The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
172 The Holy Spirit's Indwelling tence and love is fittingly presented by Augustine as the result of our proper loving. Such charity always carries with it a component of human transformation realized as divine conformity. What we love, we will become [amate quod eritis].90 Love changes everything except Love: for when we love God, we are changed; when God loves us, we are changed. The love of God actually changes us into love. For, by loving us when we were wicked, he made us loveable.91 This type of identity between humanity and divinity, a matching of loves, is the only reality Augustine will dare to call perfection. It is the deified life which both begins with and is consummated by the charity who is the Holy Spirit.
This insight is found again in his exegesis of 1 John 4:12– 16. Human perfection is possible only by appropriating divine love. We begin to realize such completion when we begin to love rightly. Augustine thus instructs:
Begin to love; you will be perfected [incipe diligere, perficieris]. Have you begun to love? God has begun to dwell in you; love him who has begun to dwell in you that by indwelling more perfectly he may make you perfected. "In this we know that we abide in him, and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.". . . Ask your heart; if it is filled with love, you have the Spirit of God.92
Ultimate human flourishing is again located in Christ, in charity himself. To be filled with love is to be filled with God. With such an insistence on human perfection as the divine's transformative dwelling within the created soul, we discover one more aspect of Augustine's thought which deserves to be seen as an element of his theology of deification.
90. s. 216.8; PL 38.1081. 91. Cf. s. 336.2. 92. ep. Jo. 8.12; Rettig, Tractates, 5.243: "Incipe diligere, perficieris. Coepisti diligere? coepit in te Deus habitare; ama eum qui in te coepit habitare, ut perfectius inhabitando faciat te perfectum. In hoc cognoscimus quia in ipso manemus, et ipse in nobis, quia de Spiritu suo dedit nobis. . . . Interroga uiscera tua: si plena sunt caritate, habes Spiritum Dei"; PL 35.2043.