The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 45 union with God, they describe, albeit imperfectly, the image Augustine sought. Thus the next line at De Trinitate 14.12.15: "And when [the human mind] does this (i.e., remembers, understands, and loves God) it becomes wise. If it does not do it, then even though it remembers and understands and loves itself, it is foolish. Let it then remember its God to whose image it was made, and understand and love him. To put it in a word, let it worship the uncreated God, by whom it was created with a capacity for him and able to share in him."27
After holding up and inspecting various mental triads, Augustine finally settles not simply on memory, intellect, and will, and not even on the mind's memory, knowledge, and love of itself, but on memoria Dei, intelligentia Dei, and amor Dei. The truest human honor, he writes, is found in the image and likeness of God, which is preserved only in relationship with the one by whom it has been impressed.28 It is important to reiterate how Augustine does not settle on simply memory, intellect, and will, but on these three operations only insofar as they are in dynamic union with God. In other words, this triad is fully "activated" only when it reaches out, and is in communion not with any creature (including itself), but with the triune God in whose image it is fashioned. This reading is very much in line with what Walter Principe has argued: memory, intellect, and love for Augustine are not simple nouns but are dynamic verbs with a "vital drive" yearning outward for the only object which can eternally satisfy, namely the trinitarian life.29 The imago Dei is the human person's remembering, knowing, and loving God and this operation is humanity's only way out of the skeins of self-centeredness.
27. Trin. 14.12.15; Hill, Trinity, 383; cf. Trin. 15.42. 28. Trin. 12.11.16: "Honor enim hominis uerus est imago et similitudo dei quae non custoditur nisi ad ipsum a quo imprimitur"; CCL 50.370.
29. Walter Principe, "The Dynamism of Augustine's Terms for Describing the Highest Trinitarian Image in the Human Person," Studia Patristica 18.3 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), 1291–99; 1291.