A Brief Systematic Theology of the Symbol

Joshua Mobley

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780567702517
• eBook ISBN: 9780567702531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

How do Christians understand the Trinity? How does this understanding relate to other Christian teachings? In conversation with key thinkers in contemporary and classical theology, particularly Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, this book argues that a theology of symbols can help us glimpse the mystery of the Trinity and see how this central Christian teaching corresponds to Christian understandings of creation, humanity and the church. A symbol is not here understood as an arbitrary sign, but as a sign that mediates the presence of the symbolized. Joshua Mobley examines the understanding of the Father as "symbolized" in the Son who is the "symbol" of the Father by the "symbolism" of the Spirit, the personal agent of unity between Father and Son. These trinitarian relations then structure creaturely relations to God: God is symbolized in creation, which is a symbol of God by participation in the Son, and the church is symbolism, the union of creation with God by the power of the Spirit. Mobley thus argues that a theology of symbol helps coordinate trinitarian theology with key themes in Christian dogmatics.

Chapter 1

THE TRINITY

Introduction

As we have seen, Henri de Lubac calls the patristic theology he hoped to recover “symbolism,” a mode of theology that assumed a real union-in-distinction between symbols and what they symbolize. But de Lubac nowhere develops this idea systematically. The goal of this chapter is to begin such a systematic account by setting out the trinitarian structure of symbols. In the end, I will argue that the Trinity can be understood as symbolized–symbol–symbolism: the Father is symbolized in the Son, who is the Father’s replete self-expression in another. The Son, as the eternal Word, is thus the symbol of the Father, receiving the fullness of the Father’s being. The Spirit is symbolism, the fully personal agent of love and unity of symbol and symbolized. To arrive at this account, I engage three theologians: Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine of signs, Karl Rahner’s Christology of the symbol, and de Lubac’s pneumatological sacramentology.

De Lubac’s account of symbolism claims to arise from Augustine’s theology of signs: “Augustinian theology consisted in the consideration of ‘signs’ and ‘things’.”¹ I turn to Augustine, therefore, to begin this systematic theology of the symbol. Augustine’s early De magistro builds off an analysis of human learning to argue that only Christ can teach us the truth.² Christ is the origin both of all experience as creator and of all knowledge as illuminator, and so all experiences within creation are only finally meaningful in Christ. Yet this account remains abstract from the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Christ. In later works, Augustine will emphasize that it is specifically in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ that creaturely symbols are finally meaningful. In the incarnation the eternal Word becomes a creaturely symbol, and this renders all creation a symbol of God. The incarnation is intended to shape not only our concepts about God, but our desire and love for God. This is borne out in Augustine’s doctrine of the inner word. The inner word is the capacity of the mind for self-understanding and self-expression. But in order to be true, it must be begotten in right love. This inner word begotten in love is, Augustine thinks, an apt analogy for the Trinity. The Son can thus be conceived as a sign (for a word is a sign) that bears the fullness of the Father’s presence and is thus the symbol par excellence. The Spirit, then, is the fully personal agent of love and unity between symbolized and symbol. I will call this pneumatological dynamic, symbolism. Thus we could summarize Augustine’s Trinity with the triad, symbolized–symbol–symbolism, an apt analogy for Father–Son–Spirit.

I will then turn to Karl Rahner who expands Augustinian symbolism into a great chain of symbols: Father in the Son, the divinity of Christ in his humanity, Christ in church, church in sacrament, soul in body.³ The theology of the symbol, in Rahner’s hands, is given maximum theological scope, touching on everything that is. But Rahner’s theology of the symbol remains entirely dyadic—neglecting the role of the Holy Spirit. To reclaim a trinitarian theology of the symbol, we will need a pneumatology of signs.

To unfold the place of the Spirit in symbolic theology, I will turn finally to de Lubac’s theology of those two paradigmatic signs and things: sacraments and mysteries. De Lubac discovers three nuances between patristic usages of the words “mystery” and “sacrament.” Each nuance points toward the Spirit in a firmly Augustinian mode. First, mysteries are hidden within sacraments, as symbolized within symbol, giving rise to desire and love. Secondly, a mystery is the self-donation that makes a sacrament a sacrament, a gift from symbolized to symbol. Finally, a mystery is the nuptial union between sacraments and what they signify, so that symbol and symbolized are known together. Desire, gift, and unity, then, are the animating centers of de Lubac’s sacramentology, and while he rarely draws this link, are firmly Augustinian understandings of the Spirit. The Spirit is the active and personal agent of unity, internal to both Father and Son, Symbolized and Symbol, and wholly personal and hypostatic. This pneumatology then ensures that symbols are not arbitrarily related to the symbolized, for the Spirit is wholly internal to both symbolized and symbol. Between symbolized and symbol breathes the Spirit, the wholly personal and active agent of desire, gift, and union: symbolism itself. Creatures then participate in the Spirit by reading the symbols, uniting symbols to the divine symbolized, knowing God in all things and returning creation to God in praise. Beginning with Augustine’s Trinity, taking on the ontological and theological implications of Rahner’s Christology of the symbol and de Lubac’s pneumatology of symbolism, we arrive at the trinitarian triad: symbolized–symbol–symbolism. In the next chapter we will consider the implications of this for the created order, and this discussion of the Trinity will be deepened there as well, but I begin here to establish the basic trinitarian structure of symbols.

Augustine, Signs, and the Trinity

Augustine’s semiotics is a first on two accounts. He is the first to make a theory of signs coextensive with a theory of language, and he is the first to account for the role of a receiving subject or interpreter of the sign.⁴ Prior accounts, notably in sustained debate between Stoics and Epicureans, never tied a sign-theory so closely to a theory of language, and never recognized that the interpretive act is a key component of signification. These two insights make Augustine a seminal figure in the development of the philosophy of semiotics.⁵ In Augustine’s classic definition, “A sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind.”⁶ Three poles: a sign signifies something to someone. This tripartite structure is most obviously the case in human language, but in contemporary times has been applied to all life and even all physical existence.⁷ Augustine’s two breakthroughs set the stage for a full-fledged “semiotic point of view.”⁸

But Augustine’s point is never the sign theory. Semiotics is always a servant of his theology. So much is to be expected. But the more important point of Augustine’s theory of signs is that signification itself is a symbol, and therefore contemplation of the creaturely process of communication becomes a pathway of ascent into God. Semiotics itself must be “referred” to love of God and neighbor. It is the eternal source for which the structure of signification is a symbol that Augustine is after. Semiotics, in Augustine’s thought, modulates into a higher key, becoming a tool of anagogical ascent. Such modulations are not, however, the end of his semiotic discourse. Rather, semiotics is universalized, coextensive with creation, and rooted in eternal generation and procession. If the extensiveness of Augustine’s semiotics is a breakthrough, which it certainly is, then it is theology that enables such an extension. This accounts for the difficulty of extracting from Augustine a sign-theory for its own sake. It simply does not exist for its own sake. Indeed, Augustine would argue that to stop at a semiotics qua semiotics would be to fail to go where semiotics itself leads: “It is a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things.”⁹ A philosophy of signs, Augustine would say, should lead us into the divine life in which all signification analogically participates. I will therefore follow Augustine in ascent from an analysis of signs and signification, to the precondition of external signs in inner words begotten in love, to the eternal life of God. Humans beget inner words in love; the Father speaks the Word in the Spirit. Reflection on the former will lead to greater participation in the latter.

From Him …

How may we understand the Trinity if it is so utterly beyond all creaturely reality? We are temporal creatures, and all our knowledge arises through processes of signification. We require signs to understand. But how then can we know the triune God who is ineffably beyond our signifying capacity? Augustine consistently returns to this difficulty in different forms, and while his position is refined throughout his career, his answer consistently turns on a logic of presence. We come know God through signs because signification itself is a finite participation in the eternal speaking of the Word. It is the presence of eternal truth itself to both the mind and that which the mind seeks to understand that renders signification possible and revelatory.¹⁰ Signs are thus always more than “mere” signs, for they can only be recognized as signs by their participation in God.

This insight is developed in an early treatment of language and signs. In De magistro Augustine reflects in dialogue with his son on the problem of learning.¹¹ Two axioms arise from his discussion: everything we learn, we learn by signs, but we only know the meanings of signs by the things they signify. An experience of things without signs would be an undifferentiated pile of sensation; an experience of signs without things would be nothing but empty noise. But how then do we learn, if we can know neither signs without things nor things without signs? Which comes first? Augustine solves this aporia christologically. Christ, as the source of all that is, operates on both sides of the sign–thing distinction: he is the creative source of each thing, and the illumination that makes signs meaningful. Christ is the Inner Teacher in whom the simultaneous knowledge of signs and things arises.¹² Thus, for Augustine, neither human teachers of signs, nor the accumulated effects of experience, can ever teach anything to the human mind unless joined together by Christ; we have no other teacher.

Robert Markus argues that this solution “short-circuits” the development of Augustine’s semiotics.¹³ Augustine, according to Markus, is on the cusp of realizing that our experiences and the language we use to narrate and understand them arise together and are co-constitutive, but Augustine stops short to pursue his own christological purposes. The concern of De Magistro is christological, so Markus does not fault him for making his theory of signs auxiliary to Christology. But had Augustine not reached so quickly for christological resolution, Markus argues, he might have seen that sign-systems themselves coordinate signs and significata, without requiring christic mediation. Augustine has almost, but not entirely “broken through the barrier between signs and significata, the mutual externality to each other of language and experience.”¹⁴ Indeed, Augustine does not make this breakthrough. But Markus’s observation (it is not quite, for Markus, a critique) risks missing the point. Markus is right that there is no mutual externality of language and experience, but neither is there, for Augustine, any mutual externality of Christ the Interior Teacher and the human mind, and therefore no mutual externality of Christology and semiotics. Markus is attempting to reconstruct Augustine’s semiotics independent of christological concerns, a goal that he acknowledges is not really possible.¹⁵ In building an Augustinian semiotics qua semiotics, he methodically ignores Augustine’s point that semiotics is christological, and his christological solution is no less semiotic for its Christology. Christology is not an alien solution to a native semiotic problem, so that invoking the former interrupts the latter.

This would be an alien solution to a semiotic problem if Christ were alien to the human mind and the created order, since he would be performing a function in place of the mind, competitively replacing its native (in)capacities. But christic illumination is not extrinsic to the human capacity to learn. Christology is woven into the very fabric of anthropology, so that the union of sign and thing in Christ is what sustains their union in the human mind. Yet the intellect does not end where christic illumination begins. The paradox is that this christic dynamism is both wholly the work of Christ and natural to the human mind; because Christ is both creator and illuminator, all functions of the human mind are finite participations in his eternal reality as Logos. His ongoing work is wholly interior to the mind, so that there is no competition between Christ’s work of illumination and the human act of understanding. To think is to be ontologically related to the Logos in this human way. This means that Augustine’s christological resolution is not thereby not semiotic resolution. It is fully semiotic because fully human. Signs and things are unified in Christ and therefore arise in a single act of human understanding.

Thus, it is not quite true that language and experience remain mutually external to one another in De magistro. Augustine’s negative claim that neither experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Statement of Copyright
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Trinity
• Chapter 2: Creation
• Chapter 3: Anthropology
• Chapter 4: Ecclesiology
• Chapter 5: Toward Mystical Reason
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint