The Gift of Love

<p><b>The Gift of Love</b> explores the intelligibility of Augustines claim that we come to know and encounter God in and through our love.</p><p>Building upon the discoveries of recent scholarship Andrew Staron reads Augustine's <b>De Trinitate</b> 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 <b>transforms and saves us</b>. 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. <b>The Gift of Love</b> 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 ones own love.</p>