From Irenaeus to the Cappadocians

The doctrine of deification is fully present in the Church’s teachers before the word theosis acquires its technical sense. This file traces it from St. Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century, through the Alexandrians and St. Athanasius’ anti-Arian argument, to the Cappadocian Fathers — with particular attention to St. Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of epektasis, the endless progress of the creature into the infinite God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Exchange, Recapitulation, and Growth

The earliest sustained theology of deification belongs to St. Irenaeus (c. 130–202), and it comes packaged with an anthropology that the later tradition never abandoned.

The exchange is stated in the preface to Book V of Against Heresies: the Lord Jesus Christ “did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies V, preface; trans. ANF 1). Elsewhere Irenaeus uses the stronger vocabulary directly: the Word “became the Son of man, that man… might become the son of God” (Against Heresies III.19.1; trans. ANF 1).

The mechanism is recapitulation (anakephalaiosis): Christ “sums up” the whole of human nature in himself, passing through every age of human life, so that what was lost in Adam is regathered and healed from within rather than repaired from outside (see St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Recapitulation).

And the anthropology is one of growth. Irenaeus’ Adam is not a perfected being who fell from a height but an immature one, created as a child and intended to advance by stages toward incorruption (Against Heresies IV.38; trans. ANF 1; see St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Infancy and Growth). This single move does more work than any other in the early history of the doctrine: if the human being is by constitution a creature on the way, then deification is the completion of his nature rather than an addition to it. Irenaeus also gives the tradition its most quoted line on the purpose of human existence — “the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God” (Against Heresies IV.20.7; trans. ANF 1; see St. Irenaeus of Lyons: The Glory of God Is a Living Man).

The Alexandrians

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) is the first Greek Christian writer to use the vocabulary of god-making with any freedom, and he is the point at which the Church’s language visibly overlaps with, and is bent away from, the Hellenistic philosophical vocabulary of assimilation to the divine. Norman Russell’s history places Clement and Origen at the hinge where a nomenclature drawn partly from Platonic homoiosis theo is refashioned around the Incarnation (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford, 2004, chs. on the Alexandrian tradition). Origen (c. 185–c. 254) develops the theme of participation extensively, and is the principal channel through which the language reaches the fourth century — though his reception in the Church is qualified, and the sixth-century condemnations of Origenism bear on other parts of his system rather than on participation as such (see The Church Fathers).

The reader should note that this collection does not treat every ancient use of deification language as equally authoritative. The criterion is the Church’s reception, and what the Church received is the doctrine as it stands in Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril, and Maximus.

St. Athanasius: Deification as an Argument for the Homoousion

With St. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) the doctrine becomes a load-bearing element in dogmatic argument rather than a devotional theme.

The famous formula stands at On the Incarnation 54.3: “For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality” (trans. NPNF II/4). Its content is spelled out across the Orations against the Arians: “the Word was made flesh in order… that we, partaking of his Spirit, might be deified” (Contra Arianos 2.70); the Son became a son of man “that he might make us sons of God” (Contra Arianos 1.38–39; 3.34; trans. NPNF II/4).

Three terms carry the content, and they are set out in detail at St. Athanasius: Theosis in Athanasius: participation (metousia / metoche), adoption (huiothesia), and incorruption (aphtharsia). The polemical force is this: only a Word who is God by nature can make gods, because a creature cannot confer what it does not have. Soteriology therefore demands the homoousion. The same argument is turned on the Holy Spirit in the Letters to Serapion: the Spirit deifies, therefore the Spirit is not a creature (Athanasius, Letters to Serapion 1; trans. NPNF II/4).

What Athanasius does not supply is the metaphysical specification of what in God is partaken. He says that we partake of God, of the Word, of the Spirit, and that we do not partake as the Son does — but the precise distinction that would make the claim safe from both pantheism and agnosticism belongs to the fourteenth century (see Essence and Energies).

St. Basil the Great

St. Basil (c. 330–379) contributes two things.

The first is a ranking. Listing the effects of the Holy Spirit, he ends the ascent with deification: “thence come… abiding in God, the being made like to God, and, highest of all, the being made God” (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 9.23; trans. NPNF II/8). The superlative is Basil’s own judgment on the order of the goods of salvation (see St. Basil the Great).

The second is a sentence that the whole later tradition treats as the essence–energies distinction in seed: “His operations come down to us, but His essence remains beyond our reach” (Basil, Letter 234.1; trans. NPNF II/8). Palamas reads this as the distinction already stated (see St. Gregory Palamas: Patristic Pedigree).

St. Gregory the Theologian

St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390) gives the doctrine its most quotable homiletic form — “Let us become gods for His sake, since He for ours became man” (Oration 1.5; the NPNF II/7 text renders theoi here as the possessive “God’s,” which obscures the sense — see the note at The Exchange Formula) — and its most consequential Christological corollary: “That which He has not assumed He has not healed” (Epistle 101, to Cledonius; trans. NPNF II/7). He also gives the tradition its definition of the human being as ζῷον θεούμενον, “a living creature that is being deified,” in the Nativity oration (Oration 38.11; see Panayiotis Nellas: A Living Creature Being Deified).

Gregory is also the Father most careful about the qualifier. In Oration 29.19 the deification is “so far as He is man” — bounded by the reality of the Incarnation and not by any capacity in us. And he is the source of the strong apophatic principle that shapes everything after him: “It is difficult to conceive God, but to define Him in words is an impossibility” (Oration 28.4; trans. NPNF II/7). Deification and apophaticism belong together; the God who is truly participated is the God who is truly unknowable (Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge, 1957, chs. 1–2; see Vladimir Lossky: Apophaticism).

St. Gregory of Nyssa and Epektasis

St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) contributes the doctrine that makes deification permanently dynamic, and it is his most distinctive gift to the tradition.

Epektasis takes its name from Philippians 3:13, epekteinomenos, “straining forward to what lies ahead.” Gregory’s claim is that because God is infinite, the creature’s approach to him has no terminus. There is no point at which the soul possesses what it seeks, and therefore no point at which growth stops. Perfection is not a state but a direction: “the perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness” (Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses I.10; trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978).

The most famous formulation stands in the treatment of Moses’ request to see God: “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see Him” (The Life of Moses II.239; trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, CWS, 1978). The soul’s satisfaction is precisely its unsatisfied desire; every attainment discloses more to be attained. Gregory develops the same doctrine at length in the Homilies on the Song of Songs, where the bride’s repeated seeking and finding structures the whole ascent (see St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses and The Homilies on the Song of Songs).

Three consequences follow that matter for the doctrine of theosis as a whole.

Deification is not completed even in the age to come. The blessed do not arrive; they ascend. This is one of the sharpest structural differences between the Orthodox account and any account of the final state as a static possession of the vision of God (see Theosis and the West). [Disputed: whether epektasis continues eternally even in the resurrection, or reaches a consummation, is contested — Daniélou and von Balthasar read the progress as never-ending even in glory, while more recent interpreters caution that Gregory’s eschatological texts are less univocal than the mystical treatises alone suggest (cf. Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and [Post]modern, Oxford, 2007); see St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses.]

The creature/Creator distinction is permanently secured by infinity itself. Since the infinite cannot be exhausted by a finite participant, the creature can never overtake God, and the union can never become identity. Nyssen thus supplies a metaphysical guardrail complementary to the later Palamite one.

Desire is not a defect to be overcome. In the Nyssen account desire (eros, epithymia rightly directed) is the very engine of the ascent, not a passion to be extinguished. This shaped the whole subsequent Greek ascetic tradition, and through St. Maximus and Dionysius it reaches the Philokalia (see The Philokalia).

St. Cyril of Alexandria

A note is required on St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), who is not always given his place in popular accounts. Cyril’s deification is thoroughly Eucharistic and Christological: the flesh of the Word is life-giving because it is his flesh, and it deifies those who receive it. His insistence on the single subject of the Incarnate Word — the Word himself who suffers in the flesh — is what makes the Eucharist a communion in God and not merely in a holy man (see St. Cyril of Alexandria; Christology). This line runs directly to Cabasilas and to the sacramental route mapped in The Way.

What the Pre-Byzantine Witness Establishes

By the end of the fifth century the following are settled in the Church’s teaching, before any council has legislated on them:

  1. That the purpose of the Incarnation is the deification of the human being (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory the Theologian).
  2. That deification is by grace and participation, never by nature, and never a sharing in what makes God to be God (Athanasius).
  3. That it is worked by the Holy Spirit and therefore proves the Spirit’s divinity (Athanasius, Basil).
  4. That it requires the completeness of Christ’s humanity (Gregory the Theologian).
  5. That it is a growth without end, because God is infinite (Gregory of Nyssa).
  6. That it reaches human beings through the life-giving flesh of the Word in the Eucharist (Cyril).

What remains unfinished is the metaphysics: what in God the creature participates. That is the question Byzantium answered.

See Also

References

  • Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation, 54; Orations against the Arians, 1.38–39, 2.70, 3.34; Letters to Serapion 1. Trans. NPNF II/4.
  • Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit, 9.23; Letters, Letter 234. Trans. NPNF II/8.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Orations 1.5, 28.4, 29.19, 38.11; Epistle 101 (to Cledonius). Trans. NPNF II/7.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.
  • Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on the Song of Songs. Trans. Richard A. Norris Jr. Writings from the Greco-Roman World. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies, III.19.1; IV.20.7; IV.38; V, preface. Trans. ANF 1.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957.
  • Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.