The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
152 The Holy Spirit's Indwelling or an intellectual improvement. This however does not mean that the Holy Spirit alone lives in the created soul. Augustine maintains: "After all, the Holy Spirit doesn't dwell [habitat] in anybody without the Father and the Son, just as the Son doesn't without the Father and the Holy Spirit, nor does the Father without them." Despite always stressing the inseparable workings of the persons of the Trinity, Augustine goes on here to insist on seeing the divine indwelling "as the proper work of the Holy Spirit" because the Spirit is himself "the companionship of the Father and the Son."39 As the bond between the Father and the Son, the Spirit makes the entire Trinity our divine guest: we dwell in God and God dwells in us.40
At times Augustine may refer to grace as a medicine.41 However, this should not necessitate the conclusion that "God's grace for [Augustine] was primarily an unmerited supernatural help to convert from sin or resist temptation."42 Grace does enable the rational creature to avoid sin but that is only propaedeutical and not the ultimate purpose of the divine's indwelling. Instead, this new presence of the Spirit effects created godliness; it is the divine presence in the human soul making the Christian into a participant in the triune life. This notion of indwelling is fitting to the Spirit's ubiquity and role in uniting us to God the Son, conforming creatures to him and thereby forming in the faithful those filial attributes of the Son. The Spirit's penetration and consequent abiding in the human soul is explained as a sheltering and subsequent remaining: "Let God be your house, and be the house of God.
39. s. 71.33; Hill, Sermons (III/3), 267: "Neque enim habitat in quoquam Spiritus sanctus sine Patre et Filio: sicut nec Filius sine Patre et Spiritu sancto, nec sine illis Pater . . . ideo societas unitatis Ecclesiae Dei, extra quam non fit ipsa remissio peccatorum, tamquam proprium opus est Spiritus Sancti, Patre sane et Filio cooperantibus, quia societas est quodam modo Patris et Filii ipse Spiritus Sanctus"; PL 38.463.
40. Trin. 15.17.31: "Sanctus itaque spiritus de quo dedit nobis facit nos in deo manere et ipsum in nobis"; CCL 50A.506.
41. Cf. s. 156.5. 42. Ronald Modras, Ignatian Humanism (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), 42.