The Argument of the Book

Deification in Christ moves in four parts: from the image of God and the “garments of skin” (the anthropology proper), through the spiritual life in Christ (the sacramental and ascetic realisation), to the anthropological and cosmological context of union with God, and finally to a dossier of patristic texts in translation. The structure is itself the argument: what a human being is, is determined by what he is for, and what he is for is shown in Christ and given in the Mysteries.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Structure

The book’s four parts and their principal divisions, as they stand in the English edition (contents of Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987):

Foreword (Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia), 9–14. Preface.

Part One — The Image of God and the “Garments of Skin”

I. The Image of God: 1. Man as an image of the Archetype: “image of the Image” (p. 23); 2. The Archetype of man: the incarnate Logos (p. 34)
II. The “Garments of Skin” (p. 43): 1. The general anthropological content (p. 44); 2. The transformation of the prelapsarian powers (p. 53); 3. The two-fold character of the garments of skin (p. 60); 4. The anthropological and cosmological dimensions (p. 64)
III. Consequences for the Church–World relationship (p. 93)

Part Two — The Spiritual Life in Christ (p. 109)

I. Presuppositions of the spiritual life (p. 109); II. The nature of the spiritual life (p. 115); III. Living the spiritual life (p. 121); IV. The fruits of the spiritual life (p. 141); V. The cosmic body of Christ (p. 157)

Part Three — The Anthropological and Cosmological Context of Union with God (p. 163)

Part Four — Patristic Texts (p. 199)

Bibliography (239–242), Glossary (243), Index of Patristic Texts (245), Index of Subjects (251).

Two features of that plan are worth noticing before any of the content.

Anthropology comes first and everything else follows from it. The book does not begin with God, or with the Church, or with salvation; it begins with the question of what man is, and answers it christologically. The spiritual life, the sacraments, the ascetic struggle and the cosmos are then read out of the anthropology rather than into it.

It ends with the Fathers themselves. Nearly forty pages of the book are patristic texts in translation. This is the Epi tas Pigas habit carried into a monograph: the argument is not offered as a substitute for the sources but as a way into them (see Epi tas Pigas).

The Method, Declared on Page 24

Nellas states his method rather than leaving it to be inferred. He approaches the Fathers, he says, “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 24; quoted in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82).

Russell’s gloss is the standard one and is worth quoting because it describes the book’s texture better than any summary: “The Fathers are to be studied not like any ancient text but from within the community of faith. Nellas, as it were, enters into conversation with the Fathers, letting them take him forward where they will. He does not write with the exalted monastic tone of a Gontikakis. But as a layman he was one of the few Greek theologians, as Spiteris says, who was able to bring theology into rapport with modern Greek culture. Gone now are preconceived theological schemes to which the Fathers added as testimonies” (Russell 2006, 82, incorporating Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 256).

This is a methodological claim with teeth, and it is contestable. It is treated as such in Section 08.

Part One: The Argument Proper

The image is christological, not psychological. Nellas’s first move is to refuse the standard question. The patristic tradition has many candidate answers to “what in man is the image of God?” — reason, freedom, dominion, the soul, the whole man. Nellas relocates the question. Man is an image of an Archetype, and the Archetype is not the divine nature in general but Christ. Following St Paul (Col 1:15; 2 Cor 4:4) and the Fathers who develop him, “Christ constitutes the image of God and man the image of Christ; that is to say, that man is the image of the Image” (Nellas 1987, 24–25). And therefore, in the sentence that carries the weight of the whole book: “Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos” (Nellas 1987, 34).

The consequences are set out at length in Section 07. The immediate one is that anthropology becomes a branch of christology, and that the human being cannot be defined without reference to a destiny he does not yet possess (see Christology).

The garments of skin. The second chapter of Part One is the book’s most influential stretch. Reading Genesis 3:21 with St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximus the Confessor, Nellas treats the “garments of skin” (δερμάτινοι χιτῶνες) with which God clothed Adam and Eve after the fall as a designation of the whole post-lapsarian mode of human existence: mortality and everything that comes with it — biological birth and reproduction, the passions, growth and decay, law, family, economic and political life. The four divisions of the chapter move from the general content (p. 44) through the transformation of man’s prelapsarian powers (p. 53) to the crucial section on their two-fold character (p. 60) and then to the anthropological and cosmological dimensions (p. 64). The full treatment is Section 06.

Consequences for Church and world. Part One closes (p. 93) by drawing out what the doctrine implies for the Church’s relation to the world — the point at which an exegesis of Genesis 3:21 becomes a social theology. If the structures of fallen life are divine provision as well as consequence of sin, then the Church’s stance toward them can be neither simple endorsement nor simple flight (see Social Ethics).

Part Two: The Spiritual Life in Christ

Part Two is the sacramental and ascetic half of the book, and it is where Cabasilas dominates. Its five divisions move from the presuppositions of the spiritual life through its nature and its practice to its fruits and finally to the “cosmic body of Christ” (p. 157).

The keynote is a refusal of moralism, stated in a sentence that Russell singles out and that has become the most quoted line in the book: “the spiritual life is not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love, a life of mingling and mixing with God” (Nellas 1987, 116; quoted in Russell 2006, 82).

Two things are being denied there. The first is the reduction of Christian life to ethics, which was the standing charge of Nellas’s generation against the piety they had grown up in (see From Makrakomi to Athens on the break with Zoe). The second is the forensic soteriology his doctoral work had been written against: if salvation were a verdict, the spiritual life would be conduct in view of a verdict; because salvation is participation, the spiritual life is the exercise of a communion already given in the Mysteries (see Cabasilas and the Sacramental Life and The Holy Mysteries).

The move from the sacramental life to the “cosmic body of Christ” at the end of Part Two is the bridge to Part Three: the deification of man is not a private transaction but draws the material creation with it, because man is the creature in whom the world is offered.

Part Three: The Cosmological Context

Part Three (p. 163) situates the anthropology within a doctrine of creation. This is the section in which Nellas engages most directly with modern science, and specifically with evolutionary biology — arguing, in Doru Costache’s summary, that evolutionary theory cannot damage Orthodox anthropology, because the sciences describe the external morphology and process of the human phenomenon while theology grasps its interior trajectory toward deification, the two being complementary rather than competing (Costache, “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas,” AIOCS, 27 April 2018).

This is Nellas’s own theological proposal, not the dogma of the Church, and it is presented here as his (see Anthropology by Destiny). Costache regards it as remarkable and as one of the things that make Nellas useful for a contemporary scientifically engaged theology; the position has not, so far as this collection could establish, been either formally endorsed or formally criticised in Orthodox writing.

Part Four: The Patristic Dossier

The last forty pages are texts: patristic passages in translation, with an index of patristic texts to match (Nellas 1987, 199–238; index at 245). A glossary at 243 explains the Greek technical vocabulary for the general reader — a small detail that reveals whom the book was written for. It is not a monograph aimed at patristic specialists; it is a book meant to put an educated Orthodox reader in a position to read the Fathers himself.

What the Book Does Not Do

Three absences are worth naming, because they explain both the book’s clarity and the shape of its later reception.

It is not a full systematic anthropology. There is no sustained treatment of the soul–body relation as a philosophical problem, no treatment of freedom and grace as a dogmatic locus, no anthropology of gender, and only a limited engagement with the ascetic literature on the passions in its own terms.
It does not argue with its contemporaries. Nellas does not, in this book, position himself against Yannaras or Zizioulas or anyone else. The comparison that later readers make is one the book itself does not invite (see Nellas Among the Greek Generation).
It has no sequel. The plan of Part Three points toward a theology of creation and of the Church’s engagement with the world that Nellas did not live to write.

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. (Contents and pagination as cited above; the quoted passages at 24, 24–25, 34 and 116.)
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. (Nellas at 81–82.)
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Nellas at 255–277.)
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” Australian Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.