Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-kwt9d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-12T05:26:33.186Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Kenosis and its Discontents: Towards an Augustinian Account of Divine Humility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2012

Stephen Pardue
Stephen Pardue*
Affiliation:
Asia Graduate School of Theology, 54 Scout Madriñan, Quezon City, Philippinesspardue@teachbeyond.org
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

After many years of dormancy, the concept of kenosis has recently received widespread and lively attention from contemporary theologians. Yet, in the midst of this revival, there has emerged a steady stream of critique of the concept because of its apparently adverse doctrinal and ethical implications. Less remarked upon, but equally important, is an analogous and long-standing debate about the nature and pervasiveness that we should assign to humility in Christian teaching. Indeed, the interweaving of humility and kenosis in Philippians 2 arguably requires that the two rise or fall together; even if the concepts are not semantically equal, their meanings and their theological implications overlap in manifold and important ways. This article surveys the current state of the question, and argues that the works of Augustine yield valuable insights regarding the most knotty problems emerging from contemporary disputes about kenosis and humility. In the first part, I outline several recent perspectives on kenosis, aiming to bring clarity to the discussion. Along the way, I note the similarities between kenosis and humility as they function theologically, and I offer a summary of the qualities that a theologically sound account of those concepts would need to exhibit in order to address the valid concerns which have so far been raised. In the second part, I propose that closer attention to the theme of humility (both human and divine) may shed new and important light on kenosis debates, suggesting that Augustine is the ideal theologian on whom to test this theory. To this end, I explore Augustine's explanations of christology and language, suggesting that these are the loci through which Augustine's perspective on humility – both divine and human – is best expressed. In both cases, Augustinian humility strikes a noteworthy balance between restraint and empowerment and offers an instructive vantage point from which to address the complex and lively discussions about kenosis. While the African bishop may not offer a decisive resolution of these matters, his approach to them does hold significant promise for a depiction of humility and kenosis which incorporates the valid concerns of critics while simultaneously preserving an unavoidable and central aspect of Christian doctrine.

Keywords

Augustinechristologyhumilityimitation of Christkenosislanguage

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , August 2012, pp. 271 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2012

These are at once the best of times and the worst of times for the concept of kenosis.Footnote 1 For just as several theologians have called for its burial as a key element in theology and ethics, several more have argued for its enduring significance in one or both of these loci.Footnote 2 Intriguingly, the issue has proven divisive within several schools of thought, resisting easy stereotypes; feminist theologians line up on both sides of the dispute,Footnote 3 and a lively debate rages among Barth scholars in which kenosis has featured importantly.Footnote 4 To complicate matters, discussion of kenosis often centres on Philippians 2, a text with a notoriously knotty (and, in recent history, bloated) history of interpretation. While almost every important aspect of that text is disputed in various ways, Michael Gorman has recently argued that it tells Paul's ‘master story’, and has organised significant elements of a Pauline theology around the concept of kenosis.Footnote 5

This article approaches this controversy as a dispute largely about the extent and nature of humility's role in the structure of Christian teaching.Footnote 6 The spectrum of positions on humility looks something like this. On the one hand, MoltmannFootnote 7 and Balthasar,Footnote 8 each with their own speculative treatments of kenosis, have demonstrated the importance of kenosis as a way of understanding the humility of God.Footnote 9 In a similar, though less speculative and elaborate way, Michael Gorman and Bruce McCormack have argued that we have good biblical and dogmatic reasons to view the humility of the Son as revealing a primary characteristic of the Godhead from eternity.Footnote 10 While some have argued that kenosis describes a divine disposition, others go further by arguing that this lowliness defines God's nature in a stronger, ontological sense.Footnote 11

Daphne Hampson stands in square opposition to these proposals, arguing vehemently against making humility so central to Christian teaching by exalting divine kenosis.Footnote 12 Though Hampson is the most sweeping in her condemnation, other theologians have also questioned the adequacy and relevance of a kenotic model of humility for large swathes of the world's population.Footnote 13 In less radical ways, Kathryn TannerFootnote 14 and Kevin VanhoozerFootnote 15 have also questioned the new kenotic orthodoxy, arguing from different perspectives that dogmatic balance requires restraint in defining the extensiveness of divine and human humility in Christian teaching.

Meanwhile, several mediating proposals on kenosis have recently appeared. Oliver Davies takes the concerns about kenosis and corrupt power structures utterly seriously, but still aims to construct a vision of compassion as constitutive of basic human (and divine) identity, in which an individual is simultaneously self-dispossessing and self-possessed.Footnote 16 Aristotle Papanikolaou also tries to demonstrate that a balanced account of kenosis (funded by Balthasar, in his case) can speak properly even (or especially) to victims of abuse.Footnote 17 In a somewhat similar vein, Norman Wirzba has defended the utility of humility as the attitude by which ‘we most fully approximate our true condition as creatures dependent on others’.Footnote 18 Helpfully, Wirzba envisions humility as an empowering rather than oppressive force, inasmuch as it allows us to embrace our creaturely and embodied nature as humans; less helpfully, however, it is beyond the scope of his argument to reflect on the relationship between this human characteristic and divine humility.Footnote 19

Also negotiating a middle way, Sarah Coakley analyses contemporary kenosis discussions, offering several useful categories for understanding the diverse deployments of the conceptFootnote 20 and arguing that kenosis should, when defined with proper attention to dogmatic categories and gender connotations, remain ‘a legitimate spiritual goal for both men and women’.Footnote 21 Finally, Stephen Sykes has also mourned the lack of clarity with which kenosis is often promoted, and has argued that it could play a crucial role in the renewal of theology if it can serve as an opportunity to give a balanced account of divine power.Footnote 22 The foundational relationship between Christ's self-giving and Christian baptism, furthermore, means that Christians must constantly struggle individually and corporately to understand how best to respond to the phenomenon of creaturely power.Footnote 23 Sykes recommends attention to Augustine, a thinker who refused to interpret divine power and humility as opposites, thereby calling theologians to wrestle firmly with the simultaneity of these two notions (i.e. power and glory on the one hand and humiliation and suffering on the other) in Jesus.Footnote 24

By way of summary, I suggest that a chastened theological account of humility must advocate a kind of self-emptying that (1) does not demonstrably sanction abusive power relationships (Hampson), (2) articulates a divine self-emptying that does not imply real loss (McCormack, Coakley, Sykes, Vanhoozer), (3) attends to the challenge of speaking of a simultaneously powerful and ‘kenotic’ God by focusing on Jesus’ public ministry (Sykes and Tanner), (4) respects the dignity of graced created activity (Tanner), and (5) preserves the substantial discontinuity between God and creation (Vanhoozer) without (6) making divine and human humility totally disanalogous phenomena (Wirzba).

Towards an Augustinian account of divine humility

Augustine's fondness of humility is well known, and it is common to cite his development of the Deus humilis theme as a turning point (or at least a point of codification) in Christian tradition. After Augustine, the priority of humility would widely be regarded as the defining characteristic of Christian ethics.Footnote 25 Furthermore, Augustine's ‘theology of the cross’ seems second only to Paul's in its influence on many Reformation-era thinkers, who have in turn had massive influence on contemporary formulations.

As often happens, however, this fame has come at a cost to the African bishop's reputation. Ever since David Hume dared to question the value of ‘humility . . . and the whole train of monkish virtues’, concerns about the usefulness of theological systems which apparently trumpet the value of submission, silence and restraint have grown.Footnote 26 These concerns reached a critical mass in the voices of feminist thinkers committed to envisioning Christianity sans patriarchy.

While it is not the goal of this analysis to exonerate Augustine from the charges lodged against him,Footnote 27 I do hope to expose the usefulness of Augustine's vision of humility in addressing the various difficulties associated with contemporary debates about the nature of kenosis and humility. Doing so will require attending to christology and language as the two primary loci in which Augustinian humility is explained and through which it exerts its ultimate influence on the rest of Christian doctrine. In both cases, Augustine suggests that while humility's primary function is to restrain and limit, it also has a secondary, empowering function. Thus, Christ's humility is not only what moves him to become incarnate and crucified (restraining), but also what allows him to live a life perfectly animated by the Spirit (empowering). Similarly, while divine speech inevitably requires of God a degree of self-limitation, it simultaneously works to grace a human instrument so that it produces an abundance beyond its normal capacity.

This insight suggests the possibility of developing an Augustinian account of humility more helpful to the contemporary situation than any proposal offered so far. On the one hand, Augustine does not shy away from taking Christ's kenosis to be revelatory of the Godhead's humility, since he views this as a biblically warranted expropriation. On the other hand, Augustine understands divine humility to be a fundamentally empowering and propelling phenomenon, and given his argument for the similarities between divine and human humility, this makes the ethical thrust of his account substantially less susceptible to the manipulation and misappropriation that feminist theologians have wisely highlighted.

Christology

Like Athanasius and others before him, Augustine viewed the incarnation as the culminating event capping a slew of attempts by God to teach humility by example.Footnote 28 Every instance of what we might call revelation involved a certain degree of condescension designed specifically to coax humans out of their wayward habits of life. Yet Augustine simultaneously recognises in the incarnation a unique occurrence in which the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob stoops to unthinkable depths for the purpose of shocking humanity from its persistent stupor.Footnote 29 As such, christology is central to Augustine's understanding of humility, and the biblical testimony about Christ defines in every sense the nature of Augustinian humility.

Albert Verwilghen, in a study of incredible erudition and scope, has explored specifically the pervasive role that Philippians 2:5–11 plays in Augustine's corpus.Footnote 30 According to Verwilghen, this text – the very excerpt that lies in, on, and around the flourishing debates surrounding kenosis – has had an extraordinary influence on his ‘theology, his spirituality, and his pastoral work’.Footnote 31 The humility of Christ is properly labelled a mystery, according to Augustine, and special care must be taken to define rigorously the relationships between Christ's kenosis, the Godhead's identity, and human imitation of Christ. On the one hand, his life and death build upon previous acts of condescension, and require us to predicate humility of God rather than merely of Jesus’ human nature.Footnote 32 Yet on the other hand, ‘the Bishop of Hippo never says that God is humble or that humility is God’; rather, he ‘describes the apparent humility of God in relation to the descent of the Word and His earthly life’.Footnote 33 According to Verwilghen, mercy emerges as the underlying feature of the Godhead which explains every divine act of redemptive condescension – as well as the exaltation of the Son described in the second half of the Christ-hymn, which must be accounted for as much as the humility described in the first half.Footnote 34

With these two qualifications in place, Verwilghen is able to describe the shape of Christian humility and the force that it exerts on Augustine's theological system. In particular, he highlights two types of effect arising from the Son's voluntary act of humility: salutary and exemplary.Footnote 35 By the latter, Verwilghen recognises the importance of the features of Christ's supreme instantiation of humility that serve as a model to which Christians must seek increasingly to conform.Footnote 36

Beyond this exemplary function, however, Augustine argues that the humility of Christ accomplishes several objectives which are necessary prerequisites for humans seeking to pursue the via humilitatis. In particular, Christ's humility frees humans from the ironclad reign of superbia – which yields only death according to Augustine – and raises them up to new life.Footnote 37 In addition to liberating and enlivening Christians, the humility of Christ also offers the chance to recover faith and hope, the prospect of a pure heart, justification and healing.Footnote 38 Verwilghen also notes Augustine's fondness for the irony invoked by the Gospel of John: namely, that the Son of Man's exaltation, his supreme act of drawing humanity towards the Father, occurs precisely in his humiliation.Footnote 39

Deborah Wallace Ruddy similarly emphasises that it is Jesus’ human nature that is the locus of divine humility for Augustine, since it is the incarnate life and death of Christ which ultimately yields benefits to needy humanity.Footnote 40 More precisely, it is ‘in the weakness of his humanity that Christ shows us concretely the way to God’, which Augustine takes to be the unmistakable indication that humility is properly central to our understanding of the divine nature.Footnote 41 Thus, for Augustine, while divine humility certainly involves a kind of self-limitation or kenosis, its results are empowering and not ultimately limiting. As Finbarr Clancy suggests, this is the remarkable thing about the cross that makes it such a powerful and yet ironic sign for Augustine. On the one hand, it communicates the full ignominy that Christ's unmatched humility led him to embrace; on the other hand, it functions for Christians as the source of new life and becomes thus a source of pride for catechumens.Footnote 42 Much like the eucharist, Christ's incarnate life and death on the cross achieve this saving function because they are creaturely realities that have been taken up and invested with surprising power, and in this respect, they reveal the proper shape of Christian humility.Footnote 43

The notion that Christ's humanity, and thus his humility, is an instrument that wields power far greater than one might have expected is a well-documented theme throughout Augustine's corpus.Footnote 44 Therefore, I offer here only a brief treatment of the theme's presence in a particularly revealing section of Tractates on the Gospel of John. In exposing for his congregation the nature of the incarnation described in John 1, Augustine explains the paradox thus: ‘By the nativity itself he made a salve by which the eyes of our heart may be wiped clean and we may be able to see his majesty through his lowliness.’Footnote 45 The reason that lowliness is needed to harness the power of Christ's glory is that the eye of the human heart has been injured by dust, or earth, so that ‘earth is put there that it may be healed’.Footnote 46 In spite of this, however, the end result is the restoration of sight, so that lowliness winds up leading humans to see God's glory clearly in the incarnate Christ.Footnote 47

Augustine explains later that this is the reason that the cross rather than the nativity star (a far nobler symbol) is the appropriate sign for Christians to bear. It is because ‘he was glorified by that which was made low; he raised up the lowly by that to which, when he was made low, he descended’.Footnote 48 He takes up the Christus medicus theme to note the mysterious nature of the medicine Christ prescribes, in which wounds becomes cure for wounds, leading him to repeat his comments about mud curing muddied vision once more.Footnote 49

These insights, particularly inasmuch as they depict humility as an ultimately empowering and renewing virtue, capture the key elements of an Augustinian account of humility well. Yet more must be said of humility's significance in Augustine's soteriology if we are to address the conundrums surrounding kenosis, divine humility and divine power. In particular, while Augustine's christology does much to explain divine humility's salvific effects, Augustine's corpus has still more insight to offer regarding the logic that undergirds the pervasive role that humility plays in God's redemptive work.Footnote 50 His reflections on language in particular yield special insight into the shape humility must take in Christian tradition.

Language

It should be clear by now that contemporary dubiety towards humility would be remarkably alien to Augustine. Contemporary scepticism about language, however, might find more happy reception with the African bishop. It is therefore not surprising that many have found his philosophy of language a friendly place to initiate peace talks with pre-modernity, finding an alliance between Augustine and post-modernity to be advantageous on multiple levels.Footnote 51

Unquestionably, pertinent dangers lurk in many such appropriations of Augustine. Frances Young warns that, while postmodern hermeneutics and Augustine's linguistic theory may have points of resonance, ‘Augustine's position is fundamentally invested in issues of truth and reference that postmodernism brackets out.’Footnote 52 While admitting the ‘difficult and complex process’ involved in human–divine linguistic engagement, hermeneutical challenges are not in the end insurmountable but are instead instruments of God's providential care for his creatures.Footnote 53 Young makes the connection with humility, noting that Augustine envisions readers of scripture replicating the Son's kenosis and eventually gaining as a reward the gift of understanding the right meaning of a particular text.Footnote 54

Charles T. Mathewes likewise warns against reading Augustine as an advocate of scepticism or apophasis in the mould of Kant, Derrida or Marion, but does argue that Augustine prescribes a kind of ‘open questioning’ which leads practitioners to have their mental space converted.Footnote 55 Mathewes makes his case by examining the vision at Ostia, which teaches Augustine to view history not as ‘a series of failed attempts at reaching union with the divine’, but rather as ‘one long lesson in (because one extended act of ascesis for) what that union will one day, at the end of days, be revealed to be’.Footnote 56 Augustine refers to this notion in On the Trinity, where he speaks of knowledge that ‘is sought in order to be found all the more delightfully’, and ‘is found in order to be sought all the more avidly’.Footnote 57 The blossoming of this questioning ultimately occurs in exegetical engagement with scripture, whose wells run ever deeper than our own inflamed and properly formed love for real knowledge.Footnote 58 Augustine thus does not aim to offer in the Confessions a conclusive end, but instead to articulate ‘a form of ecstatic ascesis, a form of self-formation, and self-discipline, that has as its centre precisely not concern with the self’.Footnote 59 Mathewes connects this aspect of Augustine's thought with charity, though humility, which is often defined by an absence of concern with oneself and connected with ascesis, seems an equally probable virtue to describe such a posture.

Intriguingly, both Mathewes and Young point to similarities between Augustine's linguistic theory and Gregory of Nyssa's reflections on language. Both ancient authors grapple with the limits of language to express theological truths, which applies both to human efforts at theologising and to instances of divine accommodation in which God accepts to some degree the limitations of human language. Footnote 60 While Gregory's depictions of mystical union with God – in which his conception of intellectual humility is most evidently exposed – remain almost always in the third person, the pleasure of Augustine's work is the self-aware and even autobiographical dimension he includes.

John Peter Kenney has given special attention to the vision at Ostia (and all of the other contemplative moments narrated in the Confessions),Footnote 61 one of the most widely discussed points in Augustine's corpus in which he documents his struggle with the inadequacy of fallen human systems to capture and depict the weight of the soul's contact with the divine. Kenney argues that this vision is quite similar to all of the other visions recounted in the Confessions, in that Augustine evaluates it as both a success and a failure. Inasmuch as ‘they are acts of contemplation that disclose much about a higher level of reality’, they are a success.Footnote 62 Yet they all fail ‘to insure the soul's sustained existence in that higher realm’, and thus they ‘must give way to the supreme Christian act of confession, the recognition of the soul's need for the mediation of Christ’.Footnote 63 On Kenney's account, this is a subtext throughout the whole work, as Augustine walks the reader through his own remarkable moments of transcendence, only to reveal that, even after Christian baptism, human limits permanently restrain the speech of all but those who are willing to confess their own inadequacy.Footnote 64 In the words of Robert Wilken, Augustine is suggesting by the end of the Confessions that only a different kind of contemplation than Augustine had earlier attempted – one anchored in scripture, ‘where God holds conversation with us’ – is capable of yielding the delights the young Augustine sought; the final book even depicts the church as the ‘vehicle and context for Christian contemplation’.Footnote 65

Yet even the delights experienced by the converted through properly reformed contemplation remain subject to human limitations, and Augustine is deeply aware of this prevailing reality.Footnote 66 After all, the key practices of the church – from prayer to reading scripture to administering the sacraments – are mediated by creaturely signs. Thus, while language maintains a special place in Christian tradition and practice, Christian authors both before and after Augustine maintained an ambiguous stance towards language and its relative power.Footnote 67

It appears that Augustine grappled with the limits of language while also recognising possibilities for the demolition of those limits in cases of divine intervention. As Andrew Louth has shown, these limitations are related to the Fall for Augustine, and as such they are in themselves a grace because they frustrate proud and manipulative hearts.Footnote 68 In spite (or perhaps because) of his rhetorical training, Augustine reports significant angst about the limitations of language to declare theological truth.Footnote 69 Augustine's scepticism, however,

is overcome by his grasp of the reality of the redemption of the Word – the Word incarnate and the word preached. Language itself is fractured and of itself frustrates communication . . . But it can also be a means of redemption, and then in some mysterious way language is healed and healing.Footnote 70

Carol Harrison has made a similar observation in a work that argues for a high view of this-worldly phenomena in Augustine's theology.Footnote 71 Augustine sees language, like most creaturely signs which are taken up by God to point to a separate level of reality, as a creaturely medium with readily observable limits.Footnote 72 It is, after all, reducible to the remarkably simple phenomenon of syllables passing through the lips, producing reverberations which register in the listener's ear.Footnote 73 Language is indeed an inherently under-resourced phenomenon when it comes to communicating theological insight.Footnote 74 Yet, in spite of this fact, it becomes the primary medium – and also (with the incarnation of the Word) the primary metaphor – for divine–human fellowship, and in this role it acquires power to surpass its otherwise natural limits. Language does indeed work as a veil in a sense, but it also functions, like the sacraments, to reveal ‘the truth or reality which is its source’ and to lead humans to it.Footnote 75 Thus, while language remains limited, it enables fallen humans, ‘who would otherwise be blinded by the truth, to approach it, to seek for it, and to prepare [themselves] to see it’.Footnote 76 Cary concurs on this point, and though he warns against overestimating Augustine's positive evaluation of language, he nevertheless grants that sanctified words function as (relatively successful) reminders of and pointers towards truth.Footnote 77

Scripture is certainly the best example of this capacity of language, as Harrison contends Augustine's sermons and commentaries reveal. Likening scripture to a variety of simultaneously veiling and revealing divine acts (creation, the incarnation and especially the humanity of Christ), the African doctor thereby confirms his positive – though nuanced – perspective on biblical language.Footnote 78 Again, while Cary rightly cautions against looking to Augustine for a robust account of revelation through words because of the arguments proffered in De Magistro, he sees in Augustine a similar conception of scripture's function. In God's condescension to communicate linguistically, he commits himself to a kind of restraint, but that restraint is only penultimate to the second half of the story: the empowerment of that human instrument to do something salvific – something more than words usually do.Footnote 79

Conclusion

What an Augustinian account of language and christology secures for us – and what the contemporary kenotic quagmire desperately needs – is a richer, thicker sense of the precise shape of Christian humility. In these two loci, humility is exposed as a fundamentally empowering trait. When God acts humbly, he empowers the graced creaturely instruments that he chooses (especially Christ's human nature and human language). When humans act humbly, confessing their own limitations and creatureliness, they are liberated to see beyond those boundaries and even to move them outward by a few paces.

While Augustine wisely refused to allow humility or kenosis to sum up the divine nature – a warning which we must heed today for both dogmatic and ethical reasons – he was also right to confess its pervasive status in the structure of Christian doctrine. The truly difficult task, Augustine reveals, is ensuring that the humility we exalt is the sort that has redemptive liberation and empowerment as its final end. Unfortunately, because of the pervasiveness of a different kind of intellectual humility – one funded by a Kantian respect for limits which are absolute rather than moveable by the influence of divine grace – many of us are accustomed to viewing humility as a merely restraining force.Footnote 80 Only a dogmatic account in which divine grace is allowed to demolish those limitations by embracing and then reversing them can effectively subvert this acculturated norm, and contribute to the recovery of a properly Christ-shaped humility.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

1 I thank Dan Treier, Kevin Vanhoozer, Mike Allen, Michael Graves and the members of the Theology Colloquium at Wheaton College, each of whom read and commented on earlier drafts of this article, improving it in important ways.

2 For an account of the rise and fall of kenosis, see Coakley, Sarah, ‘Kenōsis and Subversion: On the Repression of “Vulnerability” in Christian Feminist Writing’, in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 3–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCormack, Bruce L., ‘Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2006), pp. 243–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baillie, D. M., God was in Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (New York: Scribner, 1948)Google Scholar.

3 Hampson, Daphne (ed.), Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: SPCK, 1996)Google Scholar contains insightful interaction between Hampson and Coakley on kenosis (see esp. pp. 82–111, 120–4). See further Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ‘Is Feminism the End of Christianity: A Critique of Daphne Hampson's Theology and Feminism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1990), pp. 390–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hampson, Daphne, ‘On Power and Gender’, Modern Theology 4 (1988), pp. 234–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 A primary locus of this debate is the relationship between the Son's kenosis on the one hand, and divine freedom on the other. See esp. McCormack, ‘Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource’; Hunsinger, George, ‘Election and the Trinity: Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), pp. 179–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCormack, Bruce, ‘Election and the Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger’, Scottish Journal of Theology 63 (2010), pp. 203–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Gorman, Michael J., Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009)Google Scholar; idem, Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).

6 My argument does not rely on a simple identification of kenosis and humility as equivalent terms, though many contemporary authors do use them thus. Rather, I hope to show that the widely varying accounts of kenosis have implications for an account of divine humility which deserve further exposition. On the one hand, they describe a concept which has clear overlap with humility and thus suggest how best to approach the matter. On the other hand, these contemporary proposals problematise kenosis. I will suggest that Augustine helps us to address the problems associated with articulating a positive concept of humility and the current confusion surrounding kenosis. A helpful test of any theological account of humility is whether it can make sense of kenosis without getting into ethical or heretical trouble. The interrelation of these two concepts (i.e. humility and kenosis), and their similar application to both God and creatures is not the arbitrary choice of theologians, but stems from biblical descriptions of Jesus (esp. Phil. 2).

7 Moltmann argues that, given God's radical omnipresence, space must have been made before creation by a previous divine act. Employing the concept of zimsum, Moltmann depicts divine self-limitation as the carving out of a ‘primal, mystical space’ in which the whole of creation is able to subsist outside of (but somehow also inside of) God: The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 109–10; see also God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 86–93. God's power is ultimately spoken in the language of love, demonstrating its might not in autocratic ruling but in its stunning patience and unending ability to create sufficient space for creation's own realisation of its manifold potentialities: Moltmann, , ‘God's Kenosis in the Creation and Consummation of the World’, in Polkinghorne, John C. (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 148–51Google Scholar.

8 Balthasar's account is marked by an insistence on taking the kenosis of the Son with utter seriousness, and a related unwillingness to restrict its import solely to the human nature or solely to the Son in the economy. To do so is to underestimate ‘the weight of the assertions made in Scripture’, and to succumb ‘at once to both Nestorianism and Monophysitism’: Mysterium Paschale, trans. Aidan Nichols (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), p. viii. In order properly to incorporate this profound truth into our understanding of the triune God, Balthasar suggests we think of the kenosis as an eternal ‘event’ in the intra-trinitarian life, particularly by tying the concept ultimately to the divine processions (ibid.). For further exposition, see esp. Mysterium Paschale, pp. 23–35, and O'Hanlon, Gerard F., The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 11–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 It is noteworthy that Moltmann's treatment of kenosis has received particular attention from a wide range of scholars. For example, almost every article in a recent book on the topic of kenosis and creation – composed by a mix of theologians and scientists – references Moltmann's work positively (Work of Love).

10 Gorman makes his case esp. from a close study of Phil. 2:5–11, arguing that the novel contribution of Pauline theology lies particularly in its countercultural approach to the phenomenon of power: Inhabiting the Cruciform God, pp. 22–39. McCormack, on the other hand, makes a dogmatic argument in dialogue with Barth's christology and doctrine of God that the kenotic dimensions of Jesus’ incarnate life are in conformity with and grounded in the eternal nature of the Son's nature (his mode of being), with the result that the Word's kenosis constitutes neither a change in God nor a ‘divestment of anything proper to deity’: ‘Karl Barth's Christology as a Resource’, p. 250. John Macquarrie, in a series of publications on the humility of God, has also argued for the priority of humility and kenosis in our understanding of the divine nature: ‘Kenoticism Reconsidered’, Theology 77 (1974), pp. 115–24; ‘The Humility of God’, in McDonald, Durstan R. (ed.), The Myth/Truth of God Incarnate (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1979), pp. 13–25Google Scholar.

11 Thus, Barbour, Ian, ‘God's Power: A Process View’, in Polkinghorne, John C. (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 1–20Google Scholar, and Hallman, Stephen, The Descent of God: Divine Suffering in History and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991)Google Scholar, both interpret divine kenosis as an assertion about process thought, while Moltmann, ‘God's Kenosis’, Fiddes, ‘Creation Out of Love’, in Polkinghorne, John C. (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 167–91Google Scholar, Peacocke, ‘The Cost of New Life’, ibid., pp. 21–42, and Clayton, , ‘Kenotic Trinitarian Panentheism’, Dialog 44 (2005), pp. 250–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, opt to defend instead its compatibility with panentheism – yet both groups are distinguishable from weaker proposals such as Gorman's inasmuch as they see kenosis as defining not only God's ethical stance, but divine existence itself.

12 ‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy’; ‘On Power and Gender’.

13 E.g. Post, Stephen G., ‘The Inadequacy of Selflessness: God's Suffering and the Theory of Love’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (1988), pp. 213–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1993), p. 186Google Scholar; Kwok, Pui-lan, Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 79–97Google Scholar; Rieger, Joerg, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007)Google Scholar.

14 Tanner objects to common Christian appeals to embrace self-sacrifice and suffering as gifts in light of Christ's example: Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 75–7. More recently, she clarifies that this position is grounded in an understanding of the atonement as at-one-ment, and suggests that Christians focus instead on the biblical image of communal feasting over a sacrifice: Christ the Key (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 247–72.

15 Vanhoozer argues that the widespread popularity of using kenosis as a metaphor for the God–creation relation is deeply mistaken. Specifically, he warns against a conception of God as self-contracting, self-limiting or kenotic in the sense of losing some part of himself for the sake of gaining genuine relationship: Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 394. Furthermore, Vanhoozer is worried about the prospect of ‘projecting kenosis onto the immanent Trinity’, a theological move that Vanhoozer argues is intimately tied to panentheistic assumptions about the God–creation relationship (ibid., p. 130).

16 A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. xx.

17 Papanikolaou, Aristotle, ‘Person, Kenosis and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation’, Modern Theology 19 (2003), pp. 41–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 ‘The Touch of Humility: An Invitation to Creatureliness’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), p. 226.

19 While Wirzba does make a few observations about the similarities between divine and human interpersonal relationship, hinting that the divine persons – who are engaged in eternal, intimate relation from eternity and are comprised by their being-in-relatedness – might present a model of empowering humility (ibid., pp. 239–41), the distinct dissimilarities between divine persons and human persons undermines the potential fruitfulness of this approach. Since divine persons simply are not limited in the way that humans are, and their relations with one another are categorically different from human-to-human relationships of dependence, it is almost impossible to connect human and divine humility in any meaningful way when humility is defined solely in terms of dependence, relationship and limitation.

20 See ‘Kenosis: Theological Meanings and Gender Connotations’, in Polkinghorne, John C. (ed.), The Work of Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 192–210Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 208. Here Coakley specifically favours understandings of kenosis as ‘sacrificial love’ or as ‘an admission of creaturely dependence’. Elsewhere, however, she connects it esp. with silent, contemplative prayer and the rejection of sinful perversions of power: ‘Kenōsis and Subversion’, pp. 7–8, 11, 32–9.

22 ‘The Strange Persistence of Kenotic Christology’, in Kee, Alistair and Long, Eugene Thomas (eds), Being and Truth: Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie (London: SCM, 1986), pp. 359, 361, 369Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., pp. 366–72. This ambiguous relationship between Christians and power is reflected well in 1 Peter, which some have speculated has roots as a baptismal discourse, and which reflects quite astutely on the political implications of Christ's suffering example. For a particularly adroit analysis, see Bechtler, Steven Richard, Following in His Steps: Suffering, Community, and Christology in 1 Peter (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

24 ‘The Strange Persistence of Kenotic Christology’, pp. 372–3.

25 Herdt, Jennifer A., ‘Christian Humility, Courtly Civility and the Code of the Streets’, Modern Theology 25 (2009), pp. 551–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 For a brief but astute overview of the ebb and flow of humility's popularity, see Grenberg, Jeanine, Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption and Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 For a summary of the critique of the priority of humility as it relates to Augustine specifically, as well as a defence of his stance on humility, see Couenhoven, Jesse, ‘Not Every Wrong is Done with Pride?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 61 (2008), pp. 32–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deborah Wallace Ruddy, ‘A Christological Approach to Virtue: Augustine and Humility’ (PhD diss., Boston College, 2001), pp. 33–46, 238–56.

28 Ruddy, ‘A Christological Approach to Virtue’, pp. 163–4.

29 Cavadini, John C., ‘Pride’, in Fitzgerald, Allan and Cavadini, John C. (eds), Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 682Google Scholar.

30 Christologie et spiritualité selon Saint Augustin: L'hymne aux Philippiens, Théologie historique 72 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985).

31 ‘Jesus Christ: Source of Christian Humility’, in Augustine and the Bible, trans. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), p. 301. Verwilghen counts 422 citations and 563 allusions to the text in Augustine's treatises, letters and sermons (ibid., p. 310).

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., pp. 306–7. Note esp. In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus (IoEvTrac) 36.4, ed. R. Willems, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCL) 36 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), pp. 325–6, which, as Verwilghen notes, couches the series of divine condescensions described by the hymn in the image of divine mercy.

35 Christologie et spiritualité selon Saint Augustin, p. 424.

36 Ibid., pp. 291–5. ‘Par son abaissement in forma servi, le Fils est tout à la fois source de salut et modèle de vie’ (p. 295).

37 Ibid., pp. 424–5.

38 Ibid., pp. 427–8.

39 Ibid., p. 426. See John 8:28. These two ways in which the divine humility exerts influence on Christian doctrine – objectively making way for salvation, and simultaneously offering an example for humanity to follow – participate in a broader pattern in Augustine's soteriology that Verwilghen recognises as sacramentum and exemplum (ibid., p. 295). See further Studer, Basil, ‘“Sacramentum et exemplum” chez Saint Augustin’, Recherches Augustiniennes 10 (1975), pp. 87–141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Ruddy, ‘A Christological Approach to Virtue’, p. 96.

41 Ibid.; italics original.

42 Clancy, Finnbarr G., ‘The Cross in Augustine's Tractatus in Iohannem’, Studia Patristica 33 (1997), pp. 58–62Google Scholar.

43 This image is suggested by Ruddy (‘A Christological Approach to Virtue’, p. 97). Phillip Cary has raised significant questions about Augustine's true convictions regarding the power of outward signs, including the sacraments, to communicate grace to Christians. On his account, Augustine's intimate relationship with Platonism has been widely underestimated, and as a Christian Platonist, he is far less optimistic regarding these outward signs than most of his interpreters have assumed: Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine's Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3–14. Cary's is indeed a challenging proposal that should form a strong deterrent against facile descriptions of Augustine's relationship with Platonism. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the extent of diversity within Platonism during Augustine's lifetime, and the precise nature of Augustine's relationship to these various versions of Platonism is hotly disputed (see e.g. Cavadini, John C., review of Philip Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Modern Theology 18 (2002), pp. 425–8Google Scholar; Kenney, John Peter, review of Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul, Journal of Religion 89 (2009), pp. 603–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a historically sensitive and very clear engagement with Cary's foundational work on Augustine's relationship to Platonism – Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) – see Kenney, John Peter, ‘Augustine's Inner Self’, Augustinian Studies 32 (2002), pp. 79–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 In addition to Clancy's defence of this concept in IoEvTrac, see also Studer's, Basil treatment of its prevalence in De Trinitate (DeTrin) and the Enchiridion: Studer, Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of the Early Church, ed. Louth, Andrew, trans. Westerhoff, Matthias (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), p. 179Google Scholar. Ruddy also focuses on its pervasive presence in Augustine's sermons: ‘A Christological Approach to Virtue’, pp. 93–9.

45 IoEvTrac 2.16: CCL 36: 19; trans. Rettig, John W., Fathers of the Church (FC) 78 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), p. 73Google Scholar. Note that per eius humilitatem, ‘by his lowliness’, is replaced with per eius humanitatem, ‘by his humanity’, in many codices, suggesting perhaps the conceptual overlap between these two concepts in the communities receiving Augustine's work.

46 Ibid. Augustine is alluding here to the Gospel pericope in which Jesus heals a man's blindness with dirt (John 9), and unsurprisingly he makes the same connections in 44.1–2 (CCL 36: 381–2), a tractate dedicated to that passage.

47 Tractates 2.16 (CCL 36: 19), 44.1–2 (CCL 36: 381–2) and Augustine's comments on John 13 (Tractates 55–66 (CCL 36: 463–95)), all ponder the connection between the revelation of God's glory in Christ and his lowliness. Specifically, Augustine recognises the paradoxical nature of Jesus’ statement that the Son of Man is glorified right after Judas’ betrayal becomes apparent and Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet, both of which seem to conceal, rather than expose the Son's glory. As we might expect, he reports that this is a classic case of biblical language asserting that mundane signifiers can point to much more glorious truths (Tractate 63.2 (CCL 36: 486–7)).

48 Tractate 3.2 (CCL 36: 20; FC 78: 76).

49 Tractate 3.3 (CCL 36: 21) and 3.6 (CCL 36: 23).

50 Ruddy includes a section which examines the difference between human and divine humility, suggesting that, while the former involves merely ‘descending’ from pretension to a realistic evaluation of oneself, the latter implies ‘descending’ by transforming into something new for the sake of humanity (‘A Christological Approach to Virtue’, pp. 148–51). While this is a helpful qualification – humility is not univocal for Augustine and should not be for us – the nature of divine descent, which is the very point at issue in much of the kenosis debate, requires further description.

51 Perhaps the most recent high-profile attempts to enlist Augustine as an ally to the emerging postmodern discourse are Caputo, John D. and Scanlon, Michael J. (eds), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Boeve, L., Lamberigts, M. and Wisse, Maarten (eds), Augustine and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity? (Leuven: Peeters, 2009)Google Scholar; Marion, Jean-Luc, Au lieu de soi: L'approche de saint Augustin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 ‘Augustine's Hermeneutics and Postmodern Criticism’, Interpretation 58 (2004), p. 42.

53 Ibid., pp. 54–5.

54 Ibid., p. 55. Unfortunately, Young does not substantiate the connection with humility with any citations from Augustine's corpus.

55 ‘The Liberation of Questioning in Augustine's Confessions’, Journal of American Academy of Religion 70 (2002), pp. 548–50.

56 Ibid., p. 551. In an illuminating turn of phrase, Mathewes suggests that Augustine urges readers to become ‘“eschatologically patient” rather than “apocalyptically impatient”’.

57 Ibid., p. 553. See DeTrin 15.2, ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie, CCL 50A (1968), pp. 460–2.

58 ‘Liberation of Questioning’, pp. 555–6.

59 Ibid., p. 557 (italics original).

60 Mathewes, ‘Liberation of Questioning’, p. 556; Young, ‘Augustine's Hermeneutics and Postmodern Criticism’, p. 54. See also Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), pp. 140–52.

61 Confessionum, ed. L. Verheijen, CCL 27 (1981), 9.10.23–5.

62 The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Re-Reading The Confessions (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 10.

63 Ibid., p. 11.

64 Ibid., pp. 11–12. The relationship between Augustine's thinking on this subject and Plotinian accounts of contemplation with which he was clearly familiar is an important question, but one beyond our scope here. For discussion of this matter, including interaction with interlocutors (such as Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self and Paul Henry, The Path to Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in Saint Augustine, trans. Francis F. Burch (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1981), see esp. Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine, pp. 49–61; idem, ‘Saint Augustine and the Limits of Contemplation’, Studia Patristica 38 (2001), pp. 199–218.

65 Review of John Peter Kenney, Mysticism of Saint Augustine, First Things (Nov. 2006), p. 56.

66 In addition to the work of Mathewes mentioned above, Catherine Conybeare attempts to explore (by analysis of three of the bishop's earliest works) ‘an Augustine too little attended to: the Augustine who gives questioning, uncertainty, and human limitations their due role in his theology’: The Irrational Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 7. For an interesting attempt to complicate the concept of conversion by close attention to several struggles leading to Augustine's own loss of optimism regarding Christian life, see Markus, Robert A., Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine's Spiritual Career (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

67 Burton, Philip, Language in the Confessions of Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 ‘Augustine on Language’, Literature and Theology 3 (1989), p. 154.

69 The most compelling text is De Catechizandis Rudibus 2.3, ed. J. B. Bauer, CCL 46 (1969), pp. 122–3, to which Louth points (‘Augustine on Language’, pp. 156–7).

70 Ibid., p. 158. Note that language is both the thing being healed and the thing doing the healing, just as humanity is both the thing being healed and the thing doing the healing in the incarnation.

71 Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

72 Ibid., pp. 54–6. As an example of language's limitations, Harrison cites DeTrin 4.21.30 (CCL 50, pp. 202–3), in which Augustine alerts the reader to the inability of language to capture rightly the unity of the three persons of the Trinity (since we must use titles and descriptions which give the impression of more individuation than we ought).

73 Ibid., pp. 57–8. See IoEvTrac 37.4 (CCL 36, pp. 333–4).

74 This is a common assertion throughout Augustine's work, but as Phillip Cary has demonstrated, it is stated with particular clarity in De Magistro (Outward Signs, p. 94). There, Augustine argues that words, as signs, cannot really reveal things at all unless we are already familiar with the realities to which they point (De Magistro, p. 33, ed. K. D. Daur, CCL 29 (1970), p. 192).

75 Beauty and Revelation in Augustine, pp. 63–7.

76 Ibid., p. 67.

77 This is true at least until the eschaton (Outward Signs, pp. 87–9).

78 Beauty and Revelation in Augustine, pp. 82–3. The matter of multiple levels of meaning makes this claim more complex, Harrison argues, but in the end vindicates its veracity inasmuch as Augustine seems to think of the literal meaning veiling but also revealing the spiritual meaning(s) (ibid., pp. 83–6). While the literal sense may indeed obscure, it does so like Jesus’ parables – to conceal the truth from those who are unprepared while simultaneously leading the pure in heart towards truth – rather than in a deceptive manner (ibid., p. 91). For this defence of the veiling nature of scripture, see e.g. DeTrin 15.17.27 (CCL 50A, pp. 501–2) and IoEvTrac 45.6 (CCL 36, pp. 390–1).

79 ‘The relation of Scripture to the knowledge of God is thus like the relation of the doctor's orders to healthy vision . . . [they] do not embody or give us what we are looking for, but they direct our efforts to learn how to see better’ (Outward Signs, p. 43). At times, Cary may overplay his case on the limitations of words as signs in Augustine, such as when he asserts somewhat vaguely that Augustine's view of signs is closer to that of ‘the skeptics than to the philosophers who believed in the possibility of empirical knowledge’ (ibid., p. 18). Elsewhere, Cary avers that ‘we cannot expect from Augustine a strong doctrine of Scriptural revelation. For the Scriptures consist of words, which are signs, and signs do not reveal things – especially not divine things, which are seen only by the mind’ (ibid., p. 43). To be fair, these may be cases in which Cary is using hyperbole in order to give the reader a sense that Augustine also spoke hyperbolically on this matter (esp. in De Magistro) to emphasise the necessity of divine aid for words to lead to salvific knowledge.

80 For two recent descriptions of Kantian humility, see Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility; Langton, Rae, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Of course, this understanding of humility was around before Kant, and many post-Kantian instantiations of this view are not genetically indebted to him. Further, recent studies suggest that the scepticism often attributed to Kant in theological matters may not be quite right: Firestone, Chris, Theology at the Transcendental Boundaries of Reason [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007Google Scholar; Firestone, Chris and Jacobs, Nathan, In Defense of Kant's Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, I draw attention to him here because he is a particularly influential and symbolic figure widely understood to promote a version of intellectual humility which is esp. constraining for theological discourse.