The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
104 The Son's Descent
We saw above how deification language for Augustine at times involves a hyperbolic past: those who "were" human are now called to be something more. We encounter this again when we examine Augustine's next use of deificare. In a sermon dated to 409, delivered at the Shrine of the Twenty Martyrs in Hippo Regius on the first Sunday after Easter, Augustine wishes to take up the topic of becoming a new sort of human.54 To do this he juxtaposes Eph. 4:25, putting aside lying, speak the truth, with Ps. 116:11, every man is a liar. These two verses are contrasted not because he wishes to spend this homily critiquing human mendacity but, rather, he wants to show that no one should be content being merely "human" but should strive rather to be "God;" men and women are now to become something more than their current state allows.
Augustine begins this sermon by stating that God commands us to be human no longer [hoc iubet Deus, ut non simus homines].55 While realizing the boldness of such a claim [audeo dicere], he presses on because he desires to show his congregation how each human person belongs to two Adams, one who was simply man and another who is the Son of Man. If in the first Adam the human person is given to the vice of lying, in the new Adam all have the power to be made one with incarnate truth. Augustine thus exhorts his flock to see salvation as being "merely human" no longer but in becoming human anew. He uses the first Adam to represent those content being "merely" human [tantum homines], but the second Adam to describe what those noui homines in Christ can become: "Because the apostle for his part is advising us to take off the old man and put on the new, when he says Putting aside lying, speak the truth; and the psalm in turn, was
54. The Church of the Twenty Martyrs was a local shrine dedicated to those martyred under Diocletian and appears often in Augustine's homilies: s. 148, 257, 325, as well as the miracle of Florentius, recorded at ciu. Dei 22.8, the poor tailor whose sartorial needs were provided for through the intercession of the relics of these martyrs.