The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 39
It is not surprising that Augustine concludes diu. qu. 74 by stating that the relationship between the Father and the Son is so great that the Son is not only "from" the Father, is not simply "like" the Father, but is his very likeness and equality because not even temporal distance [temporis interuallum] stands between them.10 Because of this absolute equality between Father and Son, the Son is the Father's perfect image. As his unigenitus the Son is the Father's begotten and thus perfect image. However, as God's created image, the human person is also a reflection of the divine. Augustine refuses to relegate the divine image only to the Son or only to the human person: the Son is the perfect image because he is the eternal equivalence of the Father, manifesting him in full filial expression, while human persons are also understood to be images, made to have a capacity for divine perfection by a source never identifiable with themselves.
If the defining characteristic of imago for Augustine has to do with derivation and origin, the next feature emerging from such a close affinity is the proximity and relationship of resemblance between image and model. Image is a relation of likeness between a copy and the exemplar upon which it is modeled. As John Sullivan wrote on this point in his seminal study of Augustine, image "means not only closeness in nature, but also an immediate relation to the exemplar as term of the innate and dynamic tendency in the image. . . . In the realization of this tendency toward the exemplar the likeness radically implicated in the nature of the image receives its full expression."11 Three characteristics of the model-image rela-
10. diu. qu. 74, lines 38–42: "In deo autem quia condicio temporis uacat—non enim potest recte uideri deus in tempore generasse filium, per quem condidit tempora—consequens est ut non solum imago eius sit, quia de illo est, et similitudo, quia imago est, sed etiam aequlitas tanta, ut nec temporis interuallum impedimento sit"; CCL 44A.214.
11. John Sullivan, The Image of God: The Doctrine of St. Augustine and Its Influence (Dubuque, Iowa: The Priory Press, 1963), 21.