44. Enn., 1.6.8; Augustine, Unfinished Book on Genesis, 16.59-60. (continued)
INTRODUCTION
seem more applicable to Augustine's intellectual creature, man, made to the image of God as an imperfect image. Yet for Plotinus both Nous and Soul are divine and can naturally recover likeness by returning to the One whereas for Augustine man is formed by God to his likeness but created out of nothing. The tendency to nonbeing is in tension with the tendency to God. To return to God, man needs God's help illuminating and strengthening his will. Augustine does not seem to take up and use Plotinus's teaching that every image naturally produces another image. Augustine's doctrine of society as the expression of love seems to be derived from meditation on St. John's Gospel and Epistle. Unlike Plotinus, he also uses the image of God in man as a source of affirmative knowledge of God and as a means of contact with God.*°
The third crucial point that differentiates Augustinian from Plotinian spirituality is the soul's Trinitarian function: the soul, not as image of the Nous or of the One, but of the Trinity. The only way that unity and equality can come to the actions of remembering, understanding, and loving is for them to be converted to God above the memory. God's love for us manifested in the actions of Christ and given through the Spirit arouses the love that unifies one's personal actions of remembering, understanding, and willing God. Because of this unification man is able to integrate his various life-levels in one life "toward" God. This leads to the final crucial difference.
Fourth, conversion is mediated not by the internal Word or Nous as understood but by the Incarnate Word in whom we believe:
What shall wretched man do? Who shall deliver him from the body of this death, but only Your Grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom you have begotten co-eternal and formed in the beginning of Your ways, in whom the prince of this world found nothing worthy of death, yet killed Him, and the handwriting, which was against us, was blotted out. None of this is to be found in the books a the Platonists.*°
45°) Urin, XV.23.44) Epistle 9233. 46. Conf, VII.21.