The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
8 Creation as the Unifying Prologue the binding and linking [ligauit atque constrinxit], as well as the endurance [manent] of all creation.18 We shall see how Augustine reworks these triads, but it is Ambrose who first comes to provide him with a new way of reading Genesis.
Departing from Milan, Augustine quickly made this schema operative. In Rome (387–88), he initially utilizes Rom. 11:36 to describe how all things come to be.19 Later, having landed in North Africa, he next discovers how the triad found at Ws 11:21 could be a way to identify the Father with Measure, the Son with Number, and the Holy Spirit with Order.20 Very early on in his intellectual development, then, creation is understood to be doxologically deiform in that all creatures are iconic and derivatively divine. Each creature is ontologically good and perpetually confesses its triune creator.
By 389, Augustine arrived at the understanding of how such divine symmetry clearly manifests triadic traces in all created substances. He eagerly writes to his dear friend, Nebridius, that he now sees how every substance displays three characteristics: that it exists [sit], that it is either this or that [hoc uel illud], and that it remains in so far as it is able [maneant, quantum potest].21 By contemplating this triadic nature of every creature he encountered, Augustine came to realize how: "Every particular thing, you see, or substance or essence or nature, or whatever else you like to call it, has simultaneously these three aspects: that it is one something, and that it is distinguished by its own proper look or species from other things, and that it does not overstep the order of things."22
18. Ambrose, Hexameron 1.5.19; CSEL 32.16. 19. Cf. quant. 34.77 and mor. 1.14.24. 20. The first instance of this passage is found at Gn. adu. Man. 1.16.26 in 388–89; cf. Cornelius Mayer, "Creatio, creator, creatura," Augustinus Lexikon, 56–116; 84.
21. ep. 11.3; PL 33.76. 22. uera rel. 7.13; Hill, On True Relgion, 38: "Omnis enim res uel substantia uel essentia uel natura uel si quo alio uerbo melius enuntiatur, simul habet haec tria: ut et unum aliquid sit et specie propria discernatur a ceteris et rerum ordinem non excedat"; CCL 32.196–97.