35. conf. 4.16.31: "Viuit apud te semper bonum nostrum, et quia inde auersi
48 Made to be Godly such willful aversion is in the capacity of the created image. Augustine instead invites those made in the divine image to imitate the Father's equal image and thus freely turn to God, becoming fully who they have been created to be. As we shall see, such conversion is the only way to beatitude, as the only other option is to sink into one's own darkness and dissipation.
In this way, only Adam and Eve are created incompletely. They must freely take up a second, more personal conversion. Unless Adam freely converts to God, he could never achieve any good act in isolation from the one in whose image he has been made—only in God can Adam enjoy justice, knowledge, and beatitude.33 While the human person is like the rest of creation, dwelling between the fullness of being and the nothingness from which it was created, Adam is also unlike the rest of creation because he can freely choose toward which end he desires to advance. Carol Harrison has keenly expressed this tension of the human person's finding himself: "[T]urning towards the eternal, immutable, truth, goodness and beauty on which he depends to exist and to draw him from his characteristic temporality and mutability, on the one hand; and on the other, his turning away from the source of his existence towards created, temporal, mutable reality and, consequently, towards nonbeing and nothingness; he either turns towards God or turns away from Him into nothingness."34 Men and women are the only visible creatures so precariously yet gloriously poised: able to turn toward God so as to share somehow in the divine life, and similarly able to turn away from God and thus be faced with only nothingness. This latter option is a freely chosen aversion, a perversion which in Augustine's adroit hands serves as a wonderful word play [auersi sumus, peruersi sumus].35 To turn
33. Cf. Gn. litt. 8.12; CSEL 28.249. 34. Carol Harrison, "Augustine and Religious Experience," Louvain Studies 27 (2002): 99–118; 105.
35. conf. 4.16.31: "Viuit apud te semper bonum nostrum, et quia inde auersi