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Chapter 4 Augustine and a New Symbolism for the Western God w With the conclusion of the last chapter, the exposition of the historical unfolding of the primary symbolism of the triune God, from early biblical imagery to the doctrine of the ecumenical councils through Chalcedon, is complete. as i explained in the introduction, a primary symbolism, as i am using that term borrowed from Eric voegelin, is one that expresses an insight into some concrete philosophical or spiritual experience, while a secondary symbolism develops when the symbol becomes separated from its originating experience and associated with some other kind of experience or idea. a symbolism functions in the manner of a lens, directing attention through itself toward something that it represents metaphorically. Metaphor can function in thinking in a variety of ways. it can be used, for example, to represent in objectivizing language and imagery something that is intrinsically subjective or spiritual. the biblical images of bondage and freedom , and of father, son, and spirit, are all metaphors in this sense. Without metaphor it would be impossible to find voice for the spiritual dimension of experience, and by use of it one hopes to suggest at least indirectly to others the possibility of noticing features of that dimension that would otherwise be incommunicable and would perhaps remain unnoticed and unreflected upon. in this aspect, metaphor is important for theology because it can serve to guide individuals and communities toward possibilities of existence and of existential self-understanding of which they might otherwise remain unaware. Metaphor can also function in a quite different way, however, when it ceases to be transparent for the experiences it originally expressed. Under such 113 114 In Search of the Triune God circumstances, the outward form of the metaphor will draw attention to itself and trigger speculations about what kind of object it might refer to, with the result that the spiritual dimension of experience that it once illuminated will become hidden behind it. in the case of the Greek fathers and the ecumenical councils that formulated the original symbolism and doctrine of the trinity, the experience they were trying to find a language for was that of what they considered their life “in Christ,” in which they thought with “the mind of Christ” because they shared his experience of reflecting on the dynamism of the Spirit moving him from within. through that same dynamism moving them as well, and through his teachings and his life remembered among them, they believed that they could discover on the basis of their actual experience what it meant to live within his filial relation to the Father. As the contemporary Eastern orthodox monk i quoted in the preceding chapter stated, “the true theologian . . . having been united to God . . . theologizes from the Mind of Christ; he theologizes from ‘within God,’” knowing the trinity, that is, from within God’s triune life. in Western ears, to speak so straightforwardly of Christians’ experience of the mind of Christ could sound shocking, pretentious, and perhaps even exclusivist, implying that no one outside their closed circle can know the experience, but that would be to leap to an interpretation that is not implied in the words of the Eastern Christians who speak of it.1 i brought up in the introduction the question of whether the experience of transcendence in Christ that Eastern Christians speak of as underlying their doctrine of the triune God is “absolutely unique and closed to outsiders” or whether that experience might actually be universal, with the difference being whether or not one recognizes it and develops some sense of its structure and its implications . i brought up the same question again in Chapter 2 in connection with the possibility of understanding Jesus’s human experience of undergoing what the imagery of the baptismal scenes in the Gospels seems to indicate was his coming into awareness of the presence of God’s spirit within him and of what that implied about his sonship to God—the question of how Jesus could both always have experienced the inward presence of the Holy spirit as the animating principle of his life and at the same time have experienced it as something “descending upon” him at a particular moment in time. i suggested there that the answer to that question might lie in thinking of Jesus’s unfolding consciousness of himself and his messianic calling in terms of his articulation of universal existential questions and of his coming to a new, conscious...

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