The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
170 The Holy Spirit's Indwelling tive genitive, we reinforce the Spirit's inhabitation within the created soul: it is God's own love which allows creatures to offer an infinite love to God, thereby elevating the faithful and allowing them to participate in the life of the Trinity.
Furthermore, if this divine caritas is dually processional in the trinitarian life, it is fitting that the Spirit also be realized in creatures as one given. Charity can never stem from our own capacity or from our own choosing. Augustine is provided with a model of how creatures participate in the divine life through the Spirit, the donum Dei (a term which Mayer finds over 1200 times).84 Using the trinitarian relationships as the pattern of our own participation in divinity, we see how the Father begets the Begotten in Love and it is therefore fitting that we too are made sons and daughters in this same Love. Or to describe this transformation in Augustine's own words, the Son is natus-God, the Spirit is datus-God, while a human person becomes factus-God. In Augustine's own words, the Holy Spirit comes forth not as one born [non quomodo natus] but as one given [sed quomodo datus]. Furthermore, the Spirit is neither made God nor adoptively born divine like the Christian elect [factus ut per gratiam in adoptionem nasceretur sicuti nos].85 This tripartite division of natus-datus-factus exhausts the various ways of coming from the Father: equal Begotten, equal gift, and a graced creature. A generation ago Joseph Ratzinger saw how the Spirit opens up a way of being God that is neither begotten nor given. He discerned that, as gift, the Spirit allows for a new movement [Bewegung] from the Father, extended even to creatures who, while never enjoying consubstantiality with the Father, are nonetheless made like him and united to the Father through the Spirit.86
84. Mayer, s.v. "Donum," Augustinus Lexikon, 660–67; 660, n. 4. 85. Trin. 5.14.15: "Exit enim non quomodo natus sed quomodo datus, et ideo non dicitur filius quia neque natus est sicut unigenitus neque factus ut per gratiam in adoptionem nasceretur sicuti nos"; CCL 50.222.
86. Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, "Der Heilige Geist als communio: Zum Verhältnis