Augustine lived in an age of anxiety.The established state and the civilized world were being eroded by foreign elements once considered the necessary components of political stabilization and economic surety, and by political divisiveness and uncertainty as to how to deflate or to correct this oversight of judgement now virtually incorporate in the system of state. Policies of immigration, accommodation, and colonialism—one time solutions to social, economic and security problems–had transformed into situations that were not only unravelling the status quo, but toppling an entire civilization, and replacing it with something very other, something the history texts are wont to call the barbarian invasions. The 330AD move of the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium renamed Constantinople was a tacit abdication of imperial power in the West.
Within this prolonged implosion of the Roman world, religion was also in flux. The imperial cult had for centuries been under strain from the ennui that accrues to the accustomed, and from the novelty of cults being imported into urban centres from distant lands. Some came upon the heels of the armies, trophies of encounters with distant tribes. Some came as the autochthonous rites of mercenaries attached to the armies. Some came from the preachers of imperial immigrants, of displaced and conquered peoples. Some came from apostles proselytizing to the dispersed Chosen of God a new way. By 305AD the persecutions of Christianity by state were at an end. In force now were the internecine battles of Christian sects, and they were at times as disastrous as any the state had once conjured. There were Christians of every conceivable stripe, and each was as certain as the other that orthodoxy was theirs, and only heresy and hell stood with them of contrary heart. Scholars within the church were trying to reconcile the narratives and homilies of scripture with the philosophical ideas of the Greco-Roman world. What does it mean to say Jesus is son of God? How is Jesus God’s son? How is Jesus God? Was Jesus a human person or was he merely the semblance of a human person? Did he really suffer or was every aspect of humanity merely an illusion? Was Jesus a divine person? If Jesus was God, did God suffer and die? Was he in some manner two persons? Did Jesus have a human nature? Did he have a divine nature? How could two natures exist together? How many wills did he have? How could he be divine without a divine will? How could a human will not be totally overwhelmed by a divine will? What did he know? How did he know—as human or as divine? How can you mix human intelligence, will, and being with a divine mind, will, and being? Who or what was this Holy Spirit? How could God be Father and Jesus and Spirit? Were these three equal? What was the relationship one to the other? How could one god be three? What was meant by the idea of divine person? Who sent the Spirit? Who had the right to send the Spirit? What was the meaning of redemption in philosophical terms? What did St Paul mean by “in Adam all men have sinned”? How is sin forgiven? How corrupted by sin is humanity? Could man—without the aid of God—do anything good? What does such a question mean regardless of the answer? What does God’s predestination mean when Christ came for the sake of all? Is damnation real and forever? What is the role of the church in salvation? If ministers are unworthy, can they effectively act on God’s behalf? And, in an age wherein the cult of the Great Mother-goddess was ending, what connection did Mary have with the divine?
There was no shortage of opinions or argumentations about any of these questions. Countless theological histories detail the pithy ideas arising from these quandaries (adoptionism, monothelitism, dyothelitism, monophysitism, dyophysitism, Arianism, Docetism, Ebionism, Nestorianism, Apollonarianism, modalism, Sabellianism, patripassianism, subordinationism, Donatism, Pelagianism, hypostasis, anhypostasis, enhypostasis, apocatastasis, etc.). Some of these see Jesus as human, some see Jesus as divine, some seek the point of equilibrium or compromise, some make the tri-unity of the divine an equality, others make it hierarchical, some view human nature from the prospective of heaven, others from that of earth.[i]
Philosophical ideas were plied around scriptural visions, stories, and exhortations creating what must be accounted either soaring spiritual poetry or detrital intellectualizations orbiting the most volatile commixture of philosophical terms. Many great minds and well-meaning hearts may have been in agreement in principle, but most were too committed to their terminologies to see past their vocabularies to the truth in their opponents’ hearts and minds. It was a busy time, not a felicitous time. And while over centuries great councils, farraginous clumps of ecclesiastical intelligentsia and the merely impassioned, gathered to hammer out concessions point after point, question after question, bands of rabid and less than well-educated monks were roaming in fearsome and fear-mongering packs, attacking any church, bishop or city not in agreement with their fundamentalist, fanatical, or literalist inclinations. Christianity was experiencing its first bout of “better ye be dead than wrong” polity, and it was corroding the little that was left of “civilization”. Both ancient scholarship and Christian spirituality were imperilled. Unfortunately, few have taken the corpus of the theological decisions to which we are heirs as poetry for the soul, and have rather exalted their illogical extension of terms as some-sort of unfailing empiric truth. Dolorously, all these would be philosophers dabbleing in the how of God’s-being-present-in-his-Christ failed to kneel and well meditate on the prohibition against placing new wine in old wine skins, and so ancient philosophy burst at the seams and scriptural spirituality spilt out upon its tatters. The barbarians, couth of a foreign form, unwittingly destroyed the body politic of imperial civilization; the new faithful, fervent of a differing form, unwittingly deracinated the body academic. Until this day we limp and stutter trying at once to speak sacred stories with philosophical terms, not bowing to the reality that the intellect and the heart speak differing tongues.[ii]
In this corrosive age, at the dawn of the sixth century, Boethius undertook to salvage Plato and Aristotle for the next age by translating their works into Latin, the new lingua franca. He managed to complete only part of Aristotle’s works on logic. He became enlisted in the service of his sovereign, was somehow implicated in some very unsavoury politics, charged with treason, and executed. His grand scheme to transmit ancient Greek thought to a new age was terminated with him. Yet, he left the occidental world two definitive elements: in his translations, some understanding of Aristotle, and in his prison reflections, a new definition of person.
The term persona was bantered about in Christian polemics and dogmatics in reference to the idea of the divine trinity (Cf: my on “Masks” and its Christian Heritage, February 2012). He took the term from a reference to a locus of action and gave it the sense of a subsistent intelligent individual that we today accept as the primary meaning of the term. It may well be understandable how a prisoner searching philosophy for consolation could enrich the idea of persona with such an extension of “being-self”, however, that extension invested the idea of persona with a nuance, a filter, a new lense through which generations of theologians re-interpreted the considerations of the writers of scripture and early church documents, and thereby engrained in Western culture some spurious popular picturing of three “people” sitting side by side in an entity called “god”.
[i] Note: in this article I have marked out some of the Christological questions concerning the existence of a human nature, mind and will and their compatibility with a divine nature, mind and will. The early theological settlements established the groundwork of classic Christology, a structure that endured relatively unscathed until the seventeenth century. In so far as our considerations in this series are with god and soul, such Christological items are beyond our present purview, as are the concomitant considerations of Mariology. They are, however, topics I might be inclined to one day visit.
[ii] Cf: on language and the meaning of Christianity (May 2112), on the Crisis in the Church (April 2012), on “System” (February 2012).