Augustine and the Trinity (review)

This is a brilliant and, I believe, a path-breaking book. It will, in time, reshape how we read Augustine's De trinitate and how we situate Augustine within the broader history of western Trinitarian thought. There are acute insights on every page, fresh readings of famous passages, and a rich harvest of hitherto ignored texts from the vastness of Augustine's corpus. This is also a difficult book. Its difficulties come not just because it requires negotiating the intricacies of Trinitarian theology, nor because Ayres presupposes serious engagement both with Augustine and with recent recastings of the development of fourth-century Nicene orthodoxy. Its difficulties are sharpened by its roundabout and often multi-tracked argumentation.

Ayres says his aim is not to trace the full evolution of Augustine's Trinitarian theology nor to provide a detailed commentary on De trinitate; rather, it is "to highlight the extent to which the fundamental principles and questions of his Trinitarian theology evolved through an idiosyncratic engagement with Latin Nicene theologies of the 360-90 period" (42). The evolution of two themes most concerns him: Augustine's struggles to articulate the communion of the three divine persons, and Augustine's understanding of our progressive participation in the Trinity's life through contemplation (4). While he dwells on both, he covers much, much more—and it is that "more" that makes this study so useful. Along the way, he dismantles a host of stock readings. He refutes, for example, the old charge, famously made by Olivier Du Roy, that Augustine's Trinitarian theology was, at root, dependent on a Neoplatonist account of the three hypostases. As Ayres shows, Augustine may have been an eclectic pilferer of platonist views, but his early pneumatology shows no dependence, making Du Roy's claims simply "a bridge too far" (26). Ayres also refutes the old canard that Augustine "begins" with the divine essence, leaving him supposedly hard pressed to articulate the distinction of the three divine persons. Ayres cites and analyzes an array of texts that demonstrate how Augustine mined the literature of the third-century Monarchian controversy to forge a terminology that articulates the fundamental irreducibility of the divine three in a language free of technical jargon.

These dismantlings are but one thread. Ayres's concern is deeper: to effect a paradigm shift in the very way we read Augustine's Trinitarian theology. First, he seeks to redefine the canon of texts seen as paradigmatic. While passages from De trinitate form a sort of spine that runs the length of the book, he sets these alongside a dizzying array of overlooked and understudied texts, both early snippets (from De beata vita, Soliloquia, De moribus, Ep. 11) and mature expositions (De fide et symbolo, Serm. 7 and 52, In Jo. ev. 18-19, En. ps. 121). Of De trinitate itself, the bulk of his energies are expended not on the famous analogies of Books 8-14, which he consciously "de-centers" (317), but the often-intricate yet seminal Books 1-7. Second, he presses for a new context for interpreting Augustine's evolving theology, namely, the clash between his pro-Nicene predecessors and contemporaries and their homoian opponents. Third, Ayres plunges readers into close readings of texts, insisting that we pay acute attention to the carefully crafted ways Augustine articulates his theology, that we not simply zoom in on terms like "substance," "nature," "person," and their respective philosophical backgrounds, but instead savor that Augustine was, before all else, an exegete and that, to understand him, we must attend to the many, many biblical texts that occupied his exegetical energies.

I noted Ayres's roundabout argumentative style. One example: he opens Chapter Four ("The Unadorned Trinity") with a long quotation from De trinitate 1, a grand summative statement of Nicene orthodoxy in which Augustine uses, for the first time, his famous phrase, "Trinitas quae Deus est." This is not a text to which interpreters have paid much attention. Yet Ayres demonstrates its centrality. He first highlights how it echoes locutions once used by Tertullian...