosopology brings three questions to the text. Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? About whom is he speaking?Footnote 3 In this exercise students learn to distinguish between speakers, note when there has been a change in speaker, and discern what type of speech is proper for each speaker. The theological use of πρόσωπον and persona is partly built upon this grammatical exercise.Footnote 4

Most examinations of Augustine's prosopological exegesis have focused on the specific word persona. However, because persona only appears once in the ennarationes on the Psalms of Ascent, the major studies of this topic largely ignore these sermons.Footnote 5 This overlooks the fact that, despite the absence of the term persona, the grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis is a guiding motif for Augustine's preaching on the Psalms of Ascent in two ways.Footnote 6

First, Augustine focuses his audience's attention on the identity of the singer who ascends to Jerusalem.Footnote 7 This reflects the primary prosopological question, who is speaking? In the first sermon in the series, the exposition of Psalm 119, Augustine connects the song of the ascending psalmist to the life of the church: ‘We, too, are to ascend’.Footnote 8 Augustine draws out the parallels between the words of the psalm and the Christian life until the parallel becomes a common voice:

What does [the psalmist] say? ‘How long is my wandering sojourn!’ This is very much the voice of the church as it labors on this earth. It is the voice of one who cries out from the ends of the earth in another psalm: ‘From the ends of the earth I have cried out to you’ (Ps. 60.3). Who among us cries from the ends of the earth? Not I, nor you, nor any other individual; but the whole church cries from the ends of the earth. . . . All the saints are a single person (unus homo) in Christ because the church is a holy unity. It is this single person (unus homo) who says, ‘From the ends of the earth I cried to you . . .’.Footnote 9

This examination of the voice of the psalmist is programmatic for Augustine's exegesis of the Psalms of Ascent. The Christian life is one of ascent, and we learn how to make that ascent by finding our voice in the psalms – a voice which arises from many Christians joined as one to each other by being united with and into the one Christ.Footnote 10 The prosopological concern here is a reflexive activity; Augustine invites the congregation to hear themselves singing as they ascend. Who is speaking? The church is, but as one person, unus homo in Christ.

In addition, Augustine's identification of the church with the ascending Christ has a polemical use: Augustine denounces the Donatists for not participating in that unus homo who sings in the psalms. This is the second way in which prosopological exegesis guides his preaching during these months. The first Psalm of Ascent ends by proclaiming, ‘I have been peaceful with those who hate peace’. Augustine uses this verse to demonstrate how far the Donatists’ hearts are from this sentiment, no matter how often they might give utterance to peaceful words. ‘Who are the ones who hate peace? Those who rip asunder unity. . . . This voice [in the psalm] is either ours or theirs. You must pick out (elige) whose it is!’Footnote 11 Not only does Augustine use the prosopological question of ‘who is speaking’ to distinguish between Catholics and Donatists, but he trains his congregation to do the same thing. This motif of the prosopological identification of the church with Christ – what he will elsewhere refer to as the totus Christus – is the grammatical and theological context within which we should read Augustine's interpretation of John 3:13 during these seven months.

En. Ps. 122.1: the descending and ascending Christ

The second step of my argument is to show how Augustine's reading of John 3:13 is grounded in this prosopological method. Augustine opens his fourth homily on the Psalms of Ascent by reminding his audience of the theme which ties these Psalms together: ‘They are songs of one who ascends . . . We have fallen, but there is another chance left to us. We must acknowledge who it is who has descended to us – not fallen, but descended – and then we can ascend by clinging to him, for we cannot rise by our own strength.’Footnote 12 Augustine not only reminds his audience of the theme of ascent to God; he also reminds them of the central question of his exegesis of the Psalms: whose voice is it in these Psalms? The question of who descends and, ultimately, who ascends brings Augustine's audience back to this prosopological focus of identifying the speaker of the Psalms, typically understood as Christ speaking for himself or with the church.

To help his audience understand the nature of this ascent through Christ, Augustine introduces John 3:13:

Our Lord Jesus Christ himself said, ‘No one has ascended to heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.’ But he seems to have spoken about himself alone (de se solo videtur dixisse). Do the rest of us, then, remain behind, if only he who came down has ascended? What are the rest of us to do? We must be united to his body so that there might be only the one Christ who both descended and ascended.

John 3:13 poses a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. The central question is ‘about whom is Christ speaking?’ However, this question becomes more significant when it is reflexive, when it refers back to the question, ‘who is speaking’. This leads to the theological problem: if Christ is speaking ‘about himself alone’, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent?Footnote 13 Augustine does not resolve the dilemma by offering a new answer to the question ‘about whom is he speaking’. Christ does indeed speak ‘about himself alone’. But the solus, the single one who ascends, the unus Christus, includes those who are united to Christ's body. Augustine dilates the reflexive grammatical subject of Christ so that it includes the members of Christ's body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’.

Augustine urges his audience to learn to sing as one subject, as unus homo, because, ‘you who are many are one in Christ’.Footnote 14 The unity of the church with itself, as unus homo, is founded upon its unity with the singular subject of Christ, the unus Christus who ascends. Augustine's theological argument for the unity of the members of Christ's body with the head uses grammatical categories to illustrate that corporate unity. Augustine does not introduce a separate ontological category, such as persona, to identify exactly what is unus, neither among the members of the united church nor in that church's union to Christ. It is enough for him that it is Christ who is unus.

From grammar to revelation

The final step of my argument is to connect this prosopological reading of John 3:13 to the pro-Nicene epistemology which defines the salvific purpose of our incorporation into the grammatical subject of Christ. For Augustine, it is through incorporation into the body of Christ that we come to see and to know the Father through the Son, his spoken Word. Augustine first uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for not being part of Christ's body; then he highlights the epistemological nature of that union, revealing what it is that the Donatists reject and refuse to receive.Footnote 15

This claim is given more credence when we recognise the chronological correlation between these sermons and the beginning of Augustine's De Trinitate. In the first book of Trin., drafted not long before these sermons, Augustine explores the same epistemological concerns which lie behind his preaching on John 3:13.Footnote 16 Most of Trin. 1 is Augustine's exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:24, the Son handing over the kingdom to the Father. Though this verse has a ‘modalist’ reading in mid-fourth-century Greek theology, associated with Marcellus, Augustine is refuting a homoian reading of the text which sees the Son's handing over of the kingdom as evidence of his subordination to the Father. Augustine's pro-Nicene reading interprets the handing over of the kingdom as the Son leading us to ‘contemplation of God and the Father’ when ‘the Father will be made known by the Son’.Footnote 17 Lest anyone understand this to mean that only the Father is seen as God, Augustine makes it clear that this vision includes not only the Father but also the Son in his divinity, as he is equal to the Father.

Throughout Trin. 1, Augustine works with a distinction between faith and vision to describe the way in which the Son brings us to contemplation of the Trinity. Here faith is not simply the opposite of sight but the preparation for it. It is through faith that we come to sight because it is through the exercise of faith that our minds are purified and trained to see properly. Moreover, this movement through faith to sight is an activity which takes place within and through Christ. The incarnation is a revelation of God, but not in the sense that by seeing the incarnate Christ we see his divinity. Augustine denies this in order to undercut homoian claims that the visibility of Christ signifies his lack of ‘true’ divinity. Christ remains the Son of God whose form is equal to the Father and equally invisible. Rather, the incarnation is a revelation of God in that we are led through the flesh of Christ to his divinity.Footnote 18

This soteriological work lies behind Augustine's understanding of the church as the body of Christ. It is incorporation into that single grammatical subject which effects this purification of the heart and movement through faith to vision. Augustine's condemnation of the Donatists in these sermons cannot be appreciated unless we see what it is Augustine believes they are separating from or fighting against.

This christological epistemology becomes evident in Augustine's two other uses of John 3:13 in this seven-month period. In the twelfth tractate on John, Augustine considers the ‘second birth’ discourse of John 3:6–21. Midway through the sermon, Augustine exercises his audience as to what Jesus means by ‘things of earth’ and ‘things of heaven’ (John 3:12). For Augustine the passage turns on the problem of human knowledge: humans do not apprehend the things of this world properly, so how can they understand heavenly things, namely ‘that human beings can be reborn through the Spirit’?Footnote 19 Though he does not use the terms here, Augustine is making a distinction parallel to the faith/sight distinction from Trin. 1.Footnote 20

To clarify this distinction, Augustine turns to the next verse:

And it follows: ‘And no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven’. Behold, he was here and he was in heaven; he was in flesh here, and he was in divinity in heaven. Or rather, he was everywhere in his divinity. Born of a mother but not departing from the Father. Two births of Christ are understood: one divine, another human; one by which we are made, another by which we are remade . . . But because he received his body from Adam . . . and was going to raise that same body, he spoke of an earthly thing: ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it’. Yet, he spoke of a heavenly matter when he said, ‘Unless one is reborn again of water and the Spirit, he will not see the kingdom of God’.Footnote 21

Thus Augustine highlights the ChristocentricFootnote 22 nature of his epistemology. We come to know both earth and heaven, both the incarnate and the eternal Christ, through Christ himself who brings humanity and divinity together. Because of this, Augustine emphasises both Christ's eternal divinity and his assumed humanity.Footnote 23 For Augustine the key to this verse is that the Son of Man both descends from heaven and is in heaven.Footnote 24 Thus Christ's fleshly birth does not negate his eternal generation from the Father but, properly understood, reveals it. Christ's double birth enables the Christian to ascend to contemplation of divinity by way of his flesh, not in spite of it.Footnote 25

Augustine then describes how the Christ who descends in the incarnation is also the Christ who ascends with us to heaven, elucidating the soteriological nature of the Son's work of revelation. Again quoting John 3:13, Augustine revisits the same problem he raised in the exposition of Psalm 122: ‘So how is it that nobody ascends except the one who came down, because just one came down and just one ascended? What about the rest? What else could that mean, except that, since they will be his members, he ascends as one man?’Footnote 26 This mystery of the church's ascent in Christ illustrates the way in which the Word ought to be understood to exist in two ‘places’ or in two natures. The ‘Body of Christ’ which is the church and the ‘body of Christ’ which is the assumed flesh of the Word are mutually illuminating because it is by the latter that the former has a true existence.

Augustine then turns the image to his polemical use, making the anti-Donatist character of his interpretation explicit:

[Our] hope is that he came down so that those who were to ascend through him might be one in him and with him. . . . So this one person (unus) commends the unity of the church. Woe to those who hate unity and make factions among men! If only they would listen to the one who wished to make them one in one for one (unum in uno ad unum). . . . Be in the one (in uno), be one thing (unum), be one person (unus). ‘Nobody has ascended into heaven but the one who came down from heaven’.Footnote 27

The verse which was at first a puzzle and then a source of revelation and salvation becomes now a warning. This warning turns upon the connection between the unus of Christ and the unitas which is the true church. It is not merely that the ‘one person (unus) commends the unity of the church’, but that one person effects that unity by making them ‘one in one for one’. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into that unus that we are incorporated. And it is through the unity of that unus that we move from contemplating his humanity to contemplating his divinity. This is how we ascend with Christ as Christ: to be raised up to heaven means to be raised up to his divinity, sight of which is itself the ultimate goal of human creation and redemption. It is this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ which Augustine believes the Donatists forsake.Footnote 28

To conclude, I turn to Augustine's fourteenth tractate on John. Here he reads John 3:13 along with John 3:31–32: ‘The one who comes from heaven is above all; and he bears witness to what he has seen and heard, and no one accepts his testimony.’ Unlike the previous two passages, Augustine makes no explicit connection here to the life of the church as the body of Christ. He is more interested in puzzling out the relationship between Father and Son. Augustine concludes this line of thought by explaining that, in the incarnation, ‘the Son spoke to us, not his own word, but the Word of the Father; the one who uttered the Word of the Father wanted to speak himself to us’.Footnote 29 Here the significance of John 3:13 in light of John 3:31–2 is the revelatory descent of the one who ascends to yet always is in heaven. It is a revelation which manifests the eternal relationship between Father and Son.Footnote 30 For Augustine, a christological epistemology always has a trinitarian dynamic. What we encounter in Christ is the Father's Word, the Son. To be led by Christ to his own divinity is also to be led from the Son to the Father.Footnote 31

It is here that the prosopological method I discussed earlier is connected to Augustine's understanding of Christ's saving work in the incarnation: the questions ‘who is speaking’ and ‘about whom is he speaking’ are united because the Word speaks himself to us. In participating in that grammatical subject we are joined in Christ's ascent back to where he eternally is with the Father as the Father's Word.Footnote 32 The unity of the church is its unity with the incarnate Word through his Body, through his bodily revelation, so that through his flesh we might ascend to know him as he eternally is and, in knowing him, know the Father.

References

1 For the dating, see Bonnardière, Anne-Marie La, Recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1965)Google Scholar. See esp. her summary calendar, pp. 51–3.

2 Also included in this period are the ten tractatus on 1 John, although I will not discuss any of those sermons explicitly here.

3 See the standard work on early Christian prosopological exegesis, Rondeau, Marie-Josèphe, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles), vol. 2, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1985), esp. p. 22Google Scholar.

4 For a thorough summary of the etymology of persona, see Drobner, Hubertus, Person-Exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus: zur Herkunft der Formel Una Persona (Leiden: Brill, 1986), pp. 6–8Google Scholar.

5 Rondeau, Les Commentaires, skips these sermons completely, and Drobner only makes two brief references to En. Ps. 132.5 (Person-Exegese, 32 and 112).

6 This claim needs some defence given the relative silence of Rondeau and Drobner. In addition to the reasons offered below, the exegetical use of persona also appears throughout these seven months of preaching in the contemporaneous Johannine homilies. The phrase ex persona is twice used, once to explain that the prophet Isaiah speaks ex persona Christi in calling himself both bride and bridegroom (Isa 61:10, Ep. Io. 1.2), and once to describe Christ as speaking ex persona Iudaeorum in claiming that Jews ‘worship what we know’ (Jn 4:22, Io. ev. tr.15.26). Similarly, Augustine uses the term persona to distinguish between the figures of John the Baptist and Elijah (Io. ev. tr. 4.6), to explain how the bridegroom at the wedding of Cana is a figure for the personam domini (Io. ev. tr. 9.2), and to describe the literary relationship between John the author of the Gospel and John the Baptist, the former speaking per personam of the latter (Io. ev. tr. 15.3). So prosopology as an exegetical (and homiletical) method is certainly one of Augustine's tools during these months.

7 Fiedrowicz, Michael, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi: Studien zu Augustins Ennarationes in Psalmos (Freiburg: Herder, 1997)Google Scholar, focuses on the theme of the many voces of the Psalms (those of Christ, the church, etc.). His use of vox highlights the same themes which Rondeau and Drobner address, but without the limiting precision of the term persona.

8 En. Ps. 119.1. All translations from En. Ps. are my own, though in consultation with Maria Boulding's translation from Works of St Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. 3/20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004).

9 En. Ps. 119.7. As throughout this article, I translate homo as ‘person’ to avoid the use of ‘man’ or the cumbersome ‘human’. It should be taken with an asterisk, though, because Augustine does not use the christological category of persona in these sermons. Drobner, Person-Exegese, has demonstrated that it is not until 411 (four years after these sermons) that Augustine ‘discovers’ una persona as a formula for the unity of God and humanity in Christ.

10 Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox, consistently highlights this incorporation of the Christian into the vox of Christ in the Psalms. For Fiedrowicz, the focus is on the rehabilitation of the passions, for which the Psalms serve as both speculum and medicam. He does not, however, make much of the process of ascent as our journey to God through Christ. See esp. pp. 145–233.

11 En. Ps. 119 (my emphasis).

12 En. Ps. 122.1.

13 The problem of solitary ascent in this verse is addressed by Hombert, Pierre-Marie, ‘L’Exégèse Augustinienne de Io. 3,13 entre Orient et Occident’, in L’Esegesi dei Padri Latini (Rome, 2000), pp. 335–61Google Scholar. Hombert uses Augustine's exegesis of Jn 3:13 as an opportunity to examine the confluence of Augustine's Western and Eastern influences. Hombert proposes two major sources for Augustine's reading of this verse. First, there is a Western tradition of reading the text against Apelles and other gnostics who see the verse as suggesting that Christ had no real – or at least no lasting – physical body. Tertullian reads the verse as signifying that Christ rises with the flesh in a way which guarantees our own resurrection through sharing in the same flesh. This, Hombert argues, is the root of Augustine's reading of Jn 3:13 as demonstrating the unity of Christ and the church. Second, Hombert proposes an Eastern reading of the verse connected with Apollinarius and other ‘anti-Sabellians’, including Hilary. Here it is the homme céleste who guards the unity of Christ, reading Jn 3:13 with 1 Cor 2:8. This pairing is transmitted from Hilary to Ambrose to Augustine. Throughout this analysis, Hombert rightly emphasises the fact that the two ways of reading Jn 3:13 are inseparable for Augustine: the ecclesial reading is founded upon the christological. In this article, then, I want to affirm Hombert's reading but push it in three ways: First, aside from a passing mention, Hombert does not discuss the use of Jn 3:13 in the seven months of preaching in 406–7, a use which is indicative of some wider trends in Augustine's trinitarian ecclesiology. Second, Hombert does not situate exegesis of Jn 3:13 in the context of prosopological exegesis. This context, I believe, gives us a better appreciation for how Augustine bridges the christological and the ecclesial in the period before 411 and the discovery of persona in Ep. 137. Third, and most significantly, Hombert does not mention the way in which the ecclesial and christological readings are united in a christological epistemology. Below I will unpack the way in which our ascent with and in Christ is the way we come to see and to know the Father through his Son. It is this revelatory function which represents Augustine's pro-Nicene adaptation of a previously Apollinarian reading of Jn 3:13.

14 En. Ps. 122.2.

15 This section builds upon the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship. See Ayres, Lewis, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 6, ‘A Christological Epistemology’. Ayres, Lewis, ‘The Christological Context of De Trinitate XIII: Towards Relocating Books VIII–XV’, Augustinian Studies 29 (1998), pp. 111–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the move from scientia to sapientia is effected within the double-natured Christ through ‘the Christological “drama” of redemption and participation in the Body of Christ’ (p. 119). I agree with Ayres and advance his reading, grounded primarily in Trin. itself, as also the dominant motif of the anti-Donatist totus Christus of these sermons. Barnes, Michel, ‘The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine's Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology 19 (2003), pp. 329–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, situates this same christological epistemology in Augustine's anti-homoian polemic at the very beginning of his writing of Trin. 1 around 400. This anti-Homoian explication of the beatific vision is, I believe, still on Augustine's mind even as he argues against the Donatists. Finally, Gioia, Luigi, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate (Oxford: OUP, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar builds upon the work of both Barnes and Ayres to offer a sustained analysis of epistemological themes throughout Trin. Gioia ought, I believe, to be read as a companion piece to Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, because whereas Gioia focuses on Trin. itself, Ayres spends more time on Augustine's wider – and often neglected – trinitarian corpus. To all of these works, then, I add this article as an investigation of how this christological/trinitarian epistemology also shapes Augustine's anti-Donatist ecclesiology.

16 Even beyond books 1–4, Trin. on the whole ‘is not an exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity per se: it is a study of the problematic of knowing God who is Trinity. In On the Trinity Augustine is writing on trinitarian hermeneutics or epistemology. His concern is, therefore, with all the types and cases of revelation and our specific capacities for being revealed to, ranging from scripture to scriptural episodes of divine revelation (the theophanies, the incarnation), to signs, to doctrines, to the image and likeness of God (the human mind), to the perfect “form” of God (the Word) as wisdom and knowledge, and to the necessity of faith and purity for the mind to advance in any understanding of the Trinity’ (Barnes, Michel, ‘Latin Trinitarian Theology’, in Phan, Peter C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), p. 78)Google Scholar. These theological concerns must be included when considering the context for these seven months of preaching; they are as important as the Donatist conflict and serve to interpret that schism for Augustine. Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology, pp. 24–33. For the dating of the initial books of Trin. see Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 118–20. With some minor changes, Ayres follows La Bonnardière, Recherches, pp. 83–7, and Hombert, Pierre-Marie, Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Études Agustiniennes, 2000), pp. 45–51Google Scholar.

17 Trin. 1.8.16. Translations of Trin. are my adaptations of McKenna, Stephen's from The Fathers of the Church, vol. 45 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

18 See n. 15 above, esp. Ayres, ‘The Christological Context’, and Barnes, ‘The Visible Christ’.

19 Io. ev. tr. 12.7. Translations from Io. ev. tr. are mine in consultation with Hill, Edmund's from Works of St Augustine, vol. 1/12 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

20 On this distinction, see, inter alia, Ayres, ‘The Christological Context’, pp. 119ff, and Gioia, Theological Epistemology, pp. 75–83. Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society, pp. 147–81, clarifies the connection between Augustine's christology and his theories of sacrament, example, scientia and sapientia. In particular, Dodaro agrees in part with Studer, Basil's thesis, ‘Zur Christologie Augustins’, Augustinianum 19/3 (1979), pp. 539–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in connecting the unity of Christ's person to the unity of his sacrament and example; but Dodaro clarifies how ‘it is the interrelationship between the two natures in Christ, and not simply their unity in one “person”, that provides Augustine with an analogy for the relationship between Christ's sacraments and examples’ (154, n. 33).

21 Io. ev. tr. 12.8.

22 ‘Christocentric’ here should not be read as opposed to ‘trinitarian’, since, as we will see, what Christ ultimately reveals is the Father. As Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 89, notes, ‘The mediation of Christ has a Trinitarian dimension because the Incarnation is not simply the union of divine nature and human nature, but the personal action of the Son of the Father through which he unites human nature to himself. He is the mediator not simply because he is God and man, but because he is the Son and the Logos of the Father who has become man.’ It is this trinitarian christology which characterises Augustine's preaching on the body of Christ in these sermons. See also, Barnes, Michel, ‘Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine's De Trinitate I’, Augustinian Studies 30/1 (1999), pp. 43–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the anti-homoian context of this concern in Augustine's trinitarian thought of this period.

23 This constant emphasis on Christ's continued divinity in the incarnation ought to be read in the context of the anti-homoian affirmation of the Son's divine invisibility, a key theme of Trin. book 1, which Augustine is in the midst of writing at this time. See Barnes, ‘Visible Christ’, and Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 31.

24 Augustine's emphasis here is evocative of Hilary of Poitier's reading of the verse at Tr. s. Ps. 2.11–12: ‘Therefore he is not absent from heaven because when he had descended from heaven, remaining and speaking as the Son of Man, he was, when he spoke this, in heaven. Indeed the Son of Man descended, but through the power of his nature (per naturae virtute) the Son of God, from whence he had descended, was not absent. Nor did he assume himself from that which he had been before, when he was born as a man. Nor being made the Son of Man did he cease being the Son of God, but he was still the Son of God as the Son of Man so that descending as Son of God from heaven through the power of his nature (per virtutis suae substantiae) the same (idem) Son of Man was in heaven.’ Augustine's anti-Donatist use of this verse is a development of earlier pro-Nicene uses, including those by Hilary as well as Ambrose (Fid. 4.10.127).

25 My reading of Augustine's Christocentric epistemology is heavily influenced by Madec, Goulven, Le Christ de Saint Augustin: la Patrie et la Voie, new edn (Paris: Desclée, 2001)Google Scholar, especially his rejection of du Roy's emphasis on Platonic epistemology: ‘S’il reconnaît une prévenance de la Providence à son égard dans la succession de ses découvertes du néoplatonisme et de la grâce, ce n’est pas pour justifier une théorie selon laquelle la connaissance de la Trinité est possible sans le Verbe incarné, c’est pour insister sur le fait qu’il a découvert, avec la grâce de Dieu, les insuffisances et les dangers du néoplatonisme’ (pp. 42–3).

26 Io. ev. tr. 12.8.

27 Io. ev. tr. 12.9.

28 Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology: ‘The epistemological hiatus between what is temporal and what is eternal, between what is the object of faith and what is the object of contemplation, is overcome only in and by Christ’ (p. 69). Van Bavel, Tarsicius, Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin: L’Humain et le divin dans le Christ d’après saint Augustin (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaries, 1954), pp. 164ffGoogle Scholar. investigates christological epistemology primarily by engaging the scholastic question of the incarnate Christ's own vision of God. Much of his insights ought to be applied to the church through the communicatio idiomatum of our union with Christ's body. This emphasis on the unity of Christ and the church in Augustine is also a focal point of Mersch, Emile, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, tr. Kelly, John R. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1938), esp. pp. 420–38Google Scholar. Mersch is concerned primarily, though, with the communication of grace and divinisation. He does not unpack the way in which pro-Nicene epistemological concerns give shape to Augustine's understanding of that union.

29 Io. ev. tr. 14.7.

30 This theme of the Son's revelatory nature/function has been a hallmark of Augustine's trinitarian theology since the early 390s when Word as ‘Image’ so dominated his anti-Manichaean polemic. See Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 53–4.

31 Moreover, we cannot assume that this epistemological work is only an operation of the Son. As Dodaro, Robert, ‘Augustine on the Roles of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Mediation of Virtues’, Augustinian Studies 41/1 (2010), pp. 145–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has noted, the interpenetration of the triune persons is evident in Augustine's flexibility in assigning ‘roles’ to Son and Spirit. Augustine can affirm just as easily that we are taught by the Spirit and given charity by Christ (see pp. 161–3).

32 It should be noted that the true vision of God, true sapientia, is eschatological, only anticipated and approached in this life by faith. Yet the hope of this faith is so sure that throughout these sermons such wisdom is seen as in some way achieved through incorporation into the Body of Christ. Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 83.