115. en. Ps. 90, exp. 2.1; Boulding, Expositions (III/18), 330.
Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life 233 of humanity, Christ has united all Christians into "the whole Christ, which means Christ in this universal sense, Christ with his Church . . . he became man to re-create us. He is God to make us, but man to make us anew."115 The totus Christus is thus one single organism animated and amalgamated by grace: from the head to all members, Christ expands his life into all those who humbly follow him.
The theology of this "whole Christ" allows Augustine to make some very strong statements of identification between Christ and Christian. As we saw, for example, it is how Christ can reproduce himself in his persecuted church as in Acts 9 or command that his faithful serve him through their own destitute brothers and sisters, as recorded in Matthew 25. However, given this sense of unity as expressed in the totus Christus, Augustine must be careful never to confuse Christ and Christian.
When examining this concept of the "whole Christ," we observed how the assimilation which the elect enjoy is with Christ's perfect humanity and not his divinity. This helps to clarify Augustine's language: we become one with Christ insofar as he is the perfect man and can thus expect the same kind of excellence; we do not become one with him insofar as he is God. Just as the divine kenosis did not annihilate the Son's divinity, a Christian's deification will not take away his or her humanity. While we can nonetheless say, with scripture and Augustine and many other Fathers, that we "participate in divinity," such participation is always through and with the human flesh of Christ. Furthermore, such participation in God is eternal. Regardless of the level of sanctity reached by a creature, that creature's total dependence upon God never comes to an end.
115. en. Ps. 90, exp. 2.1; Boulding, Expositions (III/18), 330.
Conclusion
et uiua erit uita mea tota plena te
Summary of Study
To conclude this work, let us review the preceding arguments and raise some possible ways this thesis might prove advantageous, as well as reveal some questions for further study. These pages have set out to argue that Augustine of Hippo understands humanity's deification to be the primary purpose of Christian salvation. We began by looking at the Trinity as the supreme and unmatchable instance of alterity in unity. There we saw that communion with a divine person does not obliterate but actualizes the other and, as such, Augustine analogously presented all of creation as a conuersio ad Deum. That is, all creation must imitate the Word's (eternal) turn toward the Father in order to receive existence and definition. In this way, union with God is what establishes and actualizes all that is, showing how all creation without exception is essentially deiform (ch. 1).
Within that good creation the human person is encountered as God's unique image; only Adam and Eve have been created in order to be fashioned freely similar to their creator. Adam is thus presented as a microcosm of the entire universe in whom all human persons find their primal origin. When humanity's protoparents turned away from God, all men and
Conclusion 235 women likewise withdrew from divine communion. Augustine's hamartiology was accordingly treated at the end of his anthropology because it can come only after the goodness of Genesis and before the Son's descent where all evil is defeated. Locating the origin of human sinfulness in Gen. 3:5, Augustine saw how only something as great as a promise of divinity could have shaken Adam and Eve out of the bliss of Eden. Promising a divine life which was never his to give, Satan provides us with the matrix of all divine aversion, that innate longing to be "like gods" while proudly refusing participation in God (ch. 2).
Salvation from this false deification is achieved only through the Son's descent into the human condition. It is in this context (and this context alone) that Augustine ventures to use the term deificare in order to describe what happens when one lives in Christ. Proving disobedient and thus unable to participate in such a transforming way in God without a visible mediator, the Son of God becomes human so humans can conversely become sons and daughters of the same heavenly Father, to become other "gods" able to participate in and live in accordance with the divine nature (ch. 3). Chapter 4 then examined how the Holy Spirit brings humans into this new life, redeeming sinners in Christ by imparting his own holiness as the result of his unifying indwelling. Over and against what he perceived to be the Pelagian inability to require the internal renewal of a sinful human race, Augustine saw grace as an inner renovation enabling the human person to receive the divine and thus become a new creature in Christ. Realized as indwelling grace, the Spirit effects a real transformation, raising the human person out of sinfulness and rejuvenating his very being.
The final chapter showed how Augustine's sense of the church was pivotal in understanding how the Son and Spirit work. Providing a very wide-reaching image of ecclesia, Augus-