82. Cf. Jo. eu. tr. 10.12 and en. Ps. 95.15.
Made to be Godly 63 words of Gregory of Nazianzus, he is "a kind of second cosmos, magnificent in his littleness, a new angel on earth, a worshiper constituting both body and soul alike."80 Augustine too sees the human person as a microcosm, having imaginatively reworked in him the days of creation. In the human person is found the light of faith from the lux of the first day; his ability to discern things of the flesh from the things of the spirit is reminiscent of the waters being separated on day two. On the third day men and women cleave their minds from the "stormy waves of fleshy temptations, like the dry land from . . . the sea;" on the fourth day they see unchangeable truth which "shines in the soul like the sun" and bestow order and beauty "upon the body, like the moon lighting up the night," and finally, on the fifth day their upright souls manifest embodied deeds on the earth—acts of bravery like the "great whales" as well as the proclamation of heavenly truths like the birds of the air.81
Even the name ADAM captures the whole of the created order. Besides the numerological evidence just replayed, Augustine also detects a clever acronym connoting the four ends of the earth: Anatolê the east wind, the west Dysis, Arctos which is the north, and Mesêmbria the south.82 In ADAM creation is symbolized and unified: the human person is the summation of all of God's good creation. Only sin can frustrate such, and to this we shall now turn.
Sin and evil can only now be addressed in Augustine's thinking. Why so? In Augustine's view of things, sin is never the first word, nor will it be the last. Evil must always appear somewhere contained by the Christian narrative, never in the prologue (as the Manichees insisted) and certainly never in the epilogue where all will be Christ's. In the meantime, however, sin perverts creatures and makes them less than what
80. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes 38.11 (my translation); PG 36.321D–24A. 81. Gn. adu. Man. 1.25.43; Hill, Genesis, 67–68. 82. Cf. Jo. eu. tr. 10.12 and en. Ps. 95.15.