The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
xiv Introduction of understanding the Christian life in the West because of Augustine's inability to conceive of how God and humanity could ever come into contact without ever lessening the former or obliterating the latter. This is why, she argues, the Augustinian vision of Christianity may be motivated by a promise of beatitude, but never by deification (mais non à la déification).6 Others have made the similar case that Augustine's rendering divinity "non-participable and unknowable,"7 caused an absolute barrier between God and the human soul, concluding that such a theology was responsible for the eventual divide between the Western and the Eastern understandings of the relationship between creator and creation. That is, whereas the West could not explain how the created order could interact with God's immutable otherness, the East made a distinction between the divine essence and God's "uncreated energies," a move "Augustine could not admit."8 Each of these scholars has argued that the purported lack of deification language in Augustine parallels his supposed inability to bring God and creation into any kind of harmonious relationship.
Unfortunately, this point of view is constantly reproduced in many popular works today as well. As one more recent example, note Linda Woodhead's An Introduction to Christianity, in which she maintains that deification was "a theme that had long been central in Christian life, particularly in asceticism and monasticism . . . the purpose of prayer, of the liturgy, of the incarnation itself: God became human so that man could become divine."9 This central tenet thrived in the
6. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, La déification de l'homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), 39. The key phrase follows this claim: "celle-ci lui reste interdite, puisqu'il ne peut y avoir, pour Augustin, consubstantialité, donc compénétration, de la nature divine et de la nature humaine," 40.
7. Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1959), 143.
8. Ibid., 144. 9. Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 80.