The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 171
As the eternal union between Father and Son, the Spirit is the gift-person of the Trinity [donum] who proceeds so as to be "giveable" [donatum].87 The Spirit's presence creates the connaturality between the human soul and the Father. This unity is depicted as a new facility between creator and creature: for when Love speaks, God's ears are always attendant [caritas roget et ibi sunt aures Dei].88 The Holy Spirit conforms the human to the divine and in so doing, releases the previously carnal person from the snares of the old self. The Holy Spirit reorders the inversion of sin: what was once subject to us has become our master but through God's Spirit we are restored to the top of creation as we become one like God:
Love, then, will see to it that we are conformed to God and, having been conformed and configured by him and cut off from this world, that we are not confused with the things that ought to be subject to us. But this is done by the Holy Spirit. For the apostle says, Hope does not produce confusion, since the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom. 5.5).89
In this passage we again encounter the conflation of the love of the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts with our conforming to God. This is the natural effect of any love: it makes us what we cherish. Union and love for Augustine carry an inseparable component of formation and configuration.
Deifying union with God is the goal of humanity's exisvon Pneumatologie und Spiritualität bei Augustinus," in Erfahrung und Theologie des Heiligen Geistes, edited by Claus Heitmann and Herbert Mühlen (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1974), 223–38; 230–31. See also the more recent, Joseph Ratzinger, "The Holy Spirit as Communio: Concerning the Relationship of Pneumatology and Spirituality in Augustine," Communio (Summer, 1998): 324–37.
87. Trin. 5.3.16; CCL 50.224. 88. ep. Jo. 6.8; PL 35.2024. 89. mor. 1.13.23; Teske, The Manichean Debate (I/19), "The Catholic Way of Life and the Manichean Way of Life," 42; "Fiet ergo per caritatem ut conformemur deo et ex eo conformati atque figurati et circumcisi ab hoc mundo non confundamur cum his quae nobis debent esse subiecta. Fit autem hoc per Spiritum sanctum. Spes enim, inquit, non confundit, quoniam caritas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum qui datus est nobis"; CSEL 90.27.