Augustine's Ecclesial Model of Deification as Peculiarly Pauline

Therefore, since true sacrifices are works of mercy, whether shown to ourselves or shown to our neighbors, which are directed to God; and since works of mercy are performed with no other object than that we might be delivered from misery and so become blessed—which only happens by means of that good of which it is said, But for me the good is to cling to God (Ps 73:28)—it obviously follows that the whole redeemed city, that is, the congregation and fellowship of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice through the great priest who, in his passion, offered himself for us in the form of a servant, to the end that we might be the body of such a great head. For it was this servant form that he offered, and it was in this form that he was offered, because it is according to this form that he is the mediator, in this form that he is the priest, and in this form that he is the sacrifice.1 But perhaps what is less appreciated about this passage from City of God is that directly following it comes a summary of Romans 12:1-2 and a verbatim quotation of the entirety of Romans 12:3-6. Augustine, in this section, spends almost as much time summarizing or quoting from Paul as he does providing his own exposition, and he clearly sees himself as simply reiterating the apostle's teaching. That Augustine understands his own doctrine in this way is clear from what follows the Pauline quotation: “This is the sacrifice of Christians: although many, one body in Christ (Rom. 12:4). And this is the sacrifice that the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar (which is well known to the faithful), where it is made plain to her that, in the offering she makes, she herself is offered.” He simply identifies his teaching on the Eucharist with Paul's words in Romans 12:4. Is Augustine's own self-understanding—as doing nothing other than expounding the Pauline doctrine of ecclesial deification—supportable? The present essay will answer in the affirmative. Drawing on recent Pauline scholarship, I will discuss three themes of deification in Paul's letters that are essential to Augustine's articulation of this doctrine: 1) participation in Christ, 2) deification as eschatological and, 3) deification through the church and its cult. Although these three themes are by no means exhaustive of either Paul's or Augustine's idioms for deification, they should serve to demonstrate the deeply Pauline grammar of Augustine's notion of deification. Regarding Paul's understanding of salvation, Ben Blackwell writes “participation in Christ's death and life through the Spirit sets the primary vision of Paul's soteriology.”5 It is by this participation that one also becomes deified—each receiving Christ's life (or, put otherwise, his resurrection) as his or her own. Blackwell draws together texts where Paul envisions unity with Christ as the source of salvation—for example: being conformed to his image (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:49; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29), suffering with him to be glorified (e.g. Romans 8:17), and receiving the fullness of deity from him (e.g. Colossians 1:15, 2:9).6 Michael Gorman likewise argues that for Paul the main model of salvation is not justification or forgiveness simply, but co-crucifixion: “Paul has not two soteriological models, but one, justification by co-crucifixion.”7 By this he means being re-established in a proper covenantal relationship with God through participation in Christ's death and resurrection. It is through this process that one also becomes deified; being brought into conformity with Christ who is image leads to “theoformity.”8 Primary texts Gorman deals with on this particular point are Galatians 5 (e.g. 5:24 “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires”), Romans 6 (e.g. 6:4 “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life”), as well as the Pauline passages that speak of the Christian adopting (“putting on” or identifying with) the faithfulness of Christ (as he understands πίστις χριστοῦ ought to be translated, rather than faith in Christ).9 The idea that participation in Christ (in particular in the paschal mystery) is the principal model of salvation that leads to deification is also true for Augustine. This theme is rehearsed again and again in Augustine's concept of the totus Christus—we are united to God through unity with the body of Christ. It is his life that we live. As David Meconi notes, for example, every use of the word deificare in Augustine's corpus appears “when describing the incarnate Word's activity in the world.”10 It far exceeds our scope, of course, to give all the examples of Augustine speaking about our unity with Christ in his body and how this is reckoned as salvific and deifying. But to the point we are especially trying to prove here—that Augustine's vision of the totus Christus is both Pauline and about deification—let us turn to a particularly rich passage at the end of City of God 13. He is the one whom the Apostle wished us to understand as the man of heaven, for he came from heaven to be clothed with a body of earthly mortality so that he might clothe it with heavenly immortality.16 Let us rejoice, then, and give thanks that we are made not only Christians, but Christ. Do you understand, brethren, and apprehend the grace of God upon us? Marvel, be glad, we are made Christ. For if He is the head, we are the members: the whole man is He and we. This is what the Apostle Paul says: “That we be no longer babes, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” But above he had said, “Until we all come together into the unity of faith, and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:14). The fullness of Christ, then, is head and members. Head and members, what is that? Christ and the Church. We should indeed be arrogating this to ourselves proudly, if He did not Himself deign to promise it, who says by the same apostle, “But you are the body of Christ, and members” (1 Cor. 12:27).17 The two other themes we will discuss are so closely linked for Augustine that hitherto it has been difficult to speak about participation in Christ without bringing them in: the eschatological and ecclesial dimensions of deification. Both are important parts of Augustine's exposition of 1 Corinthians 15:42-49 and John 5 discussed above. These two are also important aspects of the Pauline discourse on deification. Let us turn first to eschatological deification. The eschatological orientation of Paul's theology is, generally speaking, very well known. His concept of glorification or deification as a future reality for the Christian based on Christ's own passage from death to life is thus consonant with his theological outlook. On this strong eschatological dimension of deification in Paul, Ben Blackwell writes that sometimes the Pauline contrast between the heavenly and earthly state is so stark that it “seems to present a strong level of discontinuity.”19 Paul clearly assigns bodily incorruption and full unity with God to the future. Nevertheless, the bridge between these two realms, according to Blackwell, is Christ himself who comes from heaven to earth—“there is a sense that he is coming to earth to bring earth under heavenly control.”20 Christ's glory is thus transforming the world now and bringing it to its final state, and he provides comfort and enlightenment to his believers, even as “physical suffering and corruption are the expected present context.”21 Augustine too has a decidedly eschatological orientation for his theology of deification. Such an emphasis is related to the accusation often leveled against Augustine that his view of sin limits his positive expression of deification.22 But Augustine, like Paul, sees Christ as the way that is also the end (to put the matter in Augustinian terms),23 and he believes that Christ provides enlightenment and comfort to his people to whom he is united, even as he places incorruption and unity with God decidedly in the future. Hold on to him as he ascends. After all, you can't be hoisted up under your own steam, because No one has gone up into heaven, except him who came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven (Jn 3:13). If no one has gone up except the one who came down, and he is the Son of man, our Lord Jesus, do you too want to go up? Be a part of him, who is the only one to have ascended. You see, he the head is, with the rest of his body, one person, one man. And since none can go up unless they have been incorporated in him as members of his body, this text is verified, that no one has gone up into heaven except him who came down. I mean, you can't say, “So why, for example, did Peter go up, why did Paul go up, why did the apostles go up, if none has gone up except him who came down?” The answer comes right back, “As for Peter, Paul and the other apostles, not to mention all the faithful, what do they hear from the apostle? But you are the body of Christ, and individually the parts of it" (1 Cor. 12:27). So if Christ's body and its parts are one person, don't make them into two.24 Augustine makes a very similar point—about the eschatological dimension of deification being dependent on Christ's motion from heaven to earth and back again—in a striking way in the latter half of de trinitate 1. In the course of his discussion, he is specifically interpreting an eschatological pronouncement of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. Augustine argues, as in the quotation from s. 91 above, that we reach union with the Father through the body of Christ entering heaven. Augustine interprets 1 Corinthians 15:24 (“then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power”) with recourse to his concept of the totus Christus. Jesus handing over the kingdom refers to Jesus in his humanity, according to Augustine, since his “kingdom” refers to his subjects, thus “he will attach them to himself there where he is equal to the Father.”26 To make the point he draws also on Colossians 3:3 and 1 Corinthians 13:12, that our life is hidden in God and it is a mystery that will not be revealed until the end.27 In other words, Christ hands over his kingdom to the Father when his body (his complete humanity including the church) reaches the head (his divinity), which is already resting in the bosom of the Father by virtue of the resurrection and ascension. Then all signs (the chief of which is Christ's humanity) will reach their final destination. Note again Augustine's characteristic way of speaking about union with God as “attachment” (elsewhere translated “cleaving” or “adhering”). Finally, let us return to where we began, because book 10 of City of God is ultimately about deification through cultic adherence (or cleaving) to Christ. For Augustine, it is obvious that when one speaks of “the body of Christ” a whole nexus of theological themes are immediately evoked—the incarnation, the church, and the Eucharist.28 He moves between these themes easily, and explicitly takes his cue from Paul. The Apostle puts it in this way so that even now we may have the sacrament of regeneration at work in us, for, as he says elsewhere, As many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ (Gal 3:27).29 That the church is the body of Christ, a mysterious but intimate union, is the heart of Augustinian participation. We enter into this body by baptism and are nourished and continued to be transformed through the eucharist. In s. 272, for example, Augustine exhorts the neophytes to receive the body of Christ in order to become that very body. His authority for this assertion is, again, Paul, and self-consciously so: “if you want to understand the body of Christ, listen to the apostle telling the faithful, You, though, are the body of Christ and its members (1 Cor 12:27).”33 Another important way to characterize deification in Augustine, then, is deification by worship. In book 14 of de trinitate, after a long discourse attempting to find a trace of the imago dei in the human person, he argues that one can only image God through worship. This worship he envisions in cultic terms drawing on the apostle. Augustine speaks of the image first being renewed by forgiveness of sins through baptism, drawing on Colossians 3:9 and Ephesians 4:24,34 but he also speaks of the image being strengthened and “renewed day by day” (a favorite phrase of his from 2 Corinthians 4:16).35 The mode of this renewal Augustine especially characterizes as one that happens by being reminded to “turn to Lord,”36 liturgical words by which he as bishop would transition from the liturgy of the Word to the liturgy of the Eucharist.37 It is God who is blessed in himself and also makes us blessed, and, because he became a participant in our humanity, he provided a shortcut to participation in his divinity. For, in delivering us from mortality and misery, he does not lead us to the immortal and blessed angels in order that, by participating in them, we too may become immortal and blessed. Rather, he leads us directly to the Trinity, by participation in whom the angels themselves are blessed.38 Whoever sacrifices to any god, he says, but to the Lord alone shall be destroyed. This is not because the Lord is in need of anything but because it is to our benefit to belong to him. For it is to him that the psalmist sings in the Hebrews’ sacred writings, You are my God, for you do not need my goods (Ps 16:2). And we ourselves—that is, his own city—are his best and most noble sacrifice, and it is the mystery of this sacrifice that we celebrate in our offerings, which are known to the faithful, as we discussed in the previous books.42 In short, for Augustine the participation in Christ that finds its fulfillment in the eschaton is both enacted and anticipated in the church. The church is Christ's body and the sacraments both form that body and communicate its meaning. Pauline scholars likewise see Paul teaching that deification comes through the sacraments or—put more broadly—communal practices,43 but this point is often downplayed or contested, especially as it regards Paul's ecclesial vision and the cultic nature of the church and her rites. Put otherwise, they recognize that Paul sees participation in Christ happening concretely by putting on Christ with baptism (cf. Galatians 3:27, Romans 6:1-11, 1 Corinthians 12:13, Titus 3:5) and in sharing in his life through the Eucharist (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:16-17), but they less often identify the ecclesial body as created by these acts and as the location within which these rituals take place. For this reason, I have placed Augustine's view of the matter first in this section, as perhaps Augustine has something to contribute or emphasize about the articulation of Paul's soteriology on this point. As should be clear from above, Augustine is steeped in the reading of Paul and often moves seamlessly between the Pauline letters. Augustine's notion of the mystical nature of the whole Christ, and Christ being the name of the whole redeemed people (i.e. the kingdom) along with its sacrifice, is drawn almost entirely from Paul. And indeed, some scholars have seen in Paul precisely what Augustine does. For example, Michael Barber and John Kincaid draw together various scholarly opinions that participation in Christ—and thus deification—is closely tied to cult for Paul.44 They go further, however, in also demonstrating that Paul—along with second temple Judaism—has a strong understanding of God's presence in the temple (and its furniture and its priests) such that it is quasi-divinized. It follows, then, that Paul has a notion of the deification of the church which is the new temple (cf. Romans 3:25, 9:33, Galatians 2:9, but especially in 1 Corinthians, also a key letter for Augustine): “Paul's identification of the church with the sanctuary would seem to entail a profound statement about the community's participation in divine realities.”45 Their conclusions about Paul are also ones which could be obviously applied to Augustine: “in sum, ‘being in Christ’ is realized cultically”46 and “the church is the temple that becomes one body with the ‘man from heaven’ through the ‘one loaf.’”47 As in our present discussion, Barber and Kincaid also emphasize both the centrality of participation in Christ and its eschatological dimension in Paul. This essay has been a brief foray into Augustine's vocabulary of deification. I have argued that his main model of deification is that of participation in Christ leading to unity with God, which includes a sharing in divine properties (such as immortality). This participation in Christ is achieved in the church, which is Christ's body and in her sacraments which build it up. This vision of deification, I have argued, is peculiarly Pauline, and Augustine self-consciously and repeatedly relies on a wide range of Pauline texts to express his own ideas. And indeed, according to modern Pauline scholarship, Paul's soteriological model is also one of participation in Christ with an eschatological and ecclesial character. We must then strongly disagree with the judgment of Cyril Hovorun, who writes in the opening line of his article on ecclesiology in Oxford Handbook of Deification that “in the patristic texts we can scarcely find direct references to theosis in the context of the church. Moreover, there are surprisingly limited references to the church as such.”48 The truth of this statement depends on an extremely narrow definition of what counts as theosis (namely, use of the technical term, which is sometimes hardly to be found even in Greek for the and also of the church (namely, its earthly on the above discussion, it is to me that there is any notion of deification either in Paul or in Augustine that is not at in some sense ecclesial and It is also to me that an could have of it Augustine repeatedly in City of God, not even the and seem of from a cultic (and vision of and of cult some in even cultic so at with their own This to the ecclesial of deification in the is not limited to David article in The Oxford Handbook of Deification on deification and provides through which we can view deification happening in Christ in the of Christian Augustine's view most closely to the model have a sharing in divine properties through sharing in Christ's but he also from what the we become in the to the of these properties and in the his essay the church only and in in his The on deification has in the especially as regards its various It has been as both a and with an essential theological in both and as regards the salvation, and final end of the human The of the sacraments and liturgy too are a and part of the deification, as notes, these are as as Christian on the of sacraments and liturgy The of the ecclesial body, however, both in its mystical and we might say, is often on the of the perhaps for obvious of the it It is, not on the for either Paul or Augustine.