The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
202 Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life
In trying to state his case that the union of divinity and humanity in the Son's incarnation is fundamentally different from the union with Christ which Christians experience, does he appear to go back on his language that Christians are to become "other Christs"? He is clear that it is sacrilegus to declare that a Christian is an alter Christus (quis enim tam sit sacrilegus, ut audeat affirmare aliquam posse animam per meritum liberi arbitrii, ut alter sit Christus, efficere?). Yet, as we saw above, this was one of the great Bishop's homiletic tropes. What is behind this apparent inconsistency? It will be best to answer this later when we treat the limitations of Augustine's concept of the "whole Christ."
Before we take up the different way divinity and humanity are joined in Christ and how the human Christian participates in divinity, let us first examine what Augustine means by the totus Christus. Although the Son's union with humanity is dissimilar to the way the church is joined to God, this is not to say that the Son does not bring all of humanity to himself. This is one of the most important formulations of Augustine's ecclesiology. The church is best understood as the result of the unique assumption of humanity to divinity achieved in the Son's descent. As mentioned, while Augustine never calls this a susceptio, he does use very strong language to describe this union. Often this bond receives nuptial imagery, an assumption described as a marital union bringing the divine bridegroom and the human bride together: a copulatio whose union between God and the church was made possible by the prior susceptio of humanity by the divine Word.41 Such conjugal imagery has the advantage of stressing the collaboration between humanity and divinity in the process of sanctification, allowing Augustine to describe salvation as the product of both God
41. qu. Eu. 1.31: "quod dominus dixit: simile est regnum caelorum homini regi qui fecit nuptias filio suo, nuptias dixit uerbum incarnatum, quia in ipso homine suscepto ecclesia deo copulata est."; CCL 44B.25.