 Welcome to the Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction in which we look at the greatest and holiest writers from Catholic history. Join us as we explore the life and times in which they lived, an overview and study of their greatest works, and how we as Catholics can look to these masters as models for our own holiness on our journey to heaven. Welcome back in our continuation of the series on the Spiritual Masters. We're talking about Saint Augustine, one of my favorite saints, kind of anew in that because of preparing for this and reading him and seeing how much I love him and appreciate him. His work just really talks to me and I got one of my good friends, Paul Thigpen, here to help me out with this. So thanks for being back here, Paul. Thanks Connor. Good to be here. So last episode we talked about on Christian doctrine, which is his great work on how to read and interpret and to defend Holy Scripture. And today we're talking about, again, one of his probably top four or five most important works, best known works, and it's on the Trinity. It's just on the Trinity. And this book, I'm just going to kind of mention a little bit of the historical side and then you can kind of help fill in the gaps that I have. I have plenty of gaps. But the Trinity was obviously one of the one of the biggest things that the early church had to work out. I mean, this is complicated stuff. We're getting into heavy duty theology here. And we know, I mean, Christ is running the earth and he's the Son and he refers to the Father and he mentions the Spirit. So you can imagine these early Christians saying, what are all these pieces here? But Augustine, I think more than anybody else, gave us our modern day understanding of the Trinity. He really helped shape the Catholic Church's understanding of the Trinity. And I think, Paul, you might be able to help with this, but it's important to see the historical context of Augustine was in the Latin church. He was in the West. He read Latin. He spoke Latin. Probably spoke some Latin to some people. In the East, they were Greek readers and speakers. And I believe it was Ambrose, Augustine's mentor, who was really one of the last people who did both Latin and Greek. And the church really kind of had, you know, not an official schism or anything yet. That wasn't until later. But the Eastern theologians, the Eastern monks, they weren't reading Augustine because they didn't read Latin. And likewise, Augustine wasn't reading Greek. So there was kind of divides too strong a word, but these two facets of the church were kind of running parallel, both devising their understanding of the Holy Trinity kind of about the same time. And I think they pretty much were in agreement on the father and the son. And the son, that issue was worked out in the Arian heresy, which we should maybe talk about briefly. But eventually, they got a settle on issues of the Holy Spirit. That's what got people very confused. So let's first talk about the father and the son. Let's talk about the Arian heresy, if we can just mention that briefly. Why don't you tell us just briefly about that, because we can't really understand the Trinity without understanding the son, and we don't understand the historical context of the son without the Council of Nicaea and who Arius was. So just to put out the framework, Council of Nicaea is 325, just called then, and Augustine was born in 354. So he's a generation after that. St. Athanasius was one of the great folks who had the orthodox positions. Father of orthodoxy. That's what he's called. And he's Eastern. So he's Constantinople. I'm sorry, Alexandria. And then you had in Cappadocia, in what's now Turkey, you had eventually the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory. And as he ends this, Gregory of Nissa. Basil. St. Basil of Cappadocia. Were they brothers? Two of them were brothers, and the third was not. They really helped to work out things about the Holy Spirit. So you did have that going on the East. But eventually you have, though, is just a disagreement about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds just from the Father or from the Father and Son. And eventually that was one of the theological flash points in the season between East and West, but that was not until 1054. So what you have going on is early on, as you said, early church time to figure out, okay, Father seems to be God, Son seems to be God, Holy Spirit. And there are people who disputed that. How do we get all that together? And one solution was, well, it's really just one person, but he wears three masks, according to how he's relating to people as Creator, that's Father, as Redeemer, that's Son, as Sustainer, that's Holy Spirit. And churches say, nope, nope, that's not right. And then some versions were like Triathlism, where they're actually separate, three separate gods. Nope, nope, that's not right. And so they had to hammer it out, and people were trying to, they would kind of throw ideas out. But one idea that was put out there was by an Egyptian priest named Arius. So he's a generation before Augustine. And his notion was to base it, and this is interesting enough, he based it on certain biblical texts, that if you took them just in a very obvious literal reading without bouncing them against other things, it makes sense. He could make a biblical argument that there's only one God, the Father, and that the Son is actually a creature that the Father made. It's the first of all creation. And through him, all the rest of creation was made, you get that in John. But on the other hand, if you look at the big picture, you've got God on here, and then a big chasm, and then everything else that's created, he's on the other side from God, that chasm. And that was one thing, you know, the folks who really knew the Apostolic Church were having to say, no, that doesn't work. So Arius was making the Son a creature and lesser. Now, you'd have within the more orthodox tradition, people trying to say if there's some kind of priority within there, that the Father is somehow prior to the Son, not in time, but in his being. So you have all these people trying to work it out, but then Arius goes this direction, and that's really a bridge too far. So the Son is created. You know, the real St. Nicholas punched Arius in the face. Well, that's the story. At the Castle of Nicaea, which Nicholas attended, he punched him out because of his blasphemy. He told us to say such things. We need some more saints like that these days. Yeah. So back to the Council of Nicaea, what's being duked out here and how the, you know, let's talk about what's being duked out because it sets a framework for what Augustine's trying to do with the Trinity later on. So the Church says, okay, we've had all these variety of speculations or even just proposals. This must be how it is. This is how we can have Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and somehow speak of all of them as God. And some of the ways I mentioned, they, you know, oh, there were just one God wearing three mask, or it's actually three Gods, or there's, there's within them a hierarchy so that you've got the fathers at the top and the Son. But the Council comes together and the leadership of the Holy Spirit defines the dogma of the Trinity is that the God is three persons in one substance or essence or nature is called in different ways. And even that had been so difficult to come about because of the differences between East and West and the languages. So they were different words being used for the same thing and didn't necessarily mean the same thing. You know, if you were translating a book, you know that you don't always have exact equivalent words between the languages. But they finally did hammer it out. The crazy thing, though, was that afterward it's not as if the whole church said, okay, we accept that. Instead, I mean, by St. Augustine's time, it had gotten so many of the bishops had become Aryan, even though the Council had said that, the Jerome one time in discussing the situation said the world woke up and grown to find itself Aryan. Wow. Wow. The majority of the bishops had fallen into the heresy. Wow. Was that just because it's hard to understand Trinitarian theology? How can you have three persons in one God? I mean, was that the problem? I think a lot of the heresies throughout history come about because somebody offers a simple solution to a theological issue that's simplistic. It doesn't work because it oversimplifies. And I think this is one of those things where, oh yeah, if we say that, then it all makes sense. And you get that again and again, even in the history of the church later, when you get the Unitarian movement to try to say, oh, just bypass all that, he's just one God. But it doesn't account for all the things. So, if there's only one person in the Trinity, then who's Jesus praying to in the garden? Yeah. I think that's a good point where I'll say one of my favorite things in theological discussions is something that St. Anselm said. St. Anselm is 1,000 AD, somewhere around there. And in the proslogeon, he said, fetus querens intelectum. He said, faith seeking understanding. But scholars consider that he actually got that from Augustine, who said something similar. And I might butcher the Latin book, Creti ut intelligus, which means believe so that you may understand. And that is in on the Trinity. That statement, believe so that you may understand, is in his work on the Trinity because he understands that there's a part of this Trinitarian theology that has to be grasped with the eye of faith. And you can reach a great understanding. So he's saying, again, this great rhetoric, this great guy in logic and classically trained, very rational philosopher, he understands that there's certain things that we have to kind of embrace with faith. But then you use all the powers that God gave you to understand the rationality of it and to build out from it as much as possible. But faith kind of has to be a starting point. Faith for Augustine was the first thing. And then, you know, reason helped get there. But then you have to make a leap of faith. And the Trinity is not a mathematical equation. It's just not. There has to be a level of faith from what the church teaches, from what scripture teaches. So I just love that, believe so that you may understand. And then again, and some faith seeking understanding. And Paul, I think we were talking earlier about this. I love that so much. But then, in recent years, and I love John Paul II, Saint John Paul II, a wonderful man, saintly man, great pope, in a lot of ways. But he wrote Fidesz at Ratio, faith and reason. And there was just this enormous emphasis on expressing to the scientific community, we don't reject science, we accept science. And so he wanted to articulate it so he wrote faith and reason. But it puts him on the same level, maybe unintentionally. Throughout all of the church's history, we had talked about faith seeking understanding, not faith and reason. So anyway, I just, any comments on that in regards to how Augustine would have had to approach something like the Trinity. And have we lost that kind of sequence in our modern science obsessed world? I think a lot of folks have lost it. I've tried to maintain it myself because in my own life, seeking my journey kind of took that direction. But I look at my own life and I look at Augustine's life that once you come to believe, okay, accept what the council said, that it is three persons and one being your essence. Now let's see how everything else makes sense in light of that. And then faith begins to lead to all kinds of understanding. And that's what happens in this book. He accepting what the church said, then he kind of says, okay, creation in a lot of ways reflects the creator and his nature. And above all, since man has made an image of God, it should reflect in some way the nature of the creator. So why don't we go looking for situations where there are multiple things that can be said to be all of the same essence. And yet they also have distinctiveness and they're related in certain ways. And it's what he did. So he came to the human person and began to find traces, I think he called them, of the Trinity, the Trinitarian model within the human person. Yeah. So fingerprints throughout nature. Yeah. So keep going on that. This is referred to as the psychological analogy. So this is in book nine, the image of God found within the soul. So kind of walk us through that. He's looking around nature, this very African-esque view of life, right? He sees everything, but most things fall short. They're an imperfect analogy, but he feels like the strongest one he finds is within the heart, is within the soul or mind, whatever you want to call it. And so if I understand it, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, I can look in the mirror and I can say I am a lover of the person I see. I love myself. We all love ourselves in some way. I love myself, but I'm also the loved. And if there's a lover and a loved or beloved, then there is love between them. I can know and I'm also known and therefore there is knowledge between us. And that's the analogy that he uses for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. You know, keep in mind if God is love, as First Leader John tells us, then that's what he is. It is nature. And he didn't start to be love when he created the world and had something else to love. There's a beautiful poem, but theologically inaccurate by, I can't think of his name now, an African-American poet. And the imagery is that one day God kind of sits down and says, I'm lonely. I'm going to make a man. It's beautiful imagery, but it doesn't, you know, it's not Christian imagery, at least as the church has traditionally understood it. The God was not lonely. He didn't need something outside of himself to love. If that were the case, you couldn't say that he is love. That means before all eternity, before any creation, you still love. And so Augustine has to use an image that only includes the individual and not other people yet. So he doesn't start off by saying, well, then, yeah, here's a man who loves his wife and he loves him because that doesn't work. God in himself is solitary. But God knows himself and he loves himself because he loves good. It's not self-loving the way we think of it. And so you've got the one who knows and the one who is known, they're both God and the knowledge that they have. There's three things, that trinity, and the same with love. You've got the God who loves himself, the self who was being loved and the love between them. So within the very nature of God, you've got three distinct aspects, you might say. And he would never say, this is an exact analogy. But this is a trace within human nature, within the human soul of a trinity that reflects, in some ways, the image of God. Again, it's kind of like he's an early psychologist and he's just this incredible introspection into what's going on inside the psyche of man, the soul. So yeah, it's beautiful. And in this work, in book 5-7, this is particularly interesting for you, I think, because he talks about the names of God. And he says, there's Lord, there's Creator, there's Begotten, there's Father, Son, Spirit. And for Tan, you did a Bible study called the names of Jesus. And this naming thing, Augustine just gave us a few of them, but do you have any, do you remember how many names there were of Jesus in Scripture? There was a ton. Over 100, I think. If you go back through the Old Testament to the prophetic references to him. See, that will shock our listeners, right? So rattle off a few so that they're like, oh, I get it. Because that's a surprising number. Word of God, Son of God, Son of Man, Bread of Life, King, Lord, Lord of Lords. Good shepherd. Good shepherd. Lion of Judah. Keep going, right? And on and on. It keeps going. It's incredible. So you start, and it's like a fun game. How many can you name? And Messiah, Christ, I mean, of course, those obviously, but yeah. It's amazing. And the study you did for us, I think, I think you stopped at like 25 or 6 or something like that. I did clusters of names. Clusters. It's amazing. But Tan publishes another book just on this point. And I think Augustine would be very happy with this point. You know, we published this other book called The Happiness of Heaven. And it's biased. This French author back from the 1800s called Boudreux, I think. He published another book that I haven't published yet, but I want to. But I've read it, and it's called Our Father. Simple, simple. But it's not like actually on the Our Father prayer. But the premise of the whole book is this, Paul. He says of all the names that God has given himself throughout Holy Scripture and Revelation, the one that the Father wants the most is the Father. He wants Father. And that's that reveals something about the relationship that he wants to have. Like the name he's choosing, you know, sort of like if I go to my kids and I say, I want you to call me, you know, Dear Father all the time versus Dad. It's a very different thing. And we know Abba was much more of an endearing thing than Father. It's probably not a very good translation. But just thinking about the names of God, Augustine is grappling with this. He's looking and saying, okay, how is God wanting us to refer to him? And Father is a very personal, you know, relationship. And it's the same that, you know, that Christ used for him. So I just find that great. And in this work on the Trinity, which is considered one of his greatest works, you know, he grapples with many of these different things. And I guess the book is mostly known for that psychological analogy of love or beloved love itself, that interior imprint, the trace, the fingerprint of the Holy Trinity on creation, which is just an incredible thing. So, you know, with that, you know, our next episode, we're going to talk about his sermons and his homilies, which you have a special affection for. But any last words on Augustine on the Trinity? I would say that I would encourage people to do as he did to receive what the Church has said and then just to begin reflecting on it. And for one thing, it can teach you humility and it can teach you a sense of wonder. I like to define wonder as humility in the sense, in the presence of mystery, and can teach us just wonder at who God is. But it should also teach us a lot about ourselves that if we are in the beloved Son, as the scripture says, if we've been adopted into God's family of sons and daughters, he's the only begotten Son, but then we're adopted sons and daughters. What does that mean, a better relationship to God? Look at how Jesus relates to the Father. That's the pattern for us. Beautiful. Thank you, Paul. We'll see you next time. Okay, Connor. God bless. This has been an episode of The Spiritual Masters, a podcast brought to you by Tan. To follow the show, learn about more inspiring holy men and women, and to support The Spiritual Masters and other great free content from Tan. Visit spiritualmasterspodcast.com to subscribe and use coupon code MASTERS25 to get 25% off your next order, including works by Saint Augustine and countless more spiritual masters to strengthen your faith and interior life. And thanks for listening.