Sean Pidgeon
TRS 650A
First Reflection Paper
September 27, 2004

Augustine


Through Augustine’s ‘Trinity of the Mind’ in On the Trinity and the three kinds of vision that he speaks of in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, we can come to an understanding of how Augustine believes we can achieve the highest contemplation of God. The ‘Trinity of the Mind’ is “the mind remembering itself, understanding itself, loving itself...a trinity...of the mind [that] is the image of God, not because the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but because it also has the power to remember, understand, and love its Maker.” (Dupre & Wiseman, 64, 65) It is with the power of the mind that Augustine says we are able to gain the greatest comprehension of God, and come into the greatest presence of God. For, of the three kinds of vision, “one through the eyes...a second through the spirit....and a third through an intuition of mind” (71), it is the third that is the greatest.

For Augustine, as he says in his Confessions, “the greatest pleasures of the bodily senses, in the brightest corporeal light whatsoever, seemed to us not worthy of comparison with the joy of that eternal life, unworthy of even being mentioned” (59). The joys of the body, or the pleasures of the flesh, were lower goods, if not even somewhat evil, because they could not bring one to unity with God like the contemplative life could. The mind is of a higher status than the body because, for Augustine, it is the image of God. That is, when the mind performs its threefold task of remembering, understanding, and loving itself, it is reflecting God, the One who never forgets us, is always there for us, and forever loves us.

Christianity has always valued the sometimes diverging issues of concern for the whole of the Christian community and the greater good of the Christian community along with the concern for the individual and the individual soul. Much of Augustine’s focus was on the individual soul and how the individual soul could reach salvation. We often hear of how we should focus our energy on others, especially through the two commandments of Jesus to love your god with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. But, Augustine focuses in on the as yourself part of this teaching. We must, through the ‘Trinity of Mind’, remember, understand, and love ourselves. We cannot truly love God and neighbor if we do not love ourselves. As we must love our neighbors as ourselves, we must love ourselves as God loves us. As for getting our minds to “perceive a trinity” (64), Augustine’s exposition of the three types of vision in The Literal Meaning of Genesis offers guidance.

The first kind of vision or way of seeing is through the eyes and with our physical senses. When we see a dog, or a tree, or another person, or the sky, we see with our senses. The second kind of vision is spirit, where we think of those things that we have seen with the first kind of vision, but which are not present at the moment. When we think of a dog or of a tree that we have seen in the past, or when we think of the picnic we went on in the summer, we are seeing with the second kind of vision. The third kind of vision, for Augustine, is the greatest of all. It is through this way of seeing that we can understand love by embracing “those objects which have no images resembling them which are not identical with them” (71-72). That is, when we take on the third way of seeing, when we see through the eyes of love, we see things as they truly are, and not just as an image of their true selves, like with the second way of seeing.

Our ways of seeing God and knowing God, here on earth, are imperfect when not seen with the ‘Trinity of the Mind’ through the third way of seeing. The first kind of vision, the “symbolic or corporeal vision” of God, “as it was seen on Mount Sinai”, and the second kind of vision, the “spiritual vision such as Isaiah saw and John saw in the Apocalypse,” are only small tastes and dim foreshadows of the third type of vision, “a direct vision and not through a dark image, as far as the human mind elevated by the grace of God can receive it” (74).

While I would agree with Augustine that it is the highest good to come to “see and understand love itself” (71) as he sees coming to fruition through the third way of seeing, I wonder if he has gone to far in calling each of us to undertake “the labor of restraining his desires” (74). He puts forth the idea that the body is a burdensome load that must get past in order to truly know God. Augustine was influenced by Neo-Platonism, and he was right to look for some guidance from it, because Neo-Platonism has a lot to offer. However, he goes too far in accepting some of the mind-body dualism that Neo-Platonism exposits. For, in a Christian understanding, creation is good, and our bodies, as part of creation, are good. That which is a good, and which is a gift from God, should not be seen as an impediment to growing closer to God. If God wished for us to simply reach higher contemplation through the mind, then He would not have created us with bodies. We can recognize the failings that we have created for ourselves through sin, without denying the goodness of the created order and God’s wish for us to come to know him through His creation.