The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 151 what conditionally, a bevy of other images stressing unity arise from Augustine's own narrative.
Augustine has elsewhere characterized friendship by the classical definition of the sharing of selves and the becoming the other as friends come to share the good, cemented together through sharing similar loves and actions.35 Friendship meant finding a soul's other half [dimidium animae suae].36 This friendship was based on a mutuality in sharing the true and the good.37 Friendship also included the love of the divine.38 If the Holy Spirit is therefore the friendship of God, we can deduce how the Son's particular role is to make us like God by allowing us to share the same love, thereby uniting us to the one for whom each human person has been made.
In examining these texts which discuss the particular work of the Holy Spirit, are we to assume that it is the Holy Spirit himself who is alive and active in the divinely-united soul? Is it the Holy Spirit who unites Christians to the Godhead or is it rather some effect of the Spirit's activity? This question is essential because any doctrine of deification demands an internal and intimate presence of the Trinity within the human soul. It is not enough for God to touch and tug from afar; God must transform from within. God, and not an effect of God, regardless how exalted, must be active within the soul.
In Augustine's Pneumatology we realize a new presence of the divine life in creatures. The binding of the believer to Christ is simultaneously a new ontological presence of the Trinity within the human soul; it is a presence reserved exclusively for the deified which is much more than an ethical empowerment
35. Cf. Gn. litt. imp. 16.59. 36. conf. 4.6.11; CCL 27.45 (paraphrasing Horace, Carmina 1.3.8). 37. Cf. ciu. Dei 19.8. For more on the Augustinian notion of friendship, see Joseph T. Lienhard, "Friendship with God, Friendship in God: Traces in St. Augustine," in Augustine: Mystic and Mystagogue, edited by F. van Fleteren, et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 207–29.