The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
60 Made to be Godly than this creature."67 Sullivan argues that such a description, God's unmediated presence within the human mind, is "used by Augustine so often in association with the image of God in man that it is almost the equivalent expression."68 The human person has received God's "direct imprint" [exprimitur] with the result that no nature can separate God and his human image: inter quam et ipsum nulla interiecta natura est.69 At the top of the visible creation's hierarchy, the human person was made to enjoy the immediate presence of God.
In fact, Augustine finds himself so strongly arguing that the soul is "near" God, that he has to defend his position against being interpreted as a type of monism. He insists that production of the human soul is unique in that it originates from the creator's exhaling the divine breath, but this should not lead us to think that the soul's origin is from God's own self or from bodily elements.70 This leads Augustine to state, even more clearly, that the soul comes directly from God, is spiritual like God, but in no way is of the substance of God: neither begotten of nor proceeding from the divine substance, but simply created by God.71 The human person is clearly not constituted out of the divine substance, yet as the enfleshed unique image of the Trinity, the human person enjoys an inseparable likeness to God. To be similar does not mean to be the same.
Despite this closeness, there is still in Adam and Eve a certain prolepsis not found in other creatures. Augustine's typology allows him to detect the birth of the incarnate Logos in
67. diu. qu. 51.2; Teske, Miscellaneous Questions, 63. 68. Sullivan, The Image of God, 16. 69. Trin. 11.5.8; CCL 50.344. 70. Gn. litt. 7.4: "nec de se ipso nec de corporeis elementis creandus est"; CSEL 28.204. 71. Gn. litt. 7.28: "ex deo sic est, ut non sit substantia dei et sit incorporea, id est non sit corpus, sed spiritus, non de substantia dei genitus nec de substantia dei procedens, sed factus a deo"; CSEL 28.228. This argument is also found at c. adu. leg. 14.22 and is used as well against Vincentius Victor, whose disagreement with Augustine on the soul prompted the latter to compose the four books of the an et or. (419–21).