The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
192 Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life the divine physically broke into space and time in a manifest way, and it is now the same with the church. As the Word becomes visible at the incarnation, the body is rendered visible as well. Mary's "yes" enfleshes and particularizes the head, now made visible and subject to certain structures and expectations. The same is true of the mystical body. In the incarnation the church too becomes historically discernible, tangible, visible, and endowed with a particular structure. In and through the humanity assumed by the Son, God now exerts a direct influence on his members, imparting his own Spirit into his body. Such intimacy results in the union of divinity and humanity. Here these two become singular: only now can the Christ and his chosen people become two in one flesh, two in one voice (duo sunt in carne una, duo sunt in uoce una).26 No longer merely spiritual nor existing in a primarily anticipatory environment, the church can now be pointed to and recognized as a universal path with a visible head and, as a result, with divinely intended structures and sacraments: "from the virgin's womb where the sacred marriage took place, Word and flesh, presented us with a miracle in time . . . [so] that human beings might eat the bread of angels, the Lord of the angels became a human being. This is our health and salvation; the medicine of the poorly, the food of the healthy."27 This marriage between divinity and humanity in Christ brings about a new accessibility to God. Because of Christ's humanity, the Christian body on earth now has a definite and discernible structure. The head has become visible— and, as the head, so the body. Before we turn to this union of head and body, let us briefly treat a fundamental component of Augustine's understanding of the visible church: the clear fact that the church on earth is not impeccable.
Augustine's ecclesia permixta is a constitutive part of his
26. s. 129.4; PL 38.722. 27. s. 126.6, Hill, Sermons (III/4), 273.