A Living Creature Being Deified

The phrase ζῷον θεούμενον comes from St Gregory the Theologian’s Nativity oration, where it is a definition of the human being: not the rational animal, but the animal that is being made god. Nellas took it for his title and built an anthropology on the grammar of it — on the fact that the differentia of man is a passive participle in the present tense, an action of God upon a creature who is not the agent of it and has not yet undergone the whole of it.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Phrase and Its Source

Bishop Kallistos gives the provenance in his foreword: “The original title in Greek begins Zōon theoumenon, a phrase taken from St Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38, 11, meaning literally ‘a living creature that is being deified’” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 12).

Oration 38 is the Nativity oration — the sermon on the Theophany and the Nativity in which Gregory sets out the creation of man and the purpose of the Incarnation, and from which the Church’s Nativity hymnography draws heavily. The context is the creation narrative: Gregory describes God fashioning a creature from both the visible and the invisible worlds, placing him on earth as “a second cosmos, great in littleness,” an animal set here and destined elsewhere, and in that setting the phrase falls (see St. Gregory the Theologian).

Two grammatical facts about the phrase are load-bearing, and Nellas builds on both.

It is zōon, animal. Gregory does not say “spirit,” “soul,” “person,” or “rational being.” He puts the human where a Greek reader expected him — among the living creatures, in the genus — and then distinguishes him. Whatever the differentia is, it does not deny that man is an animal, and Nellas is emphatic that the biological is not to be subtracted from the human but transfigured (see The Garments of Skin).

It is theoumenon, a present passive participle. Not theos, “god”; not theōtheis, “having been deified”; not theōthēsomenon, “destined to be deified.” The participle is present and passive: the deification is under way, and man is not doing it. Man’s defining characteristic is something God is doing to him, now, incompletely.

Against Definition by Present Possession

The philosophical force of the phrase, in Nellas’s use, is negative before it is positive. It excludes a whole family of anthropologies.

If man is defined by his present possession of some faculty, then anthropology proceeds by inventory: locate the faculty, describe it, and you have described the human being. This is the shape of the classical definitions (zōon logikon, the rational animal; zōon politikon, the political animal) and, in a different key, of the modern ones. It is also the shape of a certain kind of Christian anthropology, in which “the image of God” is identified with one component of the human constitution — reason, or free will, or dominion over the creatures — and the rest of man is treated as its housing.

Nellas’s first move in Deification in Christ is to refuse this. He relocates the image from a faculty to a relation: man is an image of an Archetype, and the archetype is Christ, so that “man is the image of the Image” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 24–25). An image is not a thing with a property; it is a thing constituted by its reference to another. To ask what in man is the image of God is, on this account, already to have mistaken the grammar (see Image of the Image).

And if the human being is constituted by a reference to an archetype who is the incarnate Logos, then the human being presently observable is a partial realisation of something whose measure lies outside him. Doru Costache summarises the resulting dynamism: human nature is for Nellas a “work in progress,” a continuous metamorphosis from earthly beginnings toward participation in God, and Costache quotes him to the effect that the human being, “having been created ‘in the image’ of the infinite God, … is called … to transcend the limited boundaries of creation and to become infinite” (Costache, “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas,” AIOCS, 27 April 2018, quoting Nellas).

The Nyssen Background: Epektasis

Behind this stands St Gregory of Nyssa, whose recovery in twentieth-century patristics was largely the work of Jean Daniélou, under whom Nellas studied at Paris (see Paris, the Arsakeio, and an Early Death).

Nyssen’s characteristic doctrine is epektasis — from Philippians 3:13, “straining forward [epekteinomenos] to what lies ahead” — the teaching that the creature’s approach to God has no terminus, because God is infinite and the creature’s participation in Him is therefore an unending progress from glory to glory, with no point at which the soul possesses what it seeks. Perfection, for Nyssen, is not a state but a direction: to be perfect is never to stop growing (see St. Gregory of Nyssa).

An anthropology built on epektasis cannot define man by a static essence, because on this account there is no state of the human being that is the finished article. What “human nature” means is a capacity for endless reception. This is why theoumenon is in the present tense in Gregory the Theologian’s phrase and why Nellas is content to leave it there: the participle is not a temporary condition awaiting a perfect tense. There is no perfect tense.

What Deification Is and Is Not

Because the word carries obvious dangers, the Church’s doctrine should be stated as hers before Nellas’s use of it is described further.

Theosis is the teaching that man is called to become god by grace — really to participate in the divine life, not merely to imitate it or be reckoned as sharing it. What is participated is the uncreated energies of God, not His essence, which remains forever unparticipable and unknowable; the distinction was given definitive dogmatic articulation in the fourteenth-century councils that vindicated St Gregory Palamas. Deification does not abolish the creature or dissolve the distinction between Creator and creation; the deified man does not become a fourth person of the Trinity or a second Christ by nature. He becomes by grace what Christ is by nature. This is the Church’s teaching, and it is set out in full at Theosis and St. Gregory Palamas.

Nellas’s use of it is orthodox in this sense and adds nothing to it doctrinally. What he adds is method: he makes deification the term from which the definition of man is derived, rather than a doctrine appended to a definition arrived at on other grounds.

Not a Life of Laws

The practical corollary appears in Part Two of the book, and it is the sentence of Nellas’s that has been quoted most often: “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, Deification in Christ, 1987, 116; quoted in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82).

The line follows from the anthropology with some rigour. If man is the animal being deified, then the Christian life is the exercise of a process already begun in him, and the commandments are the description of what a deified creature does rather than the conditions of a bargain. Russell puts Nellas’s positive theme thus: he “lets the Fathers show us that God is not an impersonal eternal ‘principle’ but our ontological origin and consummation. When we live theandrically — in imitation of Christ — we realize ourselves by reaching out into infinity; we attain our true fulfilment by extending it into eternity” (Russell 2006, 82).

Two words in that summary are Nellas’s own emphases. “Theandrically” — living in the divine-human mode that Christ inaugurated — makes the ethical question christological rather than legal. And “ontological origin and consummation” places God at both ends of the human definition: man comes from God and is going to God, and everything in between is described by reference to those two terms.

A Caution on Reading the Phrase

One misreading of zōon theoumenon should be closed off, because it is easy and would falsify Nellas.

The phrase does not mean that human beings are automatically or inevitably being deified regardless of anything they do. Deification, in the Orthodox account, is synergistic: God’s action and man’s free cooperation, with the possibility of refusal real throughout. Gregory’s participle describes the vocation and the process that the Creator has set in motion, not a mechanism that runs without consent. Nellas’s whole Part Two — the presuppositions, the nature, the living and the fruits of the spiritual life — is an account of the human labour involved, and would be pointless on a deterministic reading (Nellas 1987, 109–162; see Soteriology).

What the phrase does assert is that the direction is constitutive. Even the man who refuses is a creature whose nature is defined by the refused end. This is what makes the definition anthropological rather than merely spiritual: it holds of the species, not only of the saints.

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. (The quoted passages at 24–25 and 116.)
Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14 (the source of the phrase at 12).
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 38.11.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.