The Origins of Trinitarian Anthropology. Man as an Image of God in Augustine’s “De Trinitate”

Abstract

In this essay, the theological-anthropological foundations of a trinitarian anthropology of technology, which can be found in the Augustinian trinitarian interpretation of the concept of the image of God, are presented in their most important basic features. According to Augustine, man is the image of the Trinity in that his mind has a certain tripartite relational structure, the members of which Augustine first describes with the terms mens, notitia and amor (De Trinitate, Book IX), then with memoria, intellectus and voluntas (Book X). The main thesis of this text is that, contrary to extant proto-Cartesian or psychologistic interpretations, this is a genuinely biblical, Pauline anthropology in which the constitution of the human mind cannot be separated from its grace-imbued destiny to participation in the Divine.