The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
62 Made to be Godly his own kind was of course good; but scripture forbore to say this, in order to say instead something that would foreshadow (praenuntiaret) something yet to come."76 Eternal bliss is hinted at in the first story of humanity; Genesis acts as the presaging of a greater story still to follow. God comes to search for his image in the form of his own Son. Although the theme of the next chapter is to explore the deifying effects of the Incarnation, we can even now see how the life of the first Adam points to the coming of the second.
We have thus far established that the divine image always carries with it a likeness of the divine. It possesses an inherent longing for its perfect model. The human soul has been fashioned both triadically and divinely. It will therefore be satisfied only in perfect union with the Trinity. Before we conclude this section on the imago Dei, let us comment on how the human body gives men and women both a conjunction with as well as a distinction from the rest of the animals.77
Human persons are enfleshed minds occupying a middle position "between angels and beasts."78 They are similar to other animalia in their necessitated corporeality, but as divine imagines, they are closer to heaven. Consequently, manifested in the very flesh of men and women is a primal correspondence with both creation and creator. What the Greeks referred to as a mikros kosmos, the human person is a unique creation precisely because he bridges the two worlds. He is a bridge creature who unites in himself the noetic and the material.79 In the
76. Gn. litt. 3.24; Hill, Genesis, 240; "homo igitur ante peccatum et in suo genere utique bonus erat; sed scriptura praetermisit hoc dicere, ut illud potius diceret quod futurum aliquid praenuntiaret"; CSEL 28.92.
77. Gn. litt. imp.16: "et coniunctio et discretio animantium"; CSEL 28.497. 78. ciu. Dei 12.22; Bettenson, City of God, 502; "mediam inter angelos bestiasque"; CCL 47.380.
79. For excellent surveys of the human person as a microcosm, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 121–23; Norris Clarke, "Living on the Edge: The Human Person as Frontier Being and Microcosm," International Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1996): 183–200.