The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
102 The Son's Descent about by human sin, but also through God's becoming "ill" by his taking on mortal flesh. This is how, in strong deifying and participatory language, Augustine can chide those who have deceived themselves about the source of their vitality: "O you strong ones, who need no physician! Strength like this is the mark of fatuity, not fitness. . . . But the teacher of humility became a sharer in our infirmity to enable us to share in his divinity."51 The Son of God's incarnation is at once both the sign of God's strength and humanity's weakness: it is both the sign of his willingness to heal and our need for healing. Such medicinal imagery belongs under a recapitulative soteriology because it consists of the divine's becoming infirmed for our sake: he dies in order to kill our death and in so doing the Son reveals himself in humility.
By way of both conclusion and transition, I would like to turn quickly to Augustine's most comprehensive commentary on Psalm 81 [82]. In the beginning of this section on recapitulation we saw how Augustine chose to rely on explicit deification language throughout sermo 23B to explain the different senses of the plural "gods" he found within Psalm 81. Why, then, when we turn to his explication of this psalm in Expositions of the Psalms, is there no obvious deification language? Nowhere does deificare appear, nor does it even seem to motivate his explication of the passages where "gods" appear, and from such silence, some could perhaps argue that Augustine is in fact uncommitted to a doctrine of deification. Yet when we see how Augustine chooses to treat both instances where the line Deus stetit in synagoga deorum appears (Ps. 81:1 and Ps. 94:6), he explains the plural by encouraging his Christian hearers to become filios Altissimi, the sons and daughters of God. At Expositions of the Psalms 81 he goes on to illustrate
51. en. Ps. 58, exp. 1.7; Boulding, Expositions (III/17), 153; "O fortes quibus medicus opus non est! Fortitudo ista non sanitatis est, sed insaniae. . . . Doctor autem humilitatis, particeps nostrae infirmitatis, donans participationem suae diuinitatis"; CCL 39.734.