The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Son's Descent 93 trying to make clear that Christ, who "was" [erat] God, did not cease being God [non Deum in homine perdidit], alongside the parallel implication that the ones who "were" human did not cease being human. In fact, toward the front end of sermo 23B we hear that those who worship false idols risk becoming like them, thus "ceasing" to be human and risking "becoming" the wood out of which such offensive idols are made [non ut sis lignum et esse desinas homo].33 Of course Augustine cannot literally mean that deification negates humanity or that idolatry of wooden objects renders one ligneous.
Augustine employs the past tense only to stress the passage from a state before Christ to a moment after his incarnation. Looking back on the way humanity was before Christ is to look back on humanity as "merely" human, the first moment. The second moment, however, signifies no cessation of humanity, but it is nonetheless a new humanity because now the Son of God has "added" [addidit] humanity to his divinity. As Norman Russell has observed, this new life for Augustine could be brought about only through the sacrament of baptism and in those waters, "ceasing to be merely human" means being raised to a new human identity: "promoted, as it were to be gods, which in Christian tradition means they have been baptized."34 In preaching this appeal to a new life, Augustine does not intend to destroy humanity but instead wants to spur his audience to embrace a radically new way of being human in Christ through the waters of Christ's church.
Returning to sermo 23B we further see how this new state of humanity is explained in terms of adoption. A commonplace among many patristic theologians by the time of Augustine, the Son of God has become human so humans could become sons and daughters of God. This assumed humanity
33. s. 23B.5; Dolbeau, Sermons, 461. 34. Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 330.