LUIGI GIOIA – “AUGUSTINE’S INQUISITIO: A THEOLOGICAL ISSUE” - PATRISTIC CONGRESS 2003 - i THE STRUCTURE OF AUGUSTINE’S INQUISITIO IN THE DE TRINITATE: A THEOLOGICAL ISSUE 1 The starting point of Augustine’s inquisitio in the De Trinitate is often located in a formal concept of the Trinity, the result of creedal statements, at least a step removed from Scripture. Then, Augustine’s aim is interpreted as an attempt to find an ‘analogue’ or an ‘illustration’ of the Trinity, or to fill a too abstract approach to the Trinitarian mystery. We can gather these criticisms under the same label and refer to them as the ‘analogical line of interpretation’ of Augustine’s Trinitarian theology. Parallel to this ‘analogical line’, another cluster of attempts to devise an encompassing criterion to explain Augustine’s approach to the mystery of the Trinity could be labelled ‘anagogical line of interpretation’. According to it, Augustine leads his reader along a ‘soteriology of ascent’, more or less dependent on Plotinian philosophy, characterized by commentators as “an attempt at a direct “ascent” from the consideration of that which is created to the contemplation –the Plotininan noesis- of the Creator” or again as “an extended exercise of the mind in the ‘non corporeal’ mode of thinking with which the Trinity will ultimately be grasped”. 2 Whether Augustine’s method in the De Trinitate is described in analogical or anagogical terms or as a combination of both, these accounts have in common the following features: - they struggle to explain the unity of the De Trinitate and either they are based on one particular section of it or they simply assume that the treatise is not unified - attempts of interpretations almost exclusively concentrate on the books 8-14, most of the time taking for granted that there is a radical turn in the argument at the end of book 8 1 The argument of this communication is developed in the forthcoming book: Luigi Gioia, The theological epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate, OUP, Oxford 2008. 2 Cf. John Cavadini, “The structure and intention of Augustine’s De Trinitate”, Augustinian Studies 23 (1992), 106.