It’s not so much that God created Man in the image of God as though according to a model, however true that may be, but instead Augustine places the emphasis on the way that God places the image of Christ (the Eternal Word) there inside of every human being from its very beginnings and “calls” to that true being even in the womb to develop into the true person God has designed, the one who IS always already in the image of God. The entire journey of Augustine (as everyman) is recorded in Confessions as the gradual and painful discovery of that “true” Christic selfhood at the heart and root of his conflicted and fragmented and adulterated and degraded “selfhood.” (“I made of myself a wasteland.”)

It seems to me that Augustine reviews his life, his own personal Genesis (which will be deeply like the Genesis he expounds as a preacher at the end of the book), with the eyes of faith that now belong to him as a mature Christian and preacher, in order to praise the ways that God has gradually removed all the layers of false and idolatrous selfhood over the years so that the deepest and truest Augustine could finally say “yes” in the Garden in Milan. God has untied the “knot” that cannot be untied by merely human means. But what is left there is the Christic person, the “becoming human” (humanitatis) of God’s Son that is declared by human preachers (such as Augustine himself, through the Christic Ambrose, for instance) — insofar as they themselves have become the cloudy firmament (only) through which Christ is to be seen by humans here below (Conf. 1.1 and 13.15, if I recall correctly).

George Herbert works within this Augustinian textuality in “The Temple,” in “Church Windows,” “Affliction (I),” and “The Collar,” for example. The holy spirit can build a temple in the human heart (as both Augustine and Herbert put it) only because that heart already bears the image of God written inside of it, however much that image may have been erased and forgotten through a life of wandering away into the waste places.

How else could Augustine know that sexuality, for instance, is intrinsically good and that to be married is as holy as to be celibate and that the body’s delight will be part of the heavenly wedding banquet, even though in this life he felt he had to deny himself even social contact with women…. But here too we still see that incessant war that is carried on within Augustine between the incarnational Good News and the dualistic legacy of received Platonism. It is fascinating to watch, and to think of Aquinas and Dante trying to transcend that warfare implicit in the Augustinian legacy, without ceasing to be Augustinian.

Stay tuned for the remaining posts, where perhaps (or perhaps not), dualistic vestiges of Augustine’s (Christianized no doubt) Platonism manifest (e.g. soul/body relation).

What do you understand Augustine to mean by a human being created in the image of God? Aquinas’ teaching of the soul as the form of the body (following Aristotle) seems to me very different than what Augustine says (at least in this section of the Confessions) and seems much more akin to a Platonic understanding of the soul/body relation (again, no doubt Christianized).

Best wishes,
Cynthia

I always read the account that way and taught it that way, but I wonder, did you notice it in the text? Isn’t that why he perceives the I AM THAT I AM in his own depths and is able to ascend to that vision of God (via that “image”) in an instant?

P.S. On the apparent dualism — not that Augustine isn’t platonistic, because he is, but still the image of God is in his own soul and his own soul is something akin to Aquinas’s “form” (that is the very life of the body), and hence is not so dualistic as it seems. Augustine says to God, “You are the LIFE of the LIFE of my soul.” Doesn’t he ascend to God from life to life to life? (From living body to the life of that body to the life of that life of his living body?)

I agree that the soul-body complex is itself part of creation, but doesn’t Augustine come to be convinced in book VII via his reading of the Platonists that the mind is not extended and hence immaterial–the crucial insight that helped him get rid of his Manichean baggage (i.e., thinking of God as corporeal, which made it impossible for him to think of God as omnipresent)? Would Augustine say that we have a notion of our mind as “extended”? It seems to me that he would not. Perhaps, I’ve missed your point.

Best,
Cynthia