115. en. Ps. 90, exp. 2.1; Boulding, Expositions (III/18), 330. (continued)
236 Conclusion tine saw the church concomitant with creation (ecclesia ante ecclesiam), as the good angels first turned to God in resplendent light. Augustinian creation has thus never been without a chorus of praise. Analogous to the Son's body made visible and enfleshed at his incarnation, the church too became a perceptible body: now sustained and extended through its visible sacraments, agents of unity binding the faithful to God and to one another. We now therefore understand how such unity with God can be used synonymously for both the church as the societas sanctorum as well as the fruit of one's participation in the Eucharist.1
At the center of this study was Augustine's supreme image of Christian salvation, human deification. Understood as one soteriological metaphor among many, deification assumed its proper place within Augustine's overall theology: it is neither something disregarded by the Bishop of Hippo, nor is it something that begins to exhaust how he sees Christian salvation. We introduced this argument by tracing much standard opposition to this view, showing how many scholars have dismissed Augustine on this very point. When they examined his reliance on the use of deificare and its Latin cognates (for example, Joseph Mausbach, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, or Patric Ranson), they argued that the divinization was not a central component in his theology; accordingly, they concluded, the West's anthropology and subsequent soteriology paled in comparison to the East where the human person's divine likeness and eventual glorification were wonderfully stressed.
While Augustine does not stray away from presenting one's new life in Christ as an act of deification, he is reticent to highlight such language, I argued, for two reasons. First, because deificare might be easily misconstrued by the faithful, and, second, this same reality of deification can be just as easily described by more standard Christian metaphors, such as divine adoption or