The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 11
The working of the Father is a continuation [continuationem] of the same work achieved at the world's original foundation [conderet].33 Since all is continuously derived from the Father, his work must be incessant. The inability of the creature to sustain itself is the result of the nothingness from which God makes all things (a point we shall return to later). All existents are in constant need of the Father's agency and ceaseless bestowal of being.
The Father creates with and through the Son. Interpreting the first pages of sacred scripture in light of John's Prologue, Augustine reads Genesis's in principio as in Verbo since "God made heaven and earth in the beginning, not in the beginning of time but in Christ, since he was the Word with the Father, through which and in which all things were made."34 At one point Augustine even interprets the beginning of the cosmos in light of the Son's nuptial relationship with his people. Patterned on the Trinity's love, creation is a beloved expression of the Son's joy before the Father, never his rival or opposition:
When some changeable creature advises us, we are but led to that stable Truth, where we truly learn as we stand still and listen to him, and are filled with joy on hearing the Bridegroom's voice, and surrender ourselves once more to him from whom we came. He is "the Beginning" for us in the sense that if he were not abidingly the same, we should have nowhere to return to after going astray.35
The one in whom all is made is also the one through whom we return: created in the Word, creation approaches the Father only through the Son, proving to be both the Father's earthly exitus and humanity's heavenly reditus as well. The Word thus original genesis. Augustine distinguishes between the initial conditio and the ongoing administratio (cf. uera rel., 43). See section 6 of Cornelius Mayer, "Die Lehre von der Simultanschöpfung," s.v. "Creatio, creator, creatura," Augustinus Lexikon, 76–78.
33. cf. Gn. litt. 4.12; CSEL 28.208-09. 34. Gn. adu. Man. 1.2.3; Hill, Genesis, 40. 35. conf. 11.8.10; Boulding, Confessions, 291–92; CCL 27.199.