The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life 211 found throughout the created body can never be understood apart from their divine head. Christians can now be said to "become Christ" because the very characterization of Christus assumes the inclusion of particular others in the totus.
As we have seen, such a stress on the unity between Christian and Christ sometimes compels Augustine to border on hyperbole. However, he is often equally careful to remind us that this identity between Christ and Christians is not eternal but one that has been forged in time only. This is how Augustine can hold two truths together, one qualified, the other absolute: "Remember that Christ is Abraham's descendant, and, if we too are, that would mean that we are Christ. But we are Christ (ergo et nos Christus) . . . [yet] we are not the Word, we were not with God in the beginning, not through us were all things made. But when we consider the flesh, there we find Christ, and in Christ we find both him and ourselves" (et ibi Christus et ille et nos).62 While it is clear that Christ and his church form one person, it becomes equally clear that the union here is with Christ in his humanity and not in his divinity.
Another instance of this dynamic is found in a sermon dated sometime around 400. Augustine the preacher again utilizes the nuptial imagery so important to his grammar of union between Christ and the church, to warn his listeners that,. . . bride and bridegroom are one person with reference to the flesh of Christ, not to his divinity—after all, with respect to divinity we cannot be what he is, because he is creator we are creatures, he the maker we what he made, he the composer we the composition; but so that we might be one thing with him in him, he was willing to be our head by taking flesh from us, in which he could die for us—so to convince you that this whole is the one Christ, he said through the Isaiah: "He wound a turban on my head as a bridegroom, he clothed me with ornaments as a bride (Isa. 61:10)."63
62. en. Ps. 142.3; Boulding, Expositions (III/20), 346–47; CCL 40.2062. 63. s. 91.8; Hill, Sermons (III/3), 463: "[Nam ut noueritis,] quia unus homo est sponsus et sponsa, secundum carnem Christi, non secundum diuinitatem: nam se-