The Neoplatonic Prehistory of Augustine's Doctrine of The Trintiy

Abstract

This thesis examines the Neoplatonic philosophical history of the first principle which leads up to and includes Augustine's doctrine of the Trinity. While contemporary scholarship of this history shows how scholars often read their own contemporary philosophical problems into the past, which thereby inhibits a true understanding of the text or doctrine involved, the most current scholarship reveals a correction to these anachronisms. Plotinus is shown to have placed the Nous close below, but still separate from, the One. While Porphyry brings the two together to a degree, he is reluctant to do so and so is ambiguous about how exactly the two are related. This ambiguity maintains the difference between the hypostases. Victorinus, in tum, continues this Porphyrian interpretation of Plotinus: what is ambiguous in Porphyry is transformed and said clearly in the service of orthodox Christian doctrine against Arianism. Because Victorinus must bring the two hypostases together fully and clearly, he also attempts to give a logic of the production of the Son and Holy Spirit by the Father which would maintain the Trinitarian diversity within unity. In so doing, his method of predication -- often aided by Scripture -- undermines the difference itself and therefore his Trinitarianism. The task is left to Augustine to complete this Porphyrian strand of Plotinus' thought and reconcile the diversity within a unity, predicating the divine substance without undermining either the unity or diversity. This Augustine achieves, but importantly, it is arrived at using Scripture as a mirror for the mind to form the categories by which the mind could predicate the divine. Augustine not only discovers a rationally coherent doctrine of the Trinity, it is achieved solely through a conversion of philosophy in principle, whereby only the divine can predicate itself due to the weakness of man's intellect.