The gift of love

Augustine, Jean-Luc Marion, and the trinity

Andrew Staron

Building upon the discoveries of recent scholarship, Andrew Staron reads Augustine's De Trinitate not as presenting the Trinity as a concept to be grasped, but rather as a rational study of the limits of theological language and the possibility of coming to know the Trinity because of those limits. Human dependence on God's initiative indicates that the Trinitarian God of love is knowable only through attention to how God's self-revelation transforms and saves us. Therefore, to see God, one seeks to mark love's formative activity within the heart. Jean-Luc Marion's rigorous description of the gift of love offers to Augustine's theology a phenomenological texture by which the Trinitarian love given in revelation might be made incarnate in one's life. The Gift of Love presents a reason for hope that while coming to know "the Trinity that God is" might be impossible for human beings, it is made possible by God's antecedent gift of love, given in the missions Son and Holy Spirit, and iconically received in the particularity of one’s own love.