The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 61 the sixth age as already anticipated in the "unfinished" sixth day's creation of humanity. The human person is gloriously presented as a foreshadowing of the Christ, and his dominion over lesser creatures foretells the Lord's power over all creation. If Adam is the prototype of humanity, the incarnate Logos becomes the archetype; and while the first Adam is temporally prior, the Second is ontologically prior, in that he is the source and the model of all humanity. The first son is created as the anticipation of the enfleshed Son: the former created on the sixth day, the latter coming in the sixth age.72 Relying on the Pauline formula of Rom. 5:14, Augustine calls Adam the form of the one still to come [formam futuri].73 The first created person points all to Christ. To justify this further, Augustine provides a fanciful numerological argument. When taken numerically ADAM adds up as A = 1, D = 4, A = 1, M = 40, totaling 46. Forty-six is the number of years it took for Herod to have his temple built in Jerusalem, a prefiguring of Christ's body, the new and everlasting temple. Finally, we are told, Christ has taken the body of the temple from Adam but not the sin which must be driven from it.74
Augustine wants to establish how Adam was not a wholly perfected creature but a precursor to the fullness of humanity. As the first five days were completed with God's expressed approval—et uidit deus quia bonum est—Augustine muses that perhaps there is the lack of such an approbation on the sixth day in Genesis's description of the creation of man and woman, not because they were not created "good," but because the human person was still not a completed creature.75 The wholly perfected state of humanity is ascertained from sacred scripture's silence: "The man therefore before sin and in
72. Cf. Gen. adu. Man. 1.25.40; Gn. adu. Man. 1.25.43. 73. Gn. litt. 8.1; CSEL 28.229. 74. Cf. Jo. eu. tr. 10.12. 75. Cf. Gn. litt. 3.24: "an quia perfectus nondum erat, quia nondum erat in paradiso constitutus?"; CSEL 28.91.