The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
The Son's Descent 131
As such, Caelestius's reliance on 2 Pet. 1:4 is depicted as equating God's sinlessness with the human soul's impeccability [sine peccato quemadmodum Deus].107 Norman Russell qualifies Caelestius's thought here, stating that he "was probably only stating an extremely optimistic view of human nature."108 Therefore, prescinding from the question of whether Augustine understood Caelestius accurately or not, he was nonetheless rightly repulsed by any hint of the soul's innate divinity and thus distanced himself from any anthropology or soteriology that depicted the human person as a divine being or as a part of the Godhead.
While Augustine does not name those who think they can be equal to God in this life or in the next, he does admit:
For my part, I hold that, even when we shall have such great righteousness that absolutely no addition could be made to it, the creature will not be equal to the creator. But if some suppose that our progress will be so great that we will be changed into the divine substance and become exactly what he is, let them see how they may support their view. I confess that I myself am not convinced of it.109
Equality to the divine substance is clearly unattainable, perhaps in a way that the term "deification" does not readily make clear. Neither human sinlessness nor the "perfection" the elect will experience in the life to come can render a creature "divine" without making essential theological distinctions and qualifications. This limitation is something we shall return to in chapter 6, when we explore the supposed unity between divinity and humanity in Augustine's understanding of the totus Christus.
To Augustine the theologian, the Pelagian misconstruction of 2 Pet. 1:4 fostered a perfectionism which no human being
107. gest. Pel. 35.65; CSEL 42.121. 108. Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 332.
109. nat. et gr. 33.37; Teske, Answer to the Pelagians (I/23), Nature and Grace, 244.