Gerald Boersma: De vera religione 12.24: A Key to Augustine’s Early Account of Ascent.

De vera religione is the high water mark of Augustine’s early exuberance for the place of Platonic philosophy within the Christian faith.  I argue that De vera religione 12.24 contains in semine Augustine’s early account of the soul’s ascent towards participation in the Trinity.   Here he augments a Platonic philosophy of ascent with a theology of grace.  The terminus ad quem of the ascent is predicated on Nicene Trinitarianism.

Underlying the return and restoration (“revertetur reformata”) of the soul is a Plotinian account of katharsis of both mind and will.  However, De vera religione explains that the intellectual falsitas (33.61-34.67) and moral impietas (37.68-54.106) hinder the soul’s ascent.  At this point, Augustine’s theology augments and fulfils his Platonic proclivities.  The grace of God made present through the Incarnation restores the soul to health so that its natural desire can be fulfilled: union with God – to return from “the many (a multis) things that change to the one (unum) unchanging good.”  The one good, De vera rel., 12.24 continues, is participation in the Holy Trinity.  Thus, the ascent is “ad unum … per sapientiam … frueturque deo per spiritum sanctum, quod est donum dei.”

Sapientia is identified with the Son who recreates the fallen image according to the divine likeness. It is typical of Latin anti-Arian theology to identify sapientia with the Creator, as Augustine does (“non formatam, sed per quam formantur universa”).  Following this tradition, Augustine attributes the refashioning of the image to Wisdom after whom the soul was originally fashioned.  Thus, recreation follows the pattern of creation.  De vera religione contains the first occurrence in Augustine’s corpus of the title donum dei for the Holy Spirit and also identifies for the first time the Spirit as the means through which God is enjoyed (fruetur).  There is sustained development in the precision of Augustine’s pneumatological language from De beata vita through De moribus to Epistle 11, which is concurrent with De vera religione.  The ascent of De vera religione 12.24 is a confluence of the height of Augustine’s confidence in Platonic philosophy and his most developed Trinitarian theology prior to his ordination.