Augustine's Account of Trinitarian Image and Thomas Aquinas – Fr. Reginald Lynch, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fr. Reginald Lynch’s lecture explores Augustine’s account of the Trinitarian image and its reception by Aquinas, illuminating how the development of grace, human anthropology, and sacramental life shape the Christian journey toward likeness with God.

This lecture was given on June 17th, 2025, at Schloss St. Emmeram.

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About the Speakers:

Fr. Reginald Lynch is a Dominican priest of the Province of St. Joseph and a faculty member at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC (USA). His research focuses on a range of issues in the History of Christianity area, especially medieval and early modern theology. His most recent work has focused on Aquinas’ reception history in the early-modern West. He has recently completed the book, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Early Modern Period (Oxford University Press, 2023), which focuses on Dominican and Jesuit receptions of Aquinas in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He is also the author of The Cleansing of the Heart: The Sacraments as Instrumental Causes in the Thomistic Tradition (Catholic University of America Press, 2017).

Keywords: Aristotelian Categories, De Trinitate, Divine Likeness, Essence And Powers, Habitual Grace, Human Anthropology, Liturgical Virtue, Sacramental Character, Sanctification, Threefold Image

Transcript

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0:50.6	So my talk today is about the idea of image, of divine image, first in Augustine and then in Thomas Aquinas.
1:01.1	So I want to begin. Now, you should have a handout here. So there's some texts on the handout.
1:08.3	And then there's some suggested reading also at the far end of it, at the close.
1:13.6	So I'll be referring to those as I move through. There's also some articles that I said ahead
1:19.6	of time. I'll say a little bit about those in just a minute, just to foreground things.
1:23.6	But my basic plan here, you know, rather than reading the full 24 pages of my paper here, which I think I'll teach a bit and talk through these texts and also refer to my paper as necessary.
1:38.3	So as we begin then to look at Augustine, I want to focus on detrinitatte as a foundational text
1:47.0	for Latin theology.
1:49.0	Now, there are many texts that you could cite as being the most influential, if you will,
1:55.0	text for subsequent theological reflection.
1:58.0	In many ways, also the East and the West, it's sort of a
2:01.8	constructive dichotomy in some ways. There's a porous barrier between the East and the West,
2:06.6	certainly in the Patristic period. Even in the Middle Ages for St. Thomas Aquinas, we know now,
2:12.8	thanks to the wealth of historical scholarship we have from the 20th century in particular, just how much
	...

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