The One Christ

Conclusion

Conclusion et uiua erit uita mea tota plena te —conf. 10.28.39 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 234 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- 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...