The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
The Holy Spirit's Indwelling 173
Conclusion
We began this chapter by admitting that at first blush the Spirit's role in the Augustinian narrative pales. However, having identified Augustine's insistence that the economic role of each divine person reflects the role of each in the Trinity, we were able to focus on the Spirit's function in time. Using De Trinitate 6.5.7 as our guide, we saw how the Holy Spirit is God's union, God's spiritual holiness, and the love between the Father and the Son; in the economy, the Spirit is the glue which unites believers with God and with one another, the person who both renders holy and spiritually transforms Christ's followers, and the love of God poured into the hearts of his people. The Spirit is the charity which binds the church together and the church to Christ. As Augustine knew so well, unless one holds on tightly to unity, one cannot have Christ and one cannot know true unity unless one has charity.93
Such an insistence on unity is constitutive of Augustine's thought, a theme we will have to explore more deeply in the next chapter when we take up the body of Christ as a living, single organism. Why so? What lives from the Spirit of Christ? Augustine's answer is nothing but the body of Christ: de Spiritu Christi non uiuit, nisi corpus Christi.94 Thus from the Holy Spirit emerges the church, a connection alluded to in the following section of the commentary just quoted where Augustine brings together the sacrament of faith, the sign of unity and the bond of love in proclaiming: O sacramentum pietatis! O signum unitatis! O uinculum caritatis!95 As love the Spirit unifies: he is the loving union of the Father and of the
93. s. 89.1: "Non autem habet Christum, qui Christi non tenet unitatem, qui non habet caritatem. Ergo per hanc connexionem non habet fructum, qui non habet caritatem"; PL 38.554.
94. Jo. eu. tr. 26.13; CCL 36.266. 95. Jo. eu. tr. 26.13; CCL 36.266.