The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
14 Creation as the Unifying Prologue the third person of the trinity."45 As manifestations of God's love, manentia, ordo, and pondus demonstrate how the Spirit does not merely "hold" creatures in existence, but in so doing arranges them beautifully and purposefully according to the Father's Logocentric plan.
While Augustine always treats the Spirit third in his discussion of the Trinity, this does not imply that the Holy Spirit "arrives" later and completes what the Father and the SonLogos began. In his work on the ecological implications of Augustine's doctrine of creation, Scott Dunham writes, "The Holy Spirit does not come after the fact to finish the creation. . . . The Holy Spirit's work is also from the Father, drawing the Father into the delight of his good creation that has found its form in the Eternal Word of the Father."46 As Dunham would have us imagine it, the Son forms every creature, while the Spirit lifts each to the Father so he may delight in his good creation. With Dunham's help, we are able to see how each person of the Trinity acts in perfect unison with the others: the Father initiates existence (that something is), the Son bestows being and intelligibility (what something is), and the Spirit holds these creatures in a purposeful ordering (how each existent is interconnected within the cosmos). We will have to wait to see how this triune agency fully effects the divinized creature, but the hints are already detected in principio: the Father creates in and according to his perfect image, the Word, and through his Spirit, God's love unites the cosmos into a decorous order. If deification is the free sharing of God's uncreated life with an order of being which in no way could otherwise merit or expect such an existential exaltation, creation first prepares the way for such communion.
of course maintaining that all of creation is from God, taunts the Manichees regarding at what level of creation, at what insect, God's creative power begins.
45. O'Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, vol. 1.47. 46. Scott Dunham, The Trinity and Creation in Augustine: An Ecological Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 79.