Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker)

by Lee C. Barrett III

In addition to endorsing the spirit of Augustine’s hermeneutics, Clausen commended other aspects of Augustine’s work in his lectures. He referred approvingly to Augustine’s assertion that “God is good without quality, great without quantity, creates without needing to, is present without form, is everywhere without place, is sempiternal without time, makes what is mutable without being moved” (KJN 3, p. 74), which was an approximate quotation from The Trinity.35 Clausen was calling attention to Augustine’s refusal to confine the infinite God within a limiting, finite conceptuality, while at the same time magnifying God’s metaphysical perfections. Similarly, Clausen cited Augustine’s proposal — in book 6, chapter 6 of The City of God — that time was created along with the world, thereby avoiding both the Alexandrian belief that the world had been created from eternity and the opinion of Methodius of Tyre that the world had been created in time (KJN 3, p. 76). In both of these instances, according to Clausen, Augustine was exemplifying an entirely apt sensitivity to God’s transcendence of the categories of finitude.