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Pro-Nicene prosopology and the church in Augustine's preaching on John 3:13
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2014
Abstract
John 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. If the only one who ascends to heaven is the one who descended, namely Christ, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent? To unpack Augustine's solution to this problem, this article explores his use of John 3:13 in his anti-Donatist sermons of 406–7. Here Augustine uses the grammatical method of prosopological exegesis both to identify and to solve the problem of Christ's solo ascent. Prosopology asks of a text, ‘Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? And about whom is he speaking?’ in order to parse the sometimes ambiguous personae within a dramatic scene. Through this method, Augustine affirms that Christ is indeed speaking about himself alone, but the reflexive subject of Christ includes the church who is his body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’. Building on the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship, I argue that this use of John 3:13 to espouse the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his body. Based on this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ, Augustine then uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for damning themselves by separating from the body of Christ. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into his complex subject that we are incorporated. Separation from that unity is separation from the singular grammatical subject who ascends as Christ to the Father. Thus, Augustine's grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis to solve the problem of John 3:13 connects the pro-Nicene affirmation of Christ's revelation of the Father to an anti-Donatist defence of the necessary unity of the church. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's vision of the church.
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References
1 For the dating, see Bonnardière, Anne-Marie La, Recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1965)Google Scholar. See esp. her summary calendar, pp. 51–3.
2 Also included in this period are the ten tractatus on 1 John, although I will not discuss any of those sermons explicitly here.
3 See the standard work on early Christian prosopological exegesis, Rondeau, Marie-Josèphe, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles), vol. 2, Exégèse prosopologique et théologie (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1985), esp. p. 22Google Scholar.
4 For a thorough summary of the etymology of persona, see Drobner, Hubertus, Person-Exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus: zur Herkunft der Formel Una Persona (Leiden: Brill, 1986), pp. 6–8Google Scholar.
5 Rondeau, Les Commentaires, skips these sermons completely, and Drobner only makes two brief references to En. Ps. 132.5 (Person-Exegese, 32 and 112).
6 This claim needs some defence given the relative silence of Rondeau and Drobner. In addition to the reasons offered below, the exegetical use of persona also appears throughout these seven months of preaching in the contemporaneous Johannine homilies. The phrase ex persona is twice used, once to explain that the prophet Isaiah speaks ex persona Christi in calling himself both bride and bridegroom (Isa 61:10, Ep. Io. 1.2), and once to describe Christ as speaking ex persona Iudaeorum in claiming that Jews ‘worship what we know’ (Jn 4:22, Io. ev. tr.15.26). Similarly, Augustine uses the term persona to distinguish between the figures of John the Baptist and Elijah (Io. ev. tr. 4.6), to explain how the bridegroom at the wedding of Cana is a figure for the personam domini (Io. ev. tr. 9.2), and to describe the literary relationship between John the author of the Gospel and John the Baptist, the former speaking per personam of the latter (Io. ev. tr. 15.3). So prosopology as an exegetical (and homiletical) method is certainly one of Augustine's tools during these months.
7 Fiedrowicz, Michael, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi: Studien zu Augustins Ennarationes in Psalmos (Freiburg: Herder, 1997)Google Scholar, focuses on the theme of the many voces of the Psalms (those of Christ, the church, etc.). His use of vox highlights the same themes which Rondeau and Drobner address, but without the limiting precision of the term persona.
8 En. Ps. 119.1. All translations from En. Ps. are my own, though in consultation with Maria Boulding's translation from Works of St Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. 3/20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004).
9 En. Ps. 119.7. As throughout this article, I translate homo as ‘person’ to avoid the use of ‘man’ or the cumbersome ‘human’. It should be taken with an asterisk, though, because Augustine does not use the christological category of persona in these sermons. Drobner, Person-Exegese, has demonstrated that it is not until 411 (four years after these sermons) that Augustine ‘discovers’ una persona as a formula for the unity of God and humanity in Christ.
10 Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox, consistently highlights this incorporation of the Christian into the vox of Christ in the Psalms. For Fiedrowicz, the focus is on the rehabilitation of the passions, for which the Psalms serve as both speculum and medicam. He does not, however, make much of the process of ascent as our journey to God through Christ. See esp. pp. 145–233.
11 En. Ps. 119 (my emphasis).
12 En. Ps. 122.1.
13 The problem of solitary ascent in this verse is addressed by Hombert, Pierre-Marie, ‘L’Exégèse Augustinienne de Io. 3,13 entre Orient et Occident’, in L’Esegesi dei Padri Latini (Rome, 2000), pp. 335–61Google Scholar. Hombert uses Augustine's exegesis of Jn 3:13 as an opportunity to examine the confluence of Augustine's Western and Eastern influences. Hombert proposes two major sources for Augustine's reading of this verse. First, there is a Western tradition of reading the text against Apelles and other gnostics who see the verse as suggesting that Christ had no real – or at least no lasting – physical body. Tertullian reads the verse as signifying that Christ rises with the flesh in a way which guarantees our own resurrection through sharing in the same flesh. This, Hombert argues, is the root of Augustine's reading of Jn 3:13 as demonstrating the unity of Christ and the church. Second, Hombert proposes an Eastern reading of the verse connected with Apollinarius and other ‘anti-Sabellians’, including Hilary. Here it is the homme céleste who guards the unity of Christ, reading Jn 3:13 with 1 Cor 2:8. This pairing is transmitted from Hilary to Ambrose to Augustine. Throughout this analysis, Hombert rightly emphasises the fact that the two ways of reading Jn 3:13 are inseparable for Augustine: the ecclesial reading is founded upon the christological. In this article, then, I want to affirm Hombert's reading but push it in three ways: First, aside from a passing mention, Hombert does not discuss the use of Jn 3:13 in the seven months of preaching in 406–7, a use which is indicative of some wider trends in Augustine's trinitarian ecclesiology. Second, Hombert does not situate exegesis of Jn 3:13 in the context of prosopological exegesis. This context, I believe, gives us a better appreciation for how Augustine bridges the christological and the ecclesial in the period before 411 and the discovery of persona in Ep. 137. Third, and most significantly, Hombert does not mention the way in which the ecclesial and christological readings are united in a christological epistemology. Below I will unpack the way in which our ascent with and in Christ is the way we come to see and to know the Father through his Son. It is this revelatory function which represents Augustine's pro-Nicene adaptation of a previously Apollinarian reading of Jn 3:13.
14 En. Ps. 122.2.
15 This section builds upon the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship. See Ayres, Lewis, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. ch. 6, ‘A Christological Epistemology’. Ayres, Lewis, ‘The Christological Context of De Trinitate XIII: Towards Relocating Books VIII–XV’, Augustinian Studies 29 (1998), pp. 111–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the move from scientia to sapientia is effected within the double-natured Christ through ‘the Christological “drama” of redemption and participation in the Body of Christ’ (p. 119). I agree with Ayres and advance his reading, grounded primarily in Trin. itself, as also the dominant motif of the anti-Donatist totus Christus of these sermons. Barnes, Michel, ‘The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine's Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology 19 (2003), pp. 329–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, situates this same christological epistemology in Augustine's anti-homoian polemic at the very beginning of his writing of Trin. 1 around 400. This anti-Homoian explication of the beatific vision is, I believe, still on Augustine's mind even as he argues against the Donatists. Finally, Gioia, Luigi, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine's De Trinitate (Oxford: OUP, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar builds upon the work of both Barnes and Ayres to offer a sustained analysis of epistemological themes throughout Trin. Gioia ought, I believe, to be read as a companion piece to Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, because whereas Gioia focuses on Trin. itself, Ayres spends more time on Augustine's wider – and often neglected – trinitarian corpus. To all of these works, then, I add this article as an investigation of how this christological/trinitarian epistemology also shapes Augustine's anti-Donatist ecclesiology.
16 Even beyond books 1–4, Trin. on the whole ‘is not an exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity per se: it is a study of the problematic of knowing God who is Trinity. In On the Trinity Augustine is writing on trinitarian hermeneutics or epistemology. His concern is, therefore, with all the types and cases of revelation and our specific capacities for being revealed to, ranging from scripture to scriptural episodes of divine revelation (the theophanies, the incarnation), to signs, to doctrines, to the image and likeness of God (the human mind), to the perfect “form” of God (the Word) as wisdom and knowledge, and to the necessity of faith and purity for the mind to advance in any understanding of the Trinity’ (Barnes, Michel, ‘Latin Trinitarian Theology’, in Phan, Peter C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), p. 78)Google Scholar. These theological concerns must be included when considering the context for these seven months of preaching; they are as important as the Donatist conflict and serve to interpret that schism for Augustine. Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology, pp. 24–33. For the dating of the initial books of Trin. see Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 118–20. With some minor changes, Ayres follows La Bonnardière, Recherches, pp. 83–7, and Hombert, Pierre-Marie, Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris: Études Agustiniennes, 2000), pp. 45–51Google Scholar.
17 Trin. 1.8.16. Translations of Trin. are my adaptations of McKenna, Stephen's from The Fathers of the Church, vol. 45 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1963)Google Scholar.
18 See n. 15 above, esp. Ayres, ‘The Christological Context’, and Barnes, ‘The Visible Christ’.
19 Io. ev. tr. 12.7. Translations from Io. ev. tr. are mine in consultation with Hill, Edmund's from Works of St Augustine, vol. 1/12 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
20 On this distinction, see, inter alia, Ayres, ‘The Christological Context’, pp. 119ff, and Gioia, Theological Epistemology, pp. 75–83. Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society, pp. 147–81, clarifies the connection between Augustine's christology and his theories of sacrament, example, scientia and sapientia. In particular, Dodaro agrees in part with Studer, Basil's thesis, ‘Zur Christologie Augustins’, Augustinianum 19/3 (1979), pp. 539–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in connecting the unity of Christ's person to the unity of his sacrament and example; but Dodaro clarifies how ‘it is the interrelationship between the two natures in Christ, and not simply their unity in one “person”, that provides Augustine with an analogy for the relationship between Christ's sacraments and examples’ (154, n. 33).
21 Io. ev. tr. 12.8.
22 ‘Christocentric’ here should not be read as opposed to ‘trinitarian’, since, as we will see, what Christ ultimately reveals is the Father. As Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 89, notes, ‘The mediation of Christ has a Trinitarian dimension because the Incarnation is not simply the union of divine nature and human nature, but the personal action of the Son of the Father through which he unites human nature to himself. He is the mediator not simply because he is God and man, but because he is the Son and the Logos of the Father who has become man.’ It is this trinitarian christology which characterises Augustine's preaching on the body of Christ in these sermons. See also, Barnes, Michel, ‘Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine's De Trinitate I’, Augustinian Studies 30/1 (1999), pp. 43–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the anti-homoian context of this concern in Augustine's trinitarian thought of this period.
23 This constant emphasis on Christ's continued divinity in the incarnation ought to be read in the context of the anti-homoian affirmation of the Son's divine invisibility, a key theme of Trin. book 1, which Augustine is in the midst of writing at this time. See Barnes, ‘Visible Christ’, and Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 31.
24 Augustine's emphasis here is evocative of Hilary of Poitier's reading of the verse at Tr. s. Ps. 2.11–12: ‘Therefore he is not absent from heaven because when he had descended from heaven, remaining and speaking as the Son of Man, he was, when he spoke this, in heaven. Indeed the Son of Man descended, but through the power of his nature (per naturae virtute) the Son of God, from whence he had descended, was not absent. Nor did he assume himself from that which he had been before, when he was born as a man. Nor being made the Son of Man did he cease being the Son of God, but he was still the Son of God as the Son of Man so that descending as Son of God from heaven through the power of his nature (per virtutis suae substantiae) the same (idem) Son of Man was in heaven.’ Augustine's anti-Donatist use of this verse is a development of earlier pro-Nicene uses, including those by Hilary as well as Ambrose (Fid. 4.10.127).
25 My reading of Augustine's Christocentric epistemology is heavily influenced by Madec, Goulven, Le Christ de Saint Augustin: la Patrie et la Voie, new edn (Paris: Desclée, 2001)Google Scholar, especially his rejection of du Roy's emphasis on Platonic epistemology: ‘S’il reconnaît une prévenance de la Providence à son égard dans la succession de ses découvertes du néoplatonisme et de la grâce, ce n’est pas pour justifier une théorie selon laquelle la connaissance de la Trinité est possible sans le Verbe incarné, c’est pour insister sur le fait qu’il a découvert, avec la grâce de Dieu, les insuffisances et les dangers du néoplatonisme’ (pp. 42–3).
26 Io. ev. tr. 12.8.
27 Io. ev. tr. 12.9.
28 Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology: ‘The epistemological hiatus between what is temporal and what is eternal, between what is the object of faith and what is the object of contemplation, is overcome only in and by Christ’ (p. 69). Van Bavel, Tarsicius, Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin: L’Humain et le divin dans le Christ d’après saint Augustin (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaries, 1954), pp. 164ffGoogle Scholar. investigates christological epistemology primarily by engaging the scholastic question of the incarnate Christ's own vision of God. Much of his insights ought to be applied to the church through the communicatio idiomatum of our union with Christ's body. This emphasis on the unity of Christ and the church in Augustine is also a focal point of Mersch, Emile, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, tr. Kelly, John R. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1938), esp. pp. 420–38Google Scholar. Mersch is concerned primarily, though, with the communication of grace and divinisation. He does not unpack the way in which pro-Nicene epistemological concerns give shape to Augustine's understanding of that union.
29 Io. ev. tr. 14.7.
30 This theme of the Son's revelatory nature/function has been a hallmark of Augustine's trinitarian theology since the early 390s when Word as ‘Image’ so dominated his anti-Manichaean polemic. See Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 53–4.
31 Moreover, we cannot assume that this epistemological work is only an operation of the Son. As Dodaro, Robert, ‘Augustine on the Roles of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Mediation of Virtues’, Augustinian Studies 41/1 (2010), pp. 145–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has noted, the interpenetration of the triune persons is evident in Augustine's flexibility in assigning ‘roles’ to Son and Spirit. Augustine can affirm just as easily that we are taught by the Spirit and given charity by Christ (see pp. 161–3).
32 It should be noted that the true vision of God, true sapientia, is eschatological, only anticipated and approached in this life by faith. Yet the hope of this faith is so sure that throughout these sermons such wisdom is seen as in some way achieved through incorporation into the Body of Christ. Cf. Gioia, Theological Epistemology, p. 83.