Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
tures was witnessing to His divine Father and to the Holy Spirit, and when he learned from Genesis that man was made to the image and likeness of the Trinity, he discovered the glory and the responsibility and the dignity of personal existence. Human dignity, he learned, was not based on man's unlikeness to the beast but on man's possible likeness to God through deification. To be a human person is to be capax Dei. This capacity is actualized through the Son but it refers to the Trinity. If the soul was made to the image of the Son of God, as St. Paul taught, then in fact it was made to the image of the Trinity, since Christ had said: "I and the Father are one." And the Spirit sent by Christ was spoken of as "My Spirit."
The conversion Augustine experienced was a re-formation to the image of the Trinity through the gifts of faith and love. This interior re-formation is a divine work surpassing human power. Throughout the Confessions we follow this re-formation as it engaged his consciousness and consent. In later years he was to teach that this image of the Son can be remade in the human person only by the Trinity who originally made man to the image of God in holiness and justice. The Trinity re-forms persons not only to intimacy with themselves but to Christian community as well, a community of faith and charity. '""And in making all things you did not make them out of Yourself in your own likeness (which is the exemplary form of all things) but out of nothing, in a formless unlikeness to Yourself, which afterwards might be formed by your likeness, returning to You, the One, according to its appointed capacity in the measure given by You to each being in its own kind.yA4
This movement of return toward the One is initiated by the Word of God, who in receiving all in love from the Father returns all in love. Love is the special name of the Spirit, Augustine wrote in a later work, but since God is Love and God is Trinity, the Father is Love as is the Son. As love, the Father is the principle of creation and providence; as love, the Word is the principle of conversion and illumination, and the Spirit as the principle of love is the principle of return to the Father. Loving intimacy with the Trinity is true contemplative wisdom, and wisdom is the true and only image of God, a dynamic process of involvement in God,
14. Conf: X1I.28.38.