The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 59 four attributes examined above were granted without condition. Such a state was not one of absolute perfection, as the human person had only received the praeceptum perfectionis but had not yet fulfilled it. Elsewhere this distinction is between the potestas perseuerantiae which the first humans received, versus the felicitas perseuerantiae for which they were destined; in the first state they enjoyed the ability not to forsake goodness, but in the latter they would not have been able to forsake the good.64 Adam's perfection was a contingent one, dependent upon his obedience to God. The first humans were thus created not absolutely or per se perfect but enjoyed paradisiacal bliss only conditionally, insofar as they were turned toward and subject to God.
This image and likeness of God found in the human person is his most eminent quality. If we were to look for anything higher above this image, we would meet no mere creature but its very creator.65 Plotinus had argued something very similar: that between the utmost hypostases there was to be found nothing intervening between them apart from their being different, thus allowing for immediate knowledge of Nous by Psyche.66 Perhaps such imagery aided Augustine's position that between God and Adam there is no other mediating nature [nulla natura interposita], describing what it means to be created in the divine image: "Hence, when someone can partake of wisdom according to the inner person, he is to such a degree in accordance with his image that no nature may be placed between them, and so there is nothing that is more united to God. For he knows and is alive and exists, and nothing is better
64. corrept. 12.33: "prima erat perseuerantiae potestas, bonum posse non deserere; nouissima erit felicitas perseuerantiae, bonum non posse deserere"; PL 44.936.
65. Trin. 15.1.1: "Supra hanc ergo naturam si quaerimus aliquid et uerum quaerimus, deus est, natura scilicet non creata, sed creatrix"; CCL 50A.460.
66. Cf. Enneads 5.1.3; Armstrong 5.20. Reaffirming the goodness of matter, roughly the same phrase is used at Enneads 5.8.7 (Armstrong 5.258) to describe the closeness between the intelligible and visible orders.