The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
74 Made to be Godly can be found. If the Trinity alone can actualize the human person, no mere earthly communion could ever fulfill that divine image. In our fallen state we may think riches and success will satisfy, but we hear, "Gold, after all, is shining earth; you though were made to the image of God in order to be illuminated by God. Since gold is one of God's creatures, yet it wasn't gold that God made to his image, but you; it follows that he placed gold under you."105 This effect of sin is the result of our turning away from God, the aversion toward non-being we examined earlier. Those made in God's image must never be content resting in a creature but must always be moving toward a greater divine likeness.
Communion with God, for Augustine, is the defining relationship in every human's life; all other relations must therefore be oriented, referred, back to God. In this way, God reserves humanity's ultimate love for himself. We must be content to make all other relationships derived and secondary, molded by and ordered toward life in God first. Consequently, the further we are from God the more we become unlike him: "You were made in the image of God, human creature, but by your perverted and evil life you have blurred or effaced the image of your creator in you. You have grown unlike him; but look hard at yourself until what you see displeases you, and from this moment you will have begun to recover the likeness, because what displeases God now displeases you as well."106 Sinful aversion from God brings the fallen soul to a divine dissimilarity. Augustine invites his hearers to look inside and see where they are unlike God and there to grow dissatisfied and thus intent
105. s. 368.4; Hill, Sermons (III/10), 301–2; "Aurum enim terra est fulgens; tu autem ut illuminareris a Domino, ad imaginem Dei factus es. Cum sit aurum creatura Dei, non tamen fecit Deus aurum ad imaginem suam, sed te. Ergo posuit sub te aurum"; PL 39.1654.
106. en. Ps. 75.3; Boulding, Expositions (III/18), 57; "Factus enim es, o homo, ad imaginem Dei; per uitam uero peruersam et malam perturbasti in te, et exterminasti in te imaginem Conditoris tui. Factus dissimilis, adtendis in te, et displices tibi; iam ex eo coepisti similis fieri, quia hoc tibi displicet quod displicet et Deo"; CCL 39.1039.