The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
184 Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life yearned throughout his own search. By way of a résumé of his own story, then, he fittingly (and finally) prays: "And in your Word, your only Son, we saw [creatures] severally as good and collectively as exceedingly good; for what we saw was heaven and earth, the Head and the body of the Church which you predestined before time began, when there was neither morning nor evening."11 Unlike his own wanderings, the goal for which Augustine hoped is never challenged by the concupiscence of self but is wholly united with the divine immutability. As such, both the church and the caelum caeli represent the summit of creation. Here then is the answer to the quare fecerit? posed earlier. God's reason in creating is ecclesial: a collective body of creatures praising the divine glory through perfect, unceasing participation in the Trinity.
Creation and salvation once again converge in the Augustinian grammar of divine union. The interconnectedness of creation and the church bring all of God's activity into a single economy, thereby pointing us to the divine mandate that all be one. In their unceasing worship, the good angels provide those who follow with an imitable pattern. As the Trinity's created receptacle, this cosmic and angelic church is clearly something much more mysterious and ancient than even Christianity itself. However, the church does not remain solely a transcendent reality as experienced in the unsullied caelum caeli but will also be continued as a historical body with a future destiny. Having descended from heaven so as to unite human persons with the divine as well as with angelic persons, the church assumes a new form in Genesis with the appearance of God's chosen people. The ecclesia ab Abel materializes as the next instance of the church. Before the incarnation, the church was being built up through anticipation and foreshadowing. This does not mean there are multiple bodies
11. conf. 13.34.49; Boulding, Confessions, 305.