The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
30 Creation as the Unifying Prologue as the one for whom the world was made.86 The conclusion to the Confessions also points us toward a similar ecclesial telos of creation. When Augustine peers into the mysteries of creation, he looks at all things in the Word and there sees a multiplicity of goods collected into the church, which God "predestined before time began, when there was neither morning nor evening."87 All these living things thus point to one purpose: the eternal sabbath, namely, that perfect peace without end [pacem quietis, pacem sabbati, pacem sine uespera].88 A foreigner in the distention of fallen creation, Augustine knows his true rest, his only true happiness, will come by clinging closely to God and he accordingly depicts this caelum caeli as a pure love clinging to the only true God [casto amore cohaerentem deo uero]. As he conveys, "This order of creation is God's house, neither terrestrial nor some massive celestial building, but a spiritual structure which shares [God's] eternity, and is unstained forever."89 Only in this celestial domus can created persons be purged and made molten by the fire of God's love, and thus be able to flow into the divine.90 Precisely how this communion of praise effects this sort of union will be the topic of chapter 5, where we shall return to the nature and the purpose of God's church as the ultimate purpose of created existence.
In positing such a communal adherence to God as the purpose of creation, Augustine must argue that creatures made in God's image cannot be perfected simply in the natural, visible order. Persons cannot find rest in anything derived and
86. Cf. Shepherd of Hermas, vision 2.8 (II.4) 1. 87. conf. 13.34.49; Boulding, Confessions, 378. 88. conf. 13.35.50; CCL 27.272. 89. conf. 12.15.19; Boulding, Confessions, 322: "Haec est domus dei non terrena neque ulla caelesti mole corporea, sed spiritalis et particeps aeternitas tuae, quia sine labe in aeternum"; CCL 27.225.
90. conf. 11.29.39: "donec in te confluam purgatus et liquidus igne amoris tui"; CCL 27.215.