Introduction

          The doctrine of theosis (i.e., deification) is intimately connected to the Catholic doctrines of the creation and incarnation.  Together these three areas of theology contain in some sense the whole of the mystery revealed in Christ.  In my paper I will center on the concept of theosis, but I must first lay a foundation for this doctrine by examining briefly the latter elements mentioned above, i.e., creation and incarnation.  I will start by explaining the patristic view of man as he existed prior to his fall from grace, explicating in particular what man lost in the fall, and what he did not lose.  After doing that I will look at the teaching of the Fathers as it concerns the theology of the incarnation of God, what is normally called christology (i.e., the nature of the incarnate Christ).

          Although in the theology of Fathers both the teaching on creation and the incarnation are connected to the doctrine of theosis, it is the theology of the incarnation in particular that is most intimately bound to the ancient patristic teaching on man’s deification by grace. This connection was nicely summed up in a homily of St. Augustine’s, where he wrote that, “God became man, so that man might become God” [LOTH, page 125].  Finally I will deal with the doctrine of theosis itself, and what exactly the Fathers of the Church meant when they said that man is deified by grace, and concomitantly what they did not mean.  [I have included a glossary at the end of this paper; any word which appears in italics will be listed there with its definition].

PART 1

[A]  CREATION:  Man’s Original Condition and the Consequences of the Fall

          The doctrine on the creation of man is a necessary first step on the path to understanding the patristic view of what theosis means. The Fathers of the Church held that man in his original state was in communion with God, but by his disobedience he fell from that initial state of grace and was thus alienated from his Creator.  In his treatise, On the Incarnation of the Word, St. Athanasius begins by asserting that the eternal Word of God became man in Christ Jesus in order to manifest God’s love for humanity.  After this initial assertion he states that in order to understand the mystery of God’s love it is “. . . proper for us to begin the treatment of this subject by speaking of the creation” [St. Athanasius, 56].  St. Athanasius, like the patristic authors before him, teaches that God created the universe out of nothing through His eternal Word, and that this act of creation does not involve any necessity on God’s part, but is itself a completely free act of love.  By saying this he is obviously breaking from the Greek philosophical tradition which held that matter is eternal, while he is also breaking with the Greek view of that there was a form of necessity underlying all of reality.  Within created reality, man alone is made in the image and likeness of God, and though he is a natural being, which means that he is subject to corruption and death, this was not the destiny that God intended for him.  

          The whole patristic tradition held that man was created as a purely natural being, composed of body and soul.  The Fathers also taught that from the beginning of man’s existence, he had received the infused grace of God, a real participation in God’s life and being.  This was given to him contingently, and so it was not a essential component of his nature, but was instead a gift of supernatural grace.  Therefore in paradise, man was a tripartite being, composed of body and soul, and infused with God’s Holy Spirit.  In the fall man lost the Spirit of God which had dwelt in him by grace and became a purely natural being.  The fall alienated man from God, and as a result corruption and death entered the world.  The Fathers held that in the fall from grace man lost nothing natural to his being as man; but instead, that he lost a supernatural principle, i.e., the divine vivifying Spirit.  Man also lost what are called the preternatural gifts of immortality, impassibility, integrity, and infused knowledge.  These gifts were not part of man’s nature as such, but their loss did wound his nature.  The loss of immortality meant that man would die; the loss of impassibility meant that he was subject to suffering; the loss of integrity meant that his passions were no longer perfectly controlled by his intellect; and the loss of infused knowledge meant that man would experience ignorance, and that he would have to learn about his world through his own experience.  

          In contrast to this patristic view of man after the fall the Protestant Reformers held that human nature itself had become integrally and essentially corrupted by Adam’s sin.  From the perspective of the patristic tradition one could say that the Reformers had confused the natural and supernatural realms, and that they had collapsed these two separate realms of existence into one.  Because of this erroneous view of man in his pristine state, Martin Luther and the other Reformers held that man after the fall was totally depraved.  This view of human nature is foreign to the ancient Church.  The Fathers held that man’s nature was wounded, but that he had lost nothing natural to his existence as man.  They held that he had been created in the image and likeness of God, but because of his sin his likeness to God had been deformed, and so he remained only in God’s image (cf., ANF, 1:531-532, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses).

          St. Athanasius, reiterating the tradition of the earlier Fathers, said that because of Adam’s sin, death and corruption were progressively destroying the human family, and that “. . . the race of man was perishing” [St. Athanasius, 60].  Since God’s creation was being dissolved by ignorance and sin a remedy for this situation was necessary.  St. Athanasius states that it is “. . . unseemly that creatures once made rational, and having partaken of the Word, should go to ruin, and turn again to nonexistence by the way of corruption,” he then asks, “what was God in His goodness to do?” [St. Athanasius, 61].  In His goodness God desires the continued existence humanity, but God is also just, and as the Author of the Law He cannot abrogate it because it is part of His immutable nature.  St. Athanasius, and all the Fathers before and after him, answers this dilemma by saying that “. . . the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes to our realm” [St. Athanasius, 62], assuming human nature in order that through the Word’s atoning work accomplished in human form, man could once more be infused with God’s vivifying Spirit, and receive into his being the gifts of immortality and incorruption,  and thus be in communion with God.

[B]  INCARNATION:  The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us

          The Fathers of the Church see the doctrine of the incarnation as the central mystery of redemption.  That “ the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” [John 1:14], is the scriptural verse which sums up all of Catholic sotieriology.  The pre-existent Person of the Word assumes a human nature from Mary, and thus Mary can be called the theotokos (i.e., the Mother of God).  St. Athanasius was very fond of the term theotokos, a term which began to be used for Mary in the middle of the 2nd century, and he used it in order to highlight the error of the Arian heretics of the 4th century who had denied the full divinity of Christ.

          The christological doctrine of the Church was formally defined at the Councils of Ephesus (AD 431) and Chalcedon (AD 451).  The doctrine promulgated at those councils is found in seed form in all the earlier Fathers, in fact one of the clearest explanations of the doctrine was written by the 2nd century North African ecclesiastical author, Tertullian.  In his book Adversus Praxeas (cf., chapter 17) he clearly teaches that Christ is one person with two natures after the incarnation.  As he puts it, “The truth is, we find that He is expressly set forth as both God and Man  differing no doubt according to each substance in its own special property, inasmuch as the Word is nothing else but God, and the flesh is nothing else by Man,” he then continues, “We see plainly the twofold state, which is not confounded, but conjoined in One Person—Jesus, God and Man” [ANF, 3:624].  Tertullian in the clarity of his teaching anticipated the definition of the Council of Chalcedon, which formally defined the doctrine and which shows clear signs of being indebted to his formulation of it.  The definition of Chalcedon states that:

          We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, 

          and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in 

          two natures without confusion, change, division 

          or separation.  The distinction between the 

          natures was never abolished by their union, but 

          rather the character proper to each of the two 

          natures was preserved as they came together in 

          one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis. [CCC 

          #467]

It is important to note that although Tertullian was one of the earliest and clearest exponents of this doctrine, he does not claim in his book to be saying anything new or novel, and in fact he insists that he is merely restating the teaching of the Church as he had received it from her approved teachers.  Tertullian, like the whole of the patristic tradition, refused to see the incarnation as a blending of the divine nature with humanity; instead, the union takes place in a personal way, and thus the natures are united, but not mixed or confused.

          The Council of Chalcedon calls this form of union, hypostatic (i.e., the hypostatic union), which means that the union takes place, not at the level of the natures, as I indicated above, but at a personal level.  In other words, the second Person of the Trinity, who is the eternal Word of God, assumes a human nature at a specific moment in time, and does so in such a way that this human nature becomes His own, but without mixing it with the immutable divine nature which He has possessed from all eternity.  So, Christ is one divine person in two natures.

          Concerning the title theotokos I think a brief excursus is in order. This title is applied to Mary but is in fact a christological title, and so it primarily refers to Christ, not Mary. Because the scriptures make it clear that Christ is one person in two natures, it follows that there is only one subject of predication as far as the actions of Christ are concerned, and so we can predicate either divine or human operations to the one person of Christ.  This doctrine is called the communicatio idiomatum.  It is because Christ is a single subject of predication that it is possible to say things like, "Mary is the Mother of God," or "God suffered on the Cross," or even, "the man Jesus is omnipotent."  We can do this, because Jesus has two natures and two operations, and yet he is only one person, this being said, we can thus apply operations from either nature to the one personal subject, i.e., Jesus.  The term theotokos does not mean that Mary is the mother of the divine nature itself, but that she is the mother of the person of Word incarnate.  Women give birth to persons, they do not simply give birth to natures.

          As I will show in part two of this paper, there is a connection between the doctrine of theosis and the doctrine of the hypostatic union.  An example of the Church’s faith in this matter can be seen by looking at the rite of the preparation of the gifts of bread and wine at the beginning of the Eucharistic liturgy.  While the priest is preparing the chalice by mixing a small amount of water with the wine, he recites the following prayer, “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity” [Sacramentary, 370].  This prayer is connected to the teaching of St. Cyprian (circa AD 253), who explained that the wine is a sign of the blood of Christ, while the water is a sign of the people of God, and that the mixture of the two in the one cup brings about the deification of humanity.  It also signifies the unbreakable bond between Christ and His Body the Church (cf., ANF, 5:362-363, St. Cyprian, Letter 63), while simultaneously signifying the indestructible bound in the hypostatic union between the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ.  This prayer illustrates quite nicely what the Church sees as the true purpose of the incarnation, for by participating in human nature, God has enabled man to become a sharer in the divine nature.

PART 2

[A]  THEOSIS:  God Became Man, So That Man Might Become God

          Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter Redemptoris Mater explained the mystery of redemption by saying that God the Father “. . . has eternally willed to call man to share in the divine nature (cf., 2nd Peter 1:4), it can be said that He has matched the divinization of man to humanity’s historical condition, so that even after sin He is ready to restore at a great price the eternal plan of His love through the humanization of his Son, who is of the same being as Himself,” he goes on to say that, “the whole of creation and more directly man himself, cannot fail to be amazed at this gift in which he has become a sharer, in the Holy Spirit:  ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only Son’ (John, 3:16)” [Pope John Paul II, 72].  This divinization involves divine filiation, a process through which man becomes configured to the image of the Son of God, and so it can be said that man becomes a son in the Son (cf., Romans 8:14-17; 29).

          The Pope’s reference to the Second Letter of St. Peter in the Bible is quite appropriate, the pertinent part of that letter states that, “[God’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own Glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature” [2nd Peter, 1:3-4].  This scriptural text is considered to be one of the key texts to understanding the doctrine of theosis.  From it the Fathers taught that deification is a participation on the part of man in the divine essence or glory through the gift of grace.  Eventually there will arise a distinction, especially in Eastern Orthodox thought, between the essence and the energy (i.e., glory) of God (cf., ANF, 1:490, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses), and that man actually participates in the divine glory through an infusion into his being of the divine energy.  This distinction is clearly made by St. Gregory Palamas, and it  has become an accepted doctrine in the Eastern Church, but I will deal with that in the last section of part two.  In this section of the paper I am concerned with what deification itself is, and what the Fathers taught that it was not.

[B]  THEOSIS:  God is Superessential

          The first thing the Fathers of the Church emphasize about the deification of man is that, “The blessed Deity which of itself is God, is the source of all divinization” [Pseudo-Dionysius, 198].  This statement from the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius is very important, because although he lays great stress on the various hierarchies (i.e., the angelic and the ecclesiastical hierarchies) in transmitting deification to man, it is God alone who is the source of man’s elevation into the Godhead.  So in this statement he is emphasizing the fact that God alone possesses the divine nature essentially and thus He is the source, He is the efficient, formal, and final cause of deification in the rational creature.  But in addition to this Pseudo-Dionysius teaches that God transcends His own essence, as he explains in his 2nd epistle, “How could it be that He who surpasses everything also transcends the source of divinity, transcends the source of goodness?  This is possible if by divinity and goodness you mean the substance of that gift which makes us good and divine” [Pseudo-Dionysius, 263].  This assertion that God is superessential, that He is beyond being, will eventually be used by Palamas in order to distinguish between the essence and the energy of God, and it is used by the medieval mystics who said that God is beyond knowing.

[C]  THEOSIS:  Participation and Union

          Concerning the process of deification, two terms are normally used to describe it, the first is participation, and the second is union.  The first term is related to the text from scripture that I quoted at the beginning of this part of the paper, that by grace man participates in the divine nature, and thus he receives the Spirit of adoption (cf., Romans 8:14-17; John 1:12-13), so that in Christ he becomes an adopted son of God.  What Christ is by nature, man becomes by grace.  St. Thomas gives a good explanation of what is meant by the term participation.  In reference to the three theological (i.e., supernatural) virtues, he states that, “A certain nature may be ascribed to a certain thing in two ways.  First, essentially:  and thus these theological virtues surpass the nature of man.  Secondly, by participation, as kindled wood partakes of the nature of fire:  and thus, after a fashion, man becomes a partaker of the Divine Nature, as stated above:  so that these virtues are proportionate to man in respect of the Nature of which he is made a partaker" [Summa Theologica, Pt. I-II, Q. 62, Art. 1].  Thus God alone possesses the divine nature essentially, while man possesses it by a gift of participation.

          The other term that is used to describe what occurs in theosis is union. God freely gives Himself to man, and infuses His being into man's being.  In this way God unites Himself to man, so that human person is restored to the likeness of God that had been deformed by ignorance and sin.  Man is once again made just before God, while he is simultaneously sanctified.  This union is analogous to the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ.  It does not destroy human nature, nor does it absorb it; instead, the grace of deification perfects man’s nature by raising him into the very life of the Triune God.

          Therefore, theosis is a real participation on the part of man in the divine glory.  Christ is the Son of God by nature, those who are in Christ become sons of God by grace.  There are two things that the Fathers emphasized in order to explain theosis:  (1) God is uncreated, man is and remains created even after being deified, so the difference between the Creator and the creature remains, and (2) God is the Deifier, man is the deified, man is completely dependent upon the grace of God for his deification, it is a gift of God and not something man causes.  So, after man is deified by God: God is Almighty, man is not; God is All-powerful, man is not; God is All-knowing, man is not; God is Creator, man is created; God is Redeemer, man is redeemed; God is Sanctifier, man is sanctified; and I would add, God is Deifier, and man is deified.  Nothing in man's nature as man is changed, and he thus remains a created being; but he truly, and not in mere appearance, participates in the divine nature, and in the divine life.  Our mortal life is infused with God's life and being, and so man is vivified by God's Spirit unto eternal life. The change that occurs is not one of nature, but of the principle of life.

          Man prior to regeneration is a being composed of body and soul, as I have indicated before.  St. Irenaeus calls unregenerated man an "animal creature"; in other words he is a purely natural being.  But once regenerated through baptism, the Divine Spirit vivifies man, elevating him from a mere natural state of existence, to a supernatural one.  This of course is a process, and not simply a once for all event.  Deification does not happen in an instant, it begins with a man’s regeneration through faith and baptism, but it continues throughout his life by the practice of the moral virtues, under the impulse of grace.  Baptism implants a deiform principle in man, it is a seed which must grow and bear fruit, so that one can say with St. Paul that, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” [Galatians 2:20].  The grace of deification is also increased by receiving the Holy Eucharist; for the sacraments are not empty symbols; instead, they are sacred signs that contain the reality that they signify.  As Pope St. Leo said, “Such fidelity could never be born in our hearts, nor could anyone be justified by faith, if our salvation lay only in what was visible.  And so our Redeemer's visible presence has passed into the sacraments.  Our faith is nobler and stronger because sight has been replaced by a doctrine whose authority is accepted by believing hearts, enlightened from on high” [LOTH, 621].  Thus, if a man has persevered to the end and has died in a state of grace, he shall receive his crown, and the process of deification is then complete.

[D]  THEOSIS:  The Divine Essence and Divine Energy

          In this last section of the paper I will briefly touch on the theology of St. Gregory Palamas who is seen in the Eastern Orthodox Church as the man who gave final terminological precision to the understanding of how man participates through the process of theosis in the divine glory, and whether it is the divine essence itself that is infused into man, or whether it is the divine energy.  This area within Palamite theology is where the western Catholic tradition feels uncomfortable, because in its view the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies in some sense compromises the unity of God, but it is a problem that comes from a misunderstanding.  The Roman theologians of the 14th and succeeding centuries, thought that the Palamite theology was in some way making the energies of God into another person in the Trinity and thus in a sense that St. Gregory had fallen into a form of polytheism, but that was not the case.  What St. Gregory did was to distinguish in God between His essence, i.e., the nature of God, and His energies, i.e., His attributes.

          As Palamas says, the divine essence possesses “. . . the faculties of knowing, of prescience, of creating, of embracing all things in itself; . . . the power of deification, and, in a word, all such faculties” [Palamas, 93].  But as St. Gregory goes on to point out, though the whole of the divine essence is in each attribute, each attribute does not exhaust the divine essence.  So, there must be a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies.  He affirms that both the divine essence and the divine energies are uncreated; and the divine essence, and many of the divine energies are unoriginate, although some of the divine energies are not unoriginate in that they came to be in time, and some of the divine energies will cease.  This is one of the proofs Palamas gives for why there must be a distinction in God between His essence and His energies.

          He explains that many of the energies or natural properties of God are both uncreated and unoriginate.  A few examples of unoriginate energies that he enumerates are things like; the will of God, His foreknowledge, and His self-contemplation.  As he says, “. . . was there ever a moment when God began to be moved toward contemplation of Himself?  Never!” [Palamas, 94].   But he then points out that in the order of creation there are certain energies which are not unoriginate, an example being God’s creative power itself, which only becomes active when He begins to create.  Some of the energies (even some that are unoriginate) will cease to be, an example of this being God’s prescience (i.e., His foreknowledge), once the new eternal age arrives and temporal duration ends, God’s prescience will end as well since there will be no new events in eternity.

          If one identifies the divine energies with the divine essence it becomes problematic for theology because one must ultimately deny that God is immutable.  But if God’s essence and His energies are distinct this problem fades away.  So it would be erroneous to confuse the divine essence with the divine energies, even though the energies are themselves essential attributes of God, and even though the divine essence is present as a whole in each of the energies.  St. Gregory also states that the divine essence is the source (but not in a temporal sense) of the energies, this is why even though they are distinct from God’s essence they are still essential to God’s nature.

          What Palamas argues in reference to deification is that man is not deified by participating in the divine essence, because God is ultimately superessential, in that God is more than being, and so as far as this is concerned God is beyond any possibility of the creatures comprehension or participation.  It is only at the level of the energy of God that man can actually participate in divinity.  God in His superessentiality remains beyond man, beyond his comprehension, but God does infuse His energy into man and this energy is an uncreated quality that is essential to God.  St. Gregory is asserting something that seems paradoxical, he is saying that God is utterly transcendent in His essence; and yet, in His energies, which are truly divine and in which the whole of God’s essence is in some sense present, that God is really immanent.  So, as St. Gregory sees it, man is not brought into contact with the essence of God by being deified; instead, man is infused with the energy of God, and so he participates in the divine glory.

Conclusion

          The doctrine of theosis is an article of faith for both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches, though it has received greater emphasis within the Eastern Orthodox tradition.  Since the time of the Reformation, the Roman Church has not focused on this particular doctrine to the same degree that the Eastern Church has, and I would attribute this to the disruptive events in theology caused by the Reformation, and the fact that the central argument in theology since the Reformation has been the doctrine of justification, which has been emphasized  at the expense of the doctrine of sanctification, i.e., being deified.  But though the Roman Church has not focused on theosis to the same degree that the Eastern Church has, it would be erroneous to say that the doctrine was not central to the theology of the west.  Happily there has been a renewed interest in this doctrine in the western Church, and the doctrine received greater emphasis in the new universal Catechism issued by the Pope in an English translation back in 1994.  Finally, I would simply emphasize that the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and theosis, are inseparably bound together and that they all in some sense express the powerful mystery of the kenosis of God, i.e., of His self-emptying.  God's first act of self-emptying, of kenosis, was to create ex nihilo something that was other than himself, i.e., creation itself.  In the incarnation the person of the Word empties Himself taking on human form (cf., Philippians 2:5-11) in order that man might be deified in the Word; and finally, through the process of deification, man experiences kenosis and he is thus brought out of himself, and in this way, he comes to see that he is not an end in himself, but is part of the larger whole.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Christology:  The theology of the nature of the person of Christ.  It concerns how the Church understands that God has become man.

Communicatio idiomatum:  The doctrine of the communication of properties in the one person of Christ.  This doctrine allows one to predicate operations of either of Christ’s two natures to the person of the incarnate Word.  

Creation:  The doctrine that God creates the universe out of nothing, that He is the source of all being, and of all that exists.

Deification:  See Theosis.

Divine filiation:  By grace man is adopted as a son of God, and so he is conformed to the image of Christ, and can be said to become a son in the only-begotten Son.  When man receives the Spirit of adoption a real union between God and man occurs, it is not just a moral union, because it is a union that elevates man from a natural level to a supernatural level, and makes him a participant in the very life of the Triune God.

Divinization:  See Theosis.

Ex Nihilo:  This term literally means, “out of nothing.”  It is the doctrine that God created the universe of out nothing, and thus matter is not eternal.

Hypostasis:  This term literally means, "subsistence" or "existence," which makes it a more concrete term than "prosopon" to indicate "person."  The term "hypostasis" is used by the Fathers and Council in order to rule out a Sabellian understanding of the Trinity, while simultaneously excluding a Nestorian approach to Christology.

Hypostatic union:  This doctrine was defined at the Councils of Ephesus (AD 431) and Chalcedon (AD 451) in order to exclude the weak Nestorian prosopic union, which did not safeguard the reality of the incarnation.  That said, the doctrine of the hypostatic union concerns the way in which the union of the two natures in the one person (prosopon) and subsistence (hypostasis) of Christ is described, i.e., that the union takes place at the level of the person as an existing reality, and not at the level of the natures themselves.  So, the two natures are united in the one person (prosopon) and one subsistence (hypostasis) of Christ, but they are not mixed or confused, nor after the union are they separable.

Immortality:  The preternatural gift of immortality was given to man contingently in paradise, by its loss death and corruption enter into world.

Impassibility:  One of the preternatural gifts given to man in paradise.  Because of it man was initially free from suffering.

Incarnation:  The doctrine that God has become man in Christ, that the eternal Word of God has assumed a full and complete human nature.  In the words of the Gospel of John, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” [John 1:14].

Infused knowledge:  The preternatural gift whereby man was created already knowing about the nature of reality.  After the fall from grace, man has to gain his knowledge through experience.

Integrity:  This preternatural gift allowed man to control his passion by the right use of reason.

Kenosis:  This is the Greek term for “self-emptying.”  It is used by St. Paul in reference to the incarnation in particular, where God takes on the form of man, allowing His glory to be hidden, and suffering humiliation willingly in order to redeem mankind.

Participation:  This is the technical term used to explain how man is understood as deified.  Man’s essence is not changed through the process of deification; instead, he shares in the divine nature, and he becomes a participant in the divine life.

Preternatural:  The preternatural gifts, i.e., immortality, impassibility, integrity, and infused knowledge, are gifts which are not natural to man, but which are not supernatural either, they are beyond nature, but not seen in theology as of a supernatural character.  They perfected man’s nature, but were not intrinsic to it.

Prosopon:  The Greek word "prosopon" is literally translated into English as "face," but means person or personal countenance.

Soteriology:  The part of christology which deals with Christ’s work of salvation.

Theosis:  This is the Greek term that is translated as deification or divinization.  It is the doctrine that deals with the possibility that man by grace can be elevated to a participation in the divine glory, or to put it another way, that man can be so united to God that it can be said that he truly becomes God.

Theotokos:  Literally “the God-bearer,” normally translated as “The Mother of God.”  This is a christological title that is applied to the Virgin Mary; it is an affirmation of the divinity of Christ and of the doctrine of the incarnation.

Union:  This term along with the term participation is used to describe the relationship of man to God after man has been deified.  It must not be understood as an absorption of man by God, but as a communion in love between two personal beings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Reading Materials:

St. Athanasius.

        On the Incarnation of the Word.

        The Library of Christian Classics, volume 3. 

        (Philadelphia:  The Westminster Press,  1954).  

        Edited by:  Edward Rochie Hardy, Ph.D.

St. Gregory Palamas.

        The Triads.

        The Classics of Western Spirituality

        (New York:  Paulist Press, 1983).

        Translated by:  Nicolas Gendle

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

        The Divine Names, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Epistle Two.

        The Classics of Western Spirituality

        (New York:  Paulist Press, 1987).

        Translated by:  Colm Luibheid

Additional Sources:

The Ante-Nicene Fathers [ANF].  10 volumes.

        Tertullian, volume 3.

        (Peabody:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1994).

        Edited by:  Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC].

        (New York:  The Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1994).

The Liturgy of the Hours:  The Office of Readings [LOTH].

        (Boston:  St. Paul Editions, 1983).

Pope John Paul II.

        The Encyclicals of John Paul II.

        Encyclical Letter:  Redemptoris Mater (pages 340-410).

        (Huntington, Indiana:  Our Sunday Visitor, 1996).

        Edited by:  J. Michael Miller, C.S.B.

The Sacramentary.

        (New York:  Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1985).

Works Consulted:

Maximus Confessor.

        Selected Writings.

        The Classics of Western Spirituality.

        (New York:  Paulist Press, 1985).

        Translated by:  George Berthold

Pseudo-Macarius.

        The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter.

        The Classics of Western Spirituality.

        (New York:  Paulist Press, 1992).

        Translated by:  George A. Maloney, S.J.

St. Thomas Aquinas.

        The Summa Theologica. 

        (Westminster:  Christian Classics, 1981).

        Translated by:  The Fathers of the English Dominican Province

A. N. Williams.

        The Ground of Union:  Deification in Aquinas and Palamas.

        (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1999).

Biblical Translation:

The Bible:  Revised Standard Version [RSV].

        (New York:  American Bible Society, 1971).

Theosis:  Man’s Deification by Grace

by Steven Todd Kaster

San Francisco State University

Directed Reading 696:  Philosophy and Religion

Dr. Ron Epstein

16 May 2001 (revised 21 May 2001)

Copyright © 2001-2025 Steven Todd Kaster