The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
6 Creation as the Unifying Prologue of conspicuous clarity, he was delighted to see how a careful reading of Genesis 1 revealed how the entire Trinity is found there.10 In the opening two lines of scripture he thus discerned how: "The Father in the word 'God' and the Son in the word 'beginning'; the beginning, not for the Father but for the creation created at the start through himself, and chiefly for the spiritual, and consequently for the totality of creation; while with scripture saying: And the Spirit of God was being borne over the water (Gen. 1:2), we recognize the complete indication of the Trinity."11 God's act of creating mirrors the self-giving that eternally occurs within the Trinity: the Father is the one who speaks, the Son is the principium in whom all things are made, and the Spirit hovers over the waters as a sign of God's unifying order and dominion.
Both Augustine's Platonism as well as his Christianity allowed him to see how the corporeal world images the intelligible world. Together, both schools of thought equipped him to see the visible world as the externalization of God's goodness which participates in and consequently manifests signs of God's life. Eugene TeSelle also suggests that the concept of God's holding all things together in a purposeful whole (continet, συνέχει) could have easily come to Augustine by way of Cicero, Varro, and Porphyry.12 Moreover, in Plotinus's final treatise against those Gnostics who denigrate the material universe, Augustine would have gladly read there that to love God is also to love the visible world which God has providentially brought about.
Evident throughout his Timaeus, Plato presented this world as an imitation of the imitable and perfect pattern.13 Plotinus
10. Cf., ciu. Dei 11.32; CCL 47.352. 11. Gn. litt. 1.6; CSEL 28.10; Hill, Genesis, 173. Cf. ciu. Dei 5.11, 11.24; Gn. litt. 9.15; s. 126.10, s. 182.3.
12. Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1970), 117.
13. Both an intelligible pattern as well as a visible imitation of that pattern which