Counterfeits and Confusions

Because deification is the highest thing the Christian faith claims for a human being, it is also the thing most often imitated. This file names the confusions an English-speaking reader is likely to meet — the pagan apotheosis from which the vocabulary was borrowed and bent, the Latter-day Saint doctrine of exaltation, New Age and self-divinization schemes — and reports each in its own terms before distinguishing it. It ends with the counterfeit that arises inside the Church: prelest, spiritual delusion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Pagan Apotheosis

The Greek and Roman world had its own vocabulary for the making of gods, and the Church took some of its words from that world. Recognizing what was taken and what was refused is the first clarification.

Hellenistic and Roman apotheosis was the elevation of a human being — a hero, a founder, above all an emperor — into the ranks of the gods, ratified by public cult. In the Roman case consecratio was a formal act of the Senate following an emperor’s death, and the resulting divine honours were civic and political as much as religious. Philosophical assimilation to God (homoiosis theo) was a different thing altogether: the Platonic ideal of becoming like the divine through the purification of the soul and the practice of virtue, a movement of the philosopher toward an impersonal divine order.

Norman Russell’s history examines exactly this background and shows how Christian writers, above all in Alexandria, took over a nomenclature that was already available and refashioned it around the Incarnation, so that the same words came to mean something the pagan sources could not have meant (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford, 2004, chs. 1–2 and the Alexandrian chapters).

Three differences are decisive.

The Christian doctrine is not a promotion. Apotheosis moves a creature up a continuous scale into a class of beings that already contains gods differing from men in degree. Theosis crosses no such scale, because there is no scale: the Creator/creature distinction is absolute, and the deified creature never enters the divine order of being.

It is not conferred by human authority. No senate, no cult, and no community makes anyone a god. The Church recognizes saints; she does not create them, and her act of glorification is a declaration of what God has done.

It is not achieved by the aspirant. The philosophical ideal of assimilation is something the philosopher does. Theosis is something God does, in Christ, to a creature who consents (see Synergy and the Mysteries).

The Latter-day Saint Doctrine of Exaltation

English-speaking readers meet this confusion often, and it deserves to be named and distinguished plainly rather than left to inference. The two doctrines use overlapping words and rest on incompatible doctrines of God.

What the Latter-day Saint position is, in its own terms. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches exaltation: the doctrine that human beings, as literal spirit children of Heavenly Father, may through the Atonement of Christ and obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel receive their full inheritance and become as God is. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay “Becoming Like God” (2014) states the doctrine and appeals, among other things, to the deification language of the early Christian writers. Its classic formulations are Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse (April 1844) and the couplet of Lorenzo Snow, the Church’s fifth President: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.” The essay notes that little has been revealed concerning the first half of the couplet and that consequently little is taught about it, and it emphasizes that Latter-day Saints continue to worship God the Father and Jesus Christ (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Becoming Like God,” Gospel Topics essay, 2014).

Where the doctrines part company. Not on the word, and not on the degree of the promise, but on the doctrine of God and of creation.

On creation. Orthodox Christianity confesses that God created all things from nothing, and that the distinction between uncreated God and created being is absolute. Latter-day Saint theology does not hold creation ex nihilo; matter and intelligence are understood as co-eternal with God, and creation is organization rather than origination. Remove creatio ex nihilo and the Creator/creature boundary that theosis is defined against no longer exists to be crossed or not crossed.

On God. The Church confesses one God in three Persons, one indivisible essence, uncreated, without body, without beginning — the God of the Nicene Creed (see The Nicene Creed; Holy Trinity). Latter-day Saint theology teaches an embodied Heavenly Father and, in the King Follett discourse, a Father who was once as man now is. These are not variant emphases within one doctrine of God; they are different doctrines of God.

On what is attained. Theosis is participation in the uncreated energies of God, never in the divine essence and never a change of the creature’s ontological order; the deified do not become objects of worship and do not become gods in the sense of independent divine beings. Exaltation, as taught, involves human beings genuinely becoming gods in a sense the Orthodox account excludes by definition.

The honest statements on both sides. It is accurate to say that Latter-day Saint writers have appealed to patristic deification language, and that patristic scholars have taken the comparison seriously enough to argue about it. It is also accurate to say that the patristic doctrine, in the form the Church defined it, is unavailable to a theology without creatio ex nihilo and without the essence/energies distinction. Both statements are true, and neither cancels the other. This collection does not caricature the Latter-day Saint position and does not present it as a variant of Orthodox teaching; it is a different doctrine held by a different body, and the difference is at the root rather than at the surface.

New Age and Self-Divinization

A third confusion is looser and more diffuse: the family of modern spiritualities that speak of discovering the divinity already within, of realizing one’s identity with the divine, or of awakening a god-consciousness.

The structural difference is easy to state and important.

The direction of the movement is reversed. Self-divinization schemes hold that the divine is already the self’s true nature and that the task is to recognize it. The Christian doctrine holds that God is other than the creature, that the creature has nothing divine of its own, and that what is received is a gift from outside — mediated through the Incarnation, the Church, and the Mysteries.

There is no Incarnation and no Cross. Theosis is Christification: it comes through incorporation into one particular man, by baptism into his death. A doctrine of the divine self has no need of a crucified God, and it has no place for repentance.

Repentance is absent. This is perhaps the most reliable practical marker. The whole Orthodox ascetic tradition is saturated with compunction and self-accusation; the schemes that promise self-realization are characteristically free of it.

Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975) is the standard Orthodox treatment of these movements in English and is written explicitly from within the Church’s doctrine of deification (see Seraphim Rose). His polemical register is his own; the doctrinal distinction he draws is the Church’s.

Prelest: the Counterfeit Inside the Church

The most dangerous imitation of deification is not any of the above. It is the one that arises in a believing, praying, ascetically serious Christian, and the tradition has a name for it: prelest’ (Greek planē) — delusion, beguilement, the state of one who has accepted a falsehood about God or about himself as spiritual truth.

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, the tradition’s great nineteenth-century diagnostician, orders the phenomena into two classical forms, and the full treatment belongs at The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance.

Delusion of the imagination. The person prays with the imagination — picturing Christ, heaven, holy scenes — or accepts sensory phenomena (lights, voices, fragrances, visions) as divine. The tradition’s case-histories end badly: exaltation, derangement, sometimes suicide. Hence the unanimous rule that the Jesus Prayer is prayed imagelessly, and that every appearing form is refused regardless of its apparent holiness (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Lazarus [Moore], London: Watkins, 1965).

Opinion (mnenie). The subtler and, in Ignatius’ judgment, the more widespread form: no visions, only a quietly growing conviction of one’s own spiritual attainment — that one has warmth, gifts, prayer of the heart, discernment. It produces not madmen but experts: teachers without humility, correctors of their correctors. Its antidote is the Prayer’s own last word, “a sinner,” taken seriously (Brianchaninov, The Arena, trans. Lazarus, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991).

The relation to deification is exact. Prelest is what the pursuit of theosis becomes when it is pursued. The doctrine says that God gives himself; delusion begins with the secret decision to have experiences. This is why the safeguards are what they are: imageless prayer, repentance as the foundation, disclosure of thoughts to a spiritual father, and the rule that experiences are neither accepted nor rejected by the one who has them, but reported (see The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance; Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

A proportion should be kept, lest the warnings mislead. The same Ignatius who anatomized prelest urged the Jesus Prayer on his readers throughout his works; the same Athos that produced the case-histories produced the saints. The warnings are the practice’s fence, not its refutation.

A Test, Not a Technique

The tradition offers no procedure for verifying one’s own deification, and offers instead a test that can only be applied to others’ fruits and to one’s own behaviour. St. Silouan the Athonite made it as plain as it can be made: the presence of the Holy Spirit is known by love of enemies (see St. Silouan the Athonite: Love of Enemies). It is a test no counterfeit passes, and it is available to anyone.

References

Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Trans. Archimandrite Lazarus. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Becoming Like God.” Gospel Topics essay. Salt Lake City, 2014.
Rose, Seraphim. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1991.