The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
The Son's Descent 91
Bishop of Carthage likewise juxtaposed the vivification God grants with the sanctification he bestows.28
Augustine bridges these two states with human hope: surrounded by mortality and infirmity, men and women look forward to a new type of life. We are quickly told that this expectation is not wishful thinking but an attainable reality. The divine perfection which humanity desires can in fact be accomplished, but only by God who alone has divinity to give. It is not a false promise, but one deliverable by God alone. For when we hear a promise made by God himself, we do well to expect it.29 But how does God "make good" on such a promise?
In the lines which follow, Augustine instructs us that if God is going to fulfill the human longing for wholeness as well as God's own pledge to deify, God must become one of us. Such an incarnation is an act of supreme love and now God's perfect humanity becomes the instrument with which he heals all infirmed humans:
Still, it was not enough for our God to promise us divinity in himself, unless he also took on our infirmity, as though to say, "Do you want to know how much I love you, how certain you ought to be that I am going to give you my divine reality? I took to myself your mortal reality." We mustn't find it incredible, brothers and sisters, that human beings become gods, that is, that those who were human beings become gods.30
It is by taking on our weakness [infirmitatem], that God promises us his own divinity [diuinam meam]. By assuming [susciperet] our mortality to himself, God divinizes creatures by assuming his own contingent creation and not from what he
28. Cf. De Dominica Oratione §12: "sanctificatio et uiuificatio, quae de Dei gratia sumitur"; CCL 3A.97.
29. s. 156.2: "quando audis promissorem, exspecta factorem"; PL 38.850. 30. s. 23B.1 (lines 10–14); Dolbeau, Sermons, 459; Hill, Sermons (III/11), 37; "Parum tamen fuit Deo nostro promittere nobis in se diuinitatem, nisi et nostram susciperet infirmitatem, tamquam dicens: <<Vis nosse quantum te diligam, quam certus esse debeas daturum me tibi diuinam meum? Accepi mortale tuum>>. Non nobis uideatur incredibile, fratres, deos fieri homines, id est <ut> qui homines erant dii fiant."