The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life 183 ity. Those deified in the church experience the same type of knowing as those instantaneously created in the caelum caeli. This aspect of divine conformity and effect reinforces my argument that the "heaven's heaven" at the end of the Confessions, can be read as "the church" in light of later ecclesial reflections, especially the Enchiridion.
In an excellent study on the mystical strands running through the Confessions, John Peter Kenney likewise shows how the caelum caeli is best understood as the first instance of the church. He sees how the angels perfectly model the Son's turn toward the Father and in their unwavering imitation, a spiritual body is formed, "an ecclesial locus for contemplation, [nested] within an institutional structure . . . the cosmic significance of the Church is drawn out in reference to God's own act of knowing."10 The church is "cosmic" because it is more effulgent than the praise found on earth: the angels, although not properly members of the body of Christ, find themselves created freely and wholly in the Spirit within the Son's response to the Father. Here, and only here (as we argued in chapter 4) can creatures know as God knows, see as God sees, and judge as God judges, which is a creaturely assimilation of the divine attributes which can occur only in Christ's church.
As the perfect body of praise, the caelum caeli is rightly depicted by Augustine as the telos of all creation. As such, this definition of the completion of creation also provides him with the conclusion he needs for his own story. Is this not why the Confessions end on this note? After his exposition of Gen. 1:1–2, Augustine turns to this body of praise (the caelum caeli) where nothing is squandered away, but where creatures remain firmly established in God's grace. This is the desired goal of Augustine's own narrative and the end for which he
10. John Peter Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (London: Routledge, 2005), 107; slightly adjusted.