04 — Deification in Christ
Ζῷον θεούμενον — published at Athens by Epopteia in 1979, in a second edition in 1982, and in English in 1987 as Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person — is the book by which Nellas is known outside Greece and very nearly the whole of his theological corpus in translation. This section treats the book as a book: its title, its making, its English life, and the shape of its argument.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Zōon Theoumenon and Its English Life | The Greek editions of 1979 and 1982; the title and its source in St Gregory the Theologian; the SVS Press translation of 1987 by Norman Russell with the foreword by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia; the Contemporary Greek Theologians series; the accident of a posthumous publication |
| The Argument of the Book | The four-part structure; the movement from the image of God through the garments of skin to the spiritual life in Christ and the cosmological context; the appended patristic dossier; the method declared on page 24 |
The Bibliographic Facts, Pinned
- Greek original: Ζῷον θεούμενον, Athens: Epopteia, 1979; second edition 1982 (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 12: “The Greek text was published by ‘Epopteia’ in Athens in 1979; a second edition followed in 1982”).
- English translation: Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, trans. Norman Russell, with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. Contemporary Greek Theologians 5. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. 254 pp. ISBN 0-88141-030-6 (title-page data as given in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History review notice; Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 91, Works Cited; Internet Archive catalogue record).
- Title: Ζῷον θεούμενον is a phrase of St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 38.11 — literally “a living creature that is being deified” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987, 12).
[Corrected: the English subtitle. Many citations give it as "The Nature of the Human Person." The title page reads *Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person*, and that is the form used throughout this repository; the shortened form previously carried in the St Nicholas Cabasilas collection has since been corrected to match.]
Why the Book Matters Out of Proportion to Its Size
Deification in Christ is a short book with a small bibliography and no successor. It has nonetheless done three things that larger books have not.
It gave English readers a patristic anthropology that was neither a doxography nor a philosophy. Russell’s judgement is that the book is “at first sight a conventional scholarly investigation of patristic anthropology,” but that “his declared aim is not simply to submit the texts to critical analysis” (Russell 2006, 82). What it actually is, is an argument about what a human being is, conducted through the Fathers.
It made the “garments of skin” a live category in English-language Orthodox writing. The motif was in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus all along; it became a term of art in modern Orthodox anthropology largely through this book (see Section 06).
It is the volume through which Cabasilas entered contemporary Orthodox anthropology. See Section 03 and The Modern Rediscovery.
A Caution About Attribution
Everything expounded in this section and in Sections 05–07 is Nellas’s theology — the work of a modern lay theologian reading the Fathers — and is attributed to him as such. Where he expounds the dogma of the Church, the dogma is the Church’s; where he draws a conclusion, extends a patristic motif, or proposes an application (to evolutionary biology, to modern humanism, to the Church’s relation to the world), the conclusion is his own theological work and is presented as such and not as the teaching of the Church. This distinction is applied consistently throughout, per the repository’s METHODOLOGY §4.1.
See Also
- The Deified Animal — the central anthropological thesis of the book
- The Garments of Skin — its most distinctive exegetical theme
- Christ the Archetype of the Human — its christological centre
- Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) — the author of the foreword
- Theological Anthropology — the Church’s doctrine of the human person
- Theosis — the doctrine the book’s title names
References
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell, with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. Contemporary Greek Theologians 5. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. 254 pp.
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Ζῷον θεούμενον. Athens: Epopteia, 1979; 2nd ed. 1982.
- Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14.
- Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
- Review notice, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, of Deification in Christ (Contemporary Greek Theologians 5), giving the full title-page data and pagination.