112. s. 229W; Hill, Sermons (III/6), 342 (date unknown). (continued)
78 Made to be Godly possessed a connatural desire to become one with its source. While all creation is like God, only the human person can be said to image God and thus to be able to become one with God. Our analysis has showed how Adam was made to find his only true communion in the one in whose image he was made. To achieve such a transformative union, those free creatures made in the divine image must willingly and consciously respond to God by "turning" to God so as to become more and more like God. We also examined how this imaging and likeness is faintly found in the human body.
Adam represents both the fullness of creation as well as the new Adam still to come. Adam is not only the microcosm of all creation, he is also the forma futuri, the living signifier of the essentially divine image yet to become incarnate on earth. The Son of God comes to restore the image which has freely turned away from God. Sin is depicted by Augustine as that understandable human longing for divinity, but a longing that is perversely and wrongly sought. Made for God, Adam and Eve fell when they sought God on their own terms and not through the participation and the praise that God designed for them. They sought to be gods without God. In order to restore this promise, God himself will become one of them.
Consequently, we are now in a position to examine where most studies on divine union begin: the deifying descent of the Son into the human condition. We are now ready to understand how men and women will "begin to be renewed in the interior human being according to the image of him who created them."113 Having freely forfeited the fullness of that divine image, Adam and Eve were in no way able to renew it without God's own assistance. The Son therefore becomes human so as to restore and redeem humanity's divine likeness, transforming all his faithful into himself.
113. pecc. mer. 3.7.9; Teske, Pelagians (I/23), 86.
Three
The Son's Descent faciens tibi nos de seruis filios de te nascendo nobis seruiendo
Introduction
Our study began with an examination of how Augustine understood the relationship between God and creation. We saw how all contingent being exists only insofar as it imitates the Logos in adhering to the Father. In so doing, creation displays a triadic ontology that is most often explained in terms of existence, essence, and a creature's proper place in the ordered cosmos. From creation in general we then focused more particularly on Augustine's understanding of how the human person images God. The sole creature which points to one beyond himself, Adam has been brought into being so as to find completion in God. Through disobedience, however, the first humans ruptured this relationship and now stand in need of reconciliation and renewal. For this, the Son of God enters the world.
We approach Augustine's presentation of the Son's incarnation by way of deification because it not only best captures what Christ has come into the world to achieve, but also because all of Augustine's eighteen uses of deificare appear when 80 The Son's Descent describing the incarnate Son's activity in the world. If simply read in isolation, however, these eighteen instances of deificare fail to offer a fully-rounded account of salvation. But once we understand this metaphor to be used always alongside other central Christian images, we then begin to see how Augustine's account of salvation can be described as an account of deification. So, at times he will explain deification in terms of divine adoption, at other times as "becoming gods," while elsewhere in terms of the Son's exchanging his humanity for our divinity.
This chapter aims to extend earlier studies of deification in Augustine by considering all eighteen instances and, more importantly, by showing how this language must be understood as inseparable from his other central soteriological claims. Our method in this current chapter, therefore, will be to trace Augustine's use of deificare in order to understand what importance he gives to each usage and how he places the key uses of deification language within the context of other wider soteriological metaphors. In this way I intend to show how his use of deification language fits without difficulty into the wide range of concerns he employs to describe the new life in Christ.
Reading Augustine's Christology in such a way is admittedly rather novel. As we have seen, this is not a theme readily associated with the Bishop of Hippo and those opposed to including him among the patristic sources for a theology of deification seem endless. Take the scholar Myrrha Lot-Borodine, for example, who argued that l'espirit augustinien may be ordained to beatitude but never to deification. In Lot-Borodine's opinion, Augustine was unable to conceive of true communion between God and creatures because he failed to imagine any type of "co-penetration" between two ontologically distinct natures. The Bishop of Hippo's inability to work out some way to explain divine union, in Lot-Borodine's estimation, thus gave rise to the division between two distinct and separate ways of theologizing, between East and West, which