La guerra di Ferrara (1482-1484) come banco di prova per la duchessa:

It is a truism to state that Augustine (354-430) is the most influential Latin patristic theologian, that his immense influence, particularly during the medieval period which shall be the main focus of this study, was nearly ubiquitous, and that it is

impossible to understand the course of western Christianity without taking his work into account. What is much less obvious is the tremendous impact that his Christological thought played in the West, and the centrality of the kenotic hymn of Philippians to a significant portion of that thought. This critical lacuna can at least be partly attributed to the fact that Augustine did not devote any one treatise to a systematic adumbration of his whom He was sanctified; it means the Man in whom He was anointed; it means the Man in whom He was made under the law, made of the Virgin; and, to put it briefly, it means the Man in whose person He has a mother, as it is written: “O Lord, I am Your Servant, I am Your Servant, and the Son of Your hand-maid;” and again: “I am cast down and sore humbled.”

59 Ambrose, De incarnationis Dominicae sacramento, 6.54. See J. Warren Smith, Christian Grace and Pagan Virtue: The Theological Foundation of Ambrose's Ethics, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 85-86 and Beeley, Unity of Christ, p. 234.

Christology, but rather scattered his thoughts on the person and mission of Christ

throughout many works over many years. Yet, as we shall see, Augustine’s ruminations on the Son of God, and the value he placed on Philippians 2:5-11 as one of the key hermeneutical principles for understanding the identity and saving work of the incarnate Word, proved to be decisive in the development of Medieval Latin Christology up to the time of Aquinas.

Ambrose played a pivotal role in Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, and while the Bishop of Milan’s works were an important theological resource for the future Bishop of Hippo, and there are even some notable points of correspondence between Augustine and Ambrose on the particular significance of the Son’s exinanio, especially in the way that both men will use the kenotic hymn in formulating anti-homoian

Christologies, they nevertheless have a number of significantly divergent points of view.

Perhaps the most conspicuous influence can be seen in Augustine’s adoption of

Ambrose’s phrase “twin-substanced giant” from De fide and De incarnationis Dominicae sacramento (a reference to Psalm 19:5 [Vulgate 18:6]: Exsultavit ut gigas ad currendam viam), in an attempt refute the homoian arguments contained in a contemporary Arian Sermon, by pointing out that Christ “was not only a human being, but also God; indeed, he revealed that there was only one person [personam] in both natures [natura]—namely, of God and a human being—lest, if he should form two persons, a quaternity should come to exist rather than a trinity! So there are twin substances, but one person (gemina quidem substantia, sed una persona est)!”⁶⁰ Here, with his incisive use of person and

60 “Hoc est, non tantum homo, verum etiam Deus erat. Unam quippe ostendit esse personam in utraque natura, hoc est, Dei et hominis, ne si duas faciat, quaternitas incipiat esse, non trinitas. Quoniam itaque gemina quidem substantia, sed una persona est.” Augustine, Contra sermonen Arianorum liber unus, 7.6, J.P. Minge, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, Vol. 42 (Paris: 1844). Hereafter referred to as PL.

natures terminology, Augustine almost seems to anticipate the Chalcedonian doctrinal formulations of the fifth century.⁶¹ Even more striking, according to Augustine, is the fact that within the personal unity of Christ the distinctive integrity of both natures are nevertheless sustained. This insight will in turn serve Augustine as the theological basis for a robust defense of the communicatio idiomatum, as when the Bishop of Hippo goes on to boldly asserts that Christ on the cross is none other than the “crucified God.”⁶² The humanity of Christ was and remains complete, undiminished both in body and soul by its union with the Son, and very much like Origen before him, for Augustine the human soul is the connecting link between the forma Dei of the divine Word, and the forma servi of Christ the man.⁶³ Indeed, the relationship of the soul to the body will become a dominant Christological analogy for Augustine, exemplifying the intimate yet unconfused union of divinity and humanity in the enfleshed person.

In time, Augustine comes to describe this assumption of humanity as the

“bearing’’ (gerere, agere) of a human being; or, inspired no doubt by the Latin of Philippians 2:7 (sed semet ipsum exinanivit formam servi accipiens in similitudinem hominum factus et habitu inventus ut homo), as the putting on of a human body by the Word in a manner analogous to our putting on a garment (habitus).⁶⁴ We can see this sort

61 See Brian E. Daley, “The Giant’s Twin Substances: Ambrose and the Christology of Augustine’s Contra sermonem Arianorum,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, eds. J.T.

Lienhard, E.C. Muller, R.J. Teske (New York, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 477-496.

62 Sermo, 213.4.

63 Origen, On First Pronciples, 2.6.3-6; for Augustine, c.f. De diversis quaestionibus octaginta tribus 83, q.80.1.

64 See, for example, Sermo 263.3A, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, vol. 38, col. 1211:

Nam et illud nonnullos calumniantibus haereticis movet, quemadmodum Dominus sine corpora descendent, cum corpore ascenderit; velut contrarium sit illis verbis quibus ait: Nemo ascendit in caelum, nisi qui de caelo descendit. Corpus ergo, inquiunt, quod non descendit de caelo, quomodo potuit ascendere in caelum? Quasi ille dixerit: Nihil ascendit in caelum, nisi quod de caelo descendit; sed ait: Nemo ascendit, nisi qui descendit. Hoc enim ad personam, non ad personae habitum retulit. Descendit sine corporis indumento, ascendit cum corporis indumento; nemo tamen, nisi qui descendit, ascendit. Nam si nos sibimet tamquam sua membra ita coaptavit, ut etiam nobis coniunctis idem ipse sit; quanto magis illud corpus, quod de virgine assumpsit, aliam non potest in illo habere personam?; and Sermo 264.7, PL vol. 38, col. 1214: “sed quid fecit? semetipsum, ait, exinaniuit,

of exegesis in Augustine’s reading of Philippians 2: 6-7 in question 73 of De diversis quaestionibus, wherein he endeavors to explicate how the eternal, immutable, and invisible Word could assume a mutable, visible human nature in time. As Augustine indicates, it is “clear that habit (habitus) refers to that thing which is added (accidit) to someone in such a way that he could just as well not have it.”⁶⁵ Augustine then proceeds to enumerate four ways in which a habitus may be added to someone or something. In the first way, the habitus is in itself unchanged, but changes the recipient, as the wisdom acquired by a fool changes him into a wise man. According to Augustine’s second example, there is a way in which both the habitus and the recipient are changed, as food is changed when we take it into our body, and the food also effects a change in our body when it is consumed. In Augustine’s third way, the recipient remains unchanged, but the habitus is changed, as a garment changes its shape when it is put on by its wearer. In the fourth example, neither the habitus nor the recipient are changed, as—for example—

neither the ring nor the finger are changed when a ring is put on a finger. Augustine then adds that with respect to what pertains to his divinity, the Son is equal to the Father and remains so, retaining his form Dei even while emptying himself and taking on the “form of a servant” (forma servi).⁶⁶ The habitus referenced in v.7 of the hymn must therefore be an example of the third type, in which a garment is altered by the shape of the wearer, for Christ

took up humanity in such a way that it was transformed for the better, and it was so formed (formaretur) by him in a manner more ineffably

formam serui accipiens; in similitudinem hominum factus, et habitu inuentus ut homo: humiliauit se, factus obediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis.

65 Manifestum est in ea re dici habitum, quae accidit alicui, ita ut eam possit etiam non habere.

66 Q.v.: “Our Lord Jesus Christ is to be understood to be God’s Son, both equal to the Father by the form of God in which he is, and less than the Father by the form of a servant which he took.” De Trinitatte. II, 2 [98].

excellent and intimate than in a garment when put on by a man. Thus, by this name habit (habitus), the Apostle has clearly indicated what he meant by saying “having been made in human likeness” (Philippian 2:7:

in similitudinem hominum factus), because he became a man not by way of transformation, but by way of a habit (habitus) when he was clothed by a humanity which he, in some way uniting and adapting to himself, joined to his immortality and eternity.⁶⁷

This articulation of the pre-existent Son’s dual-natured Incarnation, whereby he retains essential equality with the Father’s divinity, while assuming a fully human

manner of being in the world, allows Augustine to rebut the anti-Nicene exegesis of those contested scriptural passages often employed by homoian polemicists to prove that the Son’s human limitations disclose his ontological subordination. According to Augustine, these misguided readings miss out on the central soteriological and exegetical point of the biblical accounts, which is that the Incarnation and its kerygmatic proclamation in the words of Scripture are both given for our salvation; they are both equally constitutive features of the Christological pro nobis through which we are saved. Thus, for Augustine, the kenotic narrative in Philippians 2:6-7—which proclaims how Christ, being found in the form of God, emptied himself (ipsum exinanivit), assumed a servant-form, and was made in the likeness of men—summarizes a hermeneutical principle, a regula, whereby one can understand Christ as one subject who may be spoken of as he is eternally and as he is having assumed human flesh.⁶⁸ Moreover, Augustine’s interpretation shows us that the kenotic hymn also serves as a summary of the entire incarnational mission within the economy of salvation. Thus, to accept a partitive exegesis in which Scripture speaks of

67 Sic enim assumptus est, ut commutaretur in melius, et ab eo formaretur ineffabiliter excellentius atque coniunctius quam vestis ab homine cum induitur. Hoc ergo nomine habitus satis significavit Apostolus, quemadmodum dixerit in similitudinem hominum factus, quia non transfiguratione in hominem, sed habitu factus est, cum indutus est hominem quem sibi uniens quodammodo atque conformans immortalitati aeternitatique sociaret.

68 Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, “Canonica regula: The Trinitarian Hermeneutics of Augustine,” in eds. J.C.

Schnaubel and F. van Fleteren, Collectanea Augustiniana, I, Augustine: ‘Second Founder of the Faith’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 329-343.

the Son in both forma servi and in forma Dei is also to accept a “narrative of salvation in which Christ comes to purify and reshape the attention of human beings towards eternal contemplation of and in the incorporeal and invisible divine” persons of the triune God.⁶⁹

The Word’s enfleshment, then, was brought about because “it was impossible for him to be found as God by those who had unclean hearts,” and therefore it was

“impossible for them to see the Word with the Father except by his assuming something which they could see, and something by which they might be led to that inner light.”⁷⁰ If those obsessed with the material world and its visual objects—those with “unclean

hearts”—were incapable of seeing the forma Dei of Christ, then it was equally impossible for them to see how the Son was equal to the Father unless God’s Word took on a

material form in the world—a forma servi—through which they might be led to see with the inner illumination of faith. Hence, for Augustine, the very movement from

materialist illusion to contemplation of the divine is an innate aspect of the purification that is salvation, a movement mediated through and occurring in the two-natured Christ.

By “his very nativity,” God made an “eye-salve to cleanse the eyes of our heart, and to enable us to see his majesty by means of his humility;” through Christ’s humble

69 Lewis Ayers, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 154. See also Mark D. Jordan, “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana,”

Augustinian Studies 11 (1980), pp. 177-196; Goulven Madec, La Patrie et la voie: Le Christ dans la vie et la pensée de saint Augustin (Paris: Desclée, 1989); Basil Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism?, trans. M.J. O’Connell (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997); Joseph S. O’Leary, “The Invisible Mission of the Son in Origen and Augustine,” in eds. W. Beinert and U. Kühneweg, Origeniana Septima (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), pp. 605-622; Michel René Barnes, “Visible Christ and Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400,” Modern Theology 19:3 (2003), pp. 329-355; Kari Kloos, “Seeing the Invisible God: Augustine’s Reconfiguration of Theophany Narrative Exegesis,” Augustinian Studies 26 (2005), pp. 397-420; Luigi Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of

Augustine’s De Trinitate, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jean-Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de saint Augustin (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008); Ronnie Rombs, “Augustine on Christ,” in eds. C.C. Pecknold and T. Toom, T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), pp. 36-53.

70 De diversis quaestionibus, q.73.2: Non enim poterat inveniri ab his, qui cor immundum habebant et Verbum apud Patrem videre non poterant, nisi hoc suscipiendo quod possent videre, et per quod ad illud lumen interius ducerentur.

assumption of humanity God’s glory is revealed and grace is mediated to humanity;

indeed, no one can see the Word’s glory “unless they are healed by the humility of his flesh.”⁷¹ Christ is both exemplum, a model we are called to imitate, and via, the way through which we participate in the grace of God, for it is through the servant-like humility of Christ’s humanity, humble and obedient even unto death on a cross, the very humility that Paul advocated to his Philippian interlocutors, that we are healed of our blind pridefulness, and it is by Christ as the source of participatory grace that we are integrated into God’s divine plan of mercy realized by the enfleshed Son, and find our way, through the via humilitatis, to the final unmediated vision of the form Dei, the Father’s divine glory.⁷²