The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 161 to the divine nature, thus enabling creatures to see and know divinely:
It is different for people who see creation through your Spirit, for you are seeing it through their eyes . . . no one knows the reality of God except the Spirit of God. How, then, can we too know the gifts that God has given to us? This is the answer that comes to me: if we know something through his Spirit, it is still true to say that no one knows it except God's own Spirit; for just as it could rightly be said to people who spoke in the Spirit of God, It is not you who are speaking (Matt. 10:20), so too is it rightly said to those who know anything in the Spirit of God.59
A wonderful paradox is here realized. The Spirit dwells within the deified in such a way that it is still the Spirit who sees and knows but now through created eyes and mind. These two terms, sanctus and spiritus, are synchronically linked in Augustine's trinitarian as well as in his soteriological grammar: to become holy necessarily means to become spiritual. He develops this association by joining St. Paul in searching for a homo spiritualis (cf. 1 Cor. 3:1) as opposed to a carnal one.60 To Augustine, Paul is looking for someone who has been raised above the mutability of the temporal and fallen order.
The spiritual person experiences such grace as the ability to embrace an eternal reality. In a set of important studies, Roland Teske has laid out how the spiritual man or woman is marked by two necessary characteristics: ecclesial commitment and Neoplatonic insight.61 In his recent work, Philip Cary concurs. Cary presents Augustine's concept of grace in what he readily admits is "not a turn away from [Augustine's]
59. conf. 13.31.46; Boulding, Confessions, 375; CCL 27.269. 60. Cf. conf. 13.13.14. 61. Cf. Roland Teske, "Spirituals and Spiritual Interpretation in Saint Augustine," Augustinian Studies 15 (1984): 65–81; "Homo Spiritualis in St. Augustine's De Genesi contra Manichaeos," Studia Patristica 22, edited by E. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1989), 351–55; " 'Homo Spiritualis' in the Confessions of St. Augustine," Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, edited by Joanne McWilliam (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1992), 67–76.