The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 41 the model. Augustine could have very easily learned from Plotinus how this type of longing on the part of the image to become like its paradigmatic reality is a virtue only in lesser, derived existents and never in the archetype itself.13 Only images, never the imaged, can strive for completion in an existent of a different ontological order. In the case of the human person, then, it follows that anyone who refuses to become like God remains false and becomes a riddle to himself. Movement must be made from remaining simply an image of and becoming an ever-increasing likeness to God. We can now begin to see how those who reject the model (whom they image) frustrate not their divine archetype but their own humanity by refusing their inherent tendency to become God.
When locating this image of God in the human person, Augustine uses three terms interchangeably with no rigid distinction between them. Careful not to find the divine image simply in the anima or animus—in that principle which vivifies all animalia—he instead relies on ratio, mens, or intelligentia interchangeably.14 In locating this divine image, Augustine realizes that he must find a triad. For the image bestowed is of the triune God and not simply an image of the perfect image (that is, the Son); here Augustine broke with much of the Christian tradition.
For example, many Eastern Fathers held Gen. 1:26–27 and Col. 1:15 together by arguing analogously: as the Son images the Father, Adam images the Son. Irenaeus, for example, maintained that God "made man the image of God; and the image of God is the Son, after whose image man was made."15 John Chrysostom wrote that the human person was made "in the
13. Cf. Enneads 1.2.2. 14. Cf. Gn. litt. 3.20.30: "id autem est ipsa ratio uel mens uel intellegentia uel si quo alio uocabulo commodius appellatur"; CSEL 28.86.
15. §22 Demonstratio; Ian MacKenzie, trans., Irenaeus—Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching: A Theological Commentary and Translation (London: Ashgate, 2002), Demonstration, 7.