Augustine, Personalist

One of Holmes’s targets in The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity is the “de Regnon thesis” that Greek and Latin Trinitarian theology took separate paths, the former being more pluralist and the latter more monist. Like other recent writers, Holmes doesn’t believe it, and he offers a neat inversion of the usual argument:

“The language of the Son as the Father’s logos (knowledge) or wisdom, insisting on one cognition, one wisdom, and one perception within the Trinity, is so traditional in Eastern pro-Nicene theology as to be inviolable, but Augustine criticized it for not allowing sufficient hypostatic reality to the three ‘persons,’ insisting that the one divine wisdom and knowledge was common to all. East and West alike are united in insisting on the unity of the divine will and knowledge; Augustine is slightly more ready to explore what it means for this will and knowledge to exist three times over than the earlier Greek tradition.”

Holmes concludes that “on the criteria presented for the argument, it is Augustine, not the Cappadocians, who is more ready to accept a ‘personalist’ construction of the three hypostases ” (145).