Power and Human Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
132 The Son's Descent could ever attain without constant petitioning for God's grace; to Augustine the pastor, it fostered a perfectionism which would generate a church of deluded rigorists. Augustine therefore (invidiously perhaps) accused his Pelagian neighbors of claiming that they were the only ones who need not pray, dimitte nobis, "Forgive us our sins," because their own wills have never been in need of liberation.110 Accordingly, he feared that such a naiveté only encouraged an impossible yearning for innocence and, with the Pelagian denial of the necessity of God's grace intervening and assisting all human efforts, ended up stressing the human person's innate, solitary, and unaided efforts. Against what was seen as a wrongly placed optimism, Augustine tended not to emphasize the potential of men and women to be deified but their utter ineptitude apart from God. As we have seen, however, this does not mean that deification language was absent from his explanation of the Christian life. As Bonner has rightly noticed: "Nevertheless Augustine continues to speak of deification, even when the stream of anti Pelagian writings between 411–12 and his death was absorbing much of his energy and causing him to emphasize predestination rather than participation."111 We can only wonder how Augustine's soteriology may have progressed differently if the Pelagian controversy had not forced him to mute the glory of God's life in his creatures.
Conclusion
Concentrating on those passages where deificare appears within the Augustinian corpus has revealed some significant divisions and patterns. We have seen how there are three clearly distinct uses of deification: (1) the initial use tied up
110. Cf. ep. 176.2; ep. 177.18; pecc. mer. 3.13.23. 111. Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 114.