In the Presence of God’s Own and the Absence of One’s Own

Abstract

This chapter examines the way Augustine’s search for the divine image leads him through questions of its reformation in Christ and toward its perfection in wisdom within the vision of God. In seeking to capture the nature of human participation in God, this chapter looks at Augustine’s wider account of deification and develops a type of kenotic model wherein human participation in God is found in the emptying of human emptiness and mutability—the permanent and stable deferment of humanity’s origin de nihilo—in the immutable eternity of God. This emptying comes in the achievement of wisdom, which Augustine equates with the worship of God. The anthropological model that emerges is one in which humans find permanence and stability not in themselves but in God and runs counter to modernist readings of Augustine.