We find many references to theosis in the writings of the Church Fathers, especially in the East. These holy men were the spiritual (and often ecclesiastical) leaders of their Christian communities.
The working out of Orthodox Christian theology was not without its (sometimes violent) disagreements. However within a few centuries, in the Eastern Church it became the norm to say that our salvation is in truth our deification; whereas in the West, under the legalistic Roman Imperium, the concept struggled to take root.
The Early Centuries
St Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd C) was the first to express the idea that God (as the Word/Logos/Christ) became man in order that men might become God (or gods). Irenaeus wrote: “… the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ… did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.” As missionary to Gaul, he influenced later Western theologians like Hilary of Poitiers (4th C). According to Hilary, believers become God by sharing in the glorified human body of the ascended Christ. Meanwhile in the East, Eusebius of Caesarea (3rd/4th C), the first church historian, in his work Demonstratio Evangelica described man’s salvation as deification.
The Alexandrians
Irenaeus’s formula was taken up by a succession of Fathers. In Alexandria, one of the key centres of Christian theological development, Clement (2nd/3rd C) writes, “The Word of God became man so that you should learn from a man, how it is that man can become a god.” One of Clement’s pupils, the seminal thinker Origen (3rd C) emphasizes that the Incarnation of the Logos is the root of the hopes for the theosis of the human race: “The divine nature and the human nature became very closely bonded together [in Jesus Christ] in order that… human nature itself might become divine; and this not only in the case of Jesus, but also in the case of all those who… have embraced the life which Jesus taught.”
The great St Athanasius (4th C) takes Irenaeus’s formula and restates it in the now famous more concise version:
God became man that man might become God.
De Incarnatione, 54.2
He expressed this in other ways too, eg: “The Word was made a bearer of the flesh in order that men might become bearers of the Spirit”. In his work Against the Arians he distinguishes the gods, or sons of God (theoi), from the Son of God, who is truly and eternally God (Theos). The Arians mistakenly viewed Christ, the Logos, as a son in the lesser sense that we are, created rather than eternally begotten.
Athanasius is very clear that nobody can be deified by anyone lesser than God himself, thus “Only if the Logos is himself God could he accomplish this”.
In the 5th C, Alexandrian theology ‘reaches its pinnacle’ in the thought of St Cyril, dominated by the idea of deification as the supreme goal of mankind. Cyril echoes St Peter’s expression “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4) when he says, “We shall become sons by participation”; elsewhere Cyril says, “For we too are sons and gods by grace…” To be deified, Cyril says, is to be “penetrated by divinity”; just as the red-hot iron in the fire is penetrated by the heat of the fire, so we are deified by the Holy Spirit who makes us likenesses of the Son, the perfect image of the Father.
The Cappadocians
Cappadocia (modern Eastern Turkey) was the birthplace of three remarkable 4th C theologians, St Basil (the Great), St Gregory of Nazianzus (“the Theologian”) and Basil’s younger brother St Gregory of Nyssa. In Basil’s and his brother’s writings, we find the first mention of the ‘essence-energies’ distinction in God (a bit like the sun and its rays) – God, out of His essence, makes Himself known to us in His energies in which we participate, thus becoming ever more like Him. This important concept is later developed by Dionysius the Areopagite (see below).
Gregory of Nazianzus repeats Irenaeus’s formula, poeticizing it thus: “And since, then, God is made man/So man is perfected as God, and that is my glory”. Gregory was very bold in using the language of deification and it was he who coined the word theosis as a specifically Christian word, in contrast to words like apotheosis which had pagan connotations.
Gregory of Nyssa was the most prolific writer of the three, and is now regarded as ‘one of the greatest philosophical minds of the early church’. He, too, restated Irenaeus’s formula: “[The Logos] was transfused throughout our nature so that our nature, by virtue of this transfusion, might itself become divine.”
St Basil is perhaps best known for his Rules for monastic life, with a desire to return to the simplicity of the primitive church in Jerusalem. He was also a fine theologian and wrote against Eunomius, an extreme Arian. Basil speaks of “intimacy with God”, of “union in love”, and says: “the Holy Spirit deifies by grace those who still belong to a nature subject to change”.
The Byzantines
Byzantine theology is indebted to the writings of the mysterious Dionysius the Areopagite. His treatises (late 4thC) had a huge impact in the East. Through Erigena’s 9th C translations into Latin they penetrated the Western Church too, being admired by Thomas Aquinas. However, despite the enthusiastic reception given these translations, the West had more or less lost its mystical roots by the 12th C. Dionysius writes that God’s energies (he calls them ‘powers’) are His manifestation in which created beings participate. “By calling Him God, Life, Substance we mean the deifying, vivifying, substantiating powers by which God… makes Himself known”. “When we become incorruptible and immortal… having become likenesses of Christ, we shall be ever with the Lord… illuminated by His radiant beams, just as the disciples were illuminated at the time of His divine Transfiguration… For, according to the word of Truth… we shall be likenesses of the angels and sons of God”.
The writings of St Maximus the Confessor (6th/7th C) are rich in references to deification; in fact it is his central idea. For Maximus, deification is the supreme end of the human will. The movement of man’s will towards God is reciprocated by the Almighty in a divine ‘embrace’, resulting in perichoresis (co-inherence). Maximus writes that it is love which will unite in us our created with uncreated nature, “so that they appear in unity and identity by the acquisition of grace” [i.e. acquisition of the Holy Spirit]. “Those who have followed Christ in action and contemplation will be changed into an ever better condition, and there is not time to tell of all the ascents and revelations of the saints who are being changed from glory into glory, until each one in order receives deification”.
St John of Damascus (8th C) speaks of our “assimilation to God through virtue” – in other words becoming like Christ, who is the perfect example of all virtue. In the Book of Genesis (1.26), God says, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness”, and the Church Fathers agree that while image refers to man’s reason and freedom, which distinguishes him from the animals, likeness refers to the possibility of becoming God, i.e. theosis.
St Symeon the New Theologian (10th/11th C) often writes in a rhapsodic style, a continuous outpouring, addressing the Almighty. He says, “He who is God by nature converses with those whom He has made gods by grace, as a friend converses with his friends, face to face. He loves His sons [and daughters!] as a Father”.
Symeon refers regularly to the divine Light: “God is light, and He communicates his brightness to those who are united with Him, to the extent that they are purified… O miracle! Man is united to God spiritually and corporeally, for his soul is in no way separated from the spirit, nor the body from the soul.” Here Symeon makes clear the whole of us is deified, body too: “God enters into union with the whole man”.
During the 14th C, St Gregory Palamas led the defence of the Hesychast monks of Mt Athos against ridicule – some of them claimed to have seen the uncreated Light of God, the same light that the disciples Peter, James and John had seen when Christ was transfigured before them on Mt Tabor. The dispute centred on the nature of this light and on whether deification is actual. According to Palamas, “The light of the Transfiguration of the Lord…remained…imperceptible to the senses… but the disciples of the Lord passed from the flesh into the spirit by a transmutation of their senses”; in other words they experienced theosis. “He who participates in divine energy becomes in some way light in himself; he is united to the Light and with the light he beholds with all his faculties all that remains hidden to those who do not have this grace”.
The 19th and 20th Centuries
To St Seraphim of Sarov (18th/19th C) the true aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. Good deeds, etc. on their own are not enough – but if done for Christ’s sake, then they bring us the grace of the Holy Spirit. There is a startling account by a certain ‘pious Orthodox Christian’ Nicholas Motovilov, of a conversation he had with Seraphim in his forest hermitage, snow falling all the while: ‘Father Seraphim took me very firmly by the shoulders and said, “We are now both in God’s Spirit! Why don’t you look at me?” I answered, “I can’t, father, because lightning is streaming from your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes are splitting with pain.” Father Seraphim said, “Don’t be afraid. You too have now become as bright as I. You too are now in the fullness of God’s Spirit. Otherwise you could not see me as I am now.” Seraphim asked Motovilov what he felt then, and the latter answered: “I feel extraordinarily good… I feel such serenity and peace in my soul that I can find no words to express it.”
The 20th C Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky (d. 1958) sought to bring back to the West the living reality of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, including, of course, theosis. His writings include The Vision of God, from where a number of our quotations are taken. With reference to Irenaeus (to return where we started) he comments: “Now what is the deification of created beings, if not their perfect participation in the divine life?”
We conclude this brief overview of the history of theosis by referring you to a selection of Jim Overbeck’s writings on deification (see below), taken from his extraordinary book The Autobiography of God Almighty.
Related articles
