Synergy and the Mysteries

Deification is God’s work, and it is not done without us. This file sets out synergeia — the cooperation of uncreated grace with created freedom — and shows why the Orthodox account refuses both monergism, which makes the human person passive, and Pelagianism, which makes grace superfluous. It then locates the ordinary place where deification is given: not in visions but in the Mysteries, and above all in the Eucharist.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Synergy: What the Word Claims

Synergeia is Paul’s word: “we are God’s fellow workers” (Theou gar esmen synergoi, 1 Corinthians 3:9). The Orthodox doctrine it names has a precise shape, and both halves must be kept.

Grace is prior, sovereign, and gratuitous. Nothing in the human being initiates deification, deserves it, or contributes to it as a co-cause of the same order. The energy that deifies is uncreated and is God’s; the creature has nothing to offer that God has not first given. “For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). Any account that makes deification an achievement is not the Church’s account.

Freedom is real and necessary. God does not act upon the human person as upon a stone. Grace is offered and may be refused; the whole ascetic literature presupposes that the person who receives it can also resist it, neglect it, or lose it. The Church has never taught an irresistible grace, and she has never taught that the elect are saved without their consent (see Soteriology).

The two are not in competition for a share of the work. This is the misunderstanding that generates most of the difficulties: if grace and freedom are imagined as two forces on the same plane, then whatever is granted to one must be taken from the other, and one is driven either to make the human person passive or to make grace supplementary. The Orthodox account denies the premise. Grace and freedom operate on different levels; grace is what makes free consent possible, and the more the person is filled with grace the more free he becomes, not less. The saints are the freest of human beings.

St. Maximus supplies the technical apparatus. The natural will (thelema physikon) belongs to human nature as such and is oriented toward the good; the gnomic will (gnome) is the hesitant deliberation characteristic of fallen persons who do not see clearly. Deification does not abolish the natural will; it heals the gnomic vacillation, so that the will moves toward God without division. Freedom is thereby fulfilled, not overridden (see St. Maximus the Confessor: Natural and Gnomic Will).

The Two Errors

Monergism. If salvation is entirely God’s act with no created cooperation, then the human person is an object rather than a participant, and the language of deification becomes strained: what is deified is not a free person but a passive recipient. The Orthodox tradition regards the disputes that produced this position in the West — the Augustinian doctrine of irresistible grace and its Reformed development — as answering a question posed in juridical terms that the East never adopted, and it does not accept the resulting anthropology (see Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin; The Western Trajectory).

Pelagianism. If the human person can, by natural powers, attain the likeness of God, then grace is a help rather than a necessity and the Incarnation is a moral example. The Orthodox Church rejects this as decisively as the West did. The Fathers’ whole argument from deification presupposes that only God can deify and that the creature cannot cross the gap under its own power. Nothing in the ascetic tradition is understood as earning deification; the labour clears obstacles and disposes the will, it does not produce grace (see Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

A caution belongs here. Because Orthodox writers so often defend synergy against monergism, the doctrine is occasionally misheard as a mild semi-Pelagianism. It is not. The relation is not fifty-fifty, and it is not a division of labour at all. St. Symeon the New Theologian, one of the most insistent teachers of ascetic effort, is equally insistent that everything is gift, and that the person who thinks he has attained anything has demonstrated that he has not (see St. Symeon the New Theologian: Against Formalism).

The Mysteries Are the Ordinary Means

The single most important corrective to popular misunderstandings of theosis is this: deification is given in the Mysteries of the Church, to ordinary Christians, as a matter of course. It is not the prize of an ascetic elite and not the reward of extraordinary experiences.

St. Nicholas Cabasilas wrote The Life in Christ to make exactly this point, and to make it to lay people. The union with the indwelling Christ is given through Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist; deification is therefore “not the prize of an elite asceticism but the proper destiny of the baptized,” begun now and consummated in the age to come (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford, 2004, 304–306; see St. Nicholas Cabasilas: Union with Christ).

Baptism. Death to the old self and rebirth in Christ: “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27); “we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Baptism is the beginning of the life of deification and its ontological ground: what follows is the unfolding of what is given here (see The Holy Mysteries: The Theology of Baptism).

Chrismation. The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit, administered in the Orthodox Church immediately after baptism and to infants as well as adults. Since it is the Spirit who deifies, chrismation is not an optional intensification but the personal bestowal of the deifying gift (see The Holy Mysteries: The Seal of the Gift of the Holy Spirit; Pneumatology).

Confession and repentance. The restoration of the baptismal relation when it is damaged. Deification proceeds through repeated repentance, not around it, and the Mystery of Repentance is therefore part of the road rather than a detour from it (see The Holy Mysteries: Repentance and Confession).

The Eucharist. The summit. “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him” (John 6:56). Cabasilas’ decisive claim is that in the other Mysteries Christ is possessed in a manner and in part, while in the Eucharist he is received whole and entire, so that the communicant is no longer merely the possessor of a gift but is united to the Giver himself; beyond it there is nothing further to be received in this life (The Life in Christ, Book IV; trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see St. Nicholas Cabasilas: The Sacramental Life).

His most quoted image reverses the ordinary direction of nourishment. We do not draw Christ down into ourselves and assimilate him as we assimilate food; we are assimilated to him, made over into his likeness (The Life in Christ, Book IV; see St. Nicholas Cabasilas: Union with Christ). This is deification stated in the plainest available terms: the Christian becomes what he eats.

The Orthodox tradition draws the further consequence that deification is corporate before it is individual. The Eucharist is not a private transaction but the act of the Church assembled, and what is deified is the Body of Christ, in which persons are members (1 Corinthians 12:27; see Ecclesiology; The Divine Liturgy).

The Mysteries and the Energies

The link between Section 05 and this section should be made explicit, because it is what distinguishes the Orthodox account of sacramental grace.

In the Mysteries what is communicated is the uncreated energy of God. The grace of baptism is not a created quality infused into the soul; it is God himself given. This is why the Orthodox tradition resists any account of the sacraments as instruments producing created effects, and why it speaks so realistically about matter: the water, the chrism, the bread and wine, the relics of the saints, the icon. Matter is capable of bearing the uncreated because God has made it so and has himself taken flesh (see The Holy Mysteries: The Mysteries and Theosis; Icons and Iconoclasm).

It also explains why the Orthodox Church has never produced a fixed and closed enumeration of the Mysteries as a dogmatic necessity. The number seven is a late and largely Western-influenced convention in Orthodox usage; what is dogmatic is that God gives himself through the Church’s sacramental life, not that he does so at exactly seven points (see The Holy Mysteries: The Mysteries across the Tradition).

What Synergy Looks Like in Practice

Three practical consequences close the file.

The initiative is never ours to take. The Christian does not decide to be deified and then set about it. He is baptized, he communes, he repents, he keeps the commandments, and what God does with that is God’s affair. Every account of the spiritual life in the Orthodox tradition that begins with the pursuit of experience is regarded as already off the road (see Counterfeits and Confusions).

Consent is offered in small things. Synergy is exercised in the ordinary matter of obedience, forgiveness, honesty, and the keeping of a rule — not in dramatic acts of will. The Philokalia’s attention to the smallest movements of thought is precisely an account of where human cooperation actually happens (see The Philokalia).

The measure is not ours to take. Because grace is God’s, no one is in a position to assess how far he has come. The tradition’s insistence that the saints regarded themselves as the worst of sinners is not conventional modesty; it follows from the doctrine. Whoever is measuring is not receiving.

References

Maximus the Confessor. Opuscula theologica et polemica; Disputation with Pyrrhus. Trans. Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
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.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Esp. 304–306.
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957.
Stăniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Trans. Ioan Ioniță and Robert Barringer. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994–.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995.
The Holy Bible, cited in the New King James rendering.