The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
54 Made to be Godly which the spirit raises man to God."47 All human souls image God but not all souls will be like God.
Other Greek writers, Clement of Alexandria for example, often argued the inverse: that while all may be like God, the divine image is not something constitutive of human nature.48 Rather, one must become an image by cooperating with God and acting as he does, say, in the begetting of other persons: "The human person becomes an image of God [Εἰκὼν ὁ ἄνθρωπος τοῦ θεοῦ γίνεται] in that he cooperates with him in the procreation of other human persons."49 Such evidence suggests just how novel it was for Augustine to break with the standard interpretations of Genesis's language of imago et similitudo. In fact, Robert Markus attributes such a clear divide to the "more distinctively active, dynamic sense" of the Greek ὁμοίωσις, which the Latin similitudo does not convey.50 In the Greek Fathers, "likeness" is an adventitious attribute propelling an image to become like its copy; divine likeness is not a predicate inherent in any created image. This is in obvious contrast to the Latin West where an image not somehow like its model would be unthinkable. It was Ambrose who helped Augustine to see this, not only introducing Augustine to a nonliteral reading of Genesis's imago passages, but also preaching how an image is always like its archetype.51 Thus opening his Latin version of Genesis, Augustine picked up on (in a way unavailable to those reliant simply on the Septuagint) the two senses of meaning contained in the ad of Gen. 1:26: (1) a relation of
47. Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 217. This also appears to be Origen's understanding, that the divine likeness comes when the human soul is resurrected and made righteous, cf. Contra Celsum 4.30.
48. Everett Ferguson places Clement wholly with those who argue that the divine likeness is attainable only in heaven, citing Protreptikos §12; s.v. "Image of God," Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (London: Garland Publishing, 1990), 452.
49. Clement, Paidagogos 2.10; PG 8.497B. 50. Markus, "<<Imago>> and <<similitudo>> in Augustine," 126. 51. Cf. conf. 3.7.12; 4.16.29; 5.14.24; Ambrose, Hexaemeron, sermo 9, "The Sixth Day," ch. 7.