Trinitarian Anthropology

Feast of All Saints

Reading Augustine.

An anthropology of the Trinity: Trinity as memory, understanding, will.  

God remembers: the phrase recurs throughout the Old Testament.  He remembered Noah, Abraham, Rachel.  To sin is to forget God.  

What is memory?  Not mere recollection of things past.  Memory makes present.  It is mindfulness.  Making the mind full of the presence of the remembered one.   Even more: memory as being aware of what is in your mind.  God is always present with us.  Christ promised us so.  He is always in us.  We must be made to remember Him.  He remembers us because we are in Him.  So too must we remember Him.

Understanding: God as wisdom, Spirit as wisdom.  What is wisdom?  An intellectual assent, yes.  But also an assent of love.  Understanding comes through love, not through reason alone.  We must love before we can understand.  "If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts."

Will:  Jesus says, For I have come to do not my will but the will of the one who sent me.  Can we echo these words of Christ?  Is not Christ's will also the will of the one who sent me?  He can only do what He sees His father doing.  To unite one's will so closely with God's is the goal of our life.

The Trinity as epistemologically necessary.  Memory, understanding, will - united in love: these are actions requiring an agent and another being upon whom the agent acts.  Even will cannot exist on its own: it requires the unifying of one will with another, in love.  Christ's unity with the Father through the Spirit.  

Our being made in God's image is not a static thing.  It is an active principle: we are in imago Dei because we have the ability to remember God, to understand and attain wisdom, to unite our wills with God, and to love God.  We are like God because we have the capacity to remember, understand, will, and love.  We fulfill our destiny as children of God by engaging those capacities to the best of our abilities - as the Spirit wills.

How does asceticism help us engage these capacities?  It clears out that which gets in the way: other things that fill our minds and distract from God, other things that occupy our quest for understanding, other things that direct our wills, other things that become objects of our love.  Asceticism does not deny the body but rather affirms it - seeks to make it holy, recognizes it as the vehicle by which our capacities are realized.  It is training the body, to make it a fitting home for a soul that is in imago Dei.  Shall we say that practicing the piano is a denial of musical talent?  No: it is an affirmation of and development of that talent.  So too is asceticism an affirmation and exercise of the body.

Critiques of Augustinian asceticism as too inwardly focused, rather than outwardly focused on sharing in the mystery of Christ's suffering: are the two understandings mutually exclusive?  Not if Christ is in us.  But perhaps balancing Augustine's perspective with the more concrete reality of the historical, crucified Christ is useful.  Still, they can coexist.  If asceticism aims to purify our understanding, memory, will, and love, then we can see Christ's suffering as purifying our suffering.  Christ purified all that He touched - made holy all He encountered.  In encountering suffering Christ purified it, so that when we encounter suffering we can be purified by it.  Asceticism as sharing in the mystery of Christ's purifying passion is also the same asceticism that seeks to purify the soul, make it fulfill its destiny as an image of God.

Created out of nothingness: a powerful image.  We dangle over the gaping gate of chaos.  Christ pulls us up, but how terrifying to look down, to descend back into the darkness and nothingness!  God constantly calls us into being - each moment of every day, He calls.  And the fullness of being lies in Him.  And so He calls us to Himself.

Faith and good works: a chicken and egg question.  Both exist in the realm of the Spirit.  From the beginning of our existence we existed in and through and with God.  Why ask which comes first when the Spirit that inspires them both is ever-present?