Farrell’s Reading of Augustine

Farrell reads Augustine as the fountainhead of the Second Europe: the theologian whose account of absolute divine simplicity and relations-of-opposition installed “dialectic” in the Western doctrine of God and made the Filioque inevitable. This file expounds that reading and locates it precisely on the spectrum of Orthodox opinion already mapped in the repository’s Augustine collection — where Farrell belongs to the maximalist-critique pole, alongside Romanides, and against the appreciative readings of Seraphim Rose and the Orthodox Readings of Augustine scholars.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”; modern theological literature)

Farrell’s Augustine

In God, History, and Dialectic, Augustine is not one influence among many but the hinge of Western history. Farrell’s reading has a clear structure:

Augustine’s doctrine of God is governed by absolute divine simplicity. God is the one simple essence, identical with his attributes, without real internal distinction (see Absolute Divine Simplicity). This premise, drawn in part from Augustine’s Neoplatonic formation, sets the whole subsequent trajectory.
The persons therefore become subsistent relations of opposition within that essence, defined by mutual negation rather than by origin from the Father (see The Two Triadologies). The essence is made primary; the monarchy of the Father is lost.
The Filioque follows necessarily, because the Spirit can be distinguished from the Son within the simple essence only by a relation of origin-opposition — proceeding from the Son as well as the Father (see The Filioque as Watershed).
Dialectic is thereby lodged at the source, and works itself out through the whole culture of the Second Europe (see What “Dialectic” Means; The Cultural Consequences).

On this reading Augustine’s errors are not local blemishes but a system — a coherent and generative deviation whose consequences are the entire theological pathology of the West. This is the strongest possible form of the anti-Augustinian thesis: Augustine as the single root of a civilizational disease.

Where This Sits on the Orthodox Spectrum

The repository’s Augustine collection has already mapped the full range of responsible Orthodox opinion on Augustine, and Farrell’s reading must be located on that map rather than treated as if it were simply “the Orthodox view” (see St. Augustine: The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). That map runs from a critical pole — Fr. John Romanides, who read Augustine’s theology as a deep and systematic “Franco-Latin” deviation, sharpened by Vladimir Lossky’s account of the Filioque — to an appreciative pole — Fr. Seraphim Rose’s pastoral defense in The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church (1983), the scholarly revisionism of Orthodox Readings of Augustine (Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, 2008), and Andrew Louth’s balanced mainstream reading.

Farrell belongs unmistakably to the maximalist end of the critical pole. He stands with Romanides — indeed he pushes the Romanides line further into a total theological history — in treating Augustine’s theology as a system, a coherent deviation whose logic generates the whole Western trajectory. Where Lossky is measured and largely dogmatic, and where Romanides is polemical but concentrated on a set of doctrinal points (original sin as inherited guilt, the eudaimonistic conception of God, the loss of the essence-energies distinction, the Filioque), Farrell attempts the most systematic and most sweeping version of the critique: Augustine as the fount not merely of theological error but of a civilization’s pathology. He is the maximalist-critique pole’s fullest development.

This placement is important for two reasons. First, it means Farrell’s reading is a recognized, serious Orthodox position — not a fringe eccentricity — but one position within a genuinely contested field, not the settled mind of the Church. The Church confesses that Augustine is a saint (Blessed Augustine, commemorated 15 June) and that he erred, gravely, on grace and the Fall and stands at the headwaters of the Filioque; it has not adjudicated the further question of whether his errors form the kind of generative system Romanides and Farrell describe (see St. Augustine: Blessed Augustine). Second, it means Farrell’s reading is directly answered, within Orthodoxy itself, by the appreciative pole — and honesty requires that the answer be heard.

The Answer from the Other Pole

The scholars gathered in Orthodox Readings of Augustine (2008), drawing on the wider reassessment by Lewis Ayres and Michel Barnes, argue precisely against the picture Farrell needs. Their claims, stated fairly (and without adjudication, per METHODOLOGY.md, §4.2), are:

The sharp contrast between an “essence-first” Augustine and the “person-first” Cappadocians is largely a modern construct — the “de Régnon paradigm,” named for the nineteenth-century Jesuit Théodore de Régnon — and does not survive close reading of Augustine’s actual pro-Nicene theology (Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered” [1995]; Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity [2010]; see The Scholarly Debate).
Augustine’s own account of the Filioque is more careful and qualified than the polemical picture allows, and its relation to the Greek tradition is complicated by St. Maximus’s Letter to Marinus, which defended the Latin usage as compatible with the monarchy of the Father when rightly understood (see St. Augustine: Augustine and the Filioque).
Much of the hostile Orthodox image of Augustine is a retrojection of the later Photian and post-1054 polemics onto a fifth-century Father who never knew them.

Farrell’s reading answers none of this, because it predates or ignores much of it; GHD was written before the 2008 volume and does not engage the Ayres/Barnes reassessment. This is a real limitation of the book’s Augustine, and it must be stated: Farrell presents as established a picture of Augustine that a substantial and serious body of Orthodox and non-Orthodox scholarship regards as overdrawn.

The Confessional Bottom Line

What the Church actually confesses about Augustine can be stated without taking sides in the Romanides-versus-Rose debate, and it is the fixed point this file rests on: Augustine is a saint; he made real errors, including on the doctrine that became the Filioque, which the Orthodox Church rejects; and the gravity and systematic coherence of his errors — whether they are a generative “system” (Romanides, Farrell) or real-but-bounded faults within a holy Father (Rose, the revisionists) — is a genuinely open question among faithful Orthodox (see St. Augustine: The Spectrum of Orthodox Opinion). Farrell’s reading is the maximalist answer to that open question. The Orthodox reader is heir to the whole debate, not to one side of it, and should read Farrell’s Augustine as the powerful, learned, but strongly contested case that it is — a case belonging to one pole of an argument the Church has not closed.

References

Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. II: The Dialectical God of Augustinism. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
Romanides, John S. The Ancestral Sin. Trans. George S. Gabriel. Ridgewood, NJ: Zephyr, 2002 (orig. Greek 1957); Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981.
Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983; rev. 2007.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26/2 (1995): 51–79.
Ayres, Lewis. Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.