Again, a name indicative of grace is
when man, who has been obedient to God in all things, is named “God” in the
Scriptures, as in the phrase, I said, you are Gods, for it is not by
nature or condition that he has become and is called “God,” but he has become
God and is so named by placement and grace. For the grace of divinization is completely
unconditioned [GK: η γαρ χαρις
της θεωσεως
ασχετος εσται
πανταπασιν], [1237B] because it finds no faculty or
capacity of any sort within nature that could receive it, for if it did, it
would no longer be grace but the manifestation of a natural activity latent
within the potentiality of nature. And thus, again, what takes place would no
longer be marvelous if divinization occurred simply in accordance with the
receptive capacity of nature. Indeed it would rightly be a work of nature, and
not a gift of God, and a person so divinized would be God by nature and would
have to be called so in the proper sense. For natural potential in each and
every being is nothing other than the unalterable movement of nature toward complete
actuality. How, then, divinization would make the divinized person go out of
himself, I fail to see, if it was something that lay within the bounds of his
nature [GK: Πως δε και
εξιστησιν εαυτου
τον θεουμενον
η θεωσις, ει τοις
οροις της
φυσεως αυτη
περιειληπτο, συνιδειν
ουκ εχω]. In the same
manner, but in the case of what is contrary, [1237C] the sages give the names
of “perdition,” “hades,” “sons of perdition,” and the like, to those who by their
disposition have set themselves on a course to nonexistence, and who by their
mode of life have reduced themselves to virtual nothingness. (Maximus the
Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 20, in On Difficulties in the Church
Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:409, 411)
Here Maximos states that the grace of
divinization is an uncreated energy of God (Ibid., 500 n. 6)