I.
Man understands intuitively that he was made to transcend the boundaries that the Fall has placed upon him, that he was made for a real union with the things around him. This is expressed in a variety of ways. The French mystical philosopher Simone Weil said, “We want to get behind [beauty]. . . . We should like to feed upon it, but it is merely something to look at. . . . The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation” (The Simone Weil Reader, p. 475, quoted in Vigen Guroian, The Fragrance of God, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2006, pgs. 75-6). Hindus have their belief in the soul’s absorption into the eternal brahman after she achieves liberation from the material world. Even atheistic transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil desire to unite the minds of people – using rather unsavory methods, however, like nanorobotic implants.
II.
The Orthodox Church has taken this innate desire of man and freed it from all the distortions to which it has been subjected over the millennia of his life on earth, revealing man’s true end as theosis. Mark Shuttleworth gives a short overview of this concept:
I said, “You are gods,
And all of you are children of the Most High.” (Psalm 82:6)
This is a verse that most Protestants do not underline in their Bibles. What on earth does it mean—“you are gods”? Doesn’t our faith teach that there is only one God, in three Persons? How can human beings be gods?
In the Orthodox Church, this concept is neither new nor startling. It even has a name: theosis. Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature. Also referred to as deification, divinization, or illumination, it is a concept derived from the New Testament regarding the goal of our relationship with the Triune God. (Theosis and deification may be used interchangeably. We will avoid the term divinization, since it could be misread for divination, which is another thing altogether!)
Many Protestants, and even some Roman Catholics, might find the Orthodox concept of theosis unnerving. Especially when they read a quote such as this one from St. Athanasius: “God became man so that men might become gods,” they immediately fear an influence of Eastern mysticism from Hinduism or pantheism.
But such an influence could not be further from the Orthodox understanding. The human person does not merge with some sort of impersonal divine force, losing individual identity or consciousness. Intrinsic divinity is never ascribed to humankind or any part of the creation, and no created thing is confused with the being of God. Most certainly, humans are not accorded ontological equality with God, nor are they considered to merge or co-mingle with the being of God as He is in His essence.
In fact, to safeguard against any sort of misunderstanding of this kind, Orthodox theologians have been careful to distinguish between God’s essence and His energies. God is incomprehensible in His essence. But God, who is love, allows us to know Him through His divine energies, those actions whereby He reveals Himself to us in creation, providence, and redemption. It is through the divine energies, therefore, that we achieve union with God.
We become united with God by grace in the Person of Christ, who is God come in the flesh. The means of becoming “like God” is through perfection in holiness, the continuous process of acquiring the Holy Spirit by grace through ascetic devotion. . . . Fr. David Hester, in his booklet, The Jesus Prayer, identifies theosis as “the gradual process by which a person is renewed and unified so completely with God that he becomes by grace what God is by nature.” Another way of stating it is “sharing in the divine nature through grace.”
St. Maximos the Confessor, as Fr. Hester notes, defined theosis as “total participation in Jesus Christ.” Careful to maintain the ontological safeguard noted above, St. Maximos further stated, “All that God is, except for an identity in being, one becomes when one is deified by grace.”
. . .
With the Incarnation, God has assumed and glorified our flesh and has consecrated and sanctified our humanity. He has also given us the Holy Spirit. As we acquire more of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives, we become more like Christ, and we have the opportunity of being granted, in this life, illumination or glorification. When we speak of acquiring more of the Holy Spirit, it is in the sense of appropriating to a greater degree what has actually been given to us already by God. We acquire more of what we are more able to receive. God the Holy Spirit remains ever constant.
Certain consequences follow from this truth of a real union between God and His creation, and the life lived in accordance with that truth in the Orthodox Church.
First, one will notice that, for the Orthodox, the images of God as Creator and Cultivator and the creation as a garden have not diminished. In the hymns of the Orthodox Church, one continually finds among them those such as this kontakion for Saturday: “The universe offers the God-bearing martyrs as the first-fruits of nature, to Thee, O Lord the Gardener of Creation. Through the Theotokos and their prayers preserve Thy Church, Thy habitation, in abiding peace, O Greatly-merciful One” (Orthodox Daily Prayers, 2nd edn., S. Arhipov edr., St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, South Canaan, Pennsylvania, 2008, p. 53).
St. Nikodemos of Mt. Athos extends this line of thought in the introduction to his collection of the lives of the saints:
This Synaxaristes should rightfully be called the diverse and fragrant Garden of Christ's holy Church, full of Pomegranates and Dry Fruits, Spikenard and Crocus, Calamus and Hyacinthus, Narcissus and Cinnamon and of all the best and most fragrant odors and perfumes, through whose splendor and grace she sweetens, gladdens, delights and makes fragrant her own children, each according to their own order and profession. Of such was written concerning the sung about Bride: "Awake, O north wind; and come, O south; and blow through my garden, and let my spices flow out" (Songs 4:16), and again: "Let my kinsman come down into his garden, and eat the fruit of his choice berries" (Songs 5:1). In regards to this garden, it was right for Theophilos, the sixth bishop of Antioch, to write to Autolycus, that the Church is truly a Garden, in which are the Roses of Martyrs, the Lilies of Virgins, the Violets of Widows and the Ivy of the Married.
. . .
The rest is at https://www.dissidentmama.net/the-purpose-of-man/.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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