Becoming Gods Discussion from a Non-Mormon Source

“Becoming Gods by Becoming God’s: Augustine’s Mystagogy of Identification”, David Vincent Meconi, S.J., Augustinian Studies 39. 1 (2008): 61-74.  [Meconi is associated with Saint Louis University]

 

Meconi argues that the two ways of life for Augustine lead mankind into a position whereby they have to choose.

 

Many of make the wrong choice:  Meconi says that “by settling on the creature, the deceived soul confuses material goods with God.  This type of soul fails to soar upward to the divine but falls under the very bodies over which it is to have dominion, thus confusing these visible creatures with their draftsman” (64)

 

The soul can either strain for that place from which it came or it can settle for visible goods…. In this fallen state, the soul becomes confused with what it is to master (65)

 

When the human soul turns away from God, it becomes confused with lower goods; loving creatures instead of their creator, the soul becomes fused with the world (66)

 

According to Meconi “Augustine’s strategy of being removed from this morass is the Holy Spirit…. ‘It is love which conforms us to God and thus conformed and configured to God and cut off from this world, we are not confounded with the things which ought to be subject to us.  This is done only through the Holy Spirit’” (66)

 

Without the Holy Spirit, the human person risks knowing carnally and therefore risks becoming one with lower sensible…. When the soul loves God through the signifier, the soul becomes divine, when the soul loves the sign instead of God, the soul is made bestial” (66-7)

 

Meconi quotes from Augustine’s commentary on the First Letter of John:

“’Each person is as his love.  Do you love the earth?  You will be earth.  Do you love God?  What shall I say?  Will you be God?  Listen to Scripture, for I dare not say this on my own:  You are gods, and sons and daughters of the Most High, all of you’” (71, citing Epistle on John 2. 14. 5 [PL 35. 1997])

 

There are only two types of lives:  earthly or heavenly, animal or spiritual, devilish or deifying (illa diabolica, ista deifica) (71)

 

Liturgical signs especially unite to God those who worship rightly and /Augustine does not hesitate to call them gods:  Deus facitque suos cultores deos (71, citing City of God 10. 1)

 

Augustine writes that truly religious societies are united only through such tangible signs: ‘nothing other than visible sacraments and signs are able to join human persons together in union’” (71, citing contra Faustus 19. 11)

 

Beconi then cites Gerald Bonner who wrote that deification for Augustine is an ‘ecclesial process’ in that only the communion of Christ’s people and the liturgical vehicles which causes this bond, can bring enfleshed human-persons to participate in the divine life (71)

 

Beconi then cites a recently discovered sermon by Augustine (amongst a group of 26 sermons).  Beconi writes that these sermons “provide us with a picture of a passionate pastor encouraging the recently converted Catholics before him to understand the uniqueness of their faith and not to fall into the pagan temptations of late antiquity.  One of the main concerns of Augustine is to have the faithful understand the plural dii properly, ‘gods’ found not only in the non-Christian world around them but in their own sacred tests as well.”

 

Meconi continues:

 

“He [Augustine] therefore contrasts these ‘gods’ which the pagans make out of stone, gold, and silver with the ‘gods’ made by the one deifying God (Deus deificator), an epithet unique to Augustine.  He describes the two wys of life in terms of (1) those who become less than material signs by making them into objects of divinity and (2) those who are made divine by allowing material goods to be what God intends.  For what is better, asks the bishop, to make gods or to become gods?” (73)

 

Beconi concludes his essay with this paragraph:

 

“In the preceding essay we have seen how religious symbols are used by Augustine to draw believers ever more intimately into the divine life.  The liturgy thus becomes the locus deificandi, the place where the drama of human salvation is not only reenacted but effected.  Surrounded by the temple of praise and all that is within, human persons are to see how God bids them to become his living signs.  God, oil, trees, the altar of sacrifice, the Sabbath, and the laud Christians sing are all constituted to cultivate the full life of the baptized so as to draw them into a closer union with the divine, becoming gods by becoming God’s” (74

 

In the beginning of his conclusion paragraphs Beconi writes that “deification in Augustine is only now r4eceiving sustained scholarly attention”  He says no book length study has been produced, and only a couple dozen articles or chapter papers have been published.  He refers first to a dissertation written in Africaans, but never published.  Here is his list of the “more significant articles, in chronological order":

 

J. A. A. Stoop, Die Deificatio Hominis in die SErmones en Epistulae van Augustinus (Leiden, 1952).  87 pages.

 

Victorino Capanaga, ‘La deificacion en la soteirologia agustiniana,’ Augustinus Magister 2 (1954) 745-754.

 

Gustave Bardy, ‘Divinisation: Chez les Pertes Latins,’ Dictionnaire de Spiritualite (Paris, 1957): 1395-1397.

 

Georges Folliet, ‘Deificari in otio: Augustin, Epistula 10. 2’, Recherches Augustiniennes 2 (1962): 225-236.

 

Patricia Wilson-Kastner, ‘Grace as Participation in the Divine Life in the Theology of Augustine of Hippo,’ Augustinian Studies 7 (1976): 135-52.

 

Gerald Bonner, ‘Augustine’s Concept of Deification,’ Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 369-386.

 

Gerald Bonner, ‘Deificare’, Augustinus-Lexicon, 2. 265-267.

 

Gerald Bonner, ‘Deification, Divinization,’ Augustine Through the Ages: 265-66.

 

Roland Teske, “Augustine’s Epistula X: Another look at Deificari in Otio,’ Augustinianum 32 (1992): 289-299.

 

Jose Oroz Reta, ‘De l’illumination a la deification de l’ame selon saint Augustin,’ Studia Patristica 27 (1993): 364-82.

 

Augustine Casiday, ‘St. Augustine on deification: his homily on Psalm 81’ Sobernost 23 (2001): 23-44.

 

Henry Chadwick, ‘Note sur la divinization chez saint Augustin,’ Revue des sciences religieuses 76. 2 (2002): 246-8.

 

Robert Puchniak, ‘Augustine’s Conception of Deification, Revisited,’ Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, ed., Stephen Finland [sic: should be Finlan] and Vladimir Kharlamov (2006): 122-133.

 

He has an additional three listed as “concentrated studies within larger works on deification””

 

Pedro Urbano Lopez de Meneses, Theosis: La doctrina de la divinizacion en las tradiciones cristianos: Fundamentos pard una teologia ecumenical de la gracia (Pamplona, 2001): 112-124.

 

Daniel Keating, The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria (2004): 227-251.

 

Norman Russell, The Doctrilne of Deificaiotn in the Greek Patristic Tradition (2004): 329-332.

Comments

[Hans-Georg Lundahl]

OK, so where was the Church of Jesus Christ in St Augustine's day?

In Rome and Hippo - or in the Americas?

[Hans-Georg Lundahl]

PS: about link in signature, you might enjoy pretty aptly the archives for March this year.