The Mysteries and Theosis

The mysteries are not seven separate transactions but one sacramental economy with a single end: the deification (theosis) of the human person — the becoming, by grace, of “partakers of the divine nature.” This file gathers the several mysteries into that one movement, showing how baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, repentance, and the rest together engender, nourish, restore, and perfect the life of Christ in the believer, so that the whole sacramental life is the path of theosis.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The End of the Mysteries

The Orthodox tradition does not ask, in the first place, what the mysteries are apart from what they are for, and their purpose is nothing less than theosis — the participation of the human person in the divine life, the becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) which is the whole aim of the Christian Gospel (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). “God became man that man might become god,” in the ancient formula of St. Athanasius (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54, trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4); and the mysteries are the ordinary, appointed means by which the deification won by the incarnate Christ is communicated to each person and worked out in each life. Theosis is not, in Orthodox understanding, the absorption of the human into the divine essence, but the transformation of the whole person by grace through participation in the uncreated energies of God, while the creaturely person remains himself (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, on the Palamite framework of theosis; see Orthodoxy: Theosis). The mysteries are the concrete, bodily, ecclesial locus of that participation: it is not through disembodied contemplation alone but through water and oil and bread and wine, given in the Church, that God deifies His creatures.

One Economy of Grace

St. Nicholas Cabasilas’ The Life in Christ is the classic Orthodox demonstration that the several mysteries form one organic economy, each doing its part in a single work of engendering and perfecting the divine life in the believer. Cabasilas organizes his whole treatise around three of the mysteries taken as the stages of one life:

  • Baptism gives birth — it confers being in Christ, bringing into existence a person who did not before exist in Him, cleansing, illuminating, and making him a member of Christ’s Body (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 2; see The Theology of Baptism).
  • Chrismation sets the new life in motion — it confers the energies and gifts of the Holy Spirit, animating the powers that baptism has given, so that the newborn can now act, pray, and grow (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 3; see The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit).
  • The Eucharist nourishes and perfects — it feeds the life thus begun and quickened with Christ Himself, uniting the believer to the Lord so completely that he lives no longer by his own life but by Christ’s, and it is therefore the goal and consummation toward which the other mysteries lead (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, Book 4; see Communion and the Life of the Church).

Around this core the remaining mysteries take their places in the same economy. Repentance restores the life of Christ when it has been wounded or lost by sin after baptism — the “second baptism” that returns the fallen believer to the grace of the first (see The Mystery of Repentance). Holy Orders provides the ministry through which the deifying mysteries are celebrated, so that the priesthood exists for the sake of the sanctification of the whole royal-priestly people (see The Theology of Priesthood). Marriage sanctifies the common life of husband and wife, making of it an icon of Christ and the Church and a path of deification through self-emptying love (see The Mystery of Crowning). Holy Unction heals the whole person, soul and body, against the sickness and mortality that are sin’s fruit, anticipating the final healing of the resurrection (see The Mystery of Anointing). Each mystery is a facet of the one work; none stands alone.

The Mysteries and the Whole of Life

Because their end is theosis, the mysteries reach beyond the moments of their celebration into the whole of the Christian life. The gift given in each is a seed to be cultivated: the grace of baptism is to be lived out in continual dying to sin; the Spirit sealed in chrismation is to be “acquired” ever more fully, in St. Seraphim of Sarov’s phrase for the whole aim of the Christian life — “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” (Seraphim of Sarov, Conversation with Motovilov; see Orthodoxy: Theosis); the Christ received in the Eucharist is to be made the form of one’s whole existence. The mysteries and the ascetic-prayerful life are therefore two sides of one reality: the mysteries give the grace, and the life of the commandments, of prayer, and of repentance receives, guards, and increases it (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, on the union of sacramental and ascetic life; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). There is no opposition, in Orthodoxy, between the “institutional” mysteries and the “mystical” life of prayer; the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer and the sacramental life of the Church are one, both ordered to the same vision of God and participation in Him (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

This is also why the sacramental principle overflows the count of seven into the whole of the Church’s life and, through her, into the whole of creation (see The Mysteries and the Number Seven). Schmemann’s vision of the human person as the priest of creation, called to receive the world from God and offer it back in thanksgiving, means that the deification worked in the mysteries is meant to radiate outward — sanctifying not only the person but, through him, his labor, his home, his food, the material world itself, awaiting its own redemption (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 1–2, on the cosmic scope of the sacramental; Romans 8:19–21). Theosis is not an escape from matter but its transfiguration, and the mysteries — bodily, material, given in bread and water and oil — are the pledge and beginning of the transfiguration of all things.

The Mysteries and the Kingdom

Finally, the mysteries are eschatological: they are the presence, now and in part, of the Kingdom that is to come in fullness. The Eucharist is “the sacrament of the Kingdom,” the entrance of the Church into the age to come and the foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, SVS Press, 1988, throughout). Baptism is the pledge of the resurrection; chrismation is the “earnest” (arrabōn) of the inheritance (Ephesians 1:14); the crowns of marriage are received “into the Kingdom”; unction anticipates the resurrection’s final healing. The whole sacramental economy is thus oriented toward the End — not a mere maintenance of religious life in this age but the breaking-in of the life of the world to come, in which the deification the mysteries begin will be brought to its completion when God is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). To live the sacramental life is to be carried, already, toward that consummation: the mysteries are the means by which the Church and each of her members are made ready to see God “as He is” (1 John 3:2) and to be made like Him in that seeing — which is theosis, the end of all the mysteries (see The Mysteries Across the Tradition).

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ, Books 1–4. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974.
  • Athanasius. On the Incarnation 54. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4; and trans. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2011.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973; and The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • Scripture: 2 Peter 1:4; Ephesians 1:14; Romans 8:19–21; 1 Corinthians 15:28; 1 John 3:2.