The Western Trajectory

Latin theology answered the question of union with God by a different route: grace as a created quality elevating the soul, the beatific vision as the intellectual vision of the divine essence, and — after the Reformation — justification either as inward renewal by infused righteousness or as the forensic imputation of an alien righteousness. This file reports each position in its own terms and with its own sources, and then states the Orthodox assessment, without polemic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What This File Does and Does Not Do

It reports, and then it assesses. Under METHODOLOGY §4.1 the Orthodox teaching is stated as the teaching of the Church, and the positions of separated Western bodies are reported accurately — never caricatured, never attributed in forms those bodies repudiate — with citations to their own authoritative texts. Accuracy toward an interlocutor is not neutrality between the positions.

It also does not claim that the West has no doctrine of union with God. It plainly does, in several forms, some of them very rich. The differences named here are differences about the metaphysics of that union, and they are real and consequential; they are not the claim that Latin Christianity aims at something other than God.

Created Grace: the Scholastic Account

In the mature Latin scholastic account, God is actus purus, wholly simple, identical with his own essence and his own act of being; there is in God no real distinction between essence and operation. It follows that whatever is given to the creature in grace, if it is not God’s essence, must be something created.

St. Thomas Aquinas accordingly treats sanctifying grace as a created quality — a supernatural habit or form in the essence of the soul, which elevates the soul and disposes it to acts beyond the reach of created nature (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 110, aa. 1–2). It is essential to state his position fully, because it is often reported in a truncated form: Aquinas himself explicitly describes grace as deifying. “The gift of grace surpasses every capability of created nature, since it is nothing short of a partaking of the Divine Nature, which exceeds every other nature,” and from this he concludes that no creature can cause grace: “God alone deifies, bestowing a partaking of the Divine Nature by a participated likeness” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 112, a. 1; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). Aquinas is not offering a substitute for deification. He is offering an account of it in which the medium of participation is a created effect and the term of participation is God himself.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching in the same register and quotes the Greek Fathers to do so. CCC 460 reads: “The Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature’… ‘For the Son of God became man so that we might become God’” — citing Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 3.19.1), Athanasius (De inc. 54.3), and Aquinas (Opusc. 57.1–4) (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §460). Any account of the Roman Catholic position that denies it teaches deification is inaccurate and this collection does not offer one.

The Beatific Vision

The Western eschatological term for union is the beatific vision, and it received an authoritative definition in the fourteenth century.

Pope Benedict XII, in the constitution Benedictus Deus (29 January 1336), defined that the souls of the blessed, purified where purification was needed, “have seen and see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence” (Benedictus Deus, 1336). The definition is not incidental; it was issued to close a controversy raised by Benedict’s predecessor John XXII about whether the blessed see God before the general resurrection.

The metaphysics behind it is Thomist. The created intellect can see the essence of God, but not by its natural power; it is elevated by a created supernatural disposition, the lumen gloriae, the “light of glory” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 12, aa. 1 and 5). The vision is described principally as an act of the intellect, in which the divine essence itself takes the place of an intelligible species.

Two dates are worth noting together. Benedictus Deus was promulgated in 1336; the Constantinopolitan council that defined the imparticipability of the divine essence and the uncreated character of the energies met in 1351. The two definitions were made fifteen years apart, in mutual ignorance, and they say opposite things about whether the essence of God can be seen (see The Palamite Settlement).

Trent on Justification

The Council of Trent’s Session 6 (13 January 1547) issued the Decree on Justification, and it must be reported carefully, because it is frequently misdescribed on both sides.

Trent teaches that justification is “not only the remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of grace and the gifts” — that is, a real inward change, not a mere declaration. Its chapter 7 identifies the single formal cause of justification as “the justice of God, not that by which He Himself is just, but that by which He makes us just” — an inhering righteousness given by God, a formulation Trent draws consciously from Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter 9.15 (Council of Trent, Session 6, Decree on Justification, ch. 7, 1547). The accompanying canons anathematize the doctrine that men are justified by the sole imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the exclusion of grace and charity inhering in them.

The point for a comparison with theosis is that Trent’s account is transformationist, not merely declaratory. The Orthodox objection to the Latin doctrine of grace is therefore not that Rome teaches a legal fiction — she explicitly does not — but that the righteousness said to inhere is understood as a created quality (see the assessment below).

The Reformation’s Forensic Justification

The magisterial Reformers rejected Trent’s formal cause and located justification in a divine verdict.

Luther taught that the sinner is justified by faith through the imputation of an alien righteousness — Christ’s righteousness reckoned to the believer, who remains simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner (Luther, Lectures on Galatians [1535] and the Preface to the Romans). Melanchthon gave the doctrine its explicitly forensic form in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article IV, where to be justified is to be pronounced or accounted righteous. Calvin defined justification as consisting in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.11), while insisting with equal force that justification is never separated from sanctification, since both flow from union with Christ, which for Calvin is the prior reality (Institutes III.1–2, III.11). The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577), Solid Declaration III, made the forensic sense normative for Lutheranism.

Two things must be said in accuracy. First, forensic justification in these authors is not an alternative to real transformation; it is a claim about what justification is, alongside a doctrine of regeneration and sanctification that all of them held. Second, the question of whether Luther and Calvin nonetheless have their own doctrines of participation, and even of deification, is a live scholarly question with substantial evidence on both sides — treated at The Modern Retrievals and the Scholarly Debate, and deliberately kept out of this file.

The Orthodox Assessment

The Church’s judgment on these positions follows from what she has defined, and it can be stated in four points.

On created grace. If grace is a created quality, then what the creature receives is not God but a divine effect, and union with God becomes union with something God made. The Orthodox press this as a counter-question: on the scholastic account, what does the creature finally participate in? The Church’s answer, defined in 1351, is that the grace of deification is God’s own uncreated energy, so that in receiving grace one receives God himself (Synodal Tome of 1351, in Russell, trans., Liverpool, 2020; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge, 1957, ch. 4; see How Participation Is Possible; Orthodox vs. Catholic).

On the vision of the essence. The Church confesses that the divine essence is imparticipable and unseen by any creature, now or in the age to come; what the blessed see is the uncreated light, which is God’s energy and not his essence. This is not a lesser vision. It is the refusal of a claim the Church holds to be impossible: that a finite intellect could take the infinite essence as its object. The Orthodox judgment is that Benedictus Deus asserts what cannot be asserted, and that the lumen gloriae as a created disposition reproduces the difficulty of created grace at the eschatological level.

On the intellectualist framing. Deification, in the Orthodox account, is the transformation of the whole person — body, soul, nous, and will — and not principally an act of the intellect. The Transfiguration, in which the disciples saw the light with bodily eyes transformed by the Spirit, is the paradigm (see Sonship, Glory, and the Transfiguration). This is a difference of emphasis with metaphysical consequences rather than a contradiction of a defined dogma, and it is stated here as such.

On forensic justification. A verdict changes a status. The Orthodox confession is that salvation changes a being: it is healing, life, and participation, not the alteration of a legal relation. The Church does not deny that Scripture uses juridical language; she denies that the juridical is the governing category, and she has never accepted the framework of satisfaction and imputation within which the Western debate over justification was conducted (see Soteriology; Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin).

What the Assessment Does Not Say

Three disclaimers belong to an honest §4.1 treatment.

It does not say the West aims at something other than God. Aquinas’ solus Deus deificat and CCC 460 say what they say. The difference is in the account of the medium, not in the object.

It does not say the difference is merely verbal. Some modern writers, Orthodox and Catholic, have argued that the essence–energies distinction and the Thomist account of participation are complementary idioms rather than contradictory doctrines. That literature is real and is presented, attributed, and left unadjudicated at St. Gregory Palamas: The Essence-Energies Distinction. What is not open from within the Church is whether the Tome of 1351 binds. It does.

It does not license a totalizing East/West narrative. The dogmatic differences named here are specific and datable. They are not evidence for the claim that Latin Christianity constitutes a single systematic pathology descending from one premise — a historiography this repository stages critically rather than endorses (see God, History, and Dialectic: The De Régnon Paradigm Critique).

See Also

References

  • Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, I, q. 12, aa. 1, 5; I-II, q. 110, aa. 1–2; I-II, q. 112, a. 1. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger, 1947.
  • Benedict XII. Benedictus Deus. Apostolic constitution, 29 January 1336.
  • Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559). Trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill. Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Esp. III.1–2, III.11.
  • Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. §§460, 1996–2000.
  • Council of Trent. Session 6, Decree on Justification, chs. 7 and 16, and the accompanying canons. 13 January 1547.
  • The Book of Concord: Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Art. IV; Formula of Concord (1577), Solid Declaration III.
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. Esp. ch. 4.
  • Luther, Martin. Lectures on Galatians (1535), in Luther’s Works, vols. 26–27. St. Louis: Concordia.
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974.
  • 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.)
  • Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 51–79.