Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Example of Theosis in Volume 1 of the Ambigua by Maximus the Confessor

  

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)

 

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