One of the main critics of contemporary interpretations of Augustine has been Michel Rene Barnes of Marquette. He summarizes the case against Augustine, and the fundamental problems with that case, in a 1995 article from Theological Studies. I am also drawing on the discussion of Lewis Ayres’s recent Nicaea and Its Legacy . There is, he says, “a consensus among systematicians on the existence and character of an early ‘economic’ understanding of God,” which “has led, among other things, to the not uncommon judgment that Augustine’s Trinitarian theology sacrificed this sense of oeconomia, with unfortunate consequences for later theology.”

Ayres adds to the litany of charges against Augustine.

Theologians charge that he is insufficiently Trinitarian, overly concerned with the unity of God, and over reliant on Neoplatonism. C. Plantinga finds a dual tendency in Augustine, one, arising from his examination of the economy, toward a social Trinitarianism, and the other, arising from his philosophical tendencies, toward a focus on God’s unity. Orthodox theologians often charge that Augustine is “insufficiently personal,” so focused on the unity of God that “he fails to be attentive to the Father’s status as the personal foundation of the divine communion,” a failure especially evident in his endorsement of the filioque.

Barnes mounts a devastating critique of the historical scholarship – or the non-existence of such scholarship – behind these claims. He points out that most critics of Augustine are guided by the Latin/Greek duality first introduced by the work of Theodore de Regnon in the 1890s. Few of the theologians who buy de Regnon’s contrast of the plural East v. unity-obsessed West know that it comes from de Regnon, and fewer still attempt to demonstrate the truth of this model. By accepting the duality uncritically, theologians “exhibit a scholastic modernism,” since “the existence of this Greek/Latin paradigm is a unique property of modern Trinitarian theology,” not a model of long tradition. The dominance of the de Regnon paradigm means that the Cappadocians are set against Augustine, a framing of the issues that “ignores the close affiliation that flourished between Alexandrian (‘Greek’) and Roman (‘Latin’) theologies a generation earlier.” If there is a real division between Greek and Latin theologies in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, then there is a need to explain the loss of this earlier East-West consensus.

The use of de Regnon is a symptom of a larger problem in systematic discussions of Augustine, a penchant for “grand, broad-stroked, narrative forms.” He finds the sources of this attitude in the modern emphasis on paradigm shifts in science, and the assumption that “details matter less than perspective.” Along with this preference for large narratives is an assumption that the history of doctrine is about development of “the internal logic of an idea.” Behind these habits, Barnes sees the continuing influence of German idealism. The historical studies of systematic theologians mirror the German idealistic framework of systematics itself. If de Regnon is one un-acknowledged and sometimes unknown presence behind Augustinian theology, Olivier du Roy (a mid-twentieth century writer) is another. Among other things, du Roy bequeathed to later Augustine scholars the tendency to emphasize Augustine’s philosophical sources at the expense of his theological sources: “sustained discussions of [Augustine’s] debt to his immediate Christian Latin predecessors are few and far between.” Further, du Roy did not examine Augustine’s doctrine developmentally but statically. Barnes also charges that most treatments of Augustine fail to take account of his polemical context: “Trinitarian works by Augustine that are incontrovertibly polemical are no longer read [because they have never been translated from Latin], and works that can bear a polemical reading are consistently not read that way.”

Both Barnes and Ayres have paid attention to Trinitarian arguments in works earlier than de Trinitate. A few notes from Ayres discussion. Ayres (Barnes too) finds in Augustine a strong Nicene emphasis on the unity of action of the three persons. Answering a question of Nebridius in Epistle 11, Augustine says that “according to the Catholic faith” the Trinity is “so inseparable that whatever action is performed by it must be thought to be performed at the same time by the Father and by the Son and by the Holy Spirit . . . the Son does not do anything which the Father and Holy Spirit do not also do.” This is why John 5 becomes so important in Augustine’s polemics against the anti-Nicene part of his time. It is clear from his earliest statements on the Trinity that Augustine does not see the one substance as somehow prior to the multiple persons. The Persons are irreducibly different: “The Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God; that there are not three Gods, but that the Trinity is One God; that the persons are not diverse in nature but are of the same substance; that the Father is always Father and the Son is always the Son and the Holy Spirit is always the Holy Spirit,” he writes in On the Faith and the Creed (393). The “Trinity is one God,” he emphasizes. And it is precisely as Trinity that God is one.

In Epistle 120 (410), he denies the view often attributed to him, namely, that he makes the essence into a fourth thing alongside, perhaps behind, the three Persons. On the contrary “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the Trinity, but they are only one God; not that the divinity, which they have in common, is a sort of fourth person, but that the Godhead is ineffably and inseparably a Trinity.” And, “You know that in the Catholic faith it is the true and firm belief that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God, while remaining a Trinity . . . the Trinity is of one substance and [the] essence is nothing else than the Trinity itself (ut ipsa essential non aliud sit quam ipsa trinitas).”