HOLY SPIRIT AND CHRISTIAN LIFE CONFERENCE: REGENT UNIVERSITY

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO’S TRINITARIAN IMAGO DEI FOR BALANCING INTELLECT

AND EMOTION IN THE LIFE OF FAITH

BY

JERRY M. IRELAND

VA BEACH, VA

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

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 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 3

AUGUSTINE AND EMOTION ..................................................................................................... 3

Shows in Carthage ............................................................................................................... 4
Augustine’s Conversion ...................................................................................................... 7

AUGUSTINE AND INTELLECT .................................................................................................. 8

The Manicheans ................................................................................................................... 8
Augustine’s Turn to Philosophy ........................................................................................ 11
Summary ............................................................................................................................ 13

BALANCING EMOTION AND INTELLECT ............................................................................ 13

The City of God.................................................................................................................. 13
The Trinity ......................................................................................................................... 14
On the Legitimacy of Augustine’s Trinitarian Imago Dei ................................................ 16
Augustine’s Initium Fidei .................................................................................................. 17

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 21

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 INTRODUCTION

Augustine of Hippo was a man of keen intellect. He was also a man sometimes given to
emotionalism, especially during his days as a student in Carthage. This study will explore how
Augustine would come to balance intellect and emotion in the context of his Christian life. The
thesis here is that Augustine found in a Trinitarian understanding of the imago Dei a means of
ensuring that his emotions and intellect, which at various times and in various places were
employed for selfish gain, were later directed toward God and his purposes by contemplating the
mystery of the Trinity. Because this Trinitarian view of the imago Dei is rooted in Scripture, it
serves as a helpful guide to contemporary Christians who have difficulty properly balancing the
two. This study will focus primarily on three of Augustine’s works, namely The Confessions,
The Trinity, and The City of God.
Augustine’s contemporary relevance flows from the fact that his theology was inherently
practical. That is, it was formed out of the various controversies and challenges that beset the
Bishop of Hippo in the execution of his duties. Augustine’s was not the speculative theology of
Jerome, perched as he was on Mt. Zion, but rather the practical and reflective theology of a
shepherd whose hands, heart, and mind were daily mingled with the concerns of his flock.1

AUGUSTINE AND EMOTION

In this section we shall try to highlight incidents that prompted a shift in Augustine’s
views of emotion. This, though, is not an easy task. In fact, Augustine himself once noted that
the hairs of a man’s head are “easier to number than the affections and movements of his heart.”2
That said, in The Confessions Augustine does describe how his views of emotions changed over
time. This change is discernable precisely because in Confessions the reader is confronted with
two “worlds,” and two views simultaneously. In the first world Augustine describes his life and
the emotions as he experienced them. In the second world, though, Augustine prayerfully
submits those experiences to God and evaluates them in light of God’s presence and grace.3 Thus,
in reading Confessions, “one constantly senses the tension between the ‘then’ of the young man
and the ‘now’ of the bishop.”4 This “then” and “now” perspective makes Confessions especially
valuable to this current study in that it helps us to locate and contrast Augustine’s changing
views.

1
Cf. M. W. F. Stone, “Augustine and Medieval Philosophy,” in Eleanor Stump and Norman Kretzmann,
The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 263.
2
Augustine and Maria Boulding, Confessions (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010), IV. 14, 22. All
subsequent references to Confessions are from this translation.
3
Cf. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, 12.
4
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkely: University of California Press, 1969),164.

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Shows in Carthage

Augustine traveled to Carthage to complete his education at the age of seventeen, in 371.5
Carthage exposed the future bishop to a variety of lewd entertainments.6 Augustine himself
described the scene vividly:

So I arrived at Carthage, where the din of scandalous love-affairs raged cauldron like
around me. I was not yet in love, but I was enamored with the idea of love, and so deep
within me was my need that I hated myself for the sluggishness of my desires. In love
with loving, I was casting about for something to love.7

He adds:

I was spellbound by theatrical shows full of images that mirrored my own wretched
plight and further fueled the fire within me. Why is it that one likes being moved to grief
at the sight of sad or tragic events on stage, when one would be unwilling to suffer the
same thing oneself?8

Thus, in Carthage we encounter Augustine the student exploring, as young persons

commonly do, both the pleasure and the pain inherent in emotional experiences. He pondered
how one could delight in a performance that was inherently sad. Augustine, in fact, developed a
fondness for the melancholy:

At that time I was truly miserable, for I loved feeling sad and sought out whatever could
cause me sadness. When the theme of a play dealt with other people’s tragedies––false
and theatrical tragedies––it would please and attract me more powerfully the more it
moved me to tears.9

Indeed, Augustine’s instructors encouraged him to “weep and make others weep”.10 He
did so, and did it well. As a young student in Thagaste his instructors also recognized and
acknowledged his giftedness. Specifically, his instructors charged him with elaborating a speech
based on certain elements and characters (Juno) in Virgil’s Aeneid. Later, a more mature
Augustine would come to understand these talents as rather useless apart from the knowledge of
God. After becoming Bishop of Hippo, he would write, “what did it profit me, O God, my true

5
Peter Brown, 38.
6
John J. O’Meara, The Young Augustine (New York: Alba House, 2001), 38-39.
7
Conf. III. 1, 1.
8
Conf. III. 2, 2.
9
Conf. III. 3, 4.
10
Brown, 37.

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life, that my speech was acclaimed above those of my many peers and fellow-students? Was it
not all smoke and wind?”11
The young Augustine though, placed a high value on his ability to evoke emotional
responses. According to Augustine’s own description of the rules of his education, “that boy was
adjudged the best speaker who most convincingly suggested emotions of anger and grief and
clothed them in apt words, as befitted the dignity of the person represented.” His oratory
expressing the “rage and pain” of Juno gained him accolades among his instructors.12 Here we
begin to see Augustine finding in emotion a certain utilitarian power. Emotions were for him at
this stage of his life both a source of personal enjoyment and potential for professional
advancement. Minimally, we can say that Augustine’s emotional interests showed that he was far
from being the man who would later become Bishop of Hippo, for his emotional desires and
entanglements reveal a selfishness uncharacteristic of the post-conversion Augustine. In fact,
Augustine himself described how his view of emotions had changed between his time in
Carthage and the writing of Confessions. He writes:

Even today I am not devoid of merciful sensibility, but at that time it was different
[emphasis added]; I rejoiced with lovers on the stage who took sinful pleasure in one
another, even though their adventures were only imaginary and part of a dramatic
presentation, and when they lost each other I grieved with them, ostensibly merciful; yet
in both instances I found pleasure in my emotions. Today [emphasis added] I feel greater
pity for someone who takes delight in a sinful deed than for someone else who seems to
suffer grievously at the loss of pernicious pleasure and the passing of a bliss that was in
fact nothing but misery.13

Here Augustine describes the affect of his conversion upon his own emotions. He is saying that
prior to his conversion he reveled in emotions, any emotion, just for sake of the personal delight
that followed. In short, emotion was its own reward for the young Augustine. As we will see,
Augustine will take a similar approach to philosophy. By the time Augustine becomes Bishop,
though, we see a more critical approach and his emotions are governed by his faith as seen in the
statement above. The observance of a sinful act could no longer be a source of pleasure for the
heart ruled by God; the emotion evoked by the tragedy of sin would overtake his youthful lust.

Augustine’s Conversion

“Augustine makes plain, throughout Confessions, that the evolution of the heart is the
real stuff of autobiography.”14 This idea, the evolution of the heart, is a key characteristic of
Augustine’s journey. This is especially evident in the consummating event of Augustine’s
conversion. His intellectual pursuits, addressed in detail below, which increasingly dominated his
adult life from the time he read Cicero’s Hortensius in the end proved not as fulfilling as
11
Conf. I. 17, 27.
12
Brown, 37.
13
Conf. III. 2, 3.
14
Brown, 28.

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Augustine had hoped for. Also, these pursuits offered no aid in quenching his sensual appetite.
This disparity was something that became increasingly intolerable for Augustine.15 Speaking of
his lusts, he writes:

What foul deeds were they not hinting at, what disgraceful exploits! But now their voices
were less than half as loud, for they no longer confronted me directly to argue their case,
but muttered behind my back and slyly tweaked me as I walked away, trying to make me
look back….for I could not bring myself to tear free and shake them off and leap across
to that place whither I was summoned, while aggressive habit still taunted me: “Do you
imagine you will be able to live without these things?16

Thus, a series of intricately interwoven and seemingly divinely ordained events bring Augustine
to a crisis moment. His intellect and pursuit of philosophy helped him to overcome several
obstacles regarding Christian faith. But at the crucial moment in his conversion, it was his
emotions that drove him to the point of surrender:

I flung myself down somehow under a fig-tree and gave free rein to the tears that burst
from my eyes like rivers, as an acceptable sacrifice to you. Many things I had to say, and
the gist of them, though not the precise words, was: “O Lord, how long? How long? Will
you be angry forever?17

And then,

I went on talking like this and weeping in the intense bitterness of my broken heart.
Suddenly I heard a voice of some boy or girl, I do not know––singing over and over
again, “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read”….I snatched it up, opened it and read in
silence the passage on which my eyes first lighted: Not in dissipation and drunkenness,
nor in debauchery and lewdness, nor in arguing and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires. I had no
wish to read further, nor was there need. No sooner had I reached the end of the verse
than the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shades of doubt fled away.18

In the central event of his conversion, the man who had turned away from the excessive
emotionalism of his youth, had, unwittingly found himself embroiled in a crisis of the heart. If it
was the mind of Augustine that brought him to this point, it was his heart, broken, that finally
brought him past this point and to the point of surrender.

15
O’Meara, 171.
16
Conf. VIII. 11, 26.
17
Conf. VIII. 12, 28.
18
Conf. VIII. 12, 29.

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 AUGUSTINE AND INTELLECT

Augustine, especially as a young man, entertained few doubts about his own intellectual
abilities, abilities that later in life he described as a gift from God.19 His parents certainly noticed
his intellect, for they went to great lengths despite their own financial limitations to see that
Augustine received a good education.20

The Manicheans

Intellectual barriers, more than anything else, prevented the young Augustine from giving
himself over to the Christian faith. Two problems in particular troubled him the most. These
were the problem of evil and how to interpret certain Old Testament texts. Both of these
contributed to Augustine’s becoming a Manichee. The Manicheans were a pseudo-Christian,
gnostic cult who thought themselves the only true Christians.21 The were devoted followers of
the teachings of Mani, a Persian martyred in 277, who had called himself “The Apostle of Jesus
Christ” and believed himself to be the Paraclete.22 The Manichees advocated a dualistic theology,
asserting two kingdoms, a Kingdom of Light that is the source of all good and a Kingdom of
Darkness that is the source of all evil. The world, according to the Manichees, stood corrupted—
the Kingdom of Light invaded by the Kingdom of Darkness. The only pure part of humanity that
remained uncorrupted by this invasion is the “mind, or “good soul.”23 This uncorrupted part of
their nature the Manichees preserved through a severe asceticism, at least among the top rank of
their sect.
Augustine’s sojourn with the Manicheans was thus a product of his disdain for what
seemed unsound religious beliefs, which he thought inherent in Christianity. He compared the
Bible to Cicero and found the Bible wanting.24 Plus, the dualistic theology of Manichaeism
bolstered Augustine’s already onset elevation of wisdom.25 By adopting the Manichean way of
denigrated the body and elevating the soul, Augustine found a religious framework for his own
tendency to elevate the mind (soul). Furthermore, it is not difficult to deduce why someone as
astute as Augustine would so value his mind, in the same way that athletes value their body;
Augustine’s keen mind held the promise of a bright future.

19
Conf. I.17, 27.
20
cf. James O’Donnell, “Augustine: His Time and Lives” in Eleanor Stump and Norman Kretzmann,
Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 17.
21
Bonner, 58.
22
Bonner, 58; O’Meara, 48.
23
Brown, 50.
24
Conf. III. 5, 9.
25
Brown, 49.

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 It was generally true that Manichaeism attracted an intellectual crowd, and Augustine
certainly fit that bill.26 The Manichees claimed unbridled adherence to truth and rationality, and
accused Christians of being captive to fear and superstition.27 This self-proclaimed
intellectualism of the Manichees is what most attracted Augustine, though he would later
acknowledge his own lack of discernment in joining the sect and that he perhaps accepted their
claims to be arbiters of truth and reason uncritically.28 Nonetheless, as Brown has said, “it is
hardly surprising therefore, that Augustine should have adopted a religion, which claimed to
slough off any beliefs that threatened the independence of his very active mind.”29
Ironically, the very intellectual endowment that brought Augustine to become a Manichee
was also that which led him away. Augustine, though he may have entered the Manichaean sect
somewhat blindly, he did not long remain so. One of the first things that began to trouble
Augustine was that some of the “lay” philosophers whom he had recently read showed a great
deal more accuracy in their reckoning of astronomy than the writings of Mani on these same
subjects.30 Thus, he began to see that the Wisdom he sought would not be found in Manichaeism
and he began to look elsewhere.31 Plus, Augustine finally encountered Faustus, a Manichaean
bishop who was highly regarded in the cult. He had hoped the encounter would be enlightening
and it was, but not in the manner Augustine expected. Faustus turned out to be something of a
windbag, and Augustine grew even more disenchanted with the movement. He needed only find
a sharper instrument in order to cut himself free once and for all.32

Augustine’s Turn to Philosophy

Disillusioned with Manichaeism, Augustine turned his attention to philosophy and the
skeptics of the New Academy.33 Members of the New Academy saw themselves as a continuation
of Plato’s Academy. The primary tool of both the old and New Academy was skepticism,
generally expressed in negative arguments.34 Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius when he was
nineteen, and ever since maintained an abiding love for and commitment to philosophy.35
Philosophy itself had long been viewed in a religious sense, and in the fourth century Christianity

26
O’Meara, 50.
27
O’Meara, 67.
28
O’Meara, 67.
29
Brown, 49.
30
O’Meara, 90.
31
Brown, 58.
32
cf. Conf. V.7, 3; Bonner, 68.
33
John Rist, “Faith and Reason” in Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 27
34
Bonner, 71-72
35
Bonner, 57.

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was believed its fullest consummation. Quoting Augustine, Brown notes, “There are no
crucifixes in the fourth century. [Jesus] was, rather, ‘the Great Word of God, the Wisdom of
God.’ On the sarcophagi of the age, He is always shown as a Teacher, teaching his Wisdom to a
coterie of budding philosophers.”36
By this time, Augustine had settled in Milan in the vicinity of, if not yet in the inner circle,
of Bishop Ambrose. This would prove vital, for though Augustine had embraced skepticism, he
had done so only half-heartedly. Though he sought desperately to discover and believe in Truth,
he was not willing to believe nothing at all. For Augustine, the other side of belief could never be
a content disbelief, but only total despair.37 Therefore, it was in Milan that Augustine entered the
Church as a catechumen. He still wrestled with the problem of evil, and with how to interpret the
OT. Ambrose would provide the solution to both of these problems, primarily through his
sermons. Regarding the problem of interpreting the OT, Ambrose bequeathed to Augustine an
allegorical means of interpreting difficult passages.38 And regarding evil, he introduced to
Augustine a Christianity infused with Neo-Platonism.39

Neo-Platonism. Augustine’s conversion to Christianity in Milan in 386 has at times been

called an “intellectual conversion,” and a conversion not to Christianity, but to Neo-Platonic
philosophy.40 These accusations have largely been dispelled. Nonetheless, they do bring forth a
nugget of truth, and rightly emphasize that Neo-Platonism was an essential ingredient in
overcoming some of Augustine’s intellectual barriers.41
After converting to Christianity, Augustine gave up his aspirations as a rhetorician,
deeming the practice to be somewhat vulgar and contrary to Christian ethics. He thus “retired” to
Cassiciacum and entered the life of a Christian philosopher to study, pray, and write––to devote
himself to a life of intellectual reflection––in the confines of a semi-monastic community
consisting of a small band of friends.42

Summary

Up to this point it should be clear that as a young man Augustine was at times susceptible
to destructive emotionalism. Furthermore, intellectual questions and quests fueled Augustine’s
spiritual journey prior to his conversion and wisdom was, at least for a time, considered ultimate.
The Augustine we encounter in Milan had come to believe that Wisdom was its own reward, and
his “retirement” to Cassiciacum shortly after his conversion attests to this new outlook. Thus, we
have seen that Augustine came to regard both emotion and wisdom as an end in themselves.
36
Brown, 42.
37
cf. Bonner, 74-80; O’Meara 102.
38
Augustine and Daniel E. Doyle, Essential Sermons (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007), 16.
39
O’Meara, 109
40
O’Meara, 125
41
O’Meara, 170.
42
Brown, 115-127.

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 BALANCING EMOTION AND INTELLECT

City of God

In The City of God, begun around 413, we find the clearest exposition of the mature
Augustine’s definition and understanding of the relationship between emotion and intellect.
Essentially, the mature Augustine differentiates between passions (passiones) and affections
(affectus, motus), wherein passions are the more base and corrupt desires of humanity that flow
from one’s fallen nature. Affections then, are those feelings that operate within the will and are
thus attached to reason and the mind. Affections are a product of the “higher, intellective soul,”
while passions are a product of the lower, sensitive self.43 That is, passions are “involuntary in
the sense of not in accordance with the will.”44 Reason directs our affections by helping us to
make wise choices and pursue worthy objects. The ultimate difference between passions and
affections then is that affections are in accordance with the will, and thereby in accord with
reason and truth.45 Thus, in the thought of the elder Augustine, virtuous affections are
coterminous with reason and intellect, and so there can be no denigration of one and elevation of
the other. They are of equal status and importance. Rather than grouping all emotions together,
Augustine separates higher forms (affections) from lower forms (passions), and attributes those
higher forms to right belief and to God. As Scrutton says:

In his view of passions and affections, Augustine offers us an alternative model to the
more undiscriminating modern category of the emotions. In contrast to both the ‘Myth
of the Passions’, which condemns all emotion as contrary to reason, and the Romantic
view of the emotions, which often elevates all forms of emotion, Augustine provides
a way to distinguish between reasonable and arational, between voluntary and
involuntary, and between virtuous and vicious, emotions. In addition, Augustine’s
view repudiates the idea that ‘the heart’ and ‘the head’ are separate and often in conflict,
thus concurring with much contemporary psychology.46

The Trinity

As previously noted, Neo-Platonism greatly influenced Augustine’s thinking. Despite

that the elder Augustine continued to elevate the soul above the body in a very Platonic way,47 he
43
Anastasia Scrutton, “Emotion in Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas: A Way Forward for the
Im/Passibility Debate?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 7, no. 2 (2005): 169-77, 171; Cf. Edmund Hill,
“Forward to Books IX-XIV,” in Augustine and Edmond Hill, The Trinity (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991),
263.
44
Ibid., 171.
45
Ibid., 172.
46
Scrutton, 174.
47
See Roland Teske, “Augustine’s Theory of the Soul” in Cambridge Companion, 116.

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eventually embraced a more holistic view of human persons based on his understanding of
Scripture, and specifically on his understanding of the image of God in man. This holistic view
was a product of his differentiating between passions and affections, as mentioned above.
Emotion was joined to reason, though, through Augustine’s Trinitarian concept of human nature,
described in The Trinity, completed around 419. Here Augustine rejects “the Platonic view that
learning is recollection,”48 and instead describes the immaterial aspects of the mind, namely
“memory,” “understanding,” and “will,” in Trinitarian terms. That is, Augustine believes
humanity created in the image of God (imago Dei) is a reference not merely to the one God, but
more precisely to the one God in three Persons. In fact, advancing this Trinitarian understanding
of the imago Dei was one of Augustine’s primary aims in his writings on The Trinity.49
One way in which Augustine developed this thought on the Trinitarian nature of
humanity was by considering the relationship between various aspects of the human mind. The
mind, consisting of memory, understanding, and will, reflected the imago Dei, in Trinitarian
form. Just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were One, with one mind, so too was the human
mind one, though with three distinct aspects. These aspects, though, were each inherently related
to one another. Memory forms the central part of the mind because will and understanding are
both equally dependent on the prior functioning of memory. “Memory” is thus analogous to God.
“Understanding” is likened to the Son, who as the living Word brings enlightenment, and “will”
finds a correlate in the Spirit, for our will is determined ultimately by love.50 The Trinitarian
likeness in humanity is renewed by God’s love being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit,
and so love forms the core of the spiritual life.51 As Augustine states:

And so you have a certain image of the trinity, the mind itself and its knowledge, which
is its offspring and its word about itself, and love as the third element, and these three are
one (1 Jn. 5:8) and are one substance. Nor is the offspring less than the mind so long as
the mind knows itself as much as it is, or is love any less than the mind so long as it loves
itself as much as it knows and as much as it is.52

Within The Trinity and City of God we have the full expression of Augustine’s balanced
view of intellect and emotion. He came to believe that religious beliefs must be “affectively
experienced as well as cognitively grasped.”53 This belief may have been a product of his own
conversion experience where, as mentioned above, Augustine’s affections and cognition were
gloriously brought together in a point of spiritual crisis resulting in his embracing the Christian
faith. But this transformation was informed and developed by his reflections on the Trinitarian
nature of the Christian life. Thus, the Trinity was not merely a concept for understanding God,

48
Roland Teske, “Augustine’s Philosophy of Memory” in Cambridge Companion, 150.
49
Mary Clark, “De Trinatate” in Cambridge Companion, 91.
50
Teske, “Memory,” 155.
51
Mary T. Clark, 91; cf. Rom. 5:5.
52
Augustine and Edmond Hill, The Trinity (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 9.3.18
53
John Rist, “Faith and Reason” in Cambridge Companion, 31.

11
but was an equally important means of understanding human nature in relation to God. Humanity
could only be rightly understood within the context of a reciprocal and loving relationship that
received and shared the love of God. As humans receive the love of God, they are enabled to
love themselves and so too one another.54 As the human will responds to the love of God the will
is healed from the effects of sin, allowing intellect and emotion to operate harmoniously.55 Thus,
it is love––and not the will under its own power––which determines the operation of the will and
finally determines if our emotions result in virtuous affections or destructive passions. Perhaps it
is this notion that provided Augustine’s famous line, “love, and do what you will.”56 If that love
is caritas, or charity, then the will is directed toward God and truth. If it is cupiditas, or lust, then
the will is directed toward objects of wrath.57

On the Legitimacy of Augustine’s Trinitarian Imago Dei

The question that begs for an answer so far is whether Augustine is correct in
understanding the imago Dei in Trinitarian terms. His approach raises several questions. Is
Augustine correct in asserting, as he does, that if God is a Trinity and humans are made in God’s
image, then we can understand something of God by looking inward at human nature? Also, can
Augustine’s Trinitarian view of the mind, which figures so prominently, be defended
Scripturally?
Before evaluating Augustine’s precise argument, two things must be considered. First,
The Trinity was a work in progress made public before Augustine intended and therefore we
cannot be certain to what extent Augustine might have revised these arguments. Augustine
himself in his letter to Pope Aurelius introducing The Trinity notes his wishes to have made
further revisions. Second, Augustine is not claiming that the Trinitarian imago Dei in humans
refers to genuine human “faculties” but rather is a somewhat imperfect reflection of the Divine
Trinity. 58 By contemplating the Trinitarian nature of the imago Dei, we are led to the
contemplation of God Himself. That is, by better understanding God’s creatures, particularly
those made in His own image, we shall inevitably arrive a deeper knowledge of God. This is
Augustine’s primary purpose in The Trinity59 and is based on Augustine’s belief that scientia, or
knowledge of temporal things, can lead to sapientia, or wisdom derived from the contemplation
of eternal truth.60

54
Mary T. Clark, “De Trinitate,” 91ff.
55
Cf. Brown, 374.
56
Tractates on the Letter of John, 7.8.
57
Scrutton, 173.
58
C.f. Edmond Hill, “Introduction” in Augustine and Edmond Hill, The Trinity, 25. Thus Hill describes
Augustine’s work in The Trinity as an “Alice through the looking-glass exercise,” 52.
59
Ibid., 24-25.
60
Ibid., “Forward to Books IX-XIV,” 261-263.

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Augustine’s Initium Fidei

Throughout The Trinity Augustine asserts the necessity and priority of initial faith, or
initium fidei, in contemplating the mystery of the Trinity. By speaking of faith as the proper
place from which to embark on a quest for God, Augustine is directing the reader to Scripture,
for his entire treatment of the Trinity argues based upon God’s self-revelation.61 For Augustine,
though, this is not circular reasoning but rather a necessity since “we are incapable of grasping
eternal things, and weighed down by the accumulated dirt of our sins, which we had collected by
our love of temporal things…so we need purifying.”62 We are thus purified by God’s Word, for
as the Living Word has revealed, “If you abide in my word you are really my disciples,” and then,
“you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”63 Therefore, for Augustine faith by
necessity precedes reason because God is the locus of all genuine truth. Thus, “no amount of
rational effort, no high quality of rational procedures will be of any avail unless it starts from
faith.”64 His firm belief in faith as the only proper starting place derives from a favorite text of
his, namely Isaiah 7:9, which in Augustine’s version read, “unless you believe, you will not
understand.”65 The point to be made here is that due to Augustine’s emphasis on faith, and
thereby on Scripture, his Trinitarian imago Dei is thoroughly biblical. First, the entire enterprise
upon which Augustine has embarked is based on an inference Augustine derives from Rom. 1:20,
which states that the creation is capable of telling us something about the Creator.66 Augustine
also shows from Scripture that God is a Trinity, that each member of the Trinity is Divine and
each equal in status (Book I). Augustine devotes most of this section to defending the deity of
Christ, in part to respond to the Arian controversy and in part because Christ’s role as mediator is
a major component of what follows.67 After establishing the unity and deity of the Trinity,
Augustine elaborates on the missio Dei, that is the sending of the Son and the sending of the
Holy Spirit, noting specifically that this sending is found only in the New Testament.68 The
picture of this sending therefore centers on Christ as the supreme event in God’s self-revelation.
Without this self-revelation, humankind would have no starting point in knowing God.69

61
Ibid., “Introduction,” 23.
62
The Trinity, IV, 24.
63
Ibid.; John 8:31-32.
64
Hill, “Introduction,” 22.
65
Ibid., 22.
66
Cf. The Trinity, VI, 12.
67
Regarding the Arian controversy see V. 4; and regarding Christ as mediator see Book IV.
68
Ibid., 23.
69
C.f. Edmond Hill, “Introduction” in Augustine and Edmond Hill, The Trinity, 25.

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 Obviously, Augustine’s Trinitarian imago Dei is derived primarily from Gen. 1:26, “Let
us make man in our image and likeness.”70 Augustine understands the “us” and “our” in this text
to refer to the triune God. He argues:

“Let us make” and “our” are in the plural, and must be understood in terms of
relationships. For he did not mean that gods should do the making, or do it to the image
and likeness of gods, but that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit should do it; do
it therefore to the image of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, so that man might subsist
as the image of God; and God is the three.71

Key to understanding Augustine’s Trinitarian imago Dei and thus his concept of the mind,
is understanding also that image was damaged in Adam, but is being restored in Christ. This is
the subject of books XII-XIV. Augustine appeals to both reason and Scripture in arguing for his
Trinitarian concept of the mind. It is our rational mind, capable of contemplating “everlasting
meanings,” according to Augustine, that separates humans from beasts.72 Since humans alone are
made in God’s image, then this distinct feature of contemplating eternal truth surely reflects
something of the imago Dei. Our minds though are damaged through the sin of Adam and
through our own participation in sin and are thus in need of renewal. This is why Paul exhorts
believers to “[Put] off the old man with his actions, put on the new who is being renewed for the
recognition of God according to the image of him who created him” (Col. 3:9).73 This renewal
primarily is concerned with the mind; thus the admonitions, “Do not conform to this world, but
be reformed in the newness of your minds”74 (Rom. 12:2), and “Be renewed in the spirit of your
minds, and put on the new man who was created according to God in justice and the holiness of
truth”75 (Eph. 4:23).
70
The Trinity, VII, 12.
71
The Trinity, VII, 12.
72
The Trinity, XII, 2.
73
The Trinity, XII, 12.
74
The Trinity, XIV, 22.
75
Ibid. One of the criticisms sometimes brought against Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity is that it might
foster a body-soul dualism and tend to see humans as primarily spiritual beings. In fact, some have seen in The
Trinity a chiastic structure that fosters precisely this notion.75 The idea behind this chiastic structure is that the first
half of The Trinity focuses on descent, that is on God’s descent to humans, while the second half focuses on ascent,
on the human contemplation of the divine Trinity. Nathan Crawford has argued that this way of structuring The
Trinity fosters a body-soul dualism “by implying that with the descent-ascent motif, Augustine sees the bodily and
finite as a descent while seeing the soul as that which alone is capable of ascent.”75 Therefore, Crawford proposes an
alternative “double-ascent motif” that focuses on the sapiential structure of The Trinity. In other words, Crawford
understands Augustine’s chief goal as the “contemplation of God in sapientia,” or wisdom that comes from
reflecting on the deep truths of God. Crawford sees the first ascent in books I-VII, and as relating to the outer man.
The second ascent begins in book VIII and relates to the inner man. He explains: “In dying in human flesh and
overcoming fleshly death through the Resurrection, Christ becomes “the sacrament for the inner man and the model
for outer man” (IV.6). In the rest of the first ascent, books V-VII, Augustine works out how the outer person comes
to live like Christ, with the goal of having imago dei restored. The second ascent––beginning in book VIII—lays out
the way that the inner person comes to be the imago dei.” See Nathan Crawford, “The Sapiential Structure of
Augustine's De Trinitate.” Pro Ecclesia 19, no. 4 (2010): 434-52.

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 CONCLUSION

Augustine, prior to his conversion to Christianity, shared a trait common to humanity in

that he seemed to lack a guiding principle under which the various elements of his psyche,
namely his intellect and emotion, could be ordered. Apart from some sort of hermeneutical
principle, temporal things tended to became ultimate things. But by differentiating scientia, or
knowledge, from sapientia, or wisdom, and relating sapientia ultimately to the contemplation of
the Trinity, the whole of human life, in both its physical and psychical aspects is renewed in the
image of God in which it was created. The result is a temporal bodily existence lived in the
pursuit of God and his purposes, wherein intellect and emotion are ordered by the image of God
within and ultimately resulting in the knowledge of God and his purposes.
Not only does Augustine develop this understanding from his own reflection on the
Trinity, but he invites believers to embark on this life-long contemplation of the Triune God as a
means of being renewed in the image of God. Those who would know God must of necessity
begin by faith in what God has said and revealed in Scripture. Otherwise, our sin prevents us
from accessing the Divine mystery. Once the journey has begun, however, enlightenment
follows for the corrupted mind is made new and our loves are ordered according to the will and
love of God. Thus the doctrine of the Trinity becomes not an opaque and somewhat obscure
doctrine of Christian faith to which most believers feel a dissonance, but instead becomes an
inexhaustible fount of refreshing, as the faithful endeavor to “set [our] minds on things above.”76

76
Col. 3:2; cf. The Trinity, IV, 6.

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Bonner, Gerald. St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies. 3rd ed. Norwich: Canterbury,
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