Gunton, Augustine, and The Trinity
Another paper for Dr. Michael Dauphinais' class, Triune God; October 18, 2020
On January 26, 1988, at King’s College, London, Protestant Theologian Colin Gunton presented a paper at a seminar on the Trinity. His opening sentence was
“We live in a culture marked, as few have been, by persistent and deep-seated scepticism about the existence and knowability of God.”[1]
Things have not really changed much in the thirty years since, although perhaps that skepticism has grown even more deep-seated. But studying the existence and knowability of God has never been easier. At our fingertips, often literally, we have access to the great works of philosophers, theologians, and Doctors of the Church throughout time, quite often in contemporary English. And tonight, I am speaking on the Trinity, with particular reference to De Trinatate, which is one of the great works of Saint Augustine.
With all this information available, why would I choose to begin a talk to a Catholic audience about De Trinatate with a quote from a contemporary Protestant Theologian? Gunton is somewhat famous in theological circles for his rather negative view of Augustine, particularly with respect to the Trinity. I find that referencing Gunton’s objections to Augustine’s work helps us to focus in on the theology Augustine is presenting, and, with those objections in our minds, we are moved to give real thought to Augustine’s arguments, rather than just simply agree because, hey, it’s Augustine.
You probably know at least a little about Augustine – or more formally, Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was born in 354 and died in 430. He is probably best known for his conversion story, Confessions, but he wrote many other works, including City of God, and De Trinatate, the work I will be concentrating on this evening.
Gunton was born in 1941, almost 1,600 years after Augustine. Gunton’s criticism of De Trinitate raises numerous issues relating to how we see the Trinity. He believes that in the West, the doctrine of the Trinity has been relegated “to secondary status” in seeking knowledge of God and sought to discover “how far responsibility for the state of affairs is to be laid at the door of St. Augustine.”[2] Gunton’s negative view of Augustine is so well-known that theologian Bradley Green took it as the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Countering Gunton’s criticisms, Green “argues that one must remember the goal of De Trinitate – to see God face to face.”[3]
Our goal here this evening is to see how far we can come in seeing God face to face in Augustine’s De Trinitate, particularly in view of Gunton’s criticism; to see how – or if – a contemporary Protestant theologian can help us to understand an early Christian theologian and Doctor of the Church.
Gunton holds that Western atheism is caused, at least in part, by “a theological tradition which encourages thought in the essential unknowability of God.”[4] In his address at Trinity College, he quotes other theologians to support his claim that this theological tradition is due to the teachings of Saint Augustine. He states that Karl Rahner and Stephen McKenna both hold that Augustine’s teaching on the Trinity begins with the unity of God, rather than following the Greek tradition of beginning with the three persons of the Trinity.[5]
One example of Gunton’s critique of Augustine is his response to Augustine’s depiction of the interaction between man and God, as represented by angels in the Old Testament:
“Acting in and through these angels, of course, were the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it was the Father who was represented by them, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit, sometimes just God without distinction of persons.”[6]
Gunton, in what seems to me to be a tortured reading of this, states that from this “we are in danger of supposing an unknown God working through angels.”[7] Gunton has taken a phrase which clearly shows us the three Persons of the Trinity, working either together or alone, and somehow turns it into an “unknown God.”[8] Angels are the messengers of God,[9] so why ought we be surprised to see God working through them?
Gunton attacks Augustine’s treatment of the human story of Jesus, stating that he does not “do it in such a way that the fullness of the humanity is given due weight.”[10] As his proof, Gunton quotes from Book 15, Section 46:
“It would be utterly absurd for us to believe that he received the Holy Spirit when he was already thirty years old . . . but (we should) believe that he came to that baptism both entirely sinless and not without the Holy Spirit.”[11]
Gunton here has taken one sentence out of context. In this section, Augustine is discussing how the Holy Spirit is given to us, and specifically notes
“None of his disciples ever gave the Holy Spirit; they prayed that he might come upon those on whom they laid hands, they did not give him themselves.”[12]
Only God can give himself to us. Gunton here has ignored the opening of the section, [13] instead twisting the meaning to support his own view. Augustine is writing about how we may receive the Holy Spirit. Gunton attempts to turn it into a statement that Jesus received the Holy Spirit for the first time when he was baptized by John. Augustine directly refutes this idea, explicitly stating that while Jesus received the Holy Spirit at his baptism,
“we must realize that he was anointed with this mystical and invisible anointing when the Word of God became flesh, that is when a human nature without any antecedent merits of good works was coupled to the Word of God in the virgin’s womb so as to become one person with him.”[14]
Gunton would have us believe that Augustine denies Jesus’ humanity in this section, stating that “Augustine cannot handle the story,”[15] when it is Gunton who misinterprets the plain words of Augustine.
Gunton also seeks to make much of Augustine’s treatment of the concepts of person and relation, seen as central to understanding the Trinity:
“When we look at Augustine’s treatment of the topic, it becomes evident that he has scarcely if at all understood the central point. It is difficult for him to understand the meaning of the Greek hypostasis. One reason is that he can make nothing of the distinction so central to Cappadocian ontology between ousia and hypostasis.”[16]
Yet Gunton here is making an objection of something Augustine himself admitted, that that distinction eluded him, stating”
“The Greeks also have another word, hypostasis, but they make a distinction that is rather obscure to me between ousia and hypostasis, so that most of our people who treat of these matters in Greek are accustomed to say mia ousia, treis hypostaseis, which in English is literally one being, three substances.”[17]
It is notable that Augustine is writing in the first years of the fifth century. Gunton here fails to either consider or point out that this Cappadocian distinction was then a new, and not fully recognized, concept:
“the ‘Cappadocian solution’ to the fourth‐century Trinitarian controversy, summarized in the phrase ‘one ousia, three hypostaseis — (one essence and three persons)’, is often presented as widely employed, and greeted with relief and enthusiasm. But the phrase, as such, is rare in the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers, and may not be the best short expression of their teaching on the Trinity. The distinction in meaning between ousia and hypostasis (both of which mean ‘something that subsists’) was worked out only in the late fourth century, and was — to some writers — less than convincing.”[18]
Gunton believes that the Cappadocians asked “What kind of being is this, that God is to be found in the relations of Father, Son and Spirit?” while Augustine asks “What kind of sense can be made of the apparent logical oddity of the threeness of the one God in terms of Aristotelian subject-predicate logic?” Yet, Gunton does not explain why one question is better than the other, only repeating his claims that Augustine makes a weak argument. He focuses on a short statement by Augustine regarding the relation of Father and Son:
“For something can be said of God with respect to relation...of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father.”[19]
In Gunton’s opinion, Augustine here boxes himself in, leaving him
“unable to break out of the stranglehold of the dualistic ontology which underlies the logic.”[20]
Yet, Gunton does seem to have noticed the end of that very same section, where Augustine says Father and Son are the roles of the first two persons of the Trinity as to one another; it relates to the eternal connection between them, and does not thereby limit them to the same meanings those words have for man, where a father was, of necessity, once a son, and a son may cease to be a son on the death of his father, and may himself become a father to another.
Gunton complains that
“we find [Augustine] denying what for Basil was the truth about the being of God, that ‘three somethings subsist from one matter (materia) which, whatever it is, is unfolded in these three.’. . . Does Augustine believe that the true being of God underlies the threeness of the persons?”[21]
The verse Gunton refers to here has been translated in different ways. The translation at the New Advent website retains the concept of unfolding.[22] The second, from Hill’s translation, perhaps would aid Gunton’s understanding:
“Well now, it is not in this way either that we talk about the trinity as being three persons or substances, one being and one God, as though they were three things consisting of one material, even if whatever that material might be it were wholly used up in these three; for there is nothing else, of course, of this being besides this triad. And yet we do talk of three persons of the same being, or three persons one being; but we do not talk about three persons out of the same being, as though what being is were one thing and what person is another, as we can talk about three statues out of the same gold. In this case being gold is one thing, being statues another.”[23]
From Hill’s translation, we see not an “unfolding” but rather an analogy being unpacked; an explanation that when we speak of the Trinity, we do not speak of three persons made of the same substance – the three statues of gold – but one substance which is at the same time one substance but three things. Any analogy that tries to explain the Trinity will always fall short. It’s like those picture games you find online: which do you see first, the young girl or the old couple? the vase or the faces? is the dress gold and white or black and blue? None of these has a right answer; what we comprehend depends on outside factors. Trying to comprehend the Trinity has its own obstacles: Gunton looks at the same evidence as Augustine, and yet sees a different answer. Gunton wants the Trinity to be seen from one viewpoint; Augustine offers another. Gunton states
“What we find in Augustine is one distinctive reading of the church’s dogma, an outworking indeed, but one which, as we have already seen, is distinctly different from that developed by the Cappadocians.”[24]
Gunton has written extensively on Augustine; however, at least in this essay, he does not directly state why he finds the Cappadocian explanation superior to Augustine’s, offering no facts to support his opinion.
Gunton suggests that Augustine’s analogies are a
“view of an unknown substance supporting three persons rather than being constituted by their relatedness.”[25]
He says
“Augustine’s concern appears to be not so much to penetrate more deeply into the topic, but to illustrate, from outside, so to speak, a given form of words.”[26]
He then immediately admits that his statement is an exaggeration, but excuses that exaggeration, as it “indicates the baneful legacy Augustine left for later generations.”[27] Yet, if Augustine wishes to help us better understand that which we cannot really grasp, must he approach it in the same way as it has been before? Gunton appears to deplore Augustine’s “tendency to intellectualism,”[28] giving among his several examples “Augustine’s tendency to think of God as a kind of supermind,”[29] as when he described the Father and Son seeing all their infinite knowledge, fully and together:
“And all the things that are in their knowledge, in their wisdom, in their being, each of them sees all at once, not bit by bit and one by one, nor by turning his gaze from here to there and there to here, and again from there or there to this and that, as though he could not see some things unless he stopped seeing others. But as I said, each sees all things together, and there is nothing that he does not see always.”[30]
Gunton makes an accusation regarding Augustine’s view of the conception of knowledge:
“Whatever he says, Augustine is not merely producing analogies by this analysis; he is in fact developing a doctrine of God, with the stress on the unity”[31]
Gunton references here a section which begins
“These three then, memory, understanding, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind.”[32]
In this section, Augustine illustrates the Trinity by showing that there are three parts of our thinking, yet we have one mind. We remember what is in our memory; we understand based on our knowledge, which resides in our memory; we will, based on what we understand. Our one mind, described as a tripartite operation, gives us a small understanding of what it means to be Trinity. Augustine concludes this section with:
“Therefore since they are each and all and wholly contained by each, they are each and all equal to each and all, and each and all equal to all of them together, and these three are one, one life, one mind, one being.”[33]
You can see here how Augustine has built from memory, understanding, and will being one mind, to Father, Son, Spirit being one. Does Gunton fairly accuse Augustine of developing a doctrine of God by doing this? It would not be possible for Augustine to explain the Trinity without discussing God, for no matter how well we understand the three persons, we still must acknowledge that God is the Trinity; the Trinity is God. God is Father, Son and Spirit; God always consists of the three persons. When Jesus became incarnate, or when the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the three persons may each have an action which is of their person, but that action is also of God, for they never fail to be united as God.
In Book XV, Section 31, Augustine gives several quotations from scripture describing God as love, including 1John 4:8, “God is Love.” Augustine goes on to explain that since the greatest gift from God is love, and the Holy Spirit is the greatest gift of God, and since the communion of the Father and Son is shown by the love between them, that then the Holy Spirit must be love.[34] Gunton cannot handle this. He states
“One can only conclude that the whole justification is very thin and the result is that Augustine’s conclusion in XV.37 has all the air of special pleading....”
Gunton, it would seem, is not familiar with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states
“‘God is Love’ [1John 4:8, 16]and love is his first gift, containing all others. ‘God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’ [Rom 5:5]””[35]
Since the Church agrees that God is love, and love is his first gift, and it is given to us through the Holy Spirit – well, it’s hard to say that Augustine is wrong and Gunton correct.
But in the long run, I’m not sure it really matters; if either Gunton or Augustine must be right and the other must be wrong. Each of them may lead people to God, may help people attain a better understanding of God’s love for us. A theologian’s search for that path can take many twists and turns, and perhaps there is more than one path that leads us to our eternal goal. The goal of De Trinitate is for us to see God face-to-face, which will only be possible when we attain heaven. And thus, the trinity is a mystery that we will never understand in our lifetimes. In heaven, when we reach the perfection of the beatific vision, we will likely realize how incomplete even the deepest earthly explanations were of the true glory of the trinity. But by contemplating the trinity, we may grow in faith and understanding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine, Edmund Hill, and John E Rotelle. The Trinity. Hyde Park: New City Press, 1991.
Catechism Of The Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
"CHURCH FATHERS: On The Trinity, Book VII (St. Augustine)". Newadvent.Org, 2020. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130107.htm.
"Colin Gunton And The Failure Of Augustine: The Theology Of Colin Gunton In Light Of Augustine - The Gospel Coalition". The Gospel Coalition, 2020. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/colin-gunton-and-the-failure-of-augustine-the-theology-of-colin-gunton-in-l/.
Gunton, Colin. "Augustine, The Trinity And The Theological Crisis Of The West". Scottish Journal Of Theology 43, no. 1 (1990): 33-58. doi:10.1017/s0036930600039685.
Lienhard, Joseph. "Ousia And Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement And The Theology Of ‘One Hypostasis’". Oxford Scholarship Online, 2020. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199246122.001.0001/acprof-9780199246120-chapter-5?rskey=BJKmTo&result=1&q=Egyptian%20bishops.
[1] Colin Gunton, "Augustine, The Trinity And The Theological Crisis Of The West", Scottish Journal Of Theology 43, no. 1 (1990): 33-58, doi:10.1017/s0036930600039685. 33
[2] Gunton 34
[3] "Colin Gunton And The Failure Of Augustine: The Theology Of Colin Gunton In Light Of Augustine - The Gospel Coalition", The Gospel Coalition, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/colin-gunton-and-the-failure-of-augustine-the-theology-of-colin-gunton-in-l/.
[4] Gunton 33
[5] Gunton 34-35
[6] Augustine, Edmund Hill and John E Rotelle, The Trinity (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1991). III.26
[7] Gunton 38
[8] Gunton 38
[9] Catechism Of The Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1995). 329
[10] Gunton 39
[11] Gunton 39
[12] Augustine, XV.46
[13] Augustine. XV.46 His opening of this section: “As for the reason why he first gave the Holy Spirit on earth after his resurrection and then sent him from heaven, I think it is because charity is poured out in our hearts through this gift, charity by which we are to love God and neighbor according to those two commandments on which the whole law depends and the prophets. It was to signify this that the Lord Jesus gave the Holy Spirit twice, once on earth for love of neighbor, and again from heaven for love of God.”
[14] Augustine. VX.46
[15] Gunton 39
[16] Gunton 42-43
[17] Augustine. V.10
[18] Joseph Lienhard, "Ousia And Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement And The Theology Of ‘One Hypostasis’", Oxford Scholarship Online, 2020, https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0199246122.001.0001/acprof-9780199246120-chapter-5?rskey=BJKmTo&result=1&q=Egyptian%20bishops.
[19] Gunton 44
[20] Gunton 44
[21] Gunton 45
[22] CHURCH FATHERS: On The Trinity, Book VII (St. Augustine)", Newadvent.Org, 2020, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130107.htm. Their translation: “Therefore neither do we so call the Trinity three persons or substances, one essence and one God, as though three somethings subsisted out of one matter [leaving a remainder, i. e.]; although whatever that is, it is unfolded in these three. For there is nothing else of that essence besides the Trinity. Yet we say three persons of the same essence, or three persons one essence; but we do not say three persons out of the same essence, as though therein essence were one thing, and person another, as we can say three statues out of the same gold; for there it is one thing to be gold, another to be statues.”
[23] Augustine. VII.11
[24] Gunton 45
[25] Gunton 46
[26] Gunton 46
[27] Gunton 46
[28] Gunton 46
[29] Gunton 47
[30] Augustine. XV.23
[31] Gunton, 50
[32] Augustine. X.18
[33] Augustine. X.18
[34] Augustine. XV.37 “if there is nothing greater than charity among God’s gifts, and if there is no greater gift of God’s than the Holy Spirit, what must we conclude but that he is this charity which is called both God and from God? And if the charity by which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father inexpressibly shows forth the communion of them both, what more suitable than he who is the common Spirit of them both should be distinctively called charity?
[35] CCC. 733
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