The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Made to be Godly 73 three factors: (1) the divine image, (2) its becoming stained or discolored by sin, and (3) its renovation in Christ. For example, toward the end of De Trinitate we read: "But by sinning man lost justice and the holiness of truth, and thus the image became deformed and discolored [deformis et decolor]; he gets those qualities back again when he is reformed and renovated."102 The imago Dei is the place of both deformation and reformation. In sinning Adam surrendered truth, although the deformity and tarnish he freely took on by sinning can be removed.
Sin may corrupt the created image but it never does so to the extent that human deiformity is completely eradicated. While it is true that evil and sin have affected all of God's good creation, Adam did not lose his divine image altogether. Augustine came to realize that the divine image is precisely what made the human soul what it was and, as such, it could not be lost without destroying the soul altogether as well.103 The postlapsarian soul may be sinful but there is still within it the reflection of godliness, for that spark of reason [scintilla rationis] was not wholly extinguished.104 Augustine is clear: sin does not erase the image of God in the human person but reorients it away from God.
The second image often used to describe this sad condition of the image's disintegration is its distance from God. Made for a transcendent pilgrimage, the fallen image becomes enamored and ensnared by goods in which only frustration
102. Trin. 14.16.22; Hill, Trinity, 388; "Sed peccando iustitiam et sanctitatem ueritas amisit, propter quod haec imago deformis et decolor facta est; hanc recipit cum reformatur atque renouatur"; CCL 50A.452.
103. Cf. retr. 1.25 on diu. qu. 67; spir. et litt. 28.49. 104. ciu. Dei 22.24: "non in eo tamen penitus extincta est quaedam uelut scintilla rationis, in qua factus est ad imaginem Dei"; CCL 47.847. In his sustained diatribe against the Western Fathers, Constantine Tsirpanlis misconstrues this point when he defines sin for Augustine as the realization of the "total destruction of God's image in man," Introduction to Eastern Patristic Thought and Orthodox Theology, Theology and Life 30 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1991), 52.