Augustines Trinitarian Aesthetics in De Trinitate

Maarten Wisse June

Abstract In contemporary culture, the domain of truth and the domain of beauty frequently appear as more or less separate spheres. The domain of truth seems the domain of science and technology, of lawlike, rational and repeatable processes and, not the least, of e ciency. The domain of beauty seems the domain of creativity, irrationality, originality and, not the least, ine ciency. In this paper, I present one strategy to think oneself away from the running perception of truth and beauty by exploring the way truth and beauty interact in the thought of a pre-modern thinker, Augustine in my case. I restrict myself to De Trinitate because it well represents Augustines mature thought on aesthetics, and because in Augustine, there is no aesthetics without the Trinity, and the other way round.

Introduction
In contemporary culture, the domain of truth and the domain of beauty frequently appear as more or less separate spheres. The domain of truth seems the domain of science and technology, of lawlike, rational and repeatable processes and, not the least, of e ciency. The domain of beauty seems the domain of creativity, irrationality, originality and, not the least, ine ciency. In the religious realm, we nd similar perceptions of truth and beauty. Right-wings reject aesthetic transformations of their traditional doctrines, and what one might call an aesthetic Christianity is frequently dependent on a negative attitude towards the truths of the tradition. In my conviction, philosophical thought as well as theological re ection would bene t from a more integrated view of truth and beauty. In this paper, I present one strategy to think oneself away from the running perception of truth and beauty by exploring the way truth and beauty interact in the thought of a pre-modern thinker, Augustine in my case. As Robert OConnell remarks, for Augustine, as for most thinkers in the Early Church and Middle Ages, truth is fundamentally identical with beauty. Hence, Augustines theology represents a situation in which truth and aesthetics are still inseparable. Among the large number of works written by Augustine, I choose to restrict myself to De Trinitate apart from the usual restrictions of time and space for various reasons. First, De Trinitate represents Augustines major thought on aesthetics and the Trinity. Furthermore, Augustines aesthetics should properly be understood in connection with his view of the Trinity, since as we will see below, Augustines aesthetics cannot be understood apart from an appeal to his understanding of God the Trinity. It is not
Robert J. OConnell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), .

merely that aesthetics plays a role in his doctrine of the Trinity, but his trinitarianism is aesthetically quali ed, and at the same time, his aesthetics is fundamentally a trinitarian aesthetics in a number of ways. I will argue that in realising this interconnection between aesthetics and trinitarianism, we can do away with many misunderstandings present in previous and current interpretations of De Trinitate. The structure of the paper is as follows: First, I will explain the fundamentals of what Augustine is doing in De Trinitate in confrontation with various misunderstandings of this work in previous and contemporary research. Second, I will more fully explore which role the aesthetic plays in De Trinitate. Finally, I will address the implications of my analysis for a theology and theory of aesthetics.

The Fundamentals of Augustines De Trinitate

One might well argue that from the three main speculative works of Augustine, the Confessiones, De Trinitate, and De civitate Dei, the De Trinitate is the least well researched and most frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. To mention a few examples: it is said to provide quoting the title of Michael Schmaus well known work a psychological doctrine of the Trinity; in its recent German bilingual edition, it is abbreviated to books VIII to XI as providing an interesting theory of the mind; furthermore, it has been severely criticized by recent trinitarian theology as being at the root of the modalist trinitarian theology of the West; nally, it is characterised by the otherwise excellent scholar Mary T. Clark as presenting an apophatic theology. One might say that all these interpreters of De Trinitate have their own hermeneutical key to the work. Schmaus key to the psychological Augustine is book IX to XI. Trinitarian theologys key is book V to VII etcetera. In order to remove at least some of the misunderstandings, a close reading of some of the neglected books is of crucial importance, particularly a close reading of books I and VIII. A close reading is indeed required since the initial impression of book I, is one of a very polemical work. Augustine opens De Trinitate with the rejection of three ways to the knowledge of the true God based on reason: The reader of these re ections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is
Michael Schmaus, Die psychologische Trinittslehre des hl. Augustinus, Mnsterische Beitrge zur Theologie (Mnster: Aschendor , ). Aurelius Augustinus, De Trinitate: Lateinisch Deutsch: Bcher VIII XI, XIV XV, Anhang: Buch V, trans. by Johann Kreuzer, Philosophische Bibliothek (Hamburg: Meiner, ). To name some contemporary classics propounding this opinion John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Contemporary Greek Theologians , nd edition (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, ); Colin E. Gunton, The History: Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West, in: Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, nd edition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ), ; Mary T. Clark, De Trinitate, in: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, editors, The Cambridge companion to Augustine, Cambridge companions to philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . see also Lewis Ayres, The Fundamental Grammar of Augustines Trinitarian Theology, in: Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, editors, Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, ), . The polemical context of Augustines trinitarian theology is particularly emphasized by Ayres, and Michel Ren Barnes, Exegesis and Polemic in de Trinitate I, Augustinian Studies ( ), . On the other hand, it is denied by Hill: Edmund Hill O.P., Introduction, in: Augustine, The Trinity, trans. from the by Edmund Hill O.P., The Works of Saint Augustine: A New Translation for the st Century I/ (Hyde Park NY: New City Press, ), .

on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason. Some of them try to transfer what they have observed about bodily things to incorporeal and spiritual things, which they would measure by the standard of what they experience through the senses of the body or learn by natural human intelligence, lively application, and technical skill. There are others whose concept of God, such as it is, ascribes to him the nature and moods of the human spirit, a mistake which ties their arguments about God to distorted and misleading rules of interpretation. Again, there is another type; people who indeed strive to climb above the created universe, so ineluctably subject to change, and raise their regard to the unchanging substance which is God. But so topheavy are they with the load of their mortality, that what they do not know they wish to give the impression of knowing, and what they wish to know they cannot; and so they block their own road to genuine understanding by asserting too categoricaly their own presumptuous opinions, and then rather than change a misconceived opinion they have defended, they prefer to leave it uncorrected (I, ). At the very beginning of De Trinitate, Augustine seems to give his nal verdict on ( ) natural theology, ( ) rational theology and, ( ) negative theology. Rhetorics is in play, though, because as he makes clear further on, Augustine is in some way doing all these three things himself. He is elucidating trinitarian concepts by drawing on nature, by drawing on the nature of love in the mind. Furthermore, strands of a negative theology can be found in almost every book. So, what is the rationale behind this? A fruitful key to the understanding of De Trinitate is Basil Studers phrase (in German): In De Trinitate, [. . . ] machte sich Augustinus daran, fr sich und die anderen Gott zu nden. The particular way in which he seeks to nd God for himself and fellow humans directs the shape of De Trinitate. For Augustine, God is in no way accessible to the human mind in an unconditioned way. God is not the product or denial of a human construct, or at least, theology is an attempt to do away with these constructs in a constant process of puri cation. If we make this point in terms of book VIII, we can say: the faculties of the human soul mind, love and knowledge are so much disintegrated by sin that they cannot succeed in holding fast to the true God. This implies and this is crucial to the theme of truth and aesthetics that nding God for oneself is never the result of a rational calculus. On the cognitive level already, the seeker is dependent upon external witnesses, in fact upon the community of grace which is the Church. In terms of book VIII again: we are dependent upon the community of the Church which in so far as being the body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit represents the true trinitarian God of love. This poses a problem which occupies Augustine in book I. If faith cannot be the product of the human intellect, the unbeliever seems to be confronted with a typical chicken-and-egg problem. For unbelievers to become believers, they must have access to resources presupposing faith etcetera. So, how can the unbeliever become a believer if to become a believer presupposes to be one already? Augustines De Trinitate can be read as an attempt to respond to this challenge (I, ). Augustine believes that a faithful encounter with God is what the Germans call an Aha-Erlebnis. In other words, becoming faithful coming to see God is always a historical process. At the same time,
Quotations have been taken from Hills translation. Basil Studer, Gott und unsere Erlsung im Glauben der Alten Kirche (Dsseldorf: Patmos, ), . This is true on the individual as well as on the level of society. The coming of the kingdom is by its very nature a

however, the world of faith is and must be an open world. By virtue of faith being a historical process, unbelievers must be able learn faith by as it were exercising it in the meditation of the so-called vestigia trinitatis, the traces of the Creator in the creature. Much of the De Trinitate is intended to serve such an exercise. Once we see this, the similarity between two of Augustines masterworks comes into focus. In the Confessiones, Augustine tells God and the reader his journey towards God. Augustines own experience of conversion, or conversions, is an exercise in discovering God in the creature as much as he recommends such an exercise to his fellow intellectual readers of De Trinitate. From this perspective, the Ciceronian and the Manichean period in the Confessiones should not so much be seen as dubious examples of heresy, but rather as still imperfect steps on the way to God. And yet, as De Trinitate makes clear repeatedly, even the decisive step to Christianity is still in many respects an imperfect step, since quoting Paul we still walk by faith, and not by sight (I, , IV, , V, , VII, ).

The Role of the Aesthetic

I thought it was necessary to provide this outline of the basics of Augustines purpose with De Trinitate because it sets the stage for the role of truth and aesthetics in his thought. In two recent books, Carol Harrison has re ected on Augustines view of the aesthetic in a Christian culture. Harrison summarizes Augustines contribution to a Christian aesthetic as follows: I think that we can speak of a Christian aesthetic, a new Christian literary culture; one in which rhetoric holds as central a place as it did in classical culture, but where it is transformed from a practice which primarily aims to please and persuade, to one which aims to inspire love of, and the practice of, the truth. In Augustines view of the aesthetic, the beautiful is not a domain of its own, but a speci c view of being under the perspective of that which moves our heart, evoking an act of love on the part of the believer. Everything that has being, has truth, goodness, and beauty, because in Augustines Anti-Manichean monist conception of being, there is no being outside the good, true and beautiful. This is still an overly secular description of the beautiful, however, because for Augustine, all being is eventually rooted in Gods giving them being in his initial and continuous act of creation. All truth, goodness, and beauty in the creature is dependent upon God, and all truth, goodness, and beauty in the creature refers back to its Creator. In so far as the language of creation could be reduced to the language of origin, the foregoing could still be seen as a form of Neoplatonism applied to Christianity. The contingency implied in the language of creation, however, is further reinforced by the language of the Trinity. As Gods being is de ned as being Father, Son, and Spirit (Book V), Gods
historical processthe central theme of De civitate Dei. Carol Harrison, Revelation and Beauty in the Thought of St. Augustine, Oxford theological monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Harrison, Revelation and Beauty; Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, Christian theology in context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, . Notice that I consciously avoid terms like origin here. Thus, I would like to emphasize the di erence between Augustines theology of creation and the Platonist theory of emanation, in which the relation between Being (with a capital B) and being is a necessary one. See Harrison, Revelation and Beauty, .

relationship with the world must be a trinitarian relation, and the world as Gods creation bears the traces of the trinitarian being of God. The trinitarian relationships of the world and human beings make up the beauty of the world, and at the same time, the proper functioning of the trinitarian structure of the soul is the necessary prerequisite for perceiving, knowing, and loving the true, good, and beautiful in a proper way (Book VIIIXI). Sin breaks the trinitarian structure of the soul, so that it no longer loves the true, and no longer perceives the world in its trinitarian relationship to God. The healing message of the Church it is, aided by the vestigia trinitatis in creation, that begins to restore human beings trinitarian structure in relation to the trinitarian God, so that eventually, the believer will not only look through a mirror, but see God face to face. It follows from the above that an Augustinian aesthetics di ers markedly from many modern (theological) conceptions of the aesthetics. In Augustines conception of the aesthetic, the aesthetic is, together with the good, an indispensable companion of the truth, but it does not, as in many modern aesthetic theories, qualify the true in a material sense. That is to say: in many modern theological aesthetic theories, the aesthetic is placed in contradistinction to the true, or the truth in religious expressions is aesthetically quali ed to distinguish it from mere rational or empirical truth. It is said that religious truth is narratively embedded, that religious expressions have a surplus of meaning in the same way as works of art have etcetera. To be beau tul in the modern sense is to be less true or to be true in a quali ed sense. In Augustine, the beautiful does not qualify the true, but rather embeds the knowledge of the true in the volutative and emotional nature of the human being. To know the truth does not leave me cold or lets me rationally decide whether I like that truth or not. Rather, the encounter of the truth makes me embrace it, attach myself to it, become in relation to it. The quali cation of religious truth and beauty as an only fragmentary and provisional encounter with God as supreme truth and beauty is not achieved by qualifying the true in terms of the beautiful, but by qualifying both in terms of the creaturely nature of the human experience. At the same time, it must be said that while the beautiful does not qualify the true, the true does indeed qualify the beautiful. This is an issue of major concern for Augustine in De Trinitate (I, , IV, , VIII, ), and it explains why a Christian search for the experience of God should be so concerned with the truth of its faith. Love being directed to the good, and seeking God the Creator in the creature, could easily fancy itself a god completely at odds with reality. Therefore, the soul in search of God must enter the world of faith by relying on the authority of the community of faith before it can reliably nd traces of the truth of God in the created order. If we return to the purpose of De Trinitate as outlined in the previous section, we see how Augustines view of the aesthetic exactly ts in his attempt to seek God for himself and fellow humans. De Trinitate is only a work of theology in so far as it seeks to outline the boundaries of a true understanding of God; it is theology in so far as it attempts to safeguard the seeking soul from believing in some false construct instead of believing in Godself. But to know the boundaries of a correct God talk is far from having an encounter with the living God, which is Augustines true purpose with De Trinitate. For an encounter with the living God, the soul disintegrated by sin must be trained to know the true theologys task on the basis of the authority of the living community of faith and exercise the love of that truth by experiencing its beauty. Exercising himself and his fellow humans in enjoying the truth of Gods trinitarian being is what Augustine most of all practices in De Trinitate. Thus, the so-called psychological images of the Trinity in man are not so much intended to be rational explanations or proofs of the doctrine of the Trinity, but rather, are
I use this neologism as a form of inclusive language instead of God himself.

ways in which traces of God are found in the trinitarian structure of the creature. How problematic it is to read De Trinitate without taking the aesthetic into account becomes clear when one takes a look at the second half of book IV. After having explained how the death of Christ corresponds, and henceforth, heals our double death (IV, ) the death of soul and body Augustine nds an opportunity to re ect extensively upon the relationship of single to double. I quote the beginning of this re ection: This proportion of the single to the double arises from the number ; for and make . But all this I have just mentioned comes to the number ; and and make . This number is called perfect because it is made up of its parts, of which it has three, a sixth, a third, and a half; nor has it any other part which is a simple fraction of it. Its sixth part then is , its third part , and its half part . But , , and added together make the same number . Sacred scripture commends its perfection to us above all in declaring that God completed his works in six days, and that on the sixth day man was made to the image of God (IV, ). Where some contemporary trinitarian theologians would like to see a more elaborate theology of the incarnation, Augustine o ers a long and from our point of view highly speculative account of all sorts of references to the number six in salvation historyinterestingly, except for the number mentioned in the book of Revelation (Rev. . ). This speculation on the number six belongs to the most obscure parts of De Trinitate, unless one looks at it as an extensive aesthetically embedded meditation on the unity of Gods works in creation and redemption, in which Augustine attempts to move the soul to the marvelous world of God by showing the harmony of Gods works.

Implications for Theology and Aesthetics

What does the foregoing imply for the theme of this conference: the role of aesthetics in religion? Interestingly, although De Trinitate is mostly taken to be Augustines most important contribution to doctrinal theology, an outline of its fundamental shape and the role of aesthetics in it shows that for Augustine, truth and beauty are inseparable and indispensable allies on the way to God. The purpose of thinking and speaking about God is not the development of some sort of theory which more or less accurately represents the true being of God. Rather, theologys purpose is the encounter with God self. Accurate and correct God talk are only relevant in so far as they should safeguard that what the believer encounters is indeed God, and not something else. This has two seemingly paradoxical implications for the role of theology in matters of faith. On the one hand, if theology is taken as a rational enterprise, the foregoing analysis implies the limitation of the role of theology in the realm of faith. Phrased in Gustavo Gutirrezs terminology: theology is a second act. Rather than being the foundation of faith, or even being the su cient condition for having faith, theology is only a critical instrument in removing certain misunderstandings along the way to God. Theology may o er solid rational reasonings, but faith needs more; it
Cf. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, . Gustavo Gutirrez, On Job: God Talk and the Su ering of the Innocent, trans. from the Spanish by Matthew J. OConnell (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, ), xiiixiv; see also Maarten Wisse, Scripture between Identity and Creativity: A Hermeneutical Theory Building upon Four Interpretations of Job, Ars Disputandi Supplement Series (Utrecht: Ars Disputandi, ), URL: http://adss.library.uu.nl , .

needs something that touches the heart. At the same time, if theology is seen as more than just a rational enterprise, the role of the aesthetic in Augustine may open a wholly new perspective for the academic study of religion. Rather than merely o ering critical or historical investigations into religious practices, theology could put itself into the service of the religious community by sharing its existential search for the living God. A second point I would like to make has to do with the as yet frequently observed role of so-called negative or apophatic theology in Augustines thought. As I have indicated above, Augustine shows a strong awareness of the fragmentary and provisional character of theological claims. In so far as this is meant with the term negative theology, Augustine is a negative theologian. However, I would like to stress that this does not automatically make Augustine a negative theologian in the modern sense. Augustines thought is still untouched by the modernist turn to subjectivity which seems to direct many contemporary forms of negative theology. God is other and greater than we think not because we never pass beyond the boundaries of language, writing or our own subjectivity, but because the encounter with the Lord God self is a so much richer experience than one we could reduce to a theoretical construct. Put in the dubious terminology of todays realism debate: Augustine is able to combine a negative theology with an external realism. He can do so because the fragmentary and provisional character of theological claims is safeguarded by the internal structure of his theology of creation, rather than that it is based upon a shaky philosophy rooted in the anomalies of the subject. If we shift our attention from theology to aesthetics, the implications of Augustines aesthetics for a theory of art deserve closer attention. First, it should be noted that since in Augustine, beauty is grounded in the creativity of God, in his thought, there is basically no room for a secular aesthetic. Since everything beautiful is thought of as beautiful in its relation to God, it is impossible to speak of something as beautiful apart from that relationship. This has of course wide-reaching consequences for aesthetic theory. However, one should be cautious not to misunderstand these consequences. A decisively Christian aesthetic such as Augustines could easily be misunderstood as to imply that all criteria for assessing the quality of art become super uous. Plainly said: how we speak, paint, or make music does not matter, if we only praise the Lord. This is far from being Augustines opinion, however. The danger of the standards of art falling apart is countered both in the sense that in Augustines view, the exercise of a Christian spirituality is, by its very nature, an exercise in Christian aesthetics, and in the sense that on the basis of the insight that all human creativity the creativity evident in the secular realm as well is rooted in the creativity of God as giving human beings this creativity (XII, ). In Augustines conception of art, the true praise of God deserves the highest standards of speaking well, standards which for the most part are being taken over from secular rhetorics, but it is only in their service to the praise of God that they receive their highest and proper application. Therefore, rather than doing away with the standards of beauty current at the time, Augustine re-evaluates them and takes them up in a Christian understanding of beauty. This leads to the second implication of Augustines aesthetic, namely that not surprisingly given that we speak of a pre-modern aesthetics it does not o er a theory of art proper. Augustines understanding of the aesthetic makes it possible to describe the function of the beautiful in relation to the true and the good, but it does not isolate certain objects as art and others as mere craft or suchlike. Likewise, it does not provide any theological aesthetics in the sense of describing how works of art
The same point developed along di erent lines Wisse, . Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, .

provide a particular way to the transcendent or the divine. For Augustine, there is no principal di ernce between the way in which the study of nature opens a window to God and the way in which a painting or a piece of music could do so. If one wanted to extend Augustines aesthetics in the direction of a full theory of art, one could at most build upon the notions of measure, number, weight, and unity, trinitarian notions which play a role in the aesthetics of the early Augustine. This still leaves many questions open to debate, though. For example, in terms of an aesthetics of music, sixteenth century counterpoint, Schnbergs twelve tone system, and Messiaens modes would all t in an aesthetics based upon measure, number, weight and unity; perhaps only experimental music based on random numbers like John Cages would not pass the test of Augustines aesthetic. Historically speaking, then, it is perhaps not surprising that complex theories of art, such as the musical theories of the Flemish polyphonists Josquin, Lasso, and Palestrina only begin to develop in the Renaissance period, although it of course cannot be maintained that really no rule based creation of art took place before the Renaissance period. One only needs to think of the strongly rule based practice of rhetoric which remained alive until at least the th century. However, it must be said that while being one of the great rhetors of the time, Augustine criticised albeit in line with the critique of fellow rhetors at the time the rule based practice of it in favour of a more spontaneous and less sophistic art of speaking well. Therefore, it is little surprise that as far as the rule based rhetoric was practiced in the Christian tradition, it built upon the great pagan classics such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian.

Harrison, Revelation and Beauty, . Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity,