The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 169 this gift, surely, is distinctively to be understood as being the charity which brings us through to God [perducit ad Deum], without which no other gift of God at all can bring us through to God.81
Rom. 5:5 repeatedly appears throughout Augustine's corpus, over 200 times according to La Bonnardière.82 This repetition emphasizes the love which identifies us with the love of the Trinity, conforming our humanity to the Son's divine self. It is most apposite, Augustine thinks, to see this union with the divine nature as the presence of the Spirit, the great gift of God now present in the creature leading [perducit] him or her through to God.
Such an analysis allows us to see how Augustine would have considered the caritas Dei of Rom. 5:5 as a subjective genitive. The charity here is nothing other than God's loving in us and not, as an objective genitive would have it, our purely human love reaching up to God. For it is the Spirit himself in us who brings us to a love of the Father. Far from a grammatical nicety, this question is central to Augustine's theology of union. Is the charity discoverable in the human soul actually the Holy Spirit himself or is it an infused supernatural virtue coming from the Holy Spirit? For the most part, Augustine's own words identify charity with the Holy Spirit, exhorting us: "Let us love God with God. Yes indeed, since the Holy Spirit is God, let us love God with God," and again, after quoting Rom. 5:5, "it follows that since the Holy Spirit is God and we cannot love God except through the Holy Spirit, we can only love God with God."83 By stressing the caritas Dei as a subjec-
81. Trin. 15.18.32; Hill, Trinity, 421: "Dilectio igitur quae ex deo est et deus est proprie spiritus sanctus est per quem diffunditur in cordibus nostris dei caritas per quam nos tata inhabitet trinitatis. Quocirca rectissime spiritus sanctus, cum sit deus, uocatur etiam donum dei. Quod donum proprie quid nisi caritas intellegenda est quae perducit ad deum et sine qua quodlibet aliud dei donum non perducit ad deum?"; CCL 50A.508.
82. Cf. Anne-Marie La Bonnardière, "Le verset paulinien Rom., v.5 dans l'œuvre de saint Augustin," Augustinus Magister 2, 657–665; 662–65.
83. Cf. s. 34.3; Hill, Sermons (III/2), 167.