Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.

Our task is to read Augustine after Heidegger, in a double sense: first, chronologically, returning to read Augustine after having passed through Heidegger, re-reading the Confessions after reading Being and Time. But in a second hermeneutical sense, we are reading Augustine after Heidegger; that is, we are reading Augustine after/as Heidegger read him in the period of his earliest development. By doing so, we mean to let Heidegger’s sketch of factical life (Existenz) function as a “hermeneutical situation” of our reading of Augustine as well indicate the way in which Augustine’s Confessions functions as a horizon for Being and Time.

The impetus for returning to Augustine is found in Heidegger’s turn to the doctor gratiae in his early work on the phenomenology of religion. In the young Heidegger’s work in the phenomenology of religion, it is as much phenomenology as religion which is at stake; that is, the rigorous questions of phenomenological method find a limit case in the consideration of religious experience. Thus, a phenomenology of religion functions as something of a ‘testing ground’ for phenomenology understood as a hermeneutics of facticity. As Jean Greisch has noted, these “questions of method, which have an effect on the philosophy of religion, primarily take up the question of the status of phenomenology itself, and even the status of philosophy itself in the sense of an appropriate conceptuality.”

Why do Christians celebrate the Paschal Mystery again and again? “We did it last year,” one might say, “Why do it again?” One reason, of course, is the need to deepen our understanding and appreciation of what is in fact the heart of the Christian religion; and from this point of view the Mystery unfolds in two distinct phases. The first phase is linked with the catechumenate (RCIA). The entire Christian community is invited to journey through Lent toward Easter in company with the candidates for Baptism, who are in the last stage of their preparation for sacramental initiation into the Body of Christ. Here the obvious intention is to promote in the community at large a progressively deeper spiritual plunge into the Mystery of Christ’s Death and Rising. The second phase of the Mystery encompasses the fifty days following Easter, and culminates with Pentecost Sunday. During this period there is a cycle of readings from the Johannine gospel, which taken as a whole constitutes a second catechesis. Here the Catechist is the Risen Christ himself. The teaching unfolds in three stages. It begins with the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus on New Birth (Jn 3); then there is his discourse on the Bread of Life (Jn 6); and finally the words he spoke in the Upper Room, which reveal the Gift of the Spirit (Jn 14-17). Taken together these readings are a profound instruction on the Church’s two-fold endowment of Sacrament and Spirit.