The Gift of Love: Augustine Jean-Luc Marion and the Trinity (Emerging Scholars)

The Gift of Love explores the intelligibility of Augustines claim that we come to know and encounter God in and through our love.Building upon the discoveries of recent scholarship Andrew Staron reads Augustines De Trinitate 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 Gods initiative indicates that the Trinitarian God of love is knowable only through attention to how Gods self-revelation transforms and saves us. Therefore to see God one seeks to mark loves formative activity within the heart. Jean-Luc Marions rigorous description of the gift of love offers to Augustines theology a phenomenological texture by which the Trinitarian love given in revelation might be made incarnate in ones life. The Gift of Love 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 Gods antecedent gift of love given in the missions Son and Holy Spirit and iconically received in the particularity of ones own love.