With this blog post, I begin with Augustine's larger works. I'm hoping to work through The Trinity as well as sprinkle in some of Jean-Luc Marion's work on Augustine. Then, I would like to go back to The Confessions and read that in tandem with Brown's biography of Augustine.
Augustine begins De Trinitate with a letter to Aurelius of Carthage which situates this work as a work of Augustine's youth but only published in his old age. Augustine indicates that this work was pirated with many parts missing. He is handing over an "authoritative" text.
The first chapter is concerned with his audience. Augustine frames this concern as focused on those who attribute worldly features to God. He insists God is not like these worldly attributes and they are misunderstanding the concept of God's essence by understanding God only through the material world. Some of these people are too attached to reason. This book is addressed, then, to three groups of people prone to error: those who conceive of God in bodily terms, those who do so in terms of created spirit such as soul" and those who think of him as neither but still have false ideas (65). So, in order to understand the nature of God, we have to step away from ideas of God as something understood with in the logic of matter AND the soul.
Augustine admits there is a problem of understanding God's essence: "without any change in itself makes things change and without any passage of time in itself creates things that exist in time" (66)--Augustine's goal is to explain how these apparent paradoxes make sense.
The point of De Trinitate then, is to account for God as a trinity and to understand how God, Son, and Holy Spirit are "one and the same substance or essence" (67).
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