On (Augustinian) Footnotes

For a book lover, few pleasures rival time lost reveling in footnotes. I am currently (re)reading Augustine's De Trinitate (On the Trinity), and let me tell you, the footnotes are pure decadence. So, having digested a new feast of footnotes, I intend to share two specific insights from De Trinitate, and conclude with a challenge for you & I. I should note that these footnotes appear in Edmund Hill's translation, with both introduction & footnotes written by him.

"Do not be hasty."

"Augustine was unusually sensitive to the delicacy of truth, and the the inadequacy of human language to express it, and therefore of human reason to grasp it, without an infinite number of qualifications and distinctions and approximations and provisos...So one must take his defensiveness seriously. It is a standing protest against intellectual roughness and impatience which demands cut-and-dried solutions to problems, and quickly."

Did you ever write a book report or research paper in high school? Imagine your surprise when years later a stranger approaches you and says, "Your writings on The Red Badge of Courage have proven among the most formative of my life!" "How did you get copy of my freshman book report?" you ask, understandably. "It's all over the internet!" the stranger replies to your supreme horror. Such is the situation Augustine found himself in one day when he discovered that a project he hit pause on nearly a decade prior had spread all throughout the Roman world. Thus, if you ever read De Trinitate, allow grace for the first half of the book. It was Augustine's 'freshman' project.

With the context of the pirated start to De Trinitate, you may begin to understand why this particular footnote caught my attention. Augustine, like Socrates before him, privileged the pursuit of truth so highly that only the most meticulous, careful treatment deserved such a pursuit. Augustine is exploring the rich doctrine of the Trinity, one eternal God as Father, Son, & Holy Spirit, each person of the Trinity of same substance & essence. The subject matter requires the utmost care to speak truly into a mystery profoundly beyond human comprehension. However, outside of De Trinitate Augustine also devotes similar care in writing & thinking, as the footnote points to. Quick, cut-and-dried answers might only promise false certainty & undercut the depth of reality. In a world with instant access, you & I would do well to heed the care Augustine approached not only the mystery of the Divine Trinity, but also all things worth thinking through. We ought not be hasty, to quote Tolkien's beloved Ent.

Where's the center?

"It does make all the difference where one puts the center. A fully humane, even humanist anthropology is one thing, and a good one; but a Christian may question whether it is true to the deepest heart of man to put him at the center of things, even of himself. Again, a fully balanced Christology, doing full justice to the human nature of Christ, is one thing, and a good one, and even a Christocentric approach to the Christian life is excellent in a limited context. But it leaves one with the question, what was the center of this Christ center, of Christ's own life?"

From the context I was raised in, you could not get enough Jesus. A popular song proclaimed surely, "I'm coming back to the heart of worship, and it's all about you Jesus." Most Christian leaders see a danger in churches turning away from a 'christocentric' approach. Basically, when Jesus is not the center of a church, then it cannot live into the calling it proclaims to answer. Thus, I was taught a christocentric approach to worship, reading the Bible, & even community. When I first this footnote, I was waiting to hear the priest from Monty Python's Life of Brian shouting, "No one can stone anyone until I blow this whistle!"

Yet, the voice of Augustine rings through in this annotation. For in his careful & interrogative discourse in De Trinitate, Augustine walks through & demarcates potential 'landmines' for his readers to avoid when thinking & living light of the Trinity. In short, the author of the footnote echoes a danger Augustine saw lurking around the corner.

If orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ became fully human while remaining fully God, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father, then it is possible overemphasize the humanity of Christ without proper regard to his divine nature. This, perhaps, may begin to explain the popular phenomenon of churches & church pastors saying, "We're just all about Jesus." Jesus is God incarnate. Yet when we look to the humanity of Christ & see our same humanity shared, it is only too easy to reduce Christ to his humanity & thus elevate ourselves to seek an ideal humanity instead of a Triune God at work in & through humanity. To be fair, this is a more nuanced danger at work, for we believe it is better to know & seek Christ rather than not at all. But the center must always remain in the Triune God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

Marinate, Marinate, Marinate

I must reiterate: I. Love. Footnotes. They offer lines to connect the dots surrounding the text, not that the book itself is not enough, but there is always more that could be said! For example, the first footnote follows just how slowly Augustine unpacks the relationship between God the Father & God the Son. If they are one God & equal in substance, why does Jesus say, "The Father is greater than I," in the Bible? The second footnote follows an attempt to answer this first concern.

So, what remains for you & I? To be faithful to the insights from the first footnote, I will not offer a definitive answer. However, I will suggest that we marinate. We do it to our meat & vegetables, but we rarely offer our minds, time, & opinions to saturation from good sources. Like in any marination, three elements are necessary: that which is absorbs, that which soaks, & patience. I challenge you & myself to choose specific studies, authors, traditions, people, & ideals to saturate our time. When we marinate & contemplate, we allow the more subtle truths to become a part of us, and it can't be rushed. But, the result may be transformation & not just information. Marination makes footnotes a proper feast. And maybe, someday, you & I may offer our own footnotes to the sources we enjoy so much.