The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 51 must also be fulfilled in the Father and in the Holy Spirit as well.
We next turn to how such communion requires a doctrine of participation. Following the Platonic tradition, participation plays an indispensable role throughout Augustine's theology. For Plato, μέθεξις or κοινωνία provided the bridge between the transient world of material existents and the ideal world of forms, thus giving the former a share in the latter.40 Augustine picked up on this need to bridge absolute and contingent being. Characteristic of those working out of Platonism, Augustine often relies on such axioms as omne uerum a ueritate and other three-factored phrases.41 Note the three components at work here: everything [omne] which is true [uerum] is such by means of truth itself [a ueritate]. Or, again, we learn that every creature is informed through participation in the perfect: chaste souls are such because they participate in chastity itself; wise souls are such because they participate in wisdom.42 Such a doctrine of participation, as important as it was for Plato, becomes essential for any Christian theologian of deification. Why so? This language must be central when discussing unity between creator and creation, as participation always implies a simultaneous connectedness and disparity. The participant for Augustine may share in the attributes of the other, but the participant never becomes identical with or absorbed into the one in whom it participates.
Gerald Bonner has noticed how such a doctrine of partici-
40. Cf. M. Annice, "Historical Sketch of the Theory of Participation," New Scholasticism 26 (1952): 49–79 remains an excellent survey; for the significance of various Platonic terms, cf. Cornelio Fabro, La Nozione Metafisica di Partecipazione Secondo S. Tommaso d'Aquino (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1950), 47.
41. diu. qu. 1; CCL 44A.11. 42. Gn. litt. imp. 16: "castitas autem nullius participatione casta est, sed eius participatione sunt casta quaecumque casta sunt. quae utique in deo est, ubi est etiam illa sapientia, quae non participando sapiens est, sed cuius participatione sapiens est anima quaecumque sapiens est"; CSEL 28.498. For more on this, see my "Augustine's Early Theory of Participation," Augustinian Studies 27 (1996): 79–96.