The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
90 The Son's Descent uiuificator et deificator.26 In fact, in order to find a fitting description for the one who brings all human perfection about, Augustine was hard-pressed to find the proper term and eventually (line 35) coined deus deificator. God's deifying activity is grounded first in the undying hope borne through human suffering and the conditions of mortal life:
To what hope the Lord has called us, what we now carry about with us, what we endure, what we look forward to, is well known . . . . We carry mortality about with us, we endure infirmity, we look forward to divinity. For God wishes not only to vivify, but also to deify us. When would human infirmity ever have dared to hope for this, unless divine truth had promised it?27
Despite the contingency and imperfections we discover within ourselves, every created person longs for a God-like immortality, something we saw in the last chapter when their deification was the only thing Adam and Eve lacked in prelapsarian Eden. Furthermore, God is here depicted as discontented with imparting mere biological life but longs [uult] to share his own life with those made in his image. Such a contrast between natural and supernatural life is found in Augustine's African predecessor, Cyprian. In a very similar fashion, the
26. Sermo 23B comes from François Dolbeau's recent discovery of Augustine's sermons in 1990. These twenty-six homilies were delivered either in the city of Carthage or in the villages of the dusty Medjerda valley between 397 and 404. They provide us with a picture of a passionate pastor exhorting recently converted Catholics to understand the uniqueness of their faith and not to fall into the pagan temptations surrounding them. The sermon to be analyzed here appears as number 13 in the Mainz collection. Dolbeau has named it number 56 within his collection of recently discovered sermons but we shall refer to this sermon by its numbering as found in the Maurist classification, 23B. For a brief history of these sermons, see John Rotelle's introduction to Hill, Sermons (III/11), 13–17;19 (and chart on 21–22); see also Dolbeau's insightful "Le sermonnaire augustinien de Mayence (Mainz, Stadtbibliothek I.9): Analyse et histoire," Revue Bénédictine 106 (1996): 5–52.
27. s. 23B.1 (lines 1–6); Dolbeau, Sermons, 459.1–6: "Ad quam spem uocauerit nos Dominus Deus noster, quid modo geramus, quid toleremus et quid exspectemus, notum esse. . . . Gerimus mortalitatem, toleramus infirmitatem, exspectamus diuinitatem. Vult enim Deus non solum uiuificare, sed etiam deificare nos. Quando hoc sperare humana infirmitas auderet, nisi diuina promitteret ueritas?"; Hill, Sermons (III/11), 37.