Union in Plotinus, Augustine, and Dante," Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009): 1–23.
Made to be Godly 49 back to God with a conscious and resolute trust is the only way to avoid such perverse ruin.
This brings us to the second aspect of this key text from Book 7 of De Trinitate: how imago is an analogous term for Augustine. To begin, despite the obvious disparity between the singular perfect and many imperfect images, Augustine pastorally counsels us not to dwell on such inequality but on the fact that both the Word and we created persons are divine images. As both "perfect God" and "perfect image" the Son is able to reveal to men and women what it means to approach and assimilate divinity. The created incompletion now comes to the fore. The human person is both an imperfect image and also made toward the perfect image. Augustine describes this disparity with the verbs of the movement that needs to be undertaken by rational creatures—sequimur, ambulantes, tendimus.36
In order to make sense of scripture's dual sense of imago— both (1) the human person as an image of the triune God and (2) the Son who is the perfect image of the Father (cf. Col. 1:15)—Augustine focuses on the very creatureliness of Adam which ensures that he is never perfect in and of himself but only insofar as he strives toward the Son, the only perfect image of God. As he will write a little later in De Trinitate, because the image of God in the human person "was made not entirely equal, as it was not born from him but created by him," that image is signified by being ad imaginem—"that is, it is not made equal by an equivalence but it approaches it by a certain likeness."37 Since the human person is ever a creasumus, peruersi sumus. Reuertamur, iam, domine, ut non euertamur, quia uiuit apud te sine ullo defectu bonum nostrum, quod tu ipse es, et non timemus, ne non sit quo redeamus, quia nos inde ruimus; nobis autem absentibus non ruit domus nostra, aeternitas tua"; CCL 27.56.
36. For more on this imagery, see my "Traveling without Moving: Love as Ecstatic Union in Plotinus, Augustine, and Dante," Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009): 1–23.
37. Trin. 7.6.12; Hill, Trinity, 231 (adjusted); "Sed quia non omnimodo aequalis fiebat illa imago dei tamquam non ab illo nata sed ab eo creata, huius rei significandae causa ita imago est ut ad imaginem sit, id est non aequatur parilitate sed quadam