The various
patristic authors who addressed deification were influenced by their prior
acceptance of justification itself being transformational (not a legal declaration
merely), and deification itself being
the ultimate, eschatological outcome thereof. We can see this in the following
summary of patristic-era understanding of the doctrine and how it was tied to
the person of Christ and the concept
of being made like Christ (“Christification”)
and the initial means of which was through baptismal regeneration:
Deification
Deification has several senses in patristic literature,
but at its most profound it refers to the transformative
effect of participation in Christ. Of the various terms the Father use to
express the work of Christ—salvation, redemption, reconciliation,
recapitulation, recreation, restoration, and so forth—deification is the one
that seems least rooted in the language of the New Testament. The word first appears
as θεοποιησις in the late
second century, and in its most familiar form, θεωσις, only in the mid-fourth century.
Yet what the word expresses lies at the heart of the early Church’s kerygma,
namely, that ‘God sent his only Son into the world that we might live through
him’ (1 John 4:9).
In John’s Gospel there is a report of a
critical debate between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ that took place in the Temple at
Jerusalem, in the portico of Solomon (John 10:22-39). In the course of the
debate (at verse 34), Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6, ‘I said, you are gods’, to
demonstrate a fortiori that if those to whom the word of God came in the past
could be addressed as gods, he could call himself the unique Son of God without
blasphemy. This verse was later used by Justin Martyr who adapts a Rabbinic
exegesis of Psalm 82:6 (the ‘gods’ are those who obey the Torah) to argue that
in fact they are those who obey the commandments of Christ. Not only afterwards
this exegesis was taken up by Irenaeus who identified the gods specifically
with those who had put on Christ through baptism, thus launching the verse on
its career as a key text supporting the notion of deification. Irenaeus was
prompted by his exegesis of the ‘gods’ as the baptized to enunciate the ‘exchange’
formula: the Son of God ‘became what we are in order to make us what he is
himself’ (Haer. 5, praef.; trans. mine).
The rich implications of this two-way traffic were to influence Christological
thinking. Both the self-emptying of the divine without loss of divine
impassability and the deification of the human without loss of human finitude
are required for Christ to fulfil his salvific role.
These implications were not fully drawn out
until the Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. In the
third century Origen presents a different Christology, one of continuity
between the human and the divine. The purpose of the Incarnation was to mediate
between the simplicity of God and the multiplicity of the world, to reach down
to the level of created being and endow it with divine love. This happens first
in the person of Christ, his flesh being deified by his soul and his soul by
the Logos. We can share in this ascending movement up the hierarchy of being
through our participation in Christ. Such participation is not primarily sacramental,
although it is assumed that baptism is the starting point of Christian
discipleship. Participation, as a response to the divine initiative, is achieved
by ‘proceeding along the steep path of virtue’ (cf. Origen, Prin. 4.31) and by sharing in Christ’s επινοιαι, thus imitating him morally and
intellectually; for the Holy Spirit actively makes us holy and spiritual so
that the divine Son can make us gods and sons. Only as gods who have recovered
the divine likeness can we come to share in the intimacy that the Logos enjoys
with the Father. Participation in the life of the Trinity makes us spirits,
christs, and gods, living henceforth with the life of God. There is no confusion
between the essence of God and the human soul because the relationship of
participation ensures that the distinction persists between a dependent reality
and that which is self-existent. The Logos, though deified in relation to the
Father, is nevertheless ‘God by nature’, in contrast to the perfected Christian
who is ‘a god by participation’ (Sel. in
Psalm. 135)
A century later, Athanasius presents a
different perspective on the relationship between God and all else, a
perspective dominated by a disjunction that is alien to Origen’s thinking. In
his struggle with Arius who stood more squarely in the Origenian tradition that
he did himself, Athanasius insisted that the Son could not be a participant in
divinity and still be our Saviour (Ar.
1.9). The world has been created out of nothing with the purpose of finding
fulfilment in God. As a result of the Fall, humanity had a tendency to sink
back into nothingness. The salvation brought by Christ was the power of reversing
the momentum and restoring the ascent of humanity towards the divine. God and
nothingness ae the two poles of reality. The reverse of the natural process of
corruption is the process of deification. But the Saviour could not be the one
who bestows deification if he was himself deified. The disjunction of uncreated
and created was overcome in his own person as a simultaneous ‘otherness’ and ‘nearness’
that draws humanity to the ‘otherness’ of the uncreated (K. Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought [London:
Routledge, 1998]:35-8). The created and uncreated converse in Christ, not
without tension. The humanity that Christ assumed therefore has a representative
significance. Human nature as such has become the Word’s ‘own’. There is a
human solidarity in Christ. Divine life has been communicated to the flesh and
human nature has been exalted. This reality is appropriated by the believer
sacramentally. Dynamic participation in the Word is effected through baptism and
the Eucharist. In the Epistle to Serapion
deification is synonymous with baptism (Ep.
Serap. 1). The fulfilment of the deified state is eschatological when ‘we
shall sit on thrones’ (Rev. 3:21) with Christ. This is an approach markedly
different from Origen’s intellectualism. We do not transcend human nature through
shedding the flesh and becoming pure minds. The representative humanity assumed
by the Word is transformed and endued with divine life. We begin to share in
this transformation through participating in Christ sacramentally.
After Athanasius this becomes the dominant
account of Christ’s redemptive work. Gregory of Nazianzus, in particular, keeps
coming back to it in his Orations. We
are divine people by ‘an inclination towards God’ that was interrupted by the
Fall (Or. 30.11; trans. mine). Christ
as the Second Adam is ‘a union of two opposites’ of flesh and spirit, the
latter deifying and the former being deified (Or. 38.13; trans . mind). The higher nature prevailed ‘that I might
become a god in the same measure that he became a man’ (Or. 29.19; trans mine). Christ makes us gods ‘by the power of the
Incarnation’ (Or. 30.14; trans. mine),
restoring the lost image of his own person so that we can share in it. The
basis of this sharing is baptism and the Eucharist. But Gregory lays much more
emphasis than Athanasius on spiritual ascent through the contemplative life. In
fact it is through the Holy Spirit in baptism have begun to appropriate the
deified humanity of the Son and who through the practice of ascetic discipline
are consolidating their ascent to their eschatological fulfilment.
This was not an approach that was shared
universally in the Greek-speaking world. Antiochene theologians in the tradition
of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia do not speak of deification
because they conceive of salvation in purely eschatological terms. For the
Cappadocians, however, the eschatological fulfilment may be initiated even in
this life. Augustine, too, shared the same perspective. This is evident in his
sermons and his treatises, though because references to deification are a good
deal sparser than in Gregory Nazianzus, the theme has not been much noticed
until comparatively recently (D.V. Meconi, The
One Christ: St. Augustine’s Theology of Deification [Washington, DC:
Catholic University Press of America, 2013]). For Augustine, as for all his
predecessors, the gods of Psalm 82:6 are baptized, for ‘if we have been made
sons of God, we have also been made gods’—deified by grace, that is, adopted by
baptism, so as to become fellow heirs with Christ (Enar. in Ps. 49.2; trans. mine). Christ is the agent of a new
creation, remodelling human nature to conform once again to the divine image (De Trin. 14-15). Like Gregory, Augustine
also speaks of a spiritual ascent within the human heart. In this context
deification is eschatological: “We experience mortality, we endure infirmity,
we look forward to divinity” (Mainz
Sermon 13.1; trans. mine).
The fullest development of Gregory of
Nazianzus is in Maximum the Confessor. That the economy of salvation is about
the penetration and transformation of the human by the divine is the subject of
profound meditation by Maximus. The purpose of the Incarnation is not only to
restore what was lost in the Fall, but also to endue humanity with divine life
as ‘an additional advantage through theosis over the first creation’ (Thal. 54; trans. mine). The humanization
of the divine and divinization of the human meet in the person of Jesus Christ
(Thal. 22). The reciprocity of
kenosis and theosis is frequently emphasized: ‘God and man are paradigms of
each other that as much as God is humanized to man through love for mankind, so
much is man able to be deified to God through love’ (Ambig. 10; A. Louth, St. John
Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996]: 101). That enables the human and the divine to
converge is the unifying function of love. By participating in the mystery of
love the believer participates in Christ himself. For the first time the
spiritual ascent is fully integrated with the Incarnation and participation in
the Eucharist. The mystery of Christ is the context in which the spiritual
transition is made from the limitations of this life to the glory of the next.
Theosis, the salvific goal for which humanity was created, is inaugurated in
this life by fully appropriating the mystery of Christ. For a person who has
ascended to the highest levels of unity in Christ out of the multiplicity of the
world has already attained the Eighty Day and become a god by deification (Cap. Theol. 1.54) (Norman Russell, “The
Work of Christ in Patristic Theology,” in Francesca Aran Murphy, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Christology [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015, 2018], 154-66, here, pp. 162-65)
On Theosis
D. Charles Pyle, I Have Said Ye are Gods: Concepts Conducive to the Early Christian Doctrine of Deification in Patristic Literature and the Underlying Strata of the Greek New Testament (Revised and Supplemented) (CreateSpace, 2018)
On Baptismal Regeneration
Christ's baptism is NOT imputed to the believer
