The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
70 Made to be Godly
This desire to be whole and autonomous without God is paradigmatic of all sin. For Augustine, all sin somehow reenacts and thus echoes this solipsistic pursuit of equality with God and of divinity apart from God. Because the created image naturally longs to become its prototype, even sin is an attempt to become like God. That is, all long for divinity. In a passage where Augustine is searching to understand how the mind knows itself, we read in the De Trinitate how the mind sees certain inner beauties in that more excellent nature which is God; but instead of staying still and enjoying them as it ought to, it wants to claim them for itself, and rather than be like him by his gift it wants to be what he is by its own right. So it turns away from him and slithers and slides down into less and less which is imagined to be more and more; it can find satisfaction neither in itself nor in anything else as it gets further away from him who alone can satisfy it.91
The soul is naturally attracted to divinity and, either rightly or wrongly, desires such beauty for itself. Having turned away from God [auertitur], however, such aversion results in the soul's distorting creatures for the creator.92
Augustine understands why this is so. What other than divinity could those who have been made for divinity desire? What more is there to want for those who were made "naturally" perfect? What else could be so alluring to those made in God's image? He accordingly concludes that, "our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin unless they had been told, You will be like gods."93 Humanity's Fall is depicted as the innate and good desire for deification. Nothing short of attaining God could have enticed those already made naturally perfect, so Augustine designates such a promise of godliness as the only gift great enough to have motivated Adam and Eve to sin. The
91. Trin. 10.5.7; Hill, Trinity, 292; CCL 50.320. 92. This is consistent with Augustine's long-standing definition of sin: "Sin in a human being is disorder or perversity, that is, an aversion to the more preferable creator, and a conversion to the inferior creatures" (Simpl. 1.2.18).
93. Trin. 11.5.8; Hill, Trinity, 310; CCL 50.344.