The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life 195
In the totus Christus Christ conjoins himself with his faithful: the humble, the lowly, and those whom Saul aims to persecute. Consequently, in the church's needs and maltreatments, one still encounters the humble Christ. His continued presence in humanity is thus portrayed as how we both become and serve Christ, the means by which we too are made Christian. Let us now turn to one of Augustine's most intriguing images of the church. Nowhere else in his ecclesiology do Christ and the Christian appear to enjoy such close unity as in the totus Christus.
Humanity Taken and Transformed:
The Totus Christus
With this notion of the totus Christus, Augustine maintains that he is introducing a new way to interpret sacred scripture.31 Hitherto there were only two ways of reading the scriptures christologically, both of which Augustine found in the Donatist scholar, Tyconius. The first exegetical rule was that the biblical text sometimes portrays Christ speaking as the perfect head of the church and at other times he converses in place of his stumbling and often sinful church.32 Augustine accepts this (and six other rules) as reasonable: at times the
Cum uni ex minimis meis fecistis, mihi fecistis (Matt. 25:40). Si nos ipse non essemus, non esset uerum, Saule, Saule, quid me persequeris? (Acts 9:4). Ergo et nos ipse, quia nos membra eius, quia nos corpus eius, quia ipse caput nostrum (Eph. 1:22), quia totus Christus caput et corpus."; PL 38.742. See also note 4 of the Introduction above for another instance of these crucial passages in Augustine's thought.
31. At s. 341.20 we hear of Augustine's impression that he may have been accused of faulty innovation when interpreting some of Christ's words and actions in terms of both head and body. After explaining how Christ and his members form one flesh parallel to such a declaration about husband and wife (cf. Gen. 2:24), he asks his congregation not to think he has conjured such a hermeneutic up himself: "Adtendite ipsum exponentem, ut non coniecturis nostris aliquid ausi dicere uideamur."; François Dolbeau, ed., Augustin d'Hippone: Vingt-six Sermons au Peuple d'Afrique (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1996), 572.
32. Cf. doc. Chr. 3.31.44. Despite his obvious disagreement with Tyconius's ecclesiology, his respect for Tyconius is evident in ep. 249 and in retr. 2.44.