Augustine's Early Theology of Image: A Study in the Development of Pro-Nicene Theology by Gerald P. Boersma

Abstract

Reviewed by: Augustine's Early Theology of Image: A Study in the Development of Pro-Nicene Theology by Gerald P. Boersma Michael P. Foley Augustine's Early Theology of Image: A Study in the Development of Pro-Nicene Theology by Gerald P. Boersma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), xiv + 318 pp. In Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the protagonist perseveres in his faith despite his many failings because of one "convincing mystery—that we were made in God's image." "He would sit in the confessional," Greene writes, "and hear the complicated dirty little ingenuities which God's image had thought out." The whisky priest could not help but see God in the policeman, the maniac, and the sinner in flagrante delicto. The average Christian takes for granted that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, but as Gerald P. Boersma illustrates in his new monograph Augustine's Early Theology of Image, this teaching was anything but self-explanatory. Early Latin pro-Nicene theologians were eager to defend the doctrine that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, and to do so they interpreted the Scriptural references to "image" as signifying total equality. According to this tack, when Paul states that Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), the Apostle is affirming the equality of Father and Son sharing one divine substance. But this equation of image and equality, which defends the Son's divinity, also makes it difficult to affirm man's humanity, for asserting that man is or has the imago Dei becomes tantamount to claiming that he is equal to God. At best, humans are only made in or toward (ad secundum) the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26) but are not themselves an image of the divine. Further complicating this anthropology is the question of whether this image in which man is made is an image of God, of Christ, or of the entire Trinity and to what degree, if any, the human body bears the divine image. To show how pro-Nicene Latin theology navigated these waters, Boersma carefully and sympathetically traces the development of image theology in the writings of Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, and Marius Victorinus. His perceptive explication of these authors often challenges commonly held readings, like the assumption that Ambrose's rhetoric of "fleeing the body" implies a rejection of the corporeal. And his explanation of Marius Victorinus's philosophy is the best of its kind that I have read. [End Page 1287] But Boersma's real quest—and the subject of the second half of the book—is to explore image theology in the early writings of Augustine of Hippo. Even prior to his priestly ordination, Boersma maintains, Augustine had developed a theology of image that overcame the shortcomings of his predecessors. Specifically, Boersma contends that through a resourceful application of Platonic participatory ontology, Augustine was able to affirm that two images participating in the same original were not necessarily equal and that the Second Person of the Trinity and humanity are therefore both authentic images of God albeit in different ways. Further, although the imago Dei remains firmly fixed in the higher rational faculties of the human soul, the body may be said to participate in the divine image insofar as it reflects or bears witness to it. (This participation is particularly evident when the body is well governed by the soul in leading a virtuous and faithful life.) Boersma even argues that although Augustine was not operating out of an Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism, he was nonetheless able to avoid dualistic thinking and to affirm, in a way that other Church Fathers were not, the "integrated nature of the body-soul composite" (223). In addition to a nuanced examination of Plotinus, Boersma's study of Augustine's early thought focuses on the four Cassiciacum dialogues (particularly the Contra academicos and Soliloquia), the Diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus and De quantitate animae, and the De vera religione. The study concludes with an epilogue in which Boersma traces a significant continuity between Augustine's early theology and the De Trinitate regarding the imago...