(New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 176, n. 81.
The Son's Descent 81 plagues us still today.1 Following Lot-Borodine, Ben Drewery also argues that, "the revolution in European thought" consisted of its disassociation of humanity from God as well as the human soul from the body. Such an unfortunate division was, Drewery continues, "precisely the failure of Augustine (and later Aquinas) to follow patristic thought" on the matter of deification. He points more precisely to Augustine's psychology and how it "left no room for a 'deiform' faculty. . . . Hence in the West the supreme end for man becomes the beatific vision, or some form of beatitude, which is not deification, for beatitude is itself created and human. Augustine is indeed the consistent villain."2 Finally, Michael Azkoul likewise contends that, "Augustine is uncomfortable with the Church's teaching on deificatio, θέωσις. He said very little about it and had difficulty verbalizing it."3 While Azkoul is correct that Augustine directly explicates "very little" about Christian deification, this does not mean that he is necessarily "uncomfortable" with the teaching. In fact, as we shall see, he uses the Latin term more than any Western Father before him, and with various images of human divinization, he exhorted his Christian audiences to holiness, in ways that continue to inspire still.
Despite Augustine's many detractors, however, his use of deificare is always found in the midst of other standard biblical images, inviting his audience to embrace this stunning reality as one more way of understanding how God redeems in Christ. These scholars nevertheless articulate an important point: as significant as this individual term may be in a particular homily or treatise, Augustine never cares to handle the
1. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, La Déification de l'homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), 39–40.
2. Ben Drewery, "Deification," Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp, edited by Peter Brooks (London: SCM Press, 1975), 37. As a corrective to Drewery's parenthetical remark against Aquinas, see A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. Michael Azkoul, The Influence of Augustine of Hippo on the Orthodox Church (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 176, n. 81.