The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
50 Made to be Godly ture, he can never be equal to God [non ab illo nata, sed ab illo creata . . . non aequatur parilitate]. However, as image, he is no doubt like God and can indeed even become more similar to God the nearer he approaches [similitudine accedit].
So although the human person is not the ultimate archetype of what it means to image God (the unique and unrepeatable privilege of the Son), he too is nonetheless truly an imago. As mentioned, Augustine thinks of imago in two distinct ways: one absolute and whole, the other derivative and striving. On this point Andrew Louth's reflections prove surprisingly inadequate. In his otherwise very illuminating work on western mysticism, Louth argues that if enfleshed persons are created to be divine images, the Son therefore cannot be. He writes that (the later) Augustine understood that the Son as the Father's image would have rendered the Son's status as "subordinationist: the Son is God, co-equal with the Father, not the image of the Father. The image must be something other than God."38 This is to misunderstand Augustine's main point when treating imago.
The Son is the perfect image because he is eternally begotten from the Father while created persons are simultaneously (imperfect) images in se and also seekers toward the fullness of that at same image. Furthermore, Augustine himself recognizes this linguistic and conceptual problem of equality, realizing that if the Father "made the human person to the image of the Son in a way that he is not the Father's image but only the Son's image, then the Son is dissimilar to the Father."39 However, because the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit are substantially one, any image perfected in the Son's likeness similitudine accedit."; CCL 50.266. This necessary movement toward the Word is well captured also at Gn. litt. 3.20; CSEL 28.87.
38. Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 146.
39. Trin. 12.6.7; Hill, Trinity, 325 (adjusted); "Si enim pater fecit ad imaginem filii ita ut non sit homo imago patris sed filii, dissimilis est patri filius"; CCL 50.361.