Analogy of Love

Anatolios again, on Augustine’s “analogy of love” from Book 8 of de Trinitate . Contrary to some interpreters, “this trinity of love is not simply a self-standing structure that ‘pictures’ the divine Trinity.” Anatolios insists instead that “it manifests the mind’s radical relatedness to God, since the love by which we love anything genuinely, according to Augustine, is God himself . . . . In loving another human being, we are first of all loving to love, and the love by which we love another human being is more present and inward to us than the human object of this love. This inward presence of a love by which we love others is the presence of God. Thus the trinity of ‘lover, beloved, and love’ manifest in human experience attains a certain participation in God, who is Love.”

This snugly fits with the overall thrust of Augustine as Anatolios (like Rowan Williams, Milbank, Michel Rene Barnes, and others) interprets him: The knowledge of the Trinity that Augustine aims to convey in his treatise is not exhausted by affirmation of a set of propositions about three-in-oneness, person-and-substance. Rather, the knowledge is union with God, the knowledge of imitation of divine life that comes only through following the purifying way of Jesus. The analogy of love is designed to show that there is no knowledge of God that is not also communion with Him.