The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Son's Descent 89
Christian instances of deification, we see how they reveal four different paradigms pivotal to Augustine's theology.
The first paradigm is what I will refer to as a recapitulative model. Unlike the Gnostic separation between a deity who creates and another who liberates, the same God who creates for Augustine is clearly the same God who deifies. The second paradigm explains humanity's becoming gods by way of the Pauline concept of divine adoption. Through grace the Son extends his filiation to human persons, thereby giving them a share in the divine nature. The third paradigm is seen in the "great exchange" of natures. Here Augustine relies on and continues a standard patristic insight: God becomes human so humans can become divine. The fourth paradigm illustrates how deification effects ethical and physical changes in the human person. The deified are endowed with the mind and eyes of Christ himself, called to love and to see and to understand as he does.
Augustine's Soteriology
Of Recapitulation
In a masterfully crafted homily treating Psalm 81 [82], Augustine takes up the easily misunderstood line, "God stands in the assembly of the gods" [deus stetit in synagoga deorum].25 Delivered sometime in the year 404 to a congregation in Carthage struggling to understand how they differ from their non-Christian neighbors, many of whom were most likely even intimate friends or family members, sermon 23B provides an excellent example of Augustine's recapitulative deification by presenting God as the one who both gives life and deifies,
25. Possidius refers to this sermon in his indiculus 106: "De psalmo LXXXI non toto" and a manuscript at the St. Nazarius Abbey of Lorsch, Germany (MS. Lorsch V) reports a heading, "In psalmum LXXXI quod dicitur: Deus stetit in synagoga deorum"; cf., François Dolbeau, ed., Augustin d'Hippone: Vingt-six Sermons au Peuple d'Afrique (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1996), 450. All Latin citations and line numbers are taken from this edition.