28 Aug Augustine as Epiphorologist
On this feast day of our Blessed Father and Doctor of Grace, I share with all of you an assessment on St. Augustine’s insistence on evaluating and making known the material mechanics of our thought. His insistence, in line with earlier educated Latin theologians like Marius Victorinus and St. Ambrose, arises from a largely Western concern for our awareness of the straitjacket of not only human language but also human thought prior to and above language. Augustine’s legitimate criticism for the epistemological finitude of human existence appears repeatedly throughout De Trinitate. Michel René Barnes elaborates:
But Augustine brought to this project an overriding concern that had driven his theology of God to that point, especially any theology regarding the being of the divine or the Trinity: our material minds remains so boxed in by our material imagination — our understanding of all reality is as though it were all material. Nothing was more important than that our minds should learn to think of God in an immaterial manner: to free our thoughts from the constraints imposed by thinking of material existence. Only if we were free to think immaterially could we form proper thoughts about God.
Michel René Barnes, Augustine and Nicene Theology p. xxi
On a further assessment of Augustine in understanding the visibility of the Trinity:
The limitations of language (signs) are important to remember here. The proposition “The cow is brown” is understood only if we have seen a cow and the color brown: for anyone who has not seen either (much less both), the proposition fails to communicate since we only understand what is meant by “cow” and “brown” from our previous direct knowledge of these. The proposition “God is a Trinity” is unlike the proposition “The cow is brown” in that we cannot ever have seen God or the Trinity. […] Our mind rushes to build images to see, the way it rushes to build “Alexandria” from mental images we have seen. Some of these images may be correct, many are not, but our constructed idea of Alexandria becomes tied to the word “Alexandria” and allows us to recognize what the word refers to from our mental montage: a montage built upon reasonable similarities, but a montage nonetheless. Our montages of “God” tend to be misleading and need correction, even if the correction amounts to a prohibition of using certain mental images in our montages. […] The mind’s “servile adaptation” to sense knowledge does not lie only in its need to know through sense, but also (and more importantly) in the mind’s adoption of the dynamic structure and limitations of sense knowledge as its own.
Ibid. pp. 221-222
As for my work on Ghosts in Our Doctrine, the overly anthropomorphic and material descriptions of God invade and infest the magisterial works of the modern cosmos, especially the disobedient Christian men who sought to separate from the Church as well as the philosophers who failed to reckon their own structures of consciousness. I wish to express that much of the work to come shall follow the criticism of these systems.