“PARTAKERS OF THE DIVINE NATURE”
The citation of 2 Peter 1:4, “partakers of the divine
nature,” does not enter into discussions of deification until well into the
third century. This is perhaps a consequence of the late admission of the
Second Epistle of Peter into the canon of the New Testament, but more importantly,
the concept of participation needed to have been fully appropriated by Christian
thinkers before the verse could be exploited. Origen is the first to cite 2
Peter 1:4, although very rarely, considering the bulk of even the wreckage of
his work that has come down to us, in fact, only in three texts, all of them in
Rufinus’ Latin translation (On First Principles 4.4.4; Homilies on
Leviticus 4.4; Commentary on Romans 4.9). The one Greek text
sometimes also said to cite 2 Peter 1:4, Against Celsus 3.37, does not
actually say “partakers of the divine nature” (θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως) but “by
participation in godhood” (μετοχῇ θεότητος). In his English translation,
however, Henry Chadwick has silently (but not unreasonably) assimilated the
phrase to 2 Peter 1:4, translating it as “they participate in the divine
nature” (Chadwick 1965, 153). Of Rufinus’ Latin renderings, in the Homilies
on Leviticus (PG 12, 437B), the Petrine verse occurs in a list of passages
in which the word “societas” (clearly translating κοινωνία) is used, which are given
simply in order to clarify the meaning of κοινωνία by the exegetical technique
of gezerah shavah. It is only in the Commentary on Romans and in On
First Principles that 2 Peter 1:4 is integrated into a theological
argument.
The Commentary on Romans is generally held to be a
very free translation. According to Rufinus, Origen says that if the Spirit
belongs to love, and the Son also belongs to love, and we are told that “God is
love” (1 John 4:7):
It is certain that it is from the one source of paternal
deity that the Son is to be understood [to derive] and also the Holy Spirit,
from whose abundance an abundance of love is also poured into the hearts of the
saints for the laying hold of participation in the divine nature (ad
participationem capiendam divinae naturae), as the Apostle Peter taught. (PG
14, 997C)
Love (charitas) is the principle that unites the
saints through the Holy Spirit and the Son to its source, the Father, enabling
them to share in the divine nature. Even if Rufinus has expanded the Greek text
at this point, the general sense is well attested elsewhere in Origen, namely,
that the saints participate in the attributes of God the Father through the
Spirit and the Son.
Despite the objections of Jerome, Rufinus’ translation of
On First Principles is now thought to be fundamentally reliable, even if
there have been some omissions and expansions (Behr 2017, xxi– xxiv). In On
First Principles 4.4.4, Origen says that with Christ as our guide on “the
arduous path of virtue,” we ought to cleanse ourselves after any lapse or
transgression by the oil of gladness by which Christ was himself anointed and
so resume our journey, that “perchance by this means, as far as is possible we
may, by the imitation of him, be made partakers of divine nature” (Behr 2017,
571). Here the emphasis (with a nod to the Platonic precept of Theaetetus 176b,
Christianized by Clement, that we should become like the divine as far as is
possible through the acquisition of wisdom) is on the moral assimilation
to the divine nature by imitation. Yet this imitation is not to be thought of
as merely external. Origen goes on to explain a few paragraphs later that when
human beings partake of wisdom and sanctification, it is because they have all
come to share in different degrees in the same intellectual light, the light of
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which renders their souls incorruptible and immortal.
The moral assimilation to God has ontological consequences. Participation during
this earthly life in the divine attributes brings benefits that are eternal (On
First Principles 4.4.9).
Origen’s appropriation and adaptation of the notion of
participation are fundamental for all subsequent discussions of deification,
particularly by Cyril of Alexandria and Gregory Palamas. His citations of 2
Peter 1:4, although few, reveal how he takes the Platonic concept of
participation that expresses the relationship of particulars to the universal
or of the contingent to the self- existent— in Origen’s terms, all beings that
exist (οἱ ὄντες) do so because they participate in Him who Is (ὁ ὤν)— and adds
to it a dynamic dimension that is quite new (cf. Russell 1988, 52– 56; 2004,
147– 52). This new element is the result of his Christian understanding of the personal
nature of the originator of being, the Father, and of the Father’s
mediators in the contingent world, the Son who transmits wisdom, and the Holy
Spirit who procures sanctification. By participation in the Son and the Spirit
we ascend “the arduous path of virtue,” progressively transformed in spirit,
soul, and body and becoming increasingly more Christlike, until we come to stand
in the final consummation as gods “in the assembly of gods.” (Norman Russell, “Second-
and Third-Century Greek Fathers,” in The Oxford Handbook of Deification,
ed. Paul L. Gravrilyuk, Andrew Hofer, and Matthew Levering; Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2024], 103-4)
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