07 — Theosis and the West

Western Christianity took a different road on the question of how the creature is united to God, and the difference is real. This section reports the Western trajectory accurately and in its own terms — created grace, the beatific vision as the intellectual vision of the divine essence, the Tridentine account of justification, and the Reformation’s forensic doctrine — and then states the Orthodox assessment. It then turns to a distinct question, the modern retrievals of deification in Western theology and the scholarship about them, and handles that as the factual matter it is.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
the-western-trajectory.md The Latin scholastic account of created grace; Benedictus Deus (1336) and the beatific vision of the divine essence; Trent Session 6 on justification; the Reformation’s forensic doctrine — each with its own sources — followed by the Orthodox assessment
the-modern-retrievals-and-the-scholarly-debate.md The twentieth- and twenty-first-century recovery of deification in the West: the Finnish school on Luther, the Reformed debate over Calvin, the Catholic ressourcement and Aquinas, Latin patristics, and the critics who ask whether “theme” has been mistaken for “doctrine”

The Two Questions, Kept Apart

This section makes a distinction that must be held, because collapsing it produces bad work in both directions.

The dogmatic question is a §4.1 matter. Whether grace is created or uncreated, and whether the divine essence can be seen, are questions the Orthodox Church has answered — at the councils of 1341, 1347, and 1351 and in the Synodikon. The collection states the Church’s teaching as the Church’s teaching, and reports the Western position accurately, in its own terms, with its own sources, before assessing it. It does not caricature, and it does not attribute to any body a doctrine that body repudiates.

The scholarly question is a §4.2 matter. How far Latin patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources contain their own doctrine of participation or deification is a question of evidence, on which competent scholars — Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant — disagree. Here the positions are named and sourced and the dispute is left unadjudicated.

The two are not the same question and an answer to one does not settle the other. That Aquinas has a real doctrine of participation in God (a scholarly finding with substantial support) does not make created grace acceptable to Orthodox dogma; and that Orthodox dogma rejects created grace does not license the claim that the West has no theology of union with God.

A Caution Against Over-Drawn Contrasts

This collection does not contradict the staging of the de Régnon-paradigm critique in God, History, and Dialectic: The De Régnon Paradigm Critique. The scholarly warning is that neat systematic oppositions between a “person-first East” and an “essence-first West” are substantially a nineteenth-century construction that the sources do not straightforwardly support (Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26/2 [1995]: 51–79; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Oxford, 2004). The dogmatic differences treated here are real and conciliar; they are not evidence for a total civilizational opposition, and this section does not use them that way.

Reading Order

Read the-western-trajectory.md first for the dogmatic comparison, then the-modern-retrievals-and-the-scholarly-debate.md for the current state of the scholarship.

See Also