A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

subordinate being to one who does the sending, but Augustine asserts that there
is no reason why the sender and the sent have to be unequal. His subordinationist
critics responded by asking why there is no scriptural passage in which the
Father is sent by the Son or the Holy Spirit (and whether such a sending would,
in fact, be conceivable). It is clearly an issue that cannot be resolved. When
confronted by texts such as John 14:28, ‘The Father is greater than I’, which can
hardly be interpreted in any way other than as an expression of the subordinate
nature of Jesus, Augustine simply claims that Jesus is here speaking in his
human capacity. This is unlikely to have convinced the more sophisticated of his
critics. The gospel writers could not have anticipated how their texts would
become entangled in later theological debates, and would have been surprised to
hear that the words of Jesus they quoted could be divided into ‘divine’ and
‘human’ pronouncements.
Having dealt with the scriptural background, in Books V to VII Augustine
explored the philosophical problems of the Nicene Trinity: how the language of
substance, essence and personality can be interpreted. Here he has to express in
Latin what had been examined more subtly in the works of the Greek fathers.
Yet, like the theologians in the east, he had major problems associating the Holy
Spirit with Father and Son. The only distinction between the three that
Augustine allows is in terms of their relationship. The names ‘Father’ and ‘Son’,
one ‘unbegotten’ and one ‘begotten’, define the relationship between these two
members of the Trinity. The name ‘Holy Spirit’, on the other hand, does not
contain any definition of a relationship, and Augustine, like Gregory of
Nazianzus, employed the word ‘procession’ found in John 15:26, where the
Spirit processes from the Father. But while Gregory and the eastern theologians
assumed that this verse meant that the Holy Spirit processes only from the
Father, Augustine argued that in order to keep the relationship of the threesome
intact, the Holy Spirit must also process from the Son, in what became known as
the ‘double procession’. When the Greek Church heard of this formulation, they
were outraged at the apparent distortion of John’s text, and when the Catholic
Church endorsed Augustine’s view, the ensuing confrontation - known as the
filioque controversy, from the Latin for ‘and from the Son’ - was one of the
factors that led to a final schism between the Roman Catholic and Greek
Orthodox Churches in 1054.
Perhaps the most interesting parts of De Trinitate can be found in books VIII
to XV. Turning to a verse from Genesis (1:2.6) - ‘Let us [God] make man in our
image and in our likeness’ - Augustine argues that if humans are made in the