In the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian E. Daley, S.J.

Augustine’s Christology Its Spirituality and Rhetoric

8 Augustine’s Christology Its Spirituality and Rhetoric Rowan Douglas Williams A Thesis In his enormously rich monograph, Les conversions de s. Augustin (1950), J.-M. Le Blond observed that Augustine saw the incarnation as a révélation de méthode spirituelle. Augustine’s deepest and most signi ficant “conversion,” he suggested, is that from Gottesmystik to Christusmystik , meaning not that the incarnate Christ somehow replaces the transcendent divine nature for Augustine as an object of contemplation , but that the sense of Christ as the path to and the form of trans- figuring and participatory knowledge of the transcendent God becomes ever more pervasive, more obviously an organizing principle.1 In what follows, I hope to trace some of the ways in which this theme works as such an organizing principle in Augustine’s theology. By the second decade of the fifth century—essentially by the time of the completion of the De Trinitate (Trin.) and De civitate Dei (Civ.)— 176 Augustine’s Christology 177 it is possible to see in Augustine a notably coherent christological scheme. The definitive studies of T. van Bavel and, more recently, of H. R. Drobner have established some of the important shifts in Augustine ’s christological vocabulary; Drobner, in particular, has also made plain the roots of so much of that vocabulary in the conventions of rhetorical analysis.2 Among the questions raised by this is why Augustine’s Christology fits so comfortably with the theology of Cyril of Alexandria in its resonant affirmations of the unity of the incarnate Word, when those in the Eastern Christian world who employed comparable methods from rhetoric ended up with a much more dualist reading of Christ’s person. I want to suggest that when we have grasped with Le Blond the logic of seeing Christ as the form of the spiritual path, with all that this involves, we may understand why the “Cyrilline” structure imposes itself. Briefly, my argument is simply that the unifying principle of Augustine ’s mature Christology is the understanding of Christ as sapientia. Wisdom, as defined in De doctrina christiana (Doctr. chr.), in Trin., and elsewhere, is the contemplation of the eternal, God’s delight in God; as such, it is what we hope to receive by grace, so that we acquire a share in that reflexive contemplative love which is God’s very life. But that divine love as bestowing itself on creation is (as may be seen from a close reading of the later books of Trin.) identical with that divine action which seeks the “justice” of another’s good or joy, and is therefore bound up with the divine identification with us in the incarnation. Sapienta is oriented to incarnation, and thus to the rhetorical paradoxes which involve the divine Word speaking not only human words, but also words of spiritual distress or apparent doubt—the constant theme of so many of the Enarrationes in Psalmos (Enarrat. Ps.). And the upshot in practical terms is, as Le Blond asserts, that “incarnation” becomes the path we must follow, la soumission de l’espirit aux symbols temporels.3 The embrace of our creatureliness, and resistance to all that draws us away from the recognition of the centrality of time in our learning of holiness—these are the actual consequences of the act of incarnation, making sense of both the individual path of sanctity and the Church’s corporate life and discipline. 178 Rowan Douglas Williams Some Illustrative Texts These themes are announced very straightforwardly in Confessions (Conf.) book 7, where Augustine offers an already very nuanced account of what it is to become wise with the sapienta of the divine Word, a wisdom which is not available through the speculations of the Platonists ;4 this world’s “wisdom” is overtaken by the humility of the incarnation . While the wisdom of the world seeks truth by escape from the body, by techniques designed to free us from the distortions imposed by fleshly life, God’s wisdom takes root in us only as we accept our bodily limitation and our spiritual frailty as things we cannot cure from within. Wisdom must become milk for infants if it is to enter our minds; it must be encountered in the flesh. The incarnation both requires and makes possible the conditions of its understanding: “non enim tenebam Dominum meum Iesum humilis humilem.”5 Grace humbles us so...