The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
xii Introduction person is in fact a central doctrine in the overall thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.
The classical Christian formula of humanity's deification, God became human so humans could become God, finds expression in St. Augustine's "in order to make gods of those who were merely human, one who was God made himself human."3 The humanity God assumes to himself in Christ is fundamental: for, in Christ, divinity and humanity meet and thus it is here that Christ identifies himself with his adopted brothers and sisters. This new life ushered in by the Son's incarnation is therefore an interrelationship between Christ and the Christian because the Son has come to "identify his members with himself [transfigurauit in se suos], just as he did when he said, I was hungry and you fed me (Matt. 25:35), and as he identified us with himself when he called from heaven to the rampaging Saul who was persecuting God's holy people, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? (Acts 9:4), though no one was laying a finger on Christ himself. . . . 'See yourself reflected in me,' Christ says."4 At times Augustine will explain this transformation in terms of deification explicitly. He will also talk about becoming divinely adopted sons and daughters, while at other times he will present the goal of Christian-
3. s. 192.1; Hill, Sermons (III/6), 46: "deos facturus qui homines erant, homo factus est, qui deus erat"; PL 38.1012. The first to express this exchange language of God's humanity for our divinity so explicitly was Irenaeus at Adu. Haeres. V, preface (PG 7.1120b): "Out of his boundless love for us, the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, became what we are so that he might make us what he himself is"; while Athanasius's phrase is perhaps the most celebrated: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God," De Incarnatione §54.3 (PG 25.192b).
4. en. Ps. 32, exp. 2.2; Boulding, Expositions (III/15), 393; we shall see how Augustine treats these two pivotal passages below as well; cf. xx. See also s. 305a for another strong instance of Augustine's use of transfigurare to illustrate an identification between Christ and the faithful. For more on Augustine's understanding of the transfiguration, see Édouard Divry, La Transfiguration selon l'Orient et l'Occident (Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2009), 223–48. Divry's comments here focus mainly on the transformative importance Augustine gives to the metaphor of light (lumen, lux), and less on the union of Christ and Christian, but he does at one point ask if this illumination of the Christian, "S'agit-il d'une divinisation?" 238.