109. Mary Clark, Augustine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), 107.
Made to be Godly 75 on reform. Although God is the only true goal of the image, the defaced image seeks communion with a myriad of other things. As we have seen, Adam and Eve's Fall is explained as the aversion away from God and the conversion toward oneself. For Augustine, this is the quintessential act of pride.107 Yet, as Augustine matured, he also saw how it was not necessarily the ill-sought good that pleased the sinner but oftentimes it was the mere turning away from God that brought a fallen satisfaction.
This is the paradox of Adam after the Fall. One's divine image is so distorted that he mistakenly finds pleasure in that which is ontologically prope nihil: "we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden . . . in which there was no motive for my malice except malice. The malice was loathsome, and I loved it. I was in love with my own ruin, in love with my decay: not with the thing for which I was falling into decay but with decay itself."108 In consequence, sin deforms the created image in the human person by bringing more and more distance between him and his divine exemplar. For if God is being, sin is the lack thereof. It is the enacted moving away from the archetype of all free beings. We saw this above when we examined the requisite turn toward God. We can thus now better see how, in the words of Mary Clark, "There are decisions for non-being, made by persons created ex nihilo with openness to Absolute Being. Augustine confessed to making such decisions himself until through God's providence he found in Christ, the Word made flesh, the exemplar of all humanness and the Logos through whom all things are made and made valuable."109 As we have stressed throughout this chapter, unlike lower levels of being, it is not enough for created persons simply to receive existence. While in uia, men and women find themselves between two contrary
107. Cf. ciu. Dei 12.6. 108. conf. 2.4.9; Boulding, Confessions, 68. 109. Mary Clark, Augustine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), 107.