Augustine Is Really Smart

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading my yearly allotment of Augustine: books 6-10 in the African bishop’s treatise on the Trinity. He didn’t convince me with his main point, but he did convince me (if, indeed, I needed any convincing on this point) that his intelligence embraced broad fields of knowledge and dealt with them in great power and insight.

OK, Augustine’s main point. Books 1-5 (which I read three years ago) deal mostly with terms regarding relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and with the question of Who made the appearances to Abraham, Moses, and others in certain Old Testament stories. I divided the treatise arbitrarily into thirds for my ten-year reading plan, but my artificial division seems to have worked, since books 6-10 shift focus to our relationship with and understanding of the Trinity. Augustine’s primary question is this: How can we love the Trinity when we can’t understand or form an accurate mental picture of the Trinity?

His basic answer is that we sometimes love a thing without exact knowledge of it because we have loved something else like it and reason by analogy. I, for instance, will sit down eagerly later this year as I begin The Claverings, a book by Anthony Trollope that I have not read. Why do I relish the experience in anticipation when I don’t know the book? Because I have read and enjoyed several other Trollope books, so my love is founded on the likelihood that I will enjoy this one as much.

What then, Augustine asks, do we know that is like the Trinity so that we can love the Trinity as we begin and continue to know the ultimately incomprehensible God in three Persons? There is, Augustine tells us, a trinity in my mind: the mind itself, its knowledge, and its love. This answer works to some extent: the knowledge and the love, like the Word and the Holy Spirit being respectively begotten and breathed by the Father, come from and reflect the mind itself, and the mind is not what it is without its actions of knowing and willing. But do knowledge and love have a separate identity that bears an analogy to Christ saying that He doesn’t know everything the Father knows? And doesn’t the mind perform other functions, as well, like reasoning? Augustine suggests a second trinity of human mentality: memory, understanding, and will. In some ways, this analogy seems better, and in other ways it seems just as arbitrarily limited to three as did the first proposition. But Augustine’s question still seems important to me, and his approach still provides a door to my search for an answer. I am inclined to say that I love the Trinity because God in three Persons is like nothing else in existence (thing A cannot both be with thing B and be thing B except in the case of the Trinity: John tells us that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God), and I like other things that are unique. Yeah, there’s the problem of saying that all these things are alike in that they aren’t like anything else.

My dissatisfaction with his answers doesn’t negate the point that Augustine wrestles with a fascinating, important question. And the intelligence and knowledge he uses to put all the parts of the argument together are astonishing. Did anyone else before Augustine ever examine the human mind to the point of questioning why we love things we don’t know? Plato and Aristotle both have lots of helpful things to say about loving what we do know and even loving what we mistakenly think we know. But loving what we don’t know? Augustine also appears to me to have invented, some 1500 years ahead of time, the field of semiotics, with all of his analysis of words and mental thoughts as signs of both external things and of each other. In other books, he talks about music, mathematics, and history. In the Confessions, he takes on the mystery of consciousness of time.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine commended study of all these fields and more, thus, I thank God, granting approval for medieval Christians to study literature and grammar and astronomy and geometry and to create cathedral schools and universities. He is the most influential Christian writer between the writing of the New Testament and now. Had I never read a word of his prodigious output, he would still bear responsibility for much of the shape of my intellectual life, as he does for anyone geeky and odd enough to be reading this blog. Graduates wear robes at school commencements because monks delivered medieval education because Augustine sanctioned academic pursuit for Christendom.

So what can we call Augustine? An intellectual powerhouse? The founder of Christian academicism? A beacon atop the mountain of western education? It’s difficult to find the right words to describe him adequately and to capture the importance of his far-reaching achievement. He isn’t like anyone else.