The Spirit of Augustine's Early Theology

Contextualizing Augustine's Pneumatology

Chad Tyler Gerber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409424376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317014881
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

St Augustine's pneumatology remains one of his most distinctive, decisive, and ultimately divisive contributions to the story of Christian thought. How did his understanding of the Spirit develop? Why does he identity the Spirit with divine love and cosmic order? And from what personal and literary sources did he receive inspiration? This examination of Augustine's pneumatology - the first book-length study of this important topic available - seeks answers in Augustine's earliest extant writings, penned during the years surrounding his famed return to the Catholic Church and the height of his efforts to synthesize Catholic theology and the Platonic philosophy of his day which had postulated a divine 'trinity' of its own. Careful analysis of these initial texts casts fresh light upon Augustine's more mature and well-known theology of the Holy Spirit while also illuminating on-going discussions about his early thought such as the nature and extent of his Platonic sympathies and the possibility that the recent convert remained committed to the divinity of the human soul.

Chapter 1 Nicaea and Neoplatonism: The Contours of Augustine's Earliest Trinitarian Theology

DOI: 10.4324/9781315552521-2

The initial purview of this study extends beyond the pneumatology of St Augustine to capture his earliest theology of God the Father and God the Son and to discuss the respective influences of pagan and Christian thought upon this theology. More specifically, this chapter argues that the Trinitarian theology of the Cassiciacum dialogues is fundamentally pro-Nicene in shape, though also influenced both directly and indirectly by Neoplatonic philosophy, especially in Augustine’s presentations of the so-called first and second hypostases. Examination of the relative contributions of pro-Nicene and Neoplatonic metaphysics to these comparatively more conspicuous dimensions of Augustine’s first Trinitarian discussions will provide a firm footing for the investigation of his earliest theology of the third hypostasis, the Holy Spirit, in Chapter 2. To these ends, I begin with a detailed description of Augustine’s encounters with pro-Nicene theology and Neoplatonism in the years 386–387 ce and of the literary first-fruits of these encounters, the dialogues of Cassiciacum.

Texts and Context: Cassiciacum and the Dialogues

In 386 Aurelius Augustine was a precocious young “professor” in the imperial city of Milan. If he had remained in this post, we would remember him today as a respected rhetorician of late antiquity. Instead, late in August of that year, Augustine quietly resigned his imperial teaching post and retired to the sylvan estate of his friend, the grammarian Verecundus. ¹ The onslaught of a respiratory ailment provided a satisfactory excuse for those he left behind, particularly for the overbearing parents of his students, as he tells us. ² Yet this was only a coincidence. ³ Augustine’s resignation and rural holiday were the result of a far more profound alteration in the course of his life: weeks earlier he decided, in a most resolute and dramatic fashion, to seek Christian baptism and admission into the very Church he had spurned a decade earlier. ⁴ Forsaking his career in rhetoric, then, was his first duty as a man devoted to the truth rather than words. ⁵ Retreat at Verecundus’ villa provided Augustine with the opportunity to “breathe freely again” ⁶ while preparing himself for Easter baptism and a life of continence.

¹ Augustine, Conf. IX.2.2–5.13; Ord. I.1.5. Augustine wanted to resign immediately following his decision to be baptized. However, also wanting to do so in an unobtrusive manner, he waited until the vintage holiday (23 Aug. to 15 Oct., see Codex theodosianus 2.18.19), only several weeks away (Conf. IX.2.2–4). While Augustine withdrew to Cassiciacum at the beginning of the holiday he did not officially announce his resignation until its conclusion (Conf. IX.5.3), thus doing so from Cassiciacum. ² Augustine, Conf. IX.2.4; see also C. Acad. I.1.3; B. vita 1.4; Ord. I.2.5. ³ Augustine, Conf. IX.2.4; Ord. I.2.5. ⁴ In Conf. VIII, Augustine famously recounts the events that enabled him to wholeheartedly embrace the (moral) demands of the faith that he had recently come to know as true. ⁵ Augustine, Conf. IX.9.2, 4. ⁶ Augustine uses the phrase, presumably with the same double meaning, in C. Acad. II.2.4.

The retreat also afforded him the chance to experience, or perhaps experiment with, the communal mode of otium that he had long desired. ⁷ Augustine did not spend the autumn and winter of 386–387 alone. As usual, he was accompanied by a coterie of friends and family, among them his teenage son Adeodatus, mother Monica, brother Navigius, pupils Licentius and Trygetius, and close friend and fellow catechumen Alypius. They spent their days in leisure, attending to the light duties of the estate, praying, reading, and talking with one another about the things of philosophy. ⁸ Augustine penned four dialogues that reflect, on some level, these lofty exchanges, and throw light upon his mindset during the months immediately following his embrace of the Catholic faith. ⁹

⁷ See e.g. Augustine, Conf. VI.8.17, 12.21, 14.24; C. Acad. I.1.3, II.2.4–5. ⁸ On their time at Cassiciacum, see Augustine, Conf. IX.4.7–5.13; C. Acad. I.5.15. ⁹ Augustine, Ord. I.2.5; Conf. IX.4.7. For a survey of scholarly debate on the historicity of these compositions, see O’Meara. “Introduction,” to Augustine Against the Academics, ACW 12 (Westminster: Newman Press, 1951), 23–32; Joanne McWilliam, “Cassiciacum Dialogues,” ATA 135–43; Catherine Conybeare, The Irrational Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9–59. This study will proceed upon the incontrovertible premise that no matter how fictional the written dialogues may be, they (or at least Augustine’s own statements within them) still represent his mindset at Cassiciacum.

In the first of these, Contra Academicos, Augustine attempted to convey his newfound confidence that the soul can perceive incorporeal reality in this life and thus to refute the ostensible skepticism of the New Academy ¹⁰ that had lured him during the intellectual despondency and lethargy that followed his initial disillusionment with Manicheeism. ¹¹ The dialogue climaxes in a terse and somewhat cryptic appeal to the incarnation, the embodiment of the Intelligible itself, as a source of Augustine’s epistemological optimism. The second and shortest dialogue, De beata vita, was actually the first to be completed as it took place during an interim in the group’s discussion of the Academics. In it they probe further into the question, unanswered in book I of Contra Academicos, concerning whether beatitude should be identified with seeking (quaerere) or with finding (invenire) wisdom and truth. ¹² As he will do later in the discussion of Skepticism, Augustine eventually defends the second position and concludes his defense by revealing that the philosophical terms of the preceding discussion (e.g. wisdom) are, in fact, divine realities and, once again, that his confidence in the soul’s ability to perceive them is grounded in the gracious assistance that God himself provides. ¹³

¹⁰ Augustine provides a two-fold summary of the epistemology of the New Academy. Firstly, as intimated above, they denied the possibility of the knowledge of intelligible things, relegating the mind to know only what is truth-like (verisimile) or probable (probabilis) (C. Acad. II.5.11–12, 7.16, 11.26, III.10.22). Secondly, they maintained that wisdom therefore resides in perpetual epistemic deferral or the pursuit of wisdom itself (C. Acad. II.5.11, III.10.22). The designation “New Academy” appears to have originated with Antiochus of Ascalon (first century bce) as a characterization of the period from Archesilaus (mid-third century bce) to Philo of Larissa, Antiochus’ tutor. Antiochus interpreted the skeptical posture of this period as a deviation from the teaching of Plato and his immediate successors, and in 87 bce he separated from Philo of Larissa in order to found what he called the “Old Academy.” ¹¹ Augustine, Conf. V.10.19, 14.25; C. Acad. II.9.23, III.20.43, B. vita 1.4. Util. cred. 8.20. The dialogue which comprises book I of Contra Academicos occurred over three consecutive days and pertains to the question of whether or not wisdom and beatitude should be identified with the soul’s search for truth or the attainment of the same. Following a break during which De beata vita and most of De ordine were composed (see Retr. I.2–3), the dialogue concerning the Academics resumed for another three consecutive days comprising books II and III (cf. C. Acad. II.4.10). ¹² On the initial two days of the dialogue (chs. 2, 3), Augustine poses the question as an exertatio. As in the discussion of C. Acad. I, Licentius defends the former, i.e. Academic or Skeptical, position while Trygetius defends the later. The discussion yields no conclusive answers. ¹³ This takes place on the third and final day of the discussion (ch. 4, see esp. Augustine, B. vita 4.34–5).

During the interval between books I and II of Contra Academicos, Augustine also began work on the third and lengthiest dialogue of his retreat, De ordine. The dialogue comprises two books. In the first, Augustine and his companions discuss the nature and scope of divine providence and in particular the compatibility of a divinely ordered universe and the presence of evil. ¹⁴ The sheer complexity of this topic compels Augustine, throughout the greater part of the second book, to discuss instead the moral and intellectual procedures through which order, that is God himself, might be comprehended. ¹⁵ Again we find the line between anagogical concepts and hypostatic realities often wearing thin, and one of the chief tasks in this and the following chapter will be to discern when and where this line disappears (including, of course, which divine person is implied in such instances).

¹⁴ Agreement is reached that order is that which binds and governs the entire universe such that nothing, even evil, is opposed to it (cf. Augustine, Ord. I.1.1, 6.15–16, II.4.11, 7.21). ¹⁵ The theme is introduced in Augustine’s prefatory remarks to Zenobius (Ord. I.1.2–4) and a brief conversation with Licentius (Ord. I.8.24). The shift to focused epistemological inquiry occurs twice in book II (Ord. II.5.14–16, II.8.24–19.51) and will be examined in more detail at the end of this chapter.

Finally, at some point during his country holiday, Augustine also composed a work entitled Soliloquia, a neologism indicating that he would be “speaking alone.” To be accurate, Reason (Ratio), already personified in book II of De ordine, is Augustine’s interlocutor. Like the dialogue on order, Soliloquies is divided into two books. The first takes up another motif from De ordine II, namely the role of self-knowledge in the soul’s ascent to the perception of God (thereby explaining the fittingness of Augustine talking with himself). ¹⁶ In the second book, Augustine attempts to argue for the soul’s immortality on the basis of its inseparable connection with the intelligible and immortal realm. ¹⁷

¹⁶ To be more specific, the first half of book I explicates the nature of theological knowledge (i.e. that God is seen with the “eyes” of the mind, so to speak) (Augustine, Sol. I.2.7–8.15), and the second half inv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Nicaea and Neoplatonism: The Contours of Augustine's Earliest Trinitarian Theology
• 2 The Soul of Plotinus and the Spirit of Nicaea: The Pneumatology of the Cassiciacum Dialogues (386–387)
• 3 The Spirit of Love: The Pneumatology of the Roman Writings (387–388)
• 4 The Creative Spirit of God: The Pneumatology of the Thagastan Writings (389–391)
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Spirit of God and the Soul of the World: On the Compatibility of their Operations (De vera religione 12.24–5)
• Bibliography
• Index