A Dominican scholar's affirmation of the Son of God’s causality from the Father in the thought of Augustine

In an older thread here at AF, I posted a number of quotes from the corpus of Augustine that clearly identified his belief in the causality of the Son of God from God the Father—essence and person [Link].

In the same thread, I provided a selection from the Catholic scholar, Yves Congar, wherein he quoted the following from Augustine:

The Father is the principle of all-divinity or, to be more precise, of the deity, because he does not take his origin from anything else. He has no one from whom he has his being or from whom he proceeds, but it is by him that the Son is begotten and from him that the Holy Spirit proceeds.

Concerning Augustine’s acknowledgment that the, “Father is the principle of all-divinity”, Congar concluded that, “it expresses the idea of the first and absolute source.”

Over the weekend, I found another Catholic scholar who recognizes the causality of the Son of God from the Father in the writings of Augustine. Thomas Joseph White in his new book, The Trinity – On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Google Preview), devoted a chapter to Augustine, wherein we read:

In De Trinitate books 6 and 7 Augustine developed what eventually would come to be know in the High Middle Ages as the doctrine of appropriations. The doctrine of appropriations has to do with biblical language that applies this or that divine attribute to one of the divine persons seemingly exclusively, the simplicity of the divine nature notwithstanding, or applies this or that divine action to one of the persons as if it were proper to him, despite the unit of God’s action ad extra…

What leads to Augustine’s discussion of appropriations in books 6 and 7, however, among others, are difficulties posed by the biblical verse, 1 Corinthians 1:24: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”…

The basic question is whether we can predicate attributes and actions to each of the persons in a distinctive way, without claiming that the attribute or action in question is something exclusively proper to him.

Augustine’s answer to this question is grounded in his idea of persons as relations. Yes, it is true that each of the persons possesses all the properties and actions of God equally and identically. But it is also true that each of them possesses such properties and actions in a particular personal mode, as Father, Son, or Holy. We might take the example of wisdom. On the one hand, wisdom must be understood as pertaining to the very substance and nature of God. Understood in this way, both the Father and the Son are perfectly wise, since both are God. And yet on the other hand, the Father and the Son each possesses wisdom in his own mode resulting from the relations. “So Father and Son are together one wisdom because they are one being [Latin:essentia], and one by one they are wisdom from wisdom as they as being from being.”* The Father has wisdom from all eternity in an unoriginated mode, as he who communicates divine being [i.e. essence] to the Son and the Spirit. The Son has wisdom from all eternity in an originated mode, as he is the generated Word of the Father… (White, Thomas Joseph, OP, The Trinity, pp. 165, 166 – bold emphasis mine.) [*Quote from Augustine is from his De Trinitate 7.1.3, as translated by Edmund Hill in, The Trinity – THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: A translation for the 21^st Century, I/5, p. 221.]

White, concludes from Augustine’s notion of “wisdom from wisdom” and “being from being”—concerning the relationship between the Father and the Son—that:

The Father has wisdom from all eternity in an unoriginated mode, as he who communicates divine being [i.e. essence] to the Son and the Spirit. The Son has wisdom from all eternity in an originated mode.

White’s understanding here is essentially the same as Congar’s affirmation that the Father is, “the first and absolute source.”

Shall end with the reposting of some quotes from Augustine that add crystal clear support to assessments of White and Congar:

...we understand that the Son is not indeed less than, but equal to the Father, but yet that He is from Him, God of God, Light of light. For we call the Son God of God; but the Father, God only; not of God. (On the Trinity, II.2 - NPNF 3.38 - bold emphasis mine.)

For the Son is the Son of the Father, and the Father certainly is the Father of the Son; but the Son is called God of God, the Son is called Light of Light; the Father is called Light, but not, of Light, the Father is called God, but not, of God. (On the Gospel of John, XXXIX.1 - NPNF 3.38)

Partly then, I repeat, it is with a view to this administration that those things have been thus written which the heretics make the ground of their false allegations; and partly it was with a view to the consideration that the Son owes to the Father that which He is, thereby also certainly owing this in particular to the Father, to wit, that He is equal to the same Father, or that He is His Peer (eidem Patri æqualis aut par est), whereas the Father owes whatsoever He is to no one. (On Faith and the Creed, 9.18 -NPNF 3.328-329 - bold emphasis mine.)

Grace and peace,

David