Augustine of Hippo - The Trinity

Augustinian Heritage Institute

www.augustinianheritage.org

Board of Directors

+John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (1939-2002), founding director

Michael T. Dolan	Daniel E. Doyle, O.S.A.
Joseph T. Kelley	Patricia H. Lo
Thomas Martin, O.S.A.	Jane E. Merdinger

Boniface Ramsey

Translation Advisory Board

Gerald Bonner	Maria Boulding, O.S.B.
Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A.	dmund Hill, O.P.
Joseph McGowan	Boniface Ramsey

Roland J. Teske, S.J.

THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

A Translation for the 21st Century

Part I Books

Volume 5:

The Trinity

THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

A Translation for the 21st Century

The Trinity

introduction, translation and notes

Edmund Hill, O.P.

editor

John E. Rotelle, O.S.A.

New City Press

Hyde Park, New York

Published in the United States by New City Press

202 Comforter Blvd., Hyde Park, New York 12538

www.newcitypress.com

1991 Augustinian Heritage Institute

Cover painting: Augustine discusses with the child Jesus the mystery of the Trinity (B. Gozzoli, 1465, Church of Saint Augustine, San Gimignano, Italy).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo.

The works of Saint Augustine. Augustinian Heritage Institute Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: pt. 1, Books. v. 5. The Trinity / introduction, translation, and notes / Edmund Hill. pt. 3. Sermons. v. 1. 1-19. Introduction / Michele Pellegrino. 1. Theology Early Church, ca. 30-600. I. Hill, Edmund. II. Rotelle, John E. III. Augustinian Heritage Institute. IV. Title. BR65.A5E53 1990 270.2 89-28878 ISBN 1-56548-055-4 (series) ISBN 0-911782-89-3 (pt. 1, v. 5) ISBN 1-911782-96-6 (pt. 1, v. 5 : pbk.)

Nihil Obstat: John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., S.T.L., Delegated Censor

Imprimatur: Thomas V. Daily, D.D., Bishop of Brooklyn

Brooklyn, New York, December 26, 1990

1st printing: September 1991

9th printing: September 2010

Printed in the United States of America

C OLLEGIS D ISCIPVLISQVE M EIS

A FRIS

C ARISSIMIS

S. A VGVSTINI

A FRI

V NIVERSALIS E CCLESIAE

D OCTORIS E XIMII

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I N T ERRA A FRICANA

A NGLICE V ERSVM

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Contents

Foreword

Saint Augustine took a very long time writing this book; so much so that when he still had not finished it after fifteen years, some admirers got impatient and published the unfinished work with indecent haste, without the authors permission, and to his intense annoyance.

The case has been quite the reverse with this translation. I translated Book I in 1965 or 1966, while still in England at Hawkesyard Priory in Staffordshire. Then indeed I laid the project aside for some years when I was sent out to Saint Nicholas Priory, Stellenbosch in South Africa. But I took it up again in 1968 and completed it at Saint Peters Seminary, Hammanskraal, in the Transvaal, in 1971. I took the opportunity of a sabbatical year in Manchester (1972-1973) to revise the introduction and some notes.

Already in 1970, when I had finished Book IV, I had started looking for a publisher. But for reasons totally incomprehensible to anyone outside the mysterious secret world of publishing, this translation has had to wait some years before being offered to the public.

I am therefore all the more grateful to John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., of the Augustinian Heritage Institute, for finally publishing it in this splendid series. We are friends of some yearsstanding, only, I regret to say, by correspondence and an occasional trans-Atlantic, trans-hemispherical telephone conversation.

My warmest thanks also to Martin Moynihan, whom I first had the pleasure of meeting when he was Her Majestys High Commissioner in the Kingdom of Lesotho, and who did what he could, on his retirement, to secure a publisher, and who has been unfailing all along in his moral support.

I am also deeply grateful to Boniface Ramsey, O.P., of the American Saint Josephs Province of the Order of Preachers, for all his help. He first expressed an interest in the translation during a visit to Lesotho in 1981. He has, in fact, been the midwife responsible for eventually bringing it to birthFather Rotelle, you could say, being the family doctor.

Finally, my thanks and appreciation to Mrs. Jane Worsnip and Mrs. Val Hughes for producing a final typescript.

Edmund Hill, O.P.

Saint Augustine Seminary

Roma, Lesotho Feast of Saint Augustine, 28 August 1990

Introduction

The place of the De Trinitate in Augustines work

1. The most well known of all Saint Augustines writings are the Confessions and The City of God . They are always known by their English rather than their Latin titles; they have long been available in a number of English translations. This is not the case with the De Trinitate , which it still feels more natural to refer to by its Latin name, and which was never translated until the late nineteenth century, when it appeared in the Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.

2. Yet these three works do form, in some sense, a kind of trilogy, and of the three the De Trinitate is the work of greatest genius and originality. I am not suggesting that Augustine wrote them as a trilogy, only that all three give expression in different modes to one of his basic theological intuitions. This was his keen sense of the historical, or perhaps a better word for it would be the dramatic, dimension to the truths of the Christian religion. He is indeed at his best, as a theological writer, in the dramatic presentation of truth, and at his weakest in the abstract statement of it. This goes a long way to explain, and even to excuse, his often tedious prolixity; to give expression to profound truths in dramatic form calls for a great many words. It is the merest commonplace, to be sure, that Christianity is a historical religion, even that its historical component is a dramatic one. But Augustine seems to have perceived, though he never explicitly defined this perception, that it is of the essence of Christian truth to be dramatic, to be an encounter cast in dramatic form between God revealing and man believing.

3. And so in the Confessions we have the history of his own personal drama, a drama primarily of faith. In The City of God we have the dramatic history of the Church, also a drama of faith, contrasted in a very complex pattern with unbelief. The book could in fact be called A Tale of Two Cities, because it tells of the relations between the city of God and what Augustine calls the earthly city. And as each city is constituted by an appropriate kind of love, one could call the work a kind of love story, telling of the drama of love. It is love that makes faith or its refusal dramatic.

4. But in the De Trinitate , with a stroke of almost unconscious genius, we are presented with the dramatic history of God . If you had asked Augustine whether God has a history, let alone a dramatic one, he would certainly have answered no. One of his most constantly reiterated axioms is that God is wholly unchanging and unchangeable, incommutabilis , and the unchanging is not a proper subject of either history or drama. And yet, by concentrating on the historical and dramatic revelation of the mystery of the Trinity, and by seeking to illuminate it through an examination of the divine image in man, which involves him in a kind of sub-plot of mans fall and redemption, he contrives to give the divine mystery itself a veritable dramatic quality.

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