Maximus, Symeon, and Palamas

Byzantium did not add a new doctrine of deification; it supplied the precision the earlier witness lacked. St. Maximus the Confessor gave it a metaphysics of the logoi and a Christological grammar; St. Symeon the New Theologian insisted that grace is consciously perceived; St. Nicholas Cabasilas located it in the Mysteries; and St. Gregory Palamas, defending the hesychasts, secured it dogmatically by the distinction of essence and energies.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

St. Maximus the Confessor: the Most Developed Account

St. Maximus (c. 580–662) is by common consent the most sophisticated patristic theologian of deification, and his contribution has four parts.

The logoi. Every created thing exists according to a logos — a divine intention or principle of its being — and all the logoi are contained in and derived from the one Logos of God. Creation is therefore not a set of arbitrary things but a set of divine words waiting to be read, and the human vocation is to bring each thing, and finally the whole cosmos, to the God from whom its logos comes (Maximus, Ambigua 7; see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation). Deification, in this frame, is the coincidence of a creature’s actual mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos) with the logos of its nature. It is therefore not the violation of nature but its completion — a point of the first importance for the anthropology in Image and Likeness.

The Incarnation as the purpose of creation. For Maximus the Incarnation is not a remedial afterthought occasioned by the fall but the mystery for which the world was made; the Word “wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” (Maximus, Ambigua 7; cf. Ad Thalassium 22 and 60; see St. Maximus the Confessor: Theosis in Maximus). Hence the symmetry: “the incarnation of God… makes man god to the same degree as God himself became man” (Maximus, Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice 1.62, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer–Sherrard–Ware).

The modes of union. Maximus’ Christological vocabulary is what makes the doctrine sayable without confusion. In Christ the two natures are united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (the Chalcedonian adverbs); and the union of God with the deified creature is analogous — a union in which each term remains wholly itself. The deified person becomes “by grace what God is by nature” while human nature remains human nature. His standing image is iron in fire: the iron becomes incandescent and does everything fire does, yet remains iron (Maximus, Ambigua 7; cf. Theosis; the same image is inherited by Palamas, see St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction). Maximus also holds together the five great divisions of being — created/uncreated, intelligible/sensible, heaven/earth, paradise/inhabited world, male/female — which the deified human being, following Christ, is called to reconcile (Maximus, Ambiguum 41; see St. Maximus the Confessor: Five Divisions of Being).

The will. Maximus’ defence of the two wills of Christ against Monothelitism is inseparable from his doctrine of deification. He distinguishes the natural will (thelema physikon), which belongs to human nature as such and is oriented toward the good, from the gnomic will (gnome), the mode of deliberation and choice characteristic of fallen humanity, hesitating between goods because it does not see clearly. Christ has a human natural will but no gnomic will. Deification, correspondingly, is not the abolition of human willing but its healing: the natural will is set free to move without hesitation toward God (see St. Maximus the Confessor: Natural and Gnomic Will, and Dyothelite Christology). This is the patristic answer to the perennial suspicion that union with God must mean the extinction of freedom.

Maximus also gives the doctrine one of its most exacting formulations: the deified receive all that God is, with the single exception of identity in essence. That exception is the whole guardrail, and it is not a footnote to his account but its governing condition (Maximus, Ambiguum 41; cf. Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford, 2004, on Maximus).

St. Symeon the New Theologian: Grace Is Perceived

St. Symeon (949–1022) presses a question the earlier tradition had largely left implicit: is the grace of deification something one knows one has received?

His answer is emphatic. Grace is not an unfelt juridical status or a merely inferred possession; it is consciously experienced, and a Christianity that has settled for the forms of piety without the perception of the Spirit has settled for less than the Gospel offers. His Catechetical Discourses and Hymns of Divine Love return again and again to the vision of light and to the experience of Christ within, and he is willing to make the claim in the first person, recounting his own illuminations (Symeon, Catechetical Discourses, trans. deCatanzaro, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1980; Hymns of Divine Love, trans. Maloney, 1975; see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Experience of Grace).

This got him into trouble in his own lifetime and it has been treated cautiously since, for an obvious reason: a doctrine that grace is felt can be misused by anyone who feels something (see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Controversy and Exile). Symeon himself is not naïve about this; his insistence on obedience to a spiritual father, on tears and repentance as the precondition of any vision, and on the Eucharist as the centre of the life, is the framework within which his claims about experience are made (see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Eucharist and Tears; and on the abuse of experiential claims, Counterfeits and Confusions).

Symeon’s importance for the doctrine of theosis is that he keeps it from becoming a theory. He is the direct ancestor of the hesychast claim that the monks of Athos really saw the uncreated light — the claim Barlaam denied and Palamas defended (see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Influence on Hesychasm).

St. Nicholas Cabasilas: the Sacramental Route

St. Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1322–after 1391), a layman and a contemporary of the Palamite controversy, supplies the complementary emphasis without which the doctrine skews monastic.

In The Life in Christ the union with the indwelling Christ is given through Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist, and deification is therefore “not the prize of an elite asceticism but the proper destiny of the baptized” (see St. Nicholas Cabasilas: Union with Christ; Russell 2004, 304–306). His most striking image reverses the ordinary direction of nourishment: in the Eucharist we do not assimilate Christ to ourselves as we assimilate food, but are assimilated to him (The Life in Christ, Book IV; trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974). And the fourth book’s decisive claim is that in the other Mysteries Christ is possessed in part, while in the Eucharist he is received whole, so that beyond it there is nothing further to be received in this life (The Life in Christ, Book IV; see The Way).

St. Gregory Palamas: the Dogmatic Settlement

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) is where the metaphysical question left open by Athanasius is answered and where the answer is made dogma.

The occasion was the challenge of Barlaam of Calabria, who put the hesychasts’ claim in the form of a dilemma: either the light the monks claimed to see was the divine essence, in which case they blasphemed, or it was created, in which case their vision of God was the vision of a creature. Palamas refused both horns by distinguishing, within God, between the wholly transcendent and imparticipable essence (ousia) and the truly participated, uncreated energies (energeiai) — God himself in his outgoing act (see St. Gregory Palamas: The Barlaam Dispute).

For deification the consequence is exact. “Vision of the uncreated light is not simply abstraction and negation; it is a union and a divinisation” (Palamas, Triads I.3.17; trans. Gendle, CWS). What the saints see is “this mysterious light, inaccessible, immaterial, uncreated” (Triads III.1.22; trans. Gendle, CWS) — the same light that shone on Tabor. And what they receive is God himself, not a created substitute, because the energies are God and not a tertium quid between God and the creature.

The teaching was confirmed at the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351, of which the Synodal Tome of 1351 is the fullest, and the Palamite chapters were added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (Synodal Tome of 1351, in Russell, trans., Liverpool, 2020; see The Palamite Settlement and, for the controversy’s course in detail, St. Gregory Palamas: The Councils 1341–1351 and The Synodikon of Orthodoxy).

The Shape of the Continuity

Read across nine centuries, the Byzantine development shows a consistent pattern: the doctrine does not change, but the questions put to it get harder, and each answer becomes a permanent part of the Church’s mind.

Athanasius is asked who must Christ be, if he deifies? — and answers with the homoousion.
Gregory the Theologian is asked how much of us must he have taken? — and answers, all of it.
Nyssen is asked does it ever end? — and answers, never.
Maximus is asked does deification destroy our nature and our will? — and answers, it completes them.
Symeon is asked do we know it when it comes? — and answers, yes.
Palamas is asked what in God do we receive? — and answers, his uncreated energies, and the Church defines it.

Nothing in that sequence is a reversal. It is the ordinary way a dogma is clarified: by being attacked.

References

Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua, esp. 7, 10, 41. Trans. Nicholas Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Maximus the Confessor. Questions to Thalassius, 22 and 60; Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice 1.62, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware. London: Faber, 1981.
Nicholas Cabasilas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974. Crit. ed. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, Sources Chrétiennes 355 & 361, 1989–1990.
Palamas, Gregory. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1983.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Russell, Norman, trans. Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam. Translated Texts for Byzantinists 8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. (Includes the Synodal Tome of 1351.)
Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Trans. C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Symeon the New Theologian. Hymns of Divine Love. Trans. George A. Maloney. Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1975.
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964.