The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 145 can be approached and executed only through grace [per gratiam]. This grace, furthermore, proves to be the Holy Spirit himself, named here as the gift of God [munus] now given to Christ's body. The Spirit is thus presented as the one sent to unify and to gather created persons on a two-fold level. The Spirit unites men and women to God [ad deum] and to one another [ad nos ipsos] and in this, the two great commandments are fulfilled. Unity is clearly the prerogative of the Holy Spirit: the Spirit comes to unite created persons to divine persons and in so doing, unites all created persons into a bond of peace.
Such movement out of mutability and dissipation into permanence and divinity must be a component within any theology of Christian deification. The Holy Spirit not only gathers in the soul fragmented by sin, he also frees our human nature from its self-imposed restrictions by uniting it to God, that is, by "gluing" us to the Son at the Father's right hand. Joseph T. Lienhard draws our attention to Augustine's use of gluten in this passage by convincingly arguing that what he has in mind here is the Old Latin version of Psalm 62:9, agglutinata est anima mea post te, and not the Vulgate's adhesit anima mea post te.23 Turning to Augustine's commentary on Psalm 62 thus better enables us to understand how gluten is identified with the Holy Spirit, namely the love of God: "Where are we to find the strong glue? The glue is charity. Have charity in you and it will glue your soul into place, following God. Not with God, but behind God, so that he goes ahead and you follow."24 Love is a glue in that it binds the lover to the beloved and the beloved back to the lover. This occurrence is easily used to show how we become what we love: for Augustine, any sort of unity
23. "The Glue Itself Is the Charity: Ps. 62:9 in Augustine's Thought," in Collectanea Augustiniana: Presbyter Factus Sum, edited by J. Lienhard, E. Mueller, and R. Teske (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 375–84.
24. en. Ps. 62.17; Boulding, Expositions (III/17), 243.