The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 149
If the first problem had been the plain omission of the Spirit's presence and role from the work of earlier theologians, the second danger was the earlier analogies used to describe the Trinity. Many bordered on a subordinated, tertiary position for the Spirit. The Spirit could be depicted as that which came after the sun and its ray or after a body of water's source and its river.31 While such images rely on the obvious consubstantiality of the sun or the water, as it descends from its source neither the light nor the water can help but diminish in power and effect. With Augustine's insight into the Holy Spirit as the indispensable bond (or, in Du Roy's terminology, the "curvature") between Father and Son, however, there could be no more room for the subtle subordinationism of these earlier thinkers. The Spirit's person and mission as consubstantial union were now indispensable to the Trinity's very existence.
In this way the Spirit as divine communion became an indispensable part of Augustine's soteriology. The verbs he chooses to describe the work of the Holy Spirit are strong and telling: collocare, coniungere, inhaerere, (per-)manere, uinculare, and adglutinare. Such taxonomy clearly emphasizes the Spirit as the living union between persons. As early as 396–97 and the first book of the De Doctrina Christiana, the central soteriological working of the Holy Spirit is seen as binding created persons to the trinitarian life. As in his gloss on Psalm 62:9, the Holy Spirit is depicted as the glue that unites us with divinity: "For when you reach [Christ], you also reach the Father, because it is through his equality that the one to whom he is equal can be recognized, with the Holy Spirit binding and so to say gluing us in there, so that we may abide for ever in that supreme and unchangeable good."32 This phrase, uinciente et tamquam agglu-
31. Cf. Tertullian, Aduersus Praxean §8; the same images are used at Hippolytus, Contra Noetum §11.
32. doc. Chr. 1.34.38; Hill, Teaching Christianity, 123: "Cum enim ad ipsum peruenitur, etiam ad Patrem peruenitur, quia per aequalem ille cui est aequalis agnos-