3. Vestigium Trinitatis
The third and final section of I/1/8 is shorter than the second by far –and deals with an issue (or the issue) in such a manner that Barth’s urgency in Parts 1 and 2 of this chapter becomes clearer. This is an ideal example of the way that a practical problem that Barth face brings greater clarity to his argument.
In a nutshell (and as a recapitulation): Barth is inquiring about the root or basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, and he finds it in the biblical concept of revelation. (N.B. he does not say doctrine of revelation, but concept.) In its simplest form, the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded biblical concept summed up in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit which is implicit in Scripture but not developed explicitly there. (Famously, the word Trinity never appears in the New Testament.) Barth strongly insists that the doctrine is grounded (rooted) only in the biblical concept of revelation —it has no other basis. The claim that it has some other basis reduces the doctrine to a myth, a religious expression of human need, and denies the free God who reveals as he conceals and vice versa.
Barth is always at great pains to separate the church’s doctrine and dogmatics (formal doctrinal teachings) from philosophy in general and especially particular philosophies then on offer in German universities –Hegelian, neo-Hegelian, existential, Kantian, the outright romanticism of Schelling, or anything else. (Barth could not have known about later analytical philosophy based in the work of Wittgenstein, since Ludwig himself was only sharpening his critique outside of academic in the 1920s.)
Barth encounters this problem: historically (in the western, Latin church and its heritage), the doctrine of the Trinity grew to maturity in the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine frankly imported a great many ideas from neo-Platonism associated with Plotinus and others in Late Antiquity. (Also a phrase which did not exist in Barth’s time: see the work of Peter Brown.) Augustine had his reasons for doing so in that Late Antique context. But his work authorized a strong tendency in the theologies which counted him as an ancestor (including Calvin and Luther) both to critique philosophy harshly and to import its ideas that seemed useful. Some of those ideas derived from the Late Ancient sense that the ideal forms that constitute and authorize human reality have dimensions which suggest their origins in God. This sense can be seen above all in St. Augustine’s idea of vestigium Trinitatis –a vestige or implication or trace of God the Creator as Trinity, such that such traces might be perceptible to a faithful mind, and perhaps even a mind outside the faith. This phrase vestigium Trinitatis has enabled nearly endless trouble in the history of theology and controversy in the history of the Church.
What Barth does not want to do above all is to smuggle into the church’s dogmatics any sense that its doctrines are based in anything other than the Word of God revealed through Scripture. The idea of a vestigium Trinitatis seems to do just that –so that Barth has to refine and delimit any real sense that this phrase might have if his project of measuring the Church’s proclamation against the revealed Word of God in Holy Scripture is to succeed.
Barth cites St. Augustine very careful from the Confessions, The City of God, and especially De Trinitate chapters IX-XI. Specifically he cites De Trinitate VI, 10:
Therefore it is appropriate that in contemplating the Creator, who is known through those things which have been created, we should also know the Trinity, of which, as is fitting, a trace appears in the creature. For the supreme cause of all things is in the Trinity, the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight…. Whoever sees this, though only in a part or through a glass darkly, should rejoice in the knowledge of God and so honor and give thanks to God; but whoever does not see should in piety strain toward seeing.
[Oportet igitur, ut creatorem per ea quae facta sunt intellectum conspicientes, trinitatem intelligamus, cuius in creatura, quomodo dignum est, apparet vestigium. In illa enim trinitate summa origo est rerum omnium et perfectissima pulchritudo et beatissima delectatio…. Qui videt hoc vel ex parte, vel per speculum et in aenigmate, gaudeat cognoscens Deum et sicut Deum honoret et gratias agat: qui autem non videt, tendat per pietatem ad videndum.]
Barth sums up:
The concern here was with an essential trinitarian disposition supposedly immanent in some created realities quite apart from their possible conscription by God’s revelation. It was with a genuine analogia entis, with traces of the trinitarian Creator God in being as such, in its pure createdness. If it be acknowledged that there are vestigia trinitatis in this second sense then the question obviously arises—and this is why we must discuss the matter in the present context—whether we do not have to assume a second root of the doctrine of the Trinity along-side the one we have indicated in the previous sub-section. The vestigium trinitatis would patently have to be considered as a second root of this kind if there is such a thing in the second sense of the term. (I/1/334-335)
This view would or will import a “second root” of the doctrine of the Trinity, and fatally weaken Barth’s entire project of correcting Church proclamation by the measuring rod of the revealed Word of God, understood in its three-fold form. And we would be back at natural theology (“a genuine analogia entis“), and the idea of the Word of God as a human myth that is attempting to express a human truth about transcendent wisdom –in short, the very liberal theology which Barth found so wanting through his experiences during and after the First World War.
Do we not have in this idea of the vestigium trinitatis an ancient Trojan horse which one day (for the sake of pulchritudo and delectatio, to echo Augustine) was unsuspectingly allowed entry into the theological Ilium, and in whose belly—so much more alert have certain experiences made us since Augustine’s day—we can hear a threatening clank, so that we have every cause to execute a defensive movement—perhaps there is no more we can do here—by declaring, perhaps only very naively, that we do not want to have anything to do with it? (I/1/336-337)
Barth seems unable simply to say: St. Augustine made a mistake. Instead, he patiently attends to the facts of the case (quaestio facti) like a good scholar. Following Herman Bavinck’s Gereformeerde Dogmatiek, Barth supplies examples from five spheres in theological traditions: nature, culture (which means literature in this case), history, religion (especially with regard to religious consciousness descended from Pseudo-Dionysis’ texts and well as liberal German theologians such as Wobbermin), and the human soul (especially that strand of religious psychology descended from Augustine.
From these examples in these spheres Barth first attempts to think “in which it was originally intended, namely, as an interesting, edifying, instructive and helpful hint towards understanding the Christian doctrine, not to be overrated, not to be used as a proof in the strict sense.” (I/1/338) These examples depend upon a Christian already knowing and believing the Trinity in order to perceive the vestigia: they are the second-order phenomona. Luther’s various statements “are certainly not to be regarded as a theological basis but simply as theological table-talk.” (I/1/339) Faint praise: “we need not regard [them] as an idle game, no matter how trifling . . .” (ibid.)
Nevertheless, Barth for the moment concedes that “there must be ‘something in’ the connection between the Trinity and all the “trinities” to which reference is made in the examples. (ibid.) This “something” seems to be inherent to the creaturely limits of human language, which is the only language we have, however imperfect it may be for theological reflection: is this a vestige of human meaning-making, or something ascribed “from without” and “we really come to speak of revelation . . . [as] things for which [human] speech as such as no aptitude whatever. But those who proposed various vestigia did not make such a distinction. For Barth, “the true vestigium trinitatis is the form assumed by God in revelation,” which was not the viewpoint of the Fathers and the Scholastics. (ibid.)
They were in search of language for the mystery of God which was known to them by revelation, which, as they constantly repeated, was known to them only by revelation, and which could be made known to all men only by revelation. In this search for language, the first materials they encountered apart from those offered by the Bible consisted, as is known, in a number of applicable abstract categories from the philosophy of the day. (I/1/340)
They were saying something quite different from their surface meaning: not that language could grasp revelation, but that revelation (properly understood) could grasp language. The images of vestigia were not in themselves suitable for such dogmatic purpose, but “they were adapted to be appropriated or, as it were, commandeered as images of the Trinity, as ways of speaking about the Trinity.” (ibid.) The crucial distinction is what is compared with what: not that source, stream, and lake are related to one another in the same way as Father, Son, and Spirit, but that that Father, Son, and Spirit are related in the same way as source, stream, and lake. (I/1/341). Ancient and Scholastic writers “did not believe that the Trinity is immanent in things and that things have the capability of reflecting the Trinity.” (ibid.) But they had confidence that “the Trinity can reflect itself in things, and all the more or less felicitous discoveries of vestigia were an expression of this confidence, not of confidence in the capacity of reason for revelation but of confidence in the power of revelation over reason.” Understood in this manner, the “doctrine” (better: image?) “of the vestigia is no playing with words.” (ibid.)
Barth grants that it may seem to be playing with words. A discovered intimation inadvertently became a self-conceived proof, and the idea of a second root of the doctrine of the Trinity could take hold. In a long excursus Barth traces various concepts from the history of religions, Feuerbach, and others. “The moment [these versions of doctrine of the vestigia] is taken seriously it leads plainly and ineluctably into an ambivalent sphere in which in a trice, even with the best will in the world, we are no longer speaking of the God of whom we want to speak and whose traces we meant to find but of some principle of the world or humanity, of some alien God.” (I/1/334)
In the end, Barth comes down to the distinction between interpretation and illustration. “Interpretation means saying the same thing in other words. Illustration means saying the same thing in other words. Where the lines is to be drawn between the two cannot be stated generally. But there is a line . . .” (I/1/346). Barth recognizes that he came close to crossing it: “in the previous subsection we sought to arrange the biblical concept of revelation under the aspects of veiling, unveiling and impartation we came remarkably close to the fatal Augustinian argument.” (ibid.)
Barth concludes by taking note of the line, the boundary, the fatal crossing from interpretation to illustration that cannot be entirely avoided but must be acknowledged and attended to carefully. “Theological language is not free to venture anything and everything. When we reflect on the crisis in which we always stand and which we can never escape, we will make distinctions in what we do.” (I/1/347)
In the last resort, at the same risk as all the rest, including the finders of the ancient vestigia trinitatis, we can only try to point to the fact that the root of the doctrine of the Trinity lies in revelation, and that it can lie only in this if it is not to become at once the doctrine of another and alien god, of one of the gods, the man-gods, of this aeon, if it is not to be a myth.(ibid.)
What Barth rejects is the pointer in the vestigia trinitatis –that it obscures more than it helps. “[W]e shall finally confront the doctrine of the vestigia with a very simple and unassuming No . . . a No whose power stands or falls with the fact that we relate it also and not least to ourselves, and in the last resort we delicately leave it unproved.” (I/1/348) Barth concludes with pointing out “a true vestigium trinitatis in creatura,” which “consists in the form which God Himself in His revelation has assumed in our language, world, and humanity. What we hear when with our human ears and concepts we listen to God’s revelation, what we perceive (and can perceive as men) in Scripture, what proclamation of the Word of God actually is in our lives—is the thrice single voice of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.” (ibid.) It is better described as vestigium creaturae in trinitate, and it is entirely consistent with finding the one root of the doctrine of the Trinity in biblical revelation.
Barth neither solved nor resolved the problem of theological language — that doctrinal theology cannot begin to grasp revelation without using human concepts formed elsewhere. What, after all, is “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” if not an original and authorized interpretation? Barth charactereistically refuses to assimilate theology to human experience, but rather finds in doctrinal theology a marker, a vestige of human experience. The powerful encounter of the living God with a human does not render God as merely conceivable in human terms, but renders human terms in the measure of God’s living Word. This is a characteristic motif in Barth’s thinking: the great reversal of terms, the absolute priority and initiative of the Divine over the human.