The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
The Son's Descent 119 not in the power of our own nature but through his."91 This wonderful exchange also receives a priestly and sacrificial tone on the Feast of the Ascension in the year 417. We hear that the Son took for us what he would offer the Father on our behalf [assumpsit pro te, quod offeret pro te]: "You didn't have anything to live by, and he didn't have anything to die with. What a marvelous exchange [o magna mutatio]! Live by what is his, because he died with what is yours."92
Finally, let us now examine the single instance where this mutatio is explained explicitly in terms of deificare. When the psalmist praises the Lord for the final victory he will bring about against the wicked, he uses Ps. 117:15–16 to proclaim "the joyful shout of deliverance," acknowledging how the Lord's "right hand strikes with power." Augustine translates this victory not as a mere military scuffle but as the greatest of all feats, making a god out of a human: "Great might is needed to raise up the lowly, to deify a mere mortal, to make the weak perfect, to grant glory through abasement and victory through suffering. . . . No human being has ever raised up himself, no human has made himself perfect, no human has conferred glory on himself, no man or woman has proved victorious, no human being has saved himself."93 The terms of the exchange are clearly God's subjection and suffering for humanity's deification. This passage is particularly helpful because Augustine lists five concrete ways the "great exchange" allows the divinized human to appropriate the divine
91. en. Ps. 146.11; Boulding, Expositions (III/20), 430–31. 92. s. 265D; Hill, Sermons (III/7), 259. Referring to the flesh as that which both allowed Christ to die as well as that which he came to save is a standard trope among the Fathers: cf. Tertullian, De Carne Christi §6 (PL 2.764A), Athanasius, De Incarnatione §20 (PG 25.152B) and Epistula ad Epictetum §6-7 (PG 26.1061A).
93. en. Ps. 117.11; Boulding, Expositions (III/19), 337; "Magna uirtus exaltare humilem, deificare mortalem, praebere de infirmitate perfectionem, de subiectione gloriam, de passione victoriam, dare auxilium de tribulatione. . . . Non homo se exaltauit, non homo se perfecit, non sibi homo gloriam dedit, non homo uicit, non homo sibi saluti fuit."