The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
196 Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life head speaks and at other times the body. Since Christ brings the church into himself, he can now vocalize words of doubt and despair speaking not qua head but qua body, in the place of fallen humanity whose condition he has come to share so as to redeem. Such a hermeneutical principle allowed Augustine to understand how the whole of scripture (but especially his beloved Psalter) can still be read Christologically while at the same time also being able to affirm the cries expressing abandonment and confusion. Augustine came to see how in such moments Christ speaks not as a bewildered deity, but as the Son of God speaking on behalf of sinful humanity. Tyconius provided Augustine with the tools by which to transfer such creaturely predicates away from Christ as omnipotent head, but onto Christ who can also represent the experience of the members of his beloved and vulnerable body.
Seemingly unsatisfied with Tyconius's simplistic, binary distinction between body and head, Augustine comes to speak of Christ in a third way: as the totus Christus—the whole Christ who is the fullness of his church, both head and body: id est caput et corpus, secundum plenitudinem perfecti cuiusdam uiri, in quo uiri singuli membra sumus.33 This "whole Christ" is the divinely human head inseparable from the body which he has assumed, now constituting one person. This third way of speaking of Christ has significant implications for our search into Augustine's theology of deification. Before proceeding any further, however, we must first treat the unity of divinity and humanity in Christ. While Augustine tries to show that the incarnate Word and the created church exhibit two essentially different types of divinity, the second type of participatory divinity must be somehow related to that perfect union of God and humanity in Christ.