The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 7 would later maintain that visible existents in this world are beautiful because of that original beauty in the other world.14 Plotinus came to liken those who belittle the material order to ingrates who, ignorant of the goodness of the lodging provided them, have the audacity to revile both the house and its maker.15 The philosophical tradition from which Augustine works clearly maintains that the visible world is (1) a good work and (2) an icon capable of lifting human minds to the creator. Accordingly, Augustine recounts in his Confessions: "I put my question to the earth, and it replied, 'I am not he' . . . . And to all things which stood around the portals of my flesh I said, 'Tell me of my God. . . . You are not he, but tell me something of him.' Then they lifted up their mighty voices and cried, 'He made us.' My questioning was my attentive spirit, and their reply, their beauty."16
If the Platonic books prepared Augustine to find vestigial traces of the divine within this acclamatory creation, his study of scripture poised him to look for a triad within creation. Pierre Courcelle correctly argues that Augustine was present for Ambrose's preaching on Genesis after 385, and accordingly would have heard the Bishop of Milan develop his triadic structure of creation.17 Drawing from Paul's a quo, per quem, in quo (Rom. 11:36), Ambrose delineated the creative act as one of beginning and origin [principium et origo], the continuation of all being [continuatio], and the end for which all creatures have been brought into being [finis]. These three properties are then reinterpreted as the material [materia], is subject to becoming (μίμημα δὲ παραδείγματος . . . γένεσιν καὶ ὁρατόν) are essential to the argument throughout: cf. Timaeus 48E–49A.
14. Enneads 2.9.17; Armstrong 2.292. 15. Cf. Enneads 2.9.18. 16. conf. 10.6.9; Boulding, Confessions, 242–43; cf. s. 241.2: "Pulchritudo eorum, confessio eorum"; PL 38.1134.
17. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin (Paris: Boucard, 1950), 98–103.