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 significant “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 transfiguring and participatory knowledge of the transcendent God becomes ever more pervasive, more obviously an organizing principle. 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.)— 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. 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. 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.
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 sapientia of the divine Word, a wisdom which is not available through the speculations of the Platonists; 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.” Grace humbles us so that we may accept the way of humility as the way to truth; only prosternere allows us to rise to the heights of God’s wisdom. God’s love brings the eternal Word into the human world, and that same love allows us to face our creatureliness and our sin in honesty, knowing that God’s will is for our good. In so doing, we reflect God’s caritas and know God’s light, the lux supra mentem which is accessible only to love. The displacement of our desire to rise by our own strength delivers us from the idolatry of the self which impedes love. Absent this process—as in the Platonic books—and growth becomes impossible. When I know that I am presently imperfect, I know I must grow in order to feed more fully on Christ who is the Truth (cresce et manducabis); and nothing can be built except on the foundation of humility which is Christ.
Here, as in Doctr. chr., the underlying point is that the abandonment required for us to receive the true knowledge of God is not, so to speak, the “spatial” abandonment of the world of material things in order to rise to a higher realm, but the abandonment of attachment to the projects and desires of the unregenerate will. The refusal to identify God with any res in the world, the recognition of creation itself as signum, with the cross of Christ as the central proof of this, is another means of saying that conversion is the willingness to keep moving in time, putting behind those desires that look for satisfaction within time (as though desire could be brought to an end, and time thus reduced to space). Growing into knowledge of the incarnate Christ means the reconstruction of desire into hope for God, the exspectatio which Le Blond sees as the climax of the argument of the Confessions. By the incarnation, God both binds us to the temporal world as always and inescapably our starting point and dispossesses us of the illusion that there is a point within that temporal world where we can settle. Every point in the temporal order becomes a point of departure, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. The leaving behind of our limited material condition is a temporal and not a spatial matter, in that it involves the journey of growth and learning in time. The peregrinatio, which is the basic form of discipleship, is the willingness to see every present moment as the place which a desire for God obliges me to leave, yet also as the necessary prompt or stimulus to the journey of desire, not as something simply to be negated. This is Platonism still, we may well say, but given a distinctive turn by the intensification of the particular promptings of history, focused on the crucified Christ.
To imitate the humility of the incarnate Christ is to come to occupy his position vis-à-vis God, so that his humility is indeed the doorway to knowledge of the eternal. This is the force of the language about divine humilitas that we find early in the De Trinitate (and, note, not too far distant in time from the Confessions). In Trin. 4.2.4, in the course of one of Augustine’s most extended treatments of the person and work of Christ, this is spelled out very explicitly. We are unfit for the contemplation of God because of our sin. Wicked and proud as we are, we can be made capable of participating in the divine Word, being illuminated, only by means of sanguis iusti et humilitas dei. God stoops to become a righteous human being so that, as human but not sinful, he may intercede for us so that, created though we are, we may still contemplate God. God is what we are not by nature; but by the Word’s participation in humanity, we may share the Word’s divinity in being enlightened with his light (and thus, by implication, sharing his contemplative relation to the Father). In an image which Augustine goes on to develop at length, the incarnate Word “adds” to our humanity in congruentia or convenientia, concinentia or consonantia, “what the Greeks call harmonia,” an element which in its “simplicity” overcomes the discords or fractures of our “double” humanity. The merciful will of God forms a human identity in which mortal body and damnable soul are united with the single purpose of divine love so that they are made capable of seeing God and being resurrected. Of this resurrection, Christ’s own is given in sacramento et exemplo.
The incarnation here is seen as the act of divine self-offering which, so to speak, gathers up the elements of broken humanity and constitutes thereby a new humanity, integrated in virtue of the divine act which takes and holds the twofold life of human beings, body and soul, bringing them into harmony. Augustine spends a good deal of time in book 4 elaborating the mathematical appropriateness of adding a simplum to a duplum; but the theological heart of the argument is in effect an anticipation of the scholastic notion that the humanity of Christ is distinct not because of an extra element alongside the human soul and body (as if the incarnate Word were part of a threefold complex of equipollent elements) but because the soul-body compound is in this case concretely animated and individuated by a single divine agency. That is a more involved issue than can be discussed here, but, as we shall see later, it illuminates the most distinctive feature of Augustine’s deployment of rhetorical idiom in this context.
It also relates to the theme opened up a little later in Trin. book 4 and very prominent in Augustine’s preaching. In Trin. 4.9.12 Augustine reflects upon the prayer of Jesus in John 17, that the disciples will become one as the Father and the Son are one. Jesus, says Augustine, does not simply speak of a unity of nature (unum) between himself and his disciples, although the Church may say that it is unus with Christ, one subject, in the sense that there is one head of the Body and one Body. The focus is on the total unity between Son and Father, which is to be reflected among the disciples: this is to be not merely the natural unity between members of the human species but a harmonious will, a tending toward one and the same blissful heavenly end. The unum of the Father and the Son is a unity of substance and will; so for the Church the unity prayed for is dilectionis societas. This societas is attainable only in Christ, who binds us together in such a way that we are no longer divided by wanting radically different things. The common life becomes an image of the single focus of the trinitarian life upon its own intrinsic joy; as we are corporately directed toward this bliss, we share in God’s self-relatedness. Here the major themes of the closing books of De Trinitate are already sketched, but they are related very directly to the understanding of the Body of Christ as the form of our renewed life under grace.
But one of the most interesting aspects of this passage is the reference to the sense in which the Church and Christ are unus. The argument of the passage is thereby connected to the theology of Christ as Head of the Body which pervades the Enarrationes in Psalmos, where it is used precisely as a tool of rhetorical criticism. Who speaks in the Psalms? Christ as Head; and as Head, he makes his own words that would otherwise shock or puzzle, words of guilt or suffering. Just as his death (as we are told at Trin. 4.2.4) is meritoriously effective because it is voluntarily endured, not received as punishment, so the entire range of what we might call death-directed experience in humanity is voluntarily embraced by the incarnate Word. Augustine’s de agone offers a classical exposition of the aproslepton atherapeuton argument (i.e., “that which is not assumed is not healed”), and much of the Enarrationes can be read as an elaboration of this. In an utterance like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:35; Ps 22:1), we can identify the speaker not simply as a guilty and suffering human subject, but as the one who freely undertakes to make all human guilt and suffering his own. By incarnation, death, and resurrection, the Word creates a relation between himself and the human race that brings all human experience within the scope of healing and restoration. The Word animates the particular soul and body that is Jesus, and in so embracing this human nature becomes the animating principle of any and every human identity associated with him by baptismal incorporation and the gift of the Spirit. The speaker in the Psalms is the Christ who tells Saul in Acts 9:4 that he is persecuting him (the Acts text is referred to fourteen times in the Enarrat. Ps. as a hermeneutical principle). Enarrat. Ps. 88.30 adds a further dimension, connecting the Head and Body theme with the earlier one of divine humility: “[Christ’s] love did not allow the Head to separate himself from union with the Body” even in the exalted state following the Ascension. Thus there is no context in which Christ speaks simply as human or simply as God; he speaks as the one who by taking on humanity through his divine will and power has become Head of the Body, speaking uniquely as representative of humanity in virtue of his divinity. The “right” of the exalted Christ to speak for humanity rests upon the divine decision to take flesh—and not only to take the specific flesh of Jesus of Nazareth but to create by that flesh the historical Body that is the company of believers, so that their variegated and flawed human experience may be offered by the eternal Word and touched with his transforming presence.
It is possible, then, to say, as does Augustine in Enarrat. Ps. 21, that Christ speaks in our persona. The expression personam sustinere is used here, as in other places, to mean something like representing, acting in the role of someone. It is more or less the same in sense as another of Augustine’s locutions, agere personam, and both are used by him in the works of the 390s to express aspects of the incarnation. For a related locution that does not have to do with Christology, but that also suggests a deeper level of significance, we may turn to Trin. 12.12.18: Adam and Eve both deserve punishment for sin, as each personam suam portabat. The fact, though, that Adam and Eve also represent different dimensions of human subjectivity and decision making should not lead us astray into thinking that somehow different bits of our selfhood are judged independently (as Eve would have been judged even if Adam had not sinned). Each of us is una persona . . . unus homo considered as an agent, a subject of desire, thought, and projection; each of us is judged as a single agent. The persona here is the terminus of responsibility, what finally speaks for or answers for our thoughts and desires, for the way we are. Persona operates on the frontier between legal, rhetorical, and what we should call psychological reference.
But we need to be alert to the complexities of this. The Word of God may be said to speak or act in our persona in virtue of his assumption of humanity (and there are of course several issues about how that “assumption” is best characterized, to say nothing of the varied vocabulary for it). Agere hominem appears in several early works (De ordine and Div. quaest. LXXXIII) as a way of describing the Word’s action. But this does not mean that the persona of fallen humanity, the homo activated by the Word and for which he speaks, is some kind of independent subject associated with the Word of God. The Word’s ability to sustain this persona is, as we have seen, grounded in the Word’s eternal act and determination, the act that assumes or includes humanity in its life. Hence, prior to anything that can be said about the Word speaking our “person,” is the belief that the entire earthly life of the incarnate Son is a speaking or acting in the person of divine Wisdom: agere personam sapientiae dei. The core theological conviction emerging more and more strongly in the 390s and early 400s is that the incarnate Word constitutes a unitas personae in taking human nature. Trin. 4.20.30 speaks of the homo who is joined or even “mixed” with the Word so as to form such a unitas, and there are very many examples of this definition of the incarnate persona as being the Word in union with the soul and the body (which latter two normally constitute a persona of themselves).
It becomes clear that Augustine’s persona is a flexible, or, better, an analogically complex term. Its basic meaning is fairly plain: identifying a persona is identifying who is speaking, whose role is in question in a complex of interchanges, verbal and otherwise. On that basis, persona questions about Christ can be answered at several different levels. The words of straightforward human suffering or fear in the Gospels are spoken in the persona of a fully vulnerable member of the human race; the words that must be attributed to Christ as the Word speaking in Scripture, especially in the Psalms, are spoken in the persona of what we might call the human condition in general, the condition of sinful people cut off from God. But the entire phenomenon that is the Word incarnate invariably speaks for the persona of divine Wisdom, since it is the action of divine Wisdom that creates the divine-human grammatical subject we hear speaking in Christ. Agere hominem in this sense depends upon agere sapientiam, since the utterance of human grief or pain is the result of Christ’s being freely engaged, as Wisdom’s embodiment, in the world of historical suffering and struggle. Thus the persona of Wisdom is the foundational identity with which we have to do; it is present and active in the form of the concrete historical persona that is a soul and body united with the divine Word; and as that historical persona incorporates human experience beyond its own individual limits, by setting up the relation of Head and Body in the reality of the Church, the person of divine Wisdom is free to take the role of lost humanity, agere hominem in the widest sense.
To engage with Augustine’s use of persona, then, is to encounter a concept providing a fluid and many-faceted connection between exegesis, soteriology, and Christology in the stricter sense. We may say that the answer to “Who is speaking?” where Christ is concerned is always sapientia; yet this does not entail a divine speaker who can be identified alongside a human one. Sapientia is indeed and ultimately the contemplation of God by God, but it is also that which prompts and makes possible the presence of God in what is not God, in the order of creation and in the human mind. Van Bavel rightly observes that from the first, Augustine sees the incarnation as the revelation of divine reason so that our human reason may be awakened; but as his understanding of sapientia develops, rather more than reason comes to be involved. Wisdom is identical with caritas, and so it is oriented always to the other’s good. The persona of Wisdom cannot therefore be isolated from its action as caritas; to say that Christ constantly acts in Wisdom’s person is not to assert that he always speaks or acts as divine Word simpliciter, as though the humanity were both separate and insignificant. The persona is Wisdom-in-action, Wisdom engaging with what is not by nature God (cf. Trin. 4.2.4 again) so as to incorporate it into the divine life and make it capable of seeing what Wisdom sees, knowing what it knows, contemplating the absolute otherness of the creator as if it were located where eternal Wisdom is located, in the heart of the divine self-knowledge and self-love.
Hence the truth of Le Blond’s observation with which this essay began: Augustine’s Christology is about spiritual method. In the first instance, it is the “method” of God’s own life, the method of sapientia. In contemplating the divine life with joy and delight, Wisdom realizes itself as love, the radically disinterested love that seeks the fruition of others in the same joy it knows; all that Augustine wrote about creation itself and in Doctr. chr. about the character of divine and created love must be understood in the background here. The humility of identification with the created other is the fitting expression of this, and the fitting means by which created life may become capable of divine contemplation, since it involves the “inclusion” of human experience in the life of the divine Word, by incorporation into the Body of Christ. Since our prideful self-assertion is the root of our separation from God, and the multiplicity of selfish goals and private definitions of human delight is the root of our separation from each other, only our humility opens the way to belief in the saving power of Christ and to reconciliation with God and each other.
One Christ
It is possible, then, to see why the use of rhetorical categories leads Augustine to a conclusion very different from those of the Antiochenes who (as Drobner demonstrates) have what are in some ways comparable concerns. The familiar debate in the Eastern christological controversy over whether the sayings of the incarnate Word could be divided according to whether they are spoken by the Word or the human individual Jesus is circumvented by Augustine—not because he has a straightforwardly “Cyrilline” account of union kath’ hupostasin (this is not Augustine’s mental world), but because of a more carefully integrated sense of the absolute dependence of the human speech of the incarnate one upon the single act of divine Wisdom. The stress in Trin. book 4 on the simplum that is the Word’s presence and activity is significant. As we have seen, it brings to the duplum of unredeemed humanity not simply a third element to contribute to a sum total, but an integrating unity which transforms both parts of humanity. The phraseology of Trin. 4.3.6 is instructive: here Augustine speaks of how the single death and single resurrection of Christ serve to overcome the twofold death to which we are condemned. The simplum of the Word’s agency is the principle through which our natural elements are transformed, not a sort of extra subject.
Consequently, the typical Antiochene anxiety about distributing the dicta of Jesus cannot really arise. What substantiates or gives active presence to this particular duplum of soul and body is the action of the Word, without which no human word can be spoken by this individual, Jesus of Nazareth. He exists because the Word has elected to be incarnate, and thus what he says is said because of the eternal Word. The Word is therefore never “alongside” the human speaker. It is neatly put in Trin. 13.18.23: in the saints, God “reigned,” regebat, while in Christ he “acted,” gerebat—a very characteristic Augustinian word chime. The act that defines the speaker is always the act of sapientia, not a divine act engaging with the act of another subject. There is, one could say, no “drama,” no dialogue of resistance and engagement and submission, between Jesus and the Word, as between the Word and other human beings. That is reserved for the relation between the single reality of the Word incarnate and God the Father. Here the natural and eternal self-surrender of the Son is enacted in the circumstances of weak flesh, both displaying and creating the possibility of obedience to the Father in all circumstances; human pride is overturned by divine humility. The divine act of humility in the incarnation itself, as portrayed in Conf. book 7, becomes the unifying theme of the human life of Jesus. And utterances of the incarnate Word which sound inappropriate to God are thus shown to be entirely fitting to divinity since they are the product of that loving sapientia which is the wellspring of the incarnation.
So Augustine avoids the pitfalls of Antiochene exegesis on this question by refusing to consider the human voice of Jesus in abstraction from the divine self-determination which is the coming of the Word in the flesh. How exactly he comes to this position is far from clear, but I suspect that we should read it as very closely connected with his developing concern with exegesis in the 390s, and the resultant nuancing of his understanding of sapientia. Increasingly, the pattern of Christ as “reason” incarnate opens out, as the “unreasonable” in Scripture has to be systematically interpreted. There has to be a theological way of making sense of the claim that God speaks in the oddities and contingencies, the fragmented and not always edifying words of the Christian Bible; and in Doctr. chr. and Conf. a twofold hermeneutical strategy is developed, which has the consequences for Christology that we have already sketched. Scripture is a sign, that is, a communication drawing us beyond itself, requiring change and growth, the acceptance of deferred desire (including deferred comprehension); and the embrace of this unfinished and unfinishable discourse has to be recognized as what is appropriate to temporal subjects who cannot of their own efforts lift themselves out of the contingent world to eternal verities.
Reading the Bible correctly and understanding the character of God’s work in the incarnation are clearly inseparable in the major works of the 390s; our humble acceptance of God’s accommodation to our condition correlates with the understanding of divine humility as the unifying foundation for all God’s revealing work. To paraphrase Conf. book 7 once again, if we cannot see that God takes our fleshly and temporal condition seriously enough to use it as his medium for communicating, we shall not take it seriously; and vice versa. Trin. book 4 echoes both Conf. 7 and considerable tracts of Civ. in defining the essence of religious error as the attempt to achieve reconciliation with God by means of strategies, whether ritual or meditative, to engineer a way out of the human condition; in Trin. 4.12.15, the Three Magi are presented as models of those who abandoned magic and human wisdom to adore humilitatem domini and learned to return to their patria “by another way,” the way of humility taught by Christ. With a curious passing allusion to the imagery of the Phaedrus, by this time a trope in philosophical writing, Augustine warns against supposing that the wings of virtue can be nourished by ritual and magic; instead we are weighed down more than ever by our efforts to rise.
So Augustine’s concern with humility develops during the 390s toward the mature polemic in Trin. and Civ. against pagan theurgy as well as pagan speculative metaphysics; and the incarnation has a focal place in this argument. But there is a further dimension, harder to trace with precision, that has to do with the evolving sense of what sapientia means. As the concept becomes more and more evidently connected with absence and dispossession in its human exercise (Doctr. chr. is significant in this), so when it is applied to God, its divine exercise becomes more and more linked with caritas and justitia. To enact the person of Wisdom is inevitably bound more closely with the fundamental act of self-humiliation or self-dispossession in the Word’s becoming flesh. So to represent Wisdom is precisely to represent an agency that is displaced for the sake of another. The dual idiom of the Word made flesh, the agere of homo and sapientia inseparably, makes complete sense as a resolution of the exegetical issue.
It would be tempting but misleading to say that Augustine provides a rhetorical version of what is for the Cyrilline tradition a more obviously metaphysical schema for understanding Christology. Cyrilline theology is not simply the attempt to isolate and define an undergirding “something” in Jesus that can be described as divine; it is, no less than Augustine’s language, concerned with finding what agency it is that gives unity to the components of Jesus’s humanity, and displaying that unity as the act of the second person of the Trinity. Equally, Augustine is not in any sense replacing an account of metaphysical subsistents with a “functional” union between the Word and human individual (as if this were a transcription of the stale debate in New Testament criticism two generations ago about whether the New Testament ascribed ontological or functional divinity to Jesus). Sapientia is for Augustine a real, substantive agent—both the “locus” from which the Father can be contemplated and the specific, eternal act of loving contemplation, the person of the Word of God.
But it would be fair to say that, to the extent that all Augustine’s reflection on the nature of being a subject is deeply involved with reflection on language—representation, relation of word and external reality, memory as self presence, verbal images as both prompting and expressing the complex re-routings of desire—it is not surprising that his theology of the incarnation should be, in effect, an account of how God speaks within the nexus of human relations, and that human salvation or transfiguration should be linked so often with the idea of the Word’s speech taking up and taking over the varieties of confused or rebellious human speech, anchoring the tumultuous instability of what we feel and express in a solid and unbroken self-communication, the Word’s self-giving to the Father. Most significantly of all, though, and most challengingly, this pattern of christological exposition insists that there can be no accurate discussion of the incarnation that is not itself incarnationally modeled—humble in its awareness of the inescapable context of material history, alert to the question of how justitia is realized, open to the dangerous and potentially humiliating solidarity of fallible and sinful human agents, and refusing prideful isolation. Agere personam sapientiae is for all believers the task of learning a new speech apt for the city of God, a méthode spirituelle that is both political, in the widest sense, and prayerful, continuous with the unbroken, transfiguring enactment of Wisdom that is Jesus Christ.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from In the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in the Early Church in Honor of Brian Daley, S.J. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
