The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
20 Creation as the Unifying Prologue
Father's fiat, all creatures instantaneously turn toward God in order to receive existence and to participate in being itself.63 To understand this concept, let us now take up our next key text, De Genesi ad Litteram 1.4.
Augustine began his most sustained commentary on Genesis sometime between 399 and 404, working on it with different degrees of intensity until its completion in 415.64 It is divided into three main parts. Books 1–5 continue the church's established practice of Hexameron commentary, exegeting Gen. 1:1 through God's rest on the seventh day as evidenced in Gen. 2:3. Books 6–11 treat the rest of Genesis 2 as well as Genesis 3, while the final book looks at St. Paul's understanding of the "third heaven" as depicted in 2 Cor. 12:2–4. By a "literal" reading, Augustine intends to read the narrative of Genesis as describing real events and not simply as a figurative text whose meaning could be fulfilled only in reference to something else, as if each word could be understood only with reference to enigmatic events in the future.65
To explain the fiat of Genesis, Augustine weaves many key protological principles together. The Father speaks only in his Word whose life is portrayed as one of eternal adherence. As we traced at this chapter's beginning, the relationship between God the Father and God the Son becomes the model for all created being, all things imitating the Word's conforming adherence to the Father. Augustine accordingly asks:
Or is it that when the unformed basic material, whether of spiritual or bodily being, was first being made, it was not appropriate to say
63. For Augustine's choice to follow a Porphyrian and not a Plotinian lead in referring to God more as "being itself" rather than "the One," cf. John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 258.
64. Cf. Marie-Anne Vannier, "Creatio," "conversio," "formatio" chez S. Augustin (Paradosis 31: Fribourg, 1991), 88; for a summary of this work, see her "Conversio, Creatio, Formatio chez S. Augustin," Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum (Rome: Augustinianum, 1987), 9–21.
65. Gn. litt. 1.17: "secundum proprietatem rerum gestarum, non secundum aenigmata futurarum"; CSEL 28.25.