John Cavadini, my mentor as a Master's student at Notre Dame and now the Chair of the Department of Theology there, has written what Michel Barnes said might be the best thing he's ever written on Augustine. The two of them are both Augustine scholars, and John seems to be here in much the same L'Enfant terrible mode I've seen Barnes and his collaborator Lewis Ayres of Emory University: shaking up the field of Augustine studies by doing something startlingly radical – reading Augustine.

Seriously.

I was shocked to discover from studying with Barnes just how much this field – of the man arguably still the most foundational thinker in the West, even in our secularized thought-systems – has for decades been perpetuating inaccuracies due to the simple fact of scholars quoting one another rather than reading Augustine closely. Augustine was so huge, and so given to being summarized by other thinkers, that the accepted summaries really began to distort people's readings of the text. So the paradigms have been falling of late: Augustine the Neo-Platonist; Augustine the guy who made everything go wrong about sex in the West; and here with John, Augustine the founder of the Western notion of the Self. In Cavadini's "The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine's Thought" in the last volume of Augustinian Studies, John challenged the standard "Augustine and the Creation of the Self" line which I too had obviously ingested over the years. Cavadini's attention to the detail of the Latin text, where I've generally been using the Boulding translation that makes use of the English word "self," was a great caution. There is no equivalent word to "self" in Latin. But the "English Augustine," where that word is written into texts, ends up lending Augustine's language to be related to Descartes and Locke and other modern theorists of the Self. My self. Your self. Our selves. The English gives a possessive note to it, too. And why not? Because everyone translating and reading has been told: Augustine creates this concept of the Self: so we expect to find it.

Enter Augustine: in the Latin, he speaks not of an "inner self," as the translations go, but of an "inner man," possessing five "inner" versions of our same senses. We translate this idea accurately in someone like Origen of Alexandria (d. 254), because we don't expect the "self" idea in him. Rather than concretizing a self that stands apart from the world and our actions, inviolable, Augustine actually portrays the "inner man" – humanity's innermost reality – as created and derivative of the existence of the Triune God who is living interpersonal Love. Flawed by sin, anything that appears to be an independent "Self" is in fact the decaying human beings who cut themselves off from the fundamental reality of God on which all people depend, whether they want to admit that or not. I was very interested to see Cavadini's attention to the program of the De Trinitate (Augustine's still brilliant and pertinent book on the Trinity), which gave me an increasing sense of the unity of the vision of Love in Augustine. That particular unity, I think, is going to be fertile ground for teaching, as a motif that I think students can apprehend and process profitably, that they can use as an organizing principle for Augustine's actual teaching, and use in comparison to other forms of thought or perspective.

It has been really good to hear the freshmen across the street coming back into McCormick Hall again today after a week's absence. The University just doesn't seem to be alive without the students, and I find that even though I love a certain amount of quiet, I miss the pulse of their life animating the school.

Well, this was as about as low-key a Spring Break as I could have pulled off. I mean, Spring Break is more an undergrad thing than a grad school thing, I suppose. Most grad school breaks I've had--and I still mourn that Marquette doesn't have a full week's Fall Break like Notre Dame did--have been opportunities to "catch up," with a little relaxing thrown in on the side. I did more with my high school teaching Spring Breaks, I think, than with my graduate school ones, taking in Rome, Tunisia, England, Wales and Ireland over the years. In fact, the only people to even ask me what my Spring Break plans were were both undergraduates--undergraduate women in Theatre, to be exact, now that I think of it, which makes me wonder about the optimism of that particular demographic. Of course, they both guessed that I'd blow the break reading, so maybe they're more perceptive than optimistic.... Actually, I had intended to visit my Mum a bit in there, too, but she announced that she was off to visit my sister, Jim and the little girls on the weekend I intended, and though I thought of then just going down there myself and joining up with them, it was clear to me that my sister wanted to get some one-on-one time, per se, with Mom, which I totally understand, so I stayed out of the way.

My first duty was really to finish my DDO: my Doctoral Dissertation Outline. Professor Fahey had really wanted it by the end of February, but it took me too much of February to realize that I had over-committed myself with extra work, like the massive amount of reading needed to participate in the seminar on Augustine's De Trinitate. I'm still sitting in, but I had to give up being able to keep up with the reading or else the dissertation ended up coming in third behind it and the undergrad class on the Theology of Martin Luther for which I TA and have to keep up on all the reading. I got the bulk of the Outline done in that timetable even so, but then there was so much going on at the beginning of March that it seemed I could never sit down with it, whether the Luther class or random events like the Kelly Lecture, and the like. Time just went >poof!< So that was good to finish up in the first day or two of break, which was all I needed. Now I just have to catch Fahey so that we can go over it and whip it into final form for the various committees. I guess he's out traveling: I sent him a note Tuesday and haven't heard from him yet.

Not to say that there weren't sufficient little bits of festiveness: Julie and I had a mutual 90-minute window in our schedules on Friday at the start of break, so we got to hang a bit before she left to spend a nontraditional Spring Break visiting her grandmother with her Mom. I somehow managed to spend all that time talking and not getting to any of the things I had flagged to talk with her about: 90 minutes is self-defeating for people with the gift of conversation. So I hung with Mike and Donna for the rest of the night, Dan and Amy being out of town. Despite all the grief that Donna gives us for over-discussing the sci-fi that has long been part of our regular group Friday nights, I couldn't help but note that it was her who have a bit of a shriek at hearing that the next season of Battlestar Galactica wouldn't pick up until October, whereas I hadn't even noticed that part of the next-season teaser. Wednesday was then sort of a rushed Friday-reprise when Dan and Amy got back into town, with a taped group showing for their benefit. There was a great cookout dinner in the hours beforehand with Dan venturing outside in the not-too-cold warmer spell to grill chicken breasts that Donna had marinated in a great Italian dressing/cayenne pepper combo that managed to be very flavourful without being overpowering to the chicken. Group-wide top marks all around. Thursday featured another long chat with Diane at Collector's Edge East until she closed up shop. One fun point was that she's thinking of taking her forensic skills, which is the current focus of her work in anthropology, and applying to the FBI Academy. That ended up being the basis for all sorts of interesting topics, not least of which was her recent acquisition of the physical-performance requirements, and attempting to start to get in shape for them. As a former runner, I found it odd that she wouldn't think anything of walking a dozen miles, but that running more than a few intimidated her out of reason. In the spirit of those "who can no longer do," I tried to be encouraging along those lines. Also on Thursday came the news from Donna's morning ultrasound that it is a boy that she and Mike are having in August. That continues the pattern of "matching babies" between them and the Lloyd's, with Dan and Amy's little Anna only a few months younger than Renee, while the Lloyd's little boy is due in six weeks and so will have a similar lead on Mike and Donna's boy. Fun for everyone in the crew. Donna and Mike also tried to explain to Renee (who is now 21 months) that their names were "Donna" and "Mike." Since she already knows that my name is Mike, they told me that she thought they were being marvelously silly and refused to give their words on the subject any weight whatsoever.

So lots of moments like that provided more than enough entertainment for what was in its form a rather dull week. Now things are more normal: Sunday night saw Mass, a late dinner, laundry and Luther; and the new chest of doors is still unassembled and my living room looks like a woodshop. Probably "normal" is more than dull enough for most people, but it'll keep. I suppose my "New York Times" bit in the middle of the week was unusual enough, as well as getting text messages from my frequently-odd friend Kevin while he was having dinner with President Bush. I'm actually surprised any communications equipment worked. So, anyway, halfway done for this semester: dissertation adventures will commence.

There's been a lot going on. And yet somehow I've also felt like I've managed to do very little. aristotle2002 came by on Wednesday, on his High School Spring Break Tour. I was impressed that Nathaniel even prepped for Professor Barnes' seminar on Augustine's De Trinitate, and flowed right into our conversation on Book VII. (By the way, Nathaniel, you left your De Trin on my coffeetable--tell me where to mail it back to you.) A dinner down at Mo's Pub was supposed to be followed by a late Ash Wednesday Mass, but I think that the fish did something funny to me. We got in the doors for the readings and I had to get out, so we gave one another Official Theologian Dispensations and called it even. I thought we might crash before too long, but conversation kept rolling on until past 4am. With a weblink handy from the couch for occasional fact-checking, we managed to dive through a number of topics, whether the Augustine of the day, natural law arguments, personal stories like the origin of his friendship with Tristan Engelhart, John Paul II's significance, more about BMWs than I could have guessed, teaching theology at the college and high school levels, and who knows how much more. Good times. We hadn't actually seen each other since August 2004, other than the fly-by-night get-togethers at the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, so this was a big-time treat.

Thursday featured the longest, slowest bus ride through Milwaukee's transport system, ever. After a hurried chat that I couldn't afford with clerk/friend Diane, who just started reading Merton's Thoughts in Solitude with her husband on my recommendation as an intro to spiritual reading (I was thrown and amused by the fact that she really liked it until she said she was thrown when "God" showed up. I'll have to find out more about why this was a problem or a surprise.), I made it back to campus a full half-hour late for the reading/presentation of the first chapter of Barnes' book on the Holy Spirit, the "Spirit as Creator" business that I mentioned was available for download on the website of our ongoing Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism. Deirdre Dempsey was just starting her response, but took time to make fun of me as I was creeping in through the door. As Deirdre looks/sounds/acts like she could be one of my Irish aunts, the being-made-fun-of was brief, to the point, and effective. I nodded in chagrined guilt as everyone had a good laugh while I sat down. Her criticisms of Barnes' approach were sensible ones. She had a few questions about dating, or about what she thought tenuous lines-of-influence, such as a connection between Genesis 1:1-3 and Job 26:4, 27:3. It was a very large and packed crowd, for the Seminar at least, meaning that it was about 30 whereas usual attendance is about 12-15 at any given session. There was a lot of interchange picking up after Professor Dempsey was done, and I even jumped in on a clarifying point after an exchange between Barnes and Prof. Mueller. It seemed to me that the talk was starting to assume that "God" in Genesis 1 was beginning to be distinguished from "the Spirit of God" who only appears in Gen. 1:2. Granted that Gen. 1:1-2 may be of a different origin than the rest of Genesis, it still seemed clear to me that in its final edited version, "God" and "the Spirit of God" were being identified as the same actor by the editor of the text. I was afraid that in the snowballing conversation of original source speculations that that simple fact about the text as it stands was being forgotten.

After the session, Dan Lloyd cornered me and appeared absolutely frisky for something to do, even though we had plans for the following night. Amy Lloyd and Donna Harris were off at Mayfair Mall with the little girls, having dinner, and so it seemed an opportune time to do something festive. When I mentioned that I was going to go over to see Julie's improv troupe, the Studio 13 Refugees, open up for a few stand-up comedians as a fund-raiser for Habitat for Humanity, that seemed just the ticket for Dan. Mike tagged along. As it turned out, the Refugees were finishing up as we walked in ten minutes late after a very brief opener for the two guys. They were definitely more beginners at stand-up, but did all right and so it wasn't a total loss. I talked to Julie for a brief moment afterward, met her other female troupe member and a friend of hers and recent MU grad visiting for the weekend who turned out to be a friend of Meg Rothbart's that I'd met last year. Dan, Mike and I drifted over to Caffrey's Pub afterwards for a drink and some talk.

Friday featured a turkey dinner/feast over at the Harris' where I consumed vast quantities of wine and sherry, at least for my normal standards. I tend to mix it up with enough non-alcohol that I have no unpleasant aftereffects, but I came out with a bit of a headache the next morning. Dan pawned Renee off on me early on with the assurance to her that I loved to read The Cat in the Hat, so much so that I became the default reader for the rest of the night, which I think the parents loved, or at least welcomed as a relief from the duty. While I get the benefit of fun with the kids and then get to hand them back, I admit that I was pleased to discover that I could turn 10 or more pages at a time without Renee being the wiser. I also developed great hopes that the wonderful rhythm of Dr. Suess would result in bringing back a love or preference for the rhyme and meter in classical forms of poetry for the kids. BSG was another classic episode from the fellow who directed "33" and "Water" and so loud conversation cut off with a snap whenever a commercial break ended.

The weekend featured the classic annual Hollywood Oscar party over at the Smiths' and that capped off a run of several days in which I managed to do virtually nothing on my dissertation outline. Tonight is being similarly lost in that regard, to TA duties. In other news, I got a tentative confirmation on teaching afternoon sessions of Intro to Theology today from the undergrad scheduler, so that's all to my preference.

The last few days my musical imagination--you know, that part of your mind that just plays music, regardless of whatever you might want it to do or not?--has been fixated on one of the most beautiful pieces written in the Freek days: keyboard-player Andy Brenner's "Let Your Spirit," linked here in a solo version he recorded, for anyone of taste who is interested. Actually, as I type this, I have to smile at an irony: in a week where my academic work has largely been consumed by Augustine, I recall that the song actually uses a number of phrases from Augustine to construct this love song. Most people would never notice: I didn't at first, either. Score one for my subconscious, I guess?

I was absolutely flattened yesterday after babysitting Renee Harris for about 90 minutes. She around that 18-month stage of starting to talk--I was "My" and she was "Nay," I realized--and when Donna and Mike got back from their errand, Donna pegged it exactly by immediately asking if Renee had spent the bulk of the time just climbing on me. I don't think I've done that much continual lifting since I moved, and maybe not then. It's finding myself exhausted by things like that that always bring back memories of being a distance runner in the most humbling way. This is the point of the entry where I ought to make some halfway-sincere pledge to myself to work out more in some way.

One of the cool things of being at school is always the opportunity to meet really compelling people. Last semester's Theology Through the Centuries class that I TAed for Mickey Mattox was the most fun I had had as a TA at Marquette because all these hard-working Honors Program students took advantage of what I could offer more than all the students I had had in the previous three years. A number of the students were folks I really enjoyed talking with--interested in the material, passionate about their own work--and by the end of the semester it was clear that a few of them were folks I could really enjoy being friends with. A few were as blessed with the gift of the gab as I was, so that we had to be careful in making appointments to do work because we had such a hard time not letting talk run away with us. Wednesday after the De Trinitate Seminar, I met Julie Riederer, one of the best of the lot, at Starbucks for a drink and a really cool three-hour conversation of that sort. She's got the same intense gift for Psychology that I'm used to from Kevin Fleming, but has more of a research edge to her that he doesn't have, so I was fascinated to hear about the kind of research into the cognition of misinformation that she was conducting with a professor. That overlapped with the pedagogical monkeywrench that The Da Vinci Code has been for the Theology Department for the last few years because of those exact, careful techniques of using a small, "flagged" piece of authentic information--like the Emperor Constantine being present at the significant Council of Nicaea in 325--and then having gotten the mind to recognize that as accurate, "approved" information, to then load it up with false content. Not that it was all lofty and technical talk, since we also laughed and spontaneously confessed to one another what junk-TV shows we currently found ourselves enslaved to. Julie also does a lot of improv comedy performance on the side, and I always enjoy being around artists who can articulate what they're doing with their work in the way that she does. My friends at Marquette tend not to have that "wing" to their lives that I enjoyed so much at Notre Dame with the strong musical/Catholic overlap in the Freek circle and beyond. It's just another strong reason to enjoy what might become a real friendship: there's only a few undergrads that I've met who have had that kind of potential. In that vein, I'm finally making plans to hang with a guy named Jonathan that I've known casually for awhile who is a member of InterVarsity and is cool and tasteful enough to have loaned me a copy of Alex Ross' and Mark Waid's Kingdom Come when I got to know him a bit last year when he was working at the desk of the Abbottsford Apartments where I lived.

I took a little time out on Tuesday with Bob Foster, who was visiting from Michigan again, studying for his Doctoral Qualifying Exams. This time he didn't stay with me, which was probably wise: I don't think he achieved as much as he wanted to in early December, when he stayed with me for the week. (See "gift of the gab," above.) Sunday night we had dinner at the Harris' downstairs where, with the Harris' conspiring, I showed up with a half-sized box of old comics (holding several dozen) that I said I had picked that I thought Bob "might want to read" while he was here. It wasn't until the end of the night when he started looking through the box (which I had grabbed because it was the closest to the door when I left) that we discovered that he had taken me with perfect seriousness and was checking to see what stories I had picked for his notice (and to destroy his study session), so we had a long laugh at that. Tuesday we went down to Downtown Books, even though I knew that Bob had already blown the allowance his wife Carmen gave him by stopping at Powell's at the University of Chicago on the way around the lake. He limited himself to a few minor biblical pieces. With less professional taste, I picked up a few used JLA trade paperbacks and a clean, good-looking hardcover copy of my favourite Star Trek novel ever, My Enemy, My Ally, by the inestimably-rich sci-fi author Diane Duane, who makes those characters and that world such a fulsome vision of the future that the best of the shows and movies are watery reflections in comparison. While to be honest, I'd probably have to rank the book a tie with her masterful Spock's World with it fictional alien history and anthropology, this novel came first. Curiously, I can still remember seeing it on the wall of Arand's Sporting Goods as a kid as I first picked it up, little knowing what I treat I was giving myself. I think Julie explained that to me, in fact, when we talked about her research in certain types of memory-flagging. So Bob accepted my reasoning as to why a quality-bound hardcover of a novel I already owned (and in fact have replaced, since that beloved original had long since disintegrated under my loving hands, along with those of my brother Joe, and such worthy friends as 2ndtimothy) deserved a spot on my much-taxed shelving space.

Michael Anthony Novak
25 January 2006
THEO 383: Augustine’s De Trinitate
Professor Michel René Barnes

Latin Homoian Theology

( Seminar Notes )

Class notes: January 23, 2006
Theo 383: De Trinitate
Dr Barnes
Anthony Briggman

Hilary of Poitiers

( Seminar Notes )

This is mostly an entry/note for myself: just something I sent off today with a point or two that I want to keep track of or be able to find later. (Our LiveJournal "tags" are very handy for that!) I'm missing a session of Barnes' seminar on Augustine's De Trinitate today because of a mild flu. The readings for the session today, should you be bored and looking for a chewy piece of Trinitarian theology to sharpen the mind and feed the spirit, were fabulous. There was this selection of original texts: Augustine's letters to Nebridius that make up his earliest (391) trinitarian work, a letter of Seneca's giving a Stoic philosophical context for Augustine's approach, and selections from Peter Brown's masterful biography of Augustine, the Confessions, and the 1998 class notes from an earlier version of this seminar. The original sources might best be read with Barnes' article "Re-reading Augustine's Theology of the Trinity" from the published collection from the Oxford Trinity Seminar, and Lewis Ayres' "'Remember That You Are Catholic': Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God" article as frosting.

I'm pissed that *this* would end up being the day I missed:
re-reading your article has been fascinating. It was the de Regnon part
that has really stayed with me from reading this for the first time in
Del Colle's Trinity seminar. Having read the Nebridius letters now at
the same time--I certainly have no recollection of reading them from
'92--has really fleshed-out or concretized your argument for me. I
still find that my natural inclination is to take Ep. 11 as a "harder"
Trinitarian analogy: I think it might be useful for the class if you
highlighted your reasons why you reject that temptation. Can any triad
that has a necessary logical sequence be separated from the attention
given to Trinitarian sequence once the "taxis" model has come to rule?
I would expect to see a more explicit denial of this in his argument if
that's what he was doing; and in this "being" model, the "what it is"
second aspect just has such a "logos" appeal to me....

I've mentioned her before, but I am here struck by the 14th-century
writing of Julian of Norwich in which she alleges a similar ontological
supposition that "all our life is in three" and that in everything we
find the resonance of "the Maker, the Lover, and the Keeper." I've
noticed De Trin material in her before, but now I'm wondering about the
transmission of this line of thought.

Given what you said in class the other day about the
amazingly-small number of scholars working on Nicaea, I'd be curious to
ask Coffey if his opinion about current Systematics' treatment on
Nicene questions is as dim as his opinion of current writing on grace.
He expressed the same kind of line as you that most writers said awful
things about grace because they had never had to really get into the
Tradition and all of its subtlety and difficulty on the matter. I
wonder if I could find a career as a Systematician in Nicaea?

M.

Notes at the end of the day. Ahhh... the sound of thugish guys in a gang barking at a drunken freshman girl screaming obscenities back at them. I'll just watch out the window to make sure she gets into her dorm safely....

That done, I'm wiped out, but too wired to go right to bed. Mickey's undergrad Martin Luther class meets at 11, and I've been up finishing the reading of the first seven chapters of Bainton's Here I Stand for that, after Mickey asked me today to help him out by writing tomorrow's quiz. I hadn't time for that, so that kinda threw the evening. I finally finished that at around 1am. Then it was finally time to make dinner, which I'd been too focused to do before then.

I just found a curious passage, in continuing to read the Luther biography over my pasta (which, of course, I could have done hours ago had I had the wit). A number of contemporary Catholics who are particularly concerned with the guarding of orthodox belief have articulated a vision of the Church where it is better to have smaller numbers of only the truly dedicated believers. This is stated as against those in the Church who are perceived as being only "cultural Catholics," or who speak of themselves as Catholics but make no attempt to hold to Catholic doctrine, practice or ethics, or at least hold only to what are decried as "selective" versions of such. I've even heard this view of the Church ascribed to Benedict XVI, although I cannot think of any specific instance of him saying this off the top of my head. What amuses me tonight is to see that this is the exact vision of the church Luther was promoting, I think from his book The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, if I'm reading Bainton's biography correctly, wherein he attacks the Catholic sacramental system as it stood at the time, in order to replace it with what he saw as a more authentically biblical vision of the sacraments. So I found it rather funny that in the name of Catholic orthodoxy, contemporary Catholics may be invoking Luther's view of the Church so opposed by loyal papalist figures like Cajetan.

Excerpting a note to friede: the seminar I began sitting in on today on Augustine's De Trinitate is being led by my advisor, Prof. Michel René Barnes, who with his collaberator Prof. Lewis Ayers of Emory University have begun to gain a significant reputation for overturning a great deal of accepted Augustinian scholarship. Their radical formula for overthrowing established scholarly conclusions: read Augustine instead of Augustinian scholars. Go figure. It is, however, brutally focused labour in trying to absorb ancient psychologies and literary conventions in approaching the Augustinian texts themselves. We opened with a real attack on our own literary conventions today, a look at what constituted "memory" and learning in a culture where books were memory-aides and not documentary memory-substitutes, and the Stoic/Ciceronian approach to learning.

Some other points from opening discussion:

De Trinitate Seminar Notes
Michel René Barnes
2006-01-18

A note on “textualization” from the handout from Mary J. Carruthers’ The Book of Memory today (noting what is underlined on p. 10—“A work is not truly read until one has made it part of oneself—that process continues a necessary stage of its ‘textualization.’”): what is not remembered is not understood. Memory is assumed in this culture. Augustine assumes in reading the later books of the De Trinitate that you will have the earlier books solidly in mind. This is very hard for moderns. An ancient or a medieval would much more easily commit these to memory because of their training.

Her distinction between “fundamentalism” and “textualism” as two poles of what literature is and how it functions in a society is analogous to the “Antioch vs. Alexandria” patristic tendencies toward the biblical texts. Barnes wants us to be aware of our own textual tendencies in these regards and not to project them onto the historical texts we are reading.

“Fundamentalism” in this sense (to be distinguished from the pejorative sense in which the term is usually used, and which here can be a more handy usage for us) “regards a work of literature as essentially not requiring interpretation.” It is the concern of being bound to a text where the words mean only what the words say, and have no meaning beyond themselves. Words are independent of institutions. See the similarity to legal “originalism,” speaking of the “original intention” of the writers, say of the Constitution. “Textualism” is then where the locus of meaning is to be found in the interpretation of words and not bound in the words themselves.

Finally was able to make some headway today and write a decent bit of commentary on the passage from Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate that I mentioned back on the 14th. Huh--nine days to really feel like I had a real handle on it! It looks like that Augustine mimicked the passage by way of correcting it: that Hilary in his attempt to understand what it meant that Jesus was "anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power" had inadvertently written the Holy Spirit more-or-less out of the program. What he's left with actually reads in a fairly binatarian way: that all we're really dealing with is a relationship between the Father and the Son. Augustine, in working on the nature of the Holy Spirit's relationship to the Father and the Son, realizes that the Spirit's role is actually central to not only who Jesus is but also to who we become in union with Christ, and sharing something of the same anointing. Augustine is able to give an intellectual or ontological, or even personal (Personal?) warrant for Christian spirituality--well, human spirituality--that Hilary has failed to perceive.

Dug around in the library to find that no one ever seems to have noticed what I've found in Augustine here, and only redeemed my time by possibly helping out classmate Lorelle of the Philosophy Department in realizing that one of our philosophy professors had been the recent translator of Augustine's letters. This was potentially useful because the apparently non-existent critical edition that she was looking for--or any version of such a beastie that might exist--could be in his possession, here conveniently on our campus.

Time to get out of town and go visit Mum for the holiday.

BOOYAH!!! Just when I thought I was done with looking for a relevant source for my Augustine passage in Hilary of Poitiers' The Trinity, I hit absolute paydirt: what seems to be a flat-out parallel passage, even if set in a different context and far more complex than Augustine's. This means absolutely nothing to y'all out there, of course, but for me it means that I'm onto something in my quest to re-construct one sliver of the intellectual/theological mindset of Augustine.

Now I just have to figure out what it all means....

For those of you bored and surfing, feel free to compare this passage from Augustine's De Trinitate, XV, 46 (c. 420AD) to what I just found in Hilary of Poitiers' De Trinitate, XI, 18-20 (c. 360).

Augustine:

That is why the Lord Jesus himself not only gave the Holy Spirit as God but also received him as man, and for that reason he was called full of grace. It is written of him more openly in the Acts of the Apostles, that God anointed him with the Holy Spirit, not of course with a visible oil but with the gift of grace which is signified by the chrism the Church anoints the baptized with. Nor, to be sure, was Christ only anointed with the Holy Spirit when the dove came down upon him at his baptism; what he was doing then was graciously prefiguring his body, that is his Church, in which it is particularly those who have just been baptized that receive the Holy Spirit. But we must realize that he was anointed with this mystical and invisible anointing when the Word of God became flesh, that is when a human nature without any antecedent merits of good works was coupled to the Word of God in the virgin's womb so as to become one person with him. This is why we confess that he was born of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary. It would be the height of absurdity to believe that he only received the Holy Spirit when he was already thirty years old--that was the age at which he was baptized by John; no, we must believe that just as he came to that baptism without any sin, so he came to it not without the Holy Spirit.

Hilary of Poitiers:

(18) The times or the ages do not cause a difference in the Spirit, so that there is not the same Christ Himself in the body who dwelt in the Prophets by the Spirit. When he declares through the mouth of patriarch David: ‘God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows,’ He did not say anything different according to the mystery than He said according to the dispensation of the body which He assumed. He who now confides to His brethren that their Father is His Father and their God His God, then declared that He was also anointed by His God above His fellows, so that, while there is no fellowship with the only-begotten Christ the Word of God, we realize that there is a fellowship with Him by that assumption in which He is flesh. That anointing did not procure any advantage for that blessed and incorrupt birth that abides in the nature of God, but for the mystery of the body and for the sanctification of the manhood which He took upon Himself, as the Apostle Peter testifies when he said: ‘For of a truth there assembled together in this city against thy holy Son Jesus, whom thou hast anointed.’ And again: “You know what took place throughout Judea; for he began in Galilee after the baptism preached by John: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.’ Jesus, therefore, is anointed in the mystery of the flesh that was born again. And there is no difficulty in regard to the manner in which He was anointed by the Spirit and by the power of God, since at that moment when He comes up from Jordan the voice of God the Father is heard: ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,’ in order that the anointing of the spiritual power might be recognized through this testimony of the flesh that was sanctified in Him.
(19) Moreover, since God the Word was in the beginning with God, the anointing rejects any cause for or any description of His nature, about which nothing else is made known than that it was in the beginning. And certainly it was not necessary for God, who is the Spirit and the power of God, to be anointed by the Spirit and the power of God. Hence, God is anointed by His God above His fellows. And if many were anointed according to the Law before the bestowal of the flesh, then Christ, who is now anointed above His fellows, is later in time, although He is preferred before all of His companions who were anointed. Finally, that prophetic utterance revealed this later anointing when it declared: ‘Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’
A consequent and later cause is never made retroactive so that it becomes first, for to merit anything follows upon the existence of Him who is capable of meriting. To merit belongs to Him who is the cause of acquiring merit for Himself. If, therefore, we attribute the anointing to the birth of the only-begotten God, and this anointing has been granted in recognition of His love for justice and His hatred of iniquity, then it is to be understood that the only-begotten God was not born, but was brought forth by the anointing and now He will be made perfect as God through an increase and gain, since He was not born as God but was anointed into God because of His merits, and now He will be the God Christ as the result of a cause and the cause of all things will not be through the God Christ. What, then, is the meaning of the Apostle’s words: ‘All things through him and unto him, and he is before all, and in him all things hold together’? God the Lord Jesus Christ is not God because of some things or through some things, but was born as God. And He who is God by birth did not develop into God after His birth through some other cause, but because He was born He is nothing else by His birth than what God is. If He is anointed as the result of a cause, then the benefit of the anointing does not refer to that which does not need to grow but to that which needs the benefit of the anointing through an increase of the mystery, that is to say, through the anointing our man Christ appears as one sanctified. IF in the present instance, therefore, the dispensation of the slave is also pointed out by the Prophet because of which He is anointed by His God above His fellows, and accordingly He is anointed because He loved justice and hated iniquity, why will not the Propet’s words refer to that nature of Christ which we share with Him by His assumption of the flesh, since the Spirit of prophecy has exercised particular care in this way, that, while God is anointed by His God, He is His God in the dispensation of the anointing and He is God in the nature? Consequently, God is anointed, but I ask the question whether the Word that was in the beginning with God was anointed? By no means! The anointing is later than God. Since the birth of the Word was not anointed, because it was in the beginning with God, then that must have been anointed in God which comes afterwards in the dispensation, in so far as He is God. And since God is anointed by His God, then everything pertaining to a slave that He received in the mystery of the flesh is anointed.
(20) Let no one, therefore, desecrate the mystery of godliness, that was made known in the flesh, by a godless interpretation, and let no one place himself on an equality with the Only-begotten in the substance of the Godhead. Let Him be a brother to and sharer with us in so far as the Word made flesh dwelt among us, and in so far as the man Jesus Christ is the mediator of God and man. Let us as slaves have a common Father and a common God, and let Him be anointed above His fellows in that nature in which His fellows were anointed, even though He was anointed with a special privilege. In the mystery of the mediator let Him be a true man as well as the true God, the God Himself from God, who has a common Father and God with us in that fellowship by which He is our brother.