Augustine argues ( de Trinitate 5.1.6) that claims about human beins are spoken either secundum substantiam or secundum accidens . The latter category includes relational terms, statements about us ad aliquid , with reference to another. That is, for humans, in contrast to God, relational terms are accidents, changeable. God never became Father or Son; I did, and so for me these relationships are accidental to my substance. For us (in Edmund Hill’s translation) “friendships, proximities, subordinations, likenesses, qualities, and anything of that sort; as also positions, possessions, places, times, doings, and undergoings [ passiones ]” are all accidental.
Yet (going beyond Augustine) our “substance” is only realized in these accidents.
It might be said this way: I am substantially human, but the specific shape of my humanity depends on these accidents, in my fatherhood, my qualities, my positions, places, times, doings, passions. But that can only mean that the specific shape of my humanity is a fluid shape, taking different forms as my positions, times, places, doings, and passions change. My human substance is a liquid that takes form from the shape of accidents that modify it.
That’s a “postmodern” account of identity, but if we work in an Augustinian framework it’s not a nihilistic account. Of course, Augustine would say, your identity is changeable. That’s what it means to be a creature – to have undergone the most radical change of all, the change from non-existence to existence, the change of creation itself, being called from nowhere and nothing by the creating Word of the Father. A creature who has been called into existence by the God who calls things that are not as though they were remains equally dependent on that Word for his continuing existence.
Were you, he might ask, perhaps looking for something more secure to ground identity? Are you wanting to be God?
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