05 — The Deified Animal
St Gregory the Theologian, preaching on the Nativity, called the human being ζῷον θεούμενον — “a living creature that is being deified.” Nellas took the phrase for the title of his book and made it the whole of his anthropological method: a human being cannot be defined by what he presently is, because what he presently is has not yet happened. He is defined by his destiny, and his destiny is God.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A Living Creature Being Deified | The phrase from Oration 38.11 and what Nellas does with it; the animal and the differentia; deification as constitutive rather than additional; the relation to the Church’s doctrine of theosis |
| Anthropology by Destiny | Defining man by his end rather than his present state; the consequences for how the fall, the passions and human nature are described; Nellas’s engagement with modern anthropologies, secular humanism and evolutionary biology |
The Thesis in One Paragraph
Every anthropology answers the question “what is man?” by naming a differentia — the thing that distinguishes him from other animals. The classical answers name a possession: reason, speech, freedom, political capacity, the making of tools, the burying of the dead. The modern answers name a process or a product: the labouring animal, the symbol-using animal, the animal that has evolved a particular brain. Gregory’s answer, in Nellas’s reading, names neither. Zōon theoumenon is not a property man has; it is something being done to him. The differentia is a divine action in the present passive.
From that, three things follow, and they organise Nellas’s entire anthropology:
- Man is not yet what he is. Anthropology must be teleological or it is describing a fragment as though it were a whole.
- The definition is theological all the way down. There is no neutral layer of “human nature” that could be described first and related to God afterwards.
- The archetype is Christ. If man is the creature being deified, then the man in whom deification is complete is the definition of the species (see Section 07).
Where This Is Nellas and Where It Is the Church’s
The doctrine of deification is the Church’s, taught by the Fathers and confessed in her worship: that God became man that man might become god by grace, participating in the uncreated energies without becoming God by nature (see Theosis and Theological Anthropology). The phrase zōon theoumenon is St Gregory the Theologian’s.
What is Nellas’s own theological work is the decision to make that phrase the organising principle of a systematic anthropology — to treat deification not as one doctrine among others but as the definition of the human, and to derive from it a series of consequences for the reading of the fall, of biological life, of culture and of the sciences. Those consequences are expounded here as his and attributed to him, not presented as the teaching of the Church (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1).
See Also
- The Argument of the Book — where this thesis sits in the structure
- The Garments of Skin — what happens to the present state once the destiny defines the nature
- Christ the Archetype of the Human — the christological completion of the thesis
- St. Gregory the Theologian — the source of the phrase
- St. Gregory of Nyssa — epektasis, the endless progress into God, which underlies the whole
- Theosis — the Church’s doctrine of deification
References
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
- Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 38.11.
- Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14.
- Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.