Perichoretic Persons: Diagramming Augustine’s Mental Trinity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article seeks to develop new insight from De Trinitate into what it means to be a trinitarian person by diagramming the interchange of cognition and love that Augustine traces in the mental trinity. It begins with some important groundwork by Augustinian scholars that enriches the formula that persons are relations. Then, we review how Augustine used ‘Eastern’ themes of interpenetration and interchange to describe the life of the divine persons, themes later to be termed perichoretic. This leads to consideration of the interesting subject of movement or logical priority in God. Finally, we move into original research by diagramming the mental trinity, that is, tracing the trinitarian movements inherent in the nature of knowing and loving and considering how this might apply to each divine person if God is indeed sapientia and charitas . We will consider that Augustine may have conceived of the interchange of the life of the triune persons extending even to the enjoyment of a shared cognition. If this is plausible, then the mental trinity provides much more insight into what it means to be a divine person than is commonly attributed to him – insight which could be productively deployed in contemporary trinitarian theology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".