Tuesday, June 28, 2022

“Divinization" in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity

  

DIVINIZATION. It is clear that the divinization of human beings was a fundamental theme of patristics, esp. the Greek. Unfortunately, its consideration by Ritschl and his followers as, along with sacramentalism, a typical case of the Hellenization of the gospel, means that to this day its study has been compromised by more or less partial debates on certain unilateral premises, such as Christ’s assumption of universal human nature, salvation by means of a physical contact between divinity and humanity in Christ, and the absorption of human beings into God. But research on divinization has also been greatly complicated by the historical data itself. The relevant vocabulary, for example, underwent a considerable evolution. Theopoiein and its various forms appear only from Clement of Alexandria on (Lampe 630f.). Under the influence of ps.-Dionysius, theōsis assumed more importance than theopoiēsis (Lampe 649f.). The equivalent Latin terms, deificare and deificatio, obtained a rather modest importance only in the 5th c. (Blaise 250; ThLL 5,403f.). The reality itself, however, was expressed by many other words, both Greek and Latin, such as aphtharsia, methexis, koinōnia, henōsis, glorificatio, profectus ad Deum, etc.

 

The anthropological premises, moreover, vary according to author, since they don’t all evaluate Adam’s intimacy with God and hence the injurious consequences of his sin in the same way. The theological and christological premises were equally diverse: the way they were conceived corresponded to how the divine transcendence was understood. This problem includes a not unimportant tension between divinization understood as a work carried out by Christ the savior, and divinization seen as a divine action carried out in souls, i.e., between Jesus’ assumption of humanity and the union of Christ with the church.

 

Even the biblical basis of the patristic doctrine of human divinization seems, at first sight, far from solid. There are few explicit texts, all of a clearly Hellenistic stamp, such as Wisd 2:23 ( θεὸς ἔκτισεν τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπʼ ἀφθαρσία) and 6:18ff. (aphtharsia); Acts 17:28 (citation of ps.-Epimenides and Aratus), 2 Pet 1:4 (koinōnoi). The biblical foundation is much more solid than it appears, however, as long as one makes use of the Scriptural evidence without forcing it. Texts concerning human beings as God’s image (Gen 1:26–27), divine sonship (Gal 4:5ff.; Rom 8:15), imitation of God (Mt 5:44–48) and of Christ (Phil 2:5–11), and texts presenting the new life of Christians as a pledge and anticipation of future glory (1 Cor 13:12; 2 Cor 3:18; 1 Jn 3:1–3), must all be considered in this light.

 

Reinterpreting, in particularly open milieus, this rich heritage of the biblical tradition, esp. the Johannine, Pauline and Wisdom literature, Christian authors soon began to develop the theology of divinization. Early on, the apostolic fathers and the Greek apologists saw the intimate union of human beings with God in an eschatological perspective, stressing the divine gift of immortality (aphtharsia), assured by Jesus’ resurrection and by the Eucharist, and conferred in the Lord’s parousia (Ign., Eph. 4,2; Polyc. 2,2f.; 6,1; Eph. 20,2; 1 Clem. 36,2: immortal gnosis; 2 Clem. 6,6–9; Hermas, Sim. V, 6,5ff.; Just., Apol. 10,3; 52,3). While Justin mentions this Christian hope in the context of true philosophy (Dial. 1), his disciple Tatian presents the human being’s destined immortality as an assimilation to God to be attained in gnosis (Orat. 12f.). It is in Theophilus, however, that the technical vocabulary of divinization first appears (Autol. 2,24; 27). All these references to immortality, divine privilege to be conceded to those who live by faith in Christ, were not limited only to eschatological hope, but they were nevertheless only somewhat occasional.

 

The situation changed under the decisive influence of 2nd-c. gnosticism which, taking up the myth of the primordial man dispersed in matter and illustrating it by, among other things, the parable of the lost sheep (see Hübner, Einheit, 290–311), was not per se interested in a divinization in the sense of a transformation to divine life, but taught rather a return to the divine sphere of those who were akin to God per naturam. Against this religious movement, esp. in its Valentinian form, Irenaeus worked out the first authentically Christian synthesis on human divinization (Tremblay). Integrating elements of gnosticism into his history of the saving incarnation of the Word, he shows how God, manifesting himself in his goodness through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, leads back the whole person (created in the image and likeness, i.e., destined to resemble the immortal God, but fallen through sin into corruption), by knowledge of the Son in the Spirit, to the eternal vision of and thus union with him in immortality (Iren., Adv. haer. III, 19,1; IV, 20; V, 36). Irenaeus’s line, at once gnostic and historical, would be followed by later Greek, esp. Alexandrian, authors, though they put the accent elsewhere, insisting more on assimilative knowledge, or perhaps preferring impassibility (apatheia) to incorruptibility (aphtharsia), according to the stronger or weaker influence of Greek philosophy. Thus Clement of Alexandria, the first to make full use of the technical and religious language of the philosophy of his time, further defined the divine pedagogy spoken of by Irenaeus as a process of divinization that made human beings rise from incredulity, through faith and gnosis, to charity, source of impassibility, though not forgetting the illuminative role of baptism (Strom. 2, 22; 7, 10; Paed. 1,6,26).

 

Origen, for his part, placed divinization within the vast framework in which he explained the relationship between God and the world through the mystery of the Logos. To a greater extent than his predecessors, he sought to base himself on the biblical data (Comm. in Jo.), and insisted on the human freedom that is the consequence of growing union with the Logos, God’s image. Above all he stressed the incarnation, as the supreme mystery of the Word. For him, the union of the Word with the ever-faithful soul of Jesus, likened to the interpenetration of iron and fire, is the model of all divinization (Princ. 11,6). On the other hand, Jesus’ kenōsis in death was not just the highest expression of his love for God (Comm. in Jo. V, 284), but also the prelude of the glorious resurrection which, begun in Christ, would be fulfilled for the whole church (Comm. in Jo. X, 228f.). This doctrine of divinization, while distinguished by its synthetic strength, like all of Origen’s theology, is defective in two points: the preexistence of Jesus’ soul and the excessively spiritualistic tendency.

 

The enormous progress made by theology in the 4th c., however, made itself felt in the question of divinization. Athanasius, the great defender of Nicene faith, managed to reduce Irenaeus’s heritage to an impressive simplicity, asserting that the incarnation of the Word has definitively restored the human being’s primordial resemblance to God on two levels: that of the incorruptibility of the body and that, impossible without the first, of gnosis (Incarn. 9). He also used the doctrine of human divinization, by now a firmly established theological doctrine, to demonstrate, against the Arians, the divinity both of Christ (Ar. II, 70; III, 33) and of the Holy Spirit (Ep. Serap. 1,24). Gregory of Nyssa, expounding his ideas on divinization esp. in his Oratio catechetica magna, dedicated to teachers “who need system in their instruction” (Or. catech. prol.), considers this doctrine an essential part of Christian teaching. Aware of the risks of pantheism inherent in the ideas he and his predecessors had taken over from Platonism, he stressed the distance that exists between God’s image in human beings and its eternal model (Or. catech. 5,6), i.e., the mutability of the former and the immutability of the latter (ibid., 21,1f.). To overcome the mutability, the cause of the loss of Adam’s likeness to God, the immutable Word was made man (ibid., 32,3), a saving work that is fulfilled, however, for each person in baptism (ibid., 33–36) and the Eucharist (ibid., 37). This doctrine could be easily deepened on particular points with texts of Basil and Cyril of Alexandria on the role of the Holy Spirit, of Theodore of Mopsuestia on baptism or of John Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem on the Eucharist. As a whole, however, Gregory’s remains the most substantial synthesis prior to the theology of ps.-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor.

 

Under the influence of Proclus, ps.-Dionysius integrated human divinization into his grandiose vision of the emanation of all things from God and their return to him (Cael. hier. 1,3f.); Maximus, in line with Chalcedonian Christology, maintained the christological indivise-inconfuse in his explanation of divinization (Quaest. ad Thal. 59), and opposed divine love, the motive of the incarnation, to human love, the measure of divinization (Ambig.: PG 91, 1113B). This broad vision of human restoration to the primordial state (kinship with God, freely given him from the beginning), founded on the incarnation of the Word, eternal image of God, including his kenōsis unto death, and fulfilled in individuals esp. by means of the sacraments, is characteristic of Greek theology.

 

The Latins, more interested in moral holiness and therefore insisting more on the elimination of sin as culpa than on liberation from mortal corruption, seem to have been less open to it. Yet divinization is not absent from Latin theology, itself indebted to the Greek and dependent on the same philosophical influences. Tertullian took from Irenaeus the idea of the admirabile commercium between God and humanity (Adv. Marc. 11,27); Hilary, influenced by Origen, developed a theology of the glorification of the human being that is a doctrine of divinization, based on the communio naturalis with the incarnate Word and realized in a special way in the Eucharist (Fierro); Ambrose attached importance to transformation to divine life (Myst. 7,37–42; Incarn. 4,23). Augustine, while seeing grace primarily as medicina and adiutorium, and giving great importance to the church as Christus totus, did not neglect the communion in which the individual, thanks to Christ’s mediation, is united with God (Serm. 47,21; 192,1). For him, the baptized person is just with the only Just One, and thus he is a child of God like Christ, though not yet in the perfect state, since he hopes, by the Spirit diffused in him, to see God as he is in the resurrection (Ep. 140 and 147). Leo the Great expressed the same thought with formulae that were perhaps even more precise (Serm. 21,3; 23,5; 26,4). For him also, the Word was made flesh so that human beings could be raised, in the grace of the Spirit, to become children of God (Serm. 22,5). (Basil Studer, “Divinization,” Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, ed. Angelo Di Berardino and James Hoover, 3 vols. [Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2014], 1:726–728)