The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
36 Made to be Godly
There is nothing more precious to God than his own image.2 The human person is the chief work of God [praecipuum Dei opus].3 All the beauty of the world yields to the glory of humanity which is alone made in God's image: "Observe the beauty of the world, and praise the plan of the creator. Observe what he has made, love the one who made it. Hold on to this maxim above all: love the one who made it, because he also made you, his lover, in his own image."4 The most cherished part of God's good creation, this divine image receives its most straightforward treatment by Augustine at qu. 74 of his De Diuersis Quaestionibus.5 Commenting on Paul's identifying the Son with the image of the invisible God (cf. Col. 1:15), Augustine gleans three metaphysical factors: imago, æqualitas, and similitudo. Each of these terms is relational in that they automatically point to some level of interconnectedness between two or more distinct existents. Tracing qu. 74 through, we learn how Augustine understood these concepts and the relationship between them:
Image and equality and likeness must be differentiated, because where there is an image there is necessarily a likeness but not necessarily equality; where there is equality there is necessarily a likeness but not necessarily an image; where there is a likeness there is not necessarily an image and not necessarily equality. Where there is an image there is necessarily a likeness but not necessarily equality, as in a person's image in a mirror: because it is a reflection of him it must also be a likeness, but there is no equality because many things are lacking to the image that are in the thing whose reflection it is. Where there is equality there is necessarily a likeness but not necessarily an
2. s. 20A.2: "Nihil est enim carius deo quam imago dei"; CCL 41.269 (dated 420). 3. Gn. litt. 6.12; CSEL 28.185. 4. s. 68.5; Hill, Sermons (III/3), 225; dated late, 425–30. 5. The ongoing composition of this set of inquiries is dated between 388 and 396. Mosher follows Bardy in dating diu. qu. 74 to the latest period (394–95) along with the other questions rooted in Pauline concerns. Cf. Edited by Gustave Bardy, BA 10, 30–31; David Mosher, trans., Eighty-Three Different Questions (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 19.