The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Made to be Godly 47 minates, and therefore it provides a model for us without having a model itself. For it does not imitate another going before it to the Father, since it is never by the least hair's breadth separated from him, since it is the same thing as he is from whom it gets its being. But we by pressing on imitate him who abides motionless; we follow him who stands still, and by walking in him we move toward him, because for us he became a road or way in time by his humility, while being for us an eternal abode by his divinity.32
There are four points worth examining here. For in this wonderful passage, Augustine weaves together his theology of creation, his anthropology, his reliance upon a Platonic metaphysic, as well as his pastoral care as he urges his readers to imitate Christ. First, notice how all of creation imitates the Son's turn toward the Father but the human person must freely do so. When we move from creation to anthropology, then, we move out of an ontological and necessitated imitation of the Son's turn to a free and conscious reception of God. The second point to examine is the analogous use of imago. The Son is the perfect image of the Father while created persons are images striving for completion in the Son's perfection. The third point is the implied reliance upon a doctrine of participation: we become illumined by partaking of the light God is absolutely. The fourth point is the dynamic between humanity's striving and the Son's stability. Through his incarnation the divine Son has made himself our everlasting dwelling [mansio aeterna].
Let us first explore this new sense of conversion and imitation. We saw in the previous chapter that all creation must "turn" to the Father. This type of conversion (epistrophe) is an inescapable aspect of contingent being and is in no way a freely-chosen state. The human person, however, is now called to a new type of conversion (metanoia), first evidenced by Augustine's use of discedere, to separate or to depart from another. The negative imperative here (non discedamus) presumes that
32. Trin. 7.3.5; Hill, Trinity, 223; CCL 50.252-53.