The Gift of Love
Augustine, Jean-Luc Marion, and the Trinity
- Theology
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2017
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Publisher's Description
The Gift of Love explores the intelligibility of Augustine’s claim that we come to know and encounter God in and through our love. 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.
Endorsements (3)
““The Gift of Love shows us, in three large steps, how to read Augustine's great book De Trinitate. After a thorough examination of the text, we pass to an equally detailed consideration of Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of givenness, and then, at last, Augustine's meaning becomes clearer than before. We cannot receive the triune God in terms of our concepts; rather, we must allow ourselves to receive Him as He gives himself, and in so doing be transformed in ways we cannot anticipate and control. A remarkable performance!"”
“This is a fine contribution to the central contemporary theological conversation on thinking the Trinitarian God today. Staron provides his own original contribution through a sustained and critical conversation with Augustine and Jean-Luc Marion. An erudite and important study.”
“While solidly built on previous research, Staron’s monograph decisively refreshes the interpretation of Augustine’s De Trinitate. His crystal clear and balanced analysis captures the heart of key counterintuitive aspects of the De Trinitate, especially with regards to the primacy of love and grace in the knowledge of God, and is a model of philosophical theology.”
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