The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 23 trépho could generically mean a turning back or a changing of direction. They also, more specifically, could refer to a conversion of mind, namely an alteration in one's intellectual or religious convictions. Pierre Hadot provides a helpful definition: "épistrophè, qui signifie changement de direction, implique l'idée de retour."71 Such a return, epistrophe, is the fundamental requirement of all creatures, while the free conversion or metanoia demanded by higher creatures is our focus when we treat the human person as an imago Dei, the only visible creature capable of such free conversion.
Before Adam and Eve, "conversion" could still be synonymous with every created being's essential reliance upon God. When commenting on the first five days of creation as found in Genesis, for example, Augustine cannot yet use "conversion" as a deliberate or rational choice, but as an ontological necessity by which every creature becomes what it is. Before it takes on any personal dimension, Augustinian conversion first denotes the necessitated act of turning toward the origin of all existence. At this level, Augustinian conuersio thus evokes the movement of Neoplatonic epistrophe, which he certainly found in the philosophical books of his earlier years. Plotinus, for example, relies on conversion to show how a being, and the nature of that being, is brought about only when the being turns back to its higher reality. For example, Nous comes into being qua Nous by turning back to the One: "This, when it has come into being [γενόμενον], turns back upon [ἐπεστράφη] the One and is filled, and becomes Intellect by looking towards it. Its halt and turning towards the One constitutes being, its gaze upon the One, Intellect. Since it halts and turns towards the One that it may see, it becomes at once Intellect and being."72 This process of turning to the source of
71. Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1981), 175, as in Vannier, Conversio, 11.
72. Enneads 5.2.1; Armstrong, 5.58-59.