The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
84 The Son's Descent and coupled with the pagan otium, it can only indicate a turning within so as to discover one's own divinity.12
In his doctoral thesis for the Netherlands' University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit), Jan Stoop also maintained that Augustine's first reliance upon deification was really no different from the blessed repose of any wise man in the Platonic tradition.13 According to G. Bardy's seminal entry, the deificari in Epistula 10 also carries the same meaning as the pagan philosophers used.14 Similarly, Frederick van der Meer saw this same hubris in Augustine's recommending to Nebridius that he seek his own divinization, "without ever guessing how selfish and presumptuous were those words."15 These remarks not only help to reveal what Augustine could have meant by deificari in otio but also tell us something about deification in the culture of late antiquity in which he studied and wrote.
However, not all see Augustine's deificari in otio in this light. Most notably, Roland Teske and Serge Lancel stand against much of the twentieth century's scholarship on Epistula 10 and offer a particularly new insight. If deificari in otio is taken in isolation, perhaps the aforementioned scholars are justified in their critique of a strictly philosophical exhortation to divine assent. However, Teske shows how, if we place this letter to Nebridius in a larger context, we can read its insistence on otium alongside the otium called for in De Vera Religione written shortly thereafter, enabling us to take deificari in otio in a more Christian sense. Teske writes that when paralleled with De Vera
12. Cf. Ibid., 226. 13. Cf. J. A. A. A. Stoop, Die Deificatio Hominis in die Sermones en Epistulae van Augustinus (Leiden: Drukkerij Luctor et Emergo, 1952), 48.
14. Gustave Bardy, "Divinization: Chez les Pères Latins," in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, edited by M. Viller et al., and continued by C. Baumgartner, et al. Tome 3, section 3, (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957): "Le sens du mot deificari paraît encore très général, ou peut même dire philosophique; car il n'est pas mis en rapport avec les mystères chrétiens," 1391.
15. Frederick van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, translated by Brian Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 209.