Friday, November 24, 2023

Giovanni Papini on Deification

  

In the Eighty-first Psalm are found these words, addressed by God to men: ‘You are gods, and all of you, the sons of the Most High’” (v. 5). This divine assurance was quoted again by Christ. Turning to the Pharisees, He apostrophized them, saying, “Is it not written in your Law: I said you are gods? . . . he called them gods to whom the word of God was spoken, and the Scripture cannot be broken.” (John 10:34-35).

 

We have, therefore, a double testimony that God considers and calls certain men gods. But is this not, perhaps, invitation to pride? And what else was it that the Serpent said to the First Parents, if not something very similar: “You will be as gods.” He was promising, then, what God Himself is ready to sustain. Yet precisely because of that desire to be like God, Adam was degraded, cast out and condemned.

 

And when Christ teaches the chosen to imitate God—“You therefore are to be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect” )Matthew, 5:48)—is He not asserting that man, simple creature, can achieve one of the essential attributes of God, that is perfection? To become perfect, as perfect as God, is that not perhaps like becoming gods?

 

St. Paul, finally, doubles the dose: “Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). Therefore, according to St. Paul, men are superior to the angels themselves, who are most perfect beings, because only the superior can judge the inferior.

 

In all these passages man—or let us say, the Christian—is magnified and exalted to the point of being placed on the same level with God. The Christian doctrine of “deification” is, in my opinion, profoundly sublime and true . . . (Gionvanni Papini, The Devil [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954], 45, in Van Hale, Mormon Miscellaneous Note Cards, 3 vols. [Sandy, Utah: Mormon Miscellaneous, 1985], 1:50)