Biblical & Theological Issues

by Viacheslav Lytvynenko –

In the English-speaking world there has been an evident renewal of interest in the theme of theosis, or deification. Often regarded as a suspiciously esoteric and unbiblical doctrine, theosis in the Eastern Christian tradition is commonly used to explain salvation in terms of human union with God. Among the other terms and phrases that are used to convey the idea of theosis is divinization, becoming gods or godlike, participating or sharing in God. In this article the word theosis will be the preferred term and I will add others as I feel needed. For our purpose it is important to note that Athanasius appears to be the first one who used this word systematically in the fourth century, while the appearance of Lossky’s book on the Eastern Church’s mystical theology in 1955 (along with the following translation of the Greek theologians) helped to introduce this concept to the Western audience.1 In what follows, I will consider both theologians within their historical contexts and will attempt to highlight those areas in which the theme of theosis may contribute to the Evangelical tradition. For methodological reasons, I will examine Lossky first and then will consider Athanasius.

Vladimir Lossky
Vladimir Lossky (1903-58) is known as one of the most influential theologians in the Eastern Orthodox Church of the twentieth century. He was raised in a dynamic intellectual environment with his father, Nikolay Lossky, being a Russian professor of philosophy in Saint Petersburg. Their family was exiled from the Soviet Russia in 1922 which led Vladimir Lossky to study in Prague and eventually graduate at the Sorbonne in Paris. His theological passion was to integrate the patristic idea of theosis into modern thought. In fact, Lossky is best understood in the context of what is known as the neo-patristic synthesis (or return to the Church Fathers) which was first declared by another Russian theologian of that time, George Florovsky.2 This synthesis was meant to recover the patristic roots of Christianity against the so-called sophiological trend3 of the religious renaissance in Russia and provide the Orthodox alternative in which Lossky attempted to place theosis at the center of the Christian faith. At the same time, Lossky’s emphases on a number of other loci in his thought such as the essence-energies distinction in God led to a lively polemics as to whether his peculiar understanding of theosis represented the genuine concept of the Fathers. In my own analysis of Lossky, I will limit the discussion of theosis to several major areas of his thought. I will start with a discussion of what is known as the negative theology and the doctrine of essence and energies in God, and will continue by touching on the topics of man, sin and Incarnation.

Negative Theology and the Doctrine of
Essence and Energies in God
The overriding concern of Lossky’s life was to establish a close link between Orthodox theology and spirituality. His main work where this concern is put forth in a systematic fashion was published in English as The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.4 In this most widely read and influential book Lossky attempts to respond to the major challenges 5 of his day, and in doing so, he relates the fundamental themes of Orthodox tradition to what he considers the goal of Christian theology as union with God, or theosis. Lossky begins his discussion of theosis by placing it into the framework of the negative theology which goes back to the mystical strand of thought of some Church fathers (the ones Lossky refers to most often are Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor), and denies the positive knowledge of God as real knowledge. This negative method attempts to know God only in what he is not, rather than in what he is. Lossky criticizes Western Christianity for its preoccupation with theology as science and argues that true theology should set one’s mind “on the path to contemplation, to pure prayer where thought stops, to the ineffable.”6 Contrary to the scientific way of reasoning designed for the “historical work here below,”7 negative theology, according to Lossky, is best described with the Greek word gnosis as pointing to the ultimate nature of human union with God in which “we are at one with our subject” and “the distinction between subject and object no longer exists.”8

This understanding of theology leads Lossky to make a sharp distinction by drawing between God in himself (whom we cannot approach in his essence, or being) and God as he is revealed to us (whom we can approach in his energies, or attributes). This distinction is most closely identified with the fourteenth century Byzantine theologian, Gregory Palamas, who formulated it in defense of the monastic practice of inner prayer, or the so-called Hesychasm.9 In the following centuries after Palamas this doctrine was largely neglected in the Eastern thought until its rediscovery in the twentieth century by Lossky (among others) who defined it as the very foundation for theosis. In Lossky’s understanding, essence and energies in God represent two modes or levels of existence. In the energies God goes forth from himself towards the world, while in his essence he remains utterly inaccessible and hidden. This distinction partly corresponds to the Western concept of immanence and transcendence by which theologians define the divine presence in the world (immanence) and emphasize the fact that God is entirely beyond the Universe (transcendence). The main difference between these two pairs of distinctions is that the Orthodox doctrine of essence and energies assumes two distinct realities in God by drawing a sharp contrast between them, while the concept of immanence and transcendence commonly claims that God communicates himself to the world as he really is in the divine life.10 In other words, the former distinction emphasizes the real or ontological difference between God’s essence and his energies, whereas the later points to the fact that transcendent God is the same God as the immanent God and attempts to explain the difference between the two as a matter of epistemological distinction (that is, made in our minds). For Lossky, human union with God or theosis occurs on the level of God’s energies and never on the level of God’s essence. Lossky often uses the terminology of energies as a synonym to grace and the meaning of this identification will become clearer as we look at his view of man and the role of Christ in the act of salvation.

Man, Fall, and Incarnation
The significance of the essence-energies distinction in God for theosis goes hand-inhand with Lossky’s understanding of man as a vocational being whose task is to acquire God’s energies as the primary means for becoming deified. Here Lossky follows the accepted Orthodox interpretation of Genesis 1:26-27 where God’s image is understood as an inherent aspect of human nature endowed to us in creation, while likeness refers to the potential similitude to God by way of free cooperation (also known as synergy) with his energies, or grace.11 In his Mystical Theology Lossky explains it by writing that “the image reaches its perfection when the human nature becomes like the divine, in attaining a complete participation in God’s uncreated energies.”12 This transition from the image to likeness represents the mechanics of theosis and is described by Lossky as an upward movement to God by way of three progressive stages.13 The first one starts with metanoia (trans. as “penitence”) and marks the beginning of one’s journey to union with God. The next two stages are katharsis (trans. as “purification”) which represents one’s liberation from the sinful passions, and apatheia (trans. as “dispassion”) as the perfect state of the pure divinized soul. The ultimate goal of such process of theosis is “the transposition from a state of corruption and mortality to one of incorruption and immortality.”14 Thus, becoming like God involves primarily the acquisition of God’s energies (or cooperation with his grace) and the final aim of attaining the same qualities of immortality or incorruption as God in order to enjoy his fellowship made available to us in and through divine energies.

Behind this portrait of theosis lies Lossky’s specific view of sin. According to this view, shared by the Eastern Orthodox tradition, humanity was originally created as having a partial fellowship with God and was granted the task of attaining it in full perfection through the process of moving from image to likeness. In light of this vocation the tragedy of Adam’s fall is not that all people inherit his guilt (as is typically explained in the Catholic and Protestant traditions) but that “humankind has fallen from the road to life onto the road to death, from incorruption to corruption.”15 In other words, the Fall is a deviation from the initial path to union with God, or theosis, not an inherited guilt for Adam’s sin or a radical change in humanity. In this perspective, Incarnation, according to Lossky, puts humanity back on the road to becoming like God in his divine qualities of incorruption and immortality. Summarizing this perspective on sin and redemption, Lossky writes: “Sin has destroyed the primitive plan, that of a direct climb of man to God. . . . [T]he atonement made necessary by our sins is not an end but a means, the means to the only real goal: deification.”16 This means of deification for Lossky is principally accomplished within the Church through our participation in the sacraments of which the Eucharist is the most important. The sacraments contain God’s presence in his energies and represent the indispensable source for theosis. In his Orthodox Theology, Lossky affirms: “The tree of life at the center of Paradise and its nourishing of immortality offered therefore a possibility: thus, in our Christoecclesiastical realities, the Eucharist, which heals us, nourishes and fortifies us, spiritually and bodily. One must feed oneself with God to attain freely deification. And it is in this personal effort that Adam failed.”17

However brief these observations of Lossky’s thought are, they do arouse a certain caution that needs to be addressed here. The reader of Lossky’s works may be led to sympathize with his program of bringing the issue of human relationships with God to the center of Christian faith. For Lossky, this is supposed to be the ultimate end of theology and the precise meaning of the Eastern Orthodox concept of theosis. However, Lossky’s persistence in drawing the distinction between essence and energies in God significantly undermines this intention. In fact, the whole idea of theosis as participation in God’s energies presses him to a rather impersonal encounter with God who remains eternally hidden in his essence. Lossky does speak about the personal dimension of theosis by arguing that energies contain the Trinitarian persons; however, in addition to the common criticism that Lossky’s thought creates two gods, the essenceenergies distinction makes the divine persons trapped in the intermediary position of the mere agents between the essence and energies of the Godhead.18 As a result, the whole idea of theosis with its primacy of essence and energies in God over the divine persons appears to determine the impersonal character of our union with God and blur the content of the divine human encounter. Furthermore, Lossky’s emphasis on salvation as a progress to likeness in God’s qualities (primarily those of immortality and incorruption) leads to an even more nhanced soteriological impersonalization. It suggests that salvation consists primarily of a set of divine qualities that we are called to acquire in our advance from one state to another and de-emphasizes the personal aspect of theosis (namely, the intimate communion with God) and his initiative to save us. In this understanding of salvation, grace assumes the role of saving energies that we are to gain through cooperation with God and thereby runs a risk of reducing the effect of Christ’s work of redemption. It is exactly in these weak areas of Lossky’s thought that Athanasius provides a more fulfilling Biblical model.

Athanasius of Alexandria
Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 295-373) is best known as the champion of Nicaea who fought against the Arian teaching that denied Christ’s divinity and was condemned as heresy at the Nicene Council in 325. His Episcopal ministry lasted fourty-five years (ca. 328-373), seventeen of which he spent in five exiles executed by four different Roman emperors. He is especially famous for his defense of the Nicaean term homoousios (trans. as “consubstantial,” or “of the same nature”) that captures the essence of the controversy in which the question of the divinity of Christ (whether he is the same God as the Father) affects the way we understand theosis. Athanasius had a profound grasp of scriptural exegesis and his works show a man who was deeply concerned for his flock both in dogmatic and practical matters. My discussion of Athanasius will be limited to an outline of his doctrine of God and salvation that reveal a deep concern for the personal nature of our union with God and his gracious initiative of redemption.

God as the Trinitarian Communion
of Divine Persons
Throughout his writings Athanasius makes two sets of interrelated contrasts: one, with regard to God, and another with regard to man. When speaking of God Athanasius emphasizes the interplay between the transcendence of divine nature and his loving care for man. In this way, the one who is “beyond all being and human conception” becomes the very source of life for those he creates out of his philanthropia (trans. as “love to people”).19 When depicting man, Athanasius emphasizes the contrast between human nature as being incapable of relating to God on its own (which is known as the concept of being created “out of nothing,” or ex nihilo) and the initial gift of sharing in the life of God himself (which represents for him the central aspect of theosis). These two sets of contrasts become the framework which Athanasius uses to describe God as the Trinity and his relation to humanity before and after the Fall, as well as the nature of the subsequent restoration. We will take a brief look at each of these subjects starting with his Trinitarian concept.

At the background of Athanasius’ concept of the Trinity lies his protest against the Arian emphasis on the transcendent essence of God and the subordination of Christ and the Holy Spirit as lesser beings. In the extant writings of Arius (which comprise a few letters and a handful of fragments of his main work Thalia) we find a scheme in which Christ is given a position of created mediator between the material realm and the sole transcendent God. Arius intentionally tried to avoid any mention of the term “Father” in relation to God as implying the idea of coessential Son and preferred the use of impersonal words such as Monad, Arche (trans. as “beginning”) and Monos Theos (trans. as “sole God”). In Arius’ understanding, the idea of God included a set of perfect qualities that he was said to possess as the sole being who transcends everything. Thus, in one of his declarations of faith he writes: “We acknowledge one God, alone ingenerate, alone everlasting, alone unbegun, alone true, alone having immortality, alone wise, alone good, alone sovereign; judge, governor, and providence of all….”20 Shortly after that, he adds, “And God, being the cause of all things, is unbegotten and altogether sole, but the Son. .was made to subsist by the Father.”21 Scholars disagree in identifying the exact influences on Arius’ thought (it could be, for example, a neo-Platonic philosophy or a monotheistic Judaism), but what is commonly recognized is that his teaching drove a wedge between God and the world and thereby encouraged human beings “to look for salvation to sources other than the Lord of heaven and earth.”22

In contrast to this teaching, Athanasius develops a theology which is stamped with a deeply relational understanding of God as a basis for the personal aspect of theosis. In fact, Athanasius’ primary task looks convincingly as one of defending the doctrine of Trinity from the Arian tendency to depersonalize God. In doing so, Athanasius describes God’s being as relational by nature and defines it generally as the loving communion of the equally divine persons of the Trinity. In contrast to Arius who shunned the term “Father,” Athanasius uses it all the time throughout his writings to argue that the Father’s person implies the divine person of the Son. In the technical terminology of that time it meant that the Son (and the Holy Spirit) was equal to and homoousios with God the Father. Another way Athanasius expressed the same idea was by speaking of the natural bond between the persons of the Trinity using the Greek word idios which means to belong to someone as one’s own. In his major works where Athanasius develops this understanding of God (Against the Greeks—On the Incarnation, Orations Against the Arians and Letters to Serapion) we see him identifying the divine qualities with the Father instead of attributing them to the impersonal essence of God as was the Arian practice. Embedded in the Father’s being, these qualities are shared by the Son in the way that what is said of the Father should also be said of the Son. In this way, if the former is God (possessing the qualities of incorruption, goodness, etc.), so is the latter except that he is named the Son, and not the Father. Thus, in view of the Father and the Son being one, we can speak of the indivisible Godhead as resting on the Trinitarian persons.

Considering the personal nature of this relationship in God, Athanasius often speaks of it in terms of union and love. This love originates in the Father and represents the very content of what is given to the Son and through him to the Holy Spirit. Finally, this eternal fellowship of love becomes the source for God’s creation and redemption which explains the first set of contrasts mentioned above: God’s transcendence and his philanthropia. Being distinct from creation, God is self-sufficient in giving and receiving love in himself, and therefore cannot be perceived as an impersonal essence. At the same time, he does not choose to remain hidden in his divine transcendence, but decides to create out of his overflowing love. In this way, God’s intention to create and then to save reflects his eternal nature.

Humanity’s Fall and the Divine Restoration
In relating his understanding of God as a loving communion of divine persons to the creation of humanity, Athanasius reveals the logic of his second set of contrasts: human nothingness and the endowment of man with the gift of sharing in God’s relationships. According to Athanasius, man’s original creation in the image and likeness of God underscores the fact that man had the fullness of perfection by being connected to the Trinity through the bond of love. Athanasius considers it to be the very essence of theosis and clarifies its nature with the help of the famous patristic formula of “becoming by grace what God is by nature” (to be explained below).23 It is through the Fall that human nothingness came to reveal itself in the full measure of what it means for man to have lost the link with the divine life of the Trinity. Man’s fall left him with the consequence of losing God’s presence, and thereby causing his spiritual death and corrupting his nature. He had no other options for salvation other than to hope for divine intervention. To put it differently, there was nothing man could do to help his situation just as there is nothing the dead could do to become alive again. Referring to Acts 2:24 with the statement of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, Athanasius writes: “To man it was not possible to succeed in this for death belongs to man. Therefore, the Word, being God, became flesh, that, being put to death in the flesh, He might restore all men by His own power.”24

The key expectation according to such understanding of salvation was that the Savior must be God himself. Therefore, Christ had to be God to save us. In the course of the Arian controversy Athanasius spent a lifetime defending and explaining this fundamental truth against the teaching that claimed Christ to be a mere man, or creature. Refuting the Arian teaching that tended to misrepresent Christ as perfect example of striving for union with the distant First Principle (which for Arius could possibly mean to imitate God’s transcendent qualities), Athanasius insisted that humanity required more than a redeemer who himself needs to be redeemed. Insisting that Christ had to be God in Against the Arians (2.70), Athanasius brings together the fact that he belongs to the Father as his own (idios) natural Son who is of the same essence (homoousios), and the idea of personal salvation as a restoration of union with God, or theosis. He writes: “So also the man had not been deified, unless the Word who became flesh had been by nature from the Father and true and proper to Him. For therefore the union was of this kind, that He might unite what is man by nature to Him who is in the nature of the Godhead, and his salvation and deification might be sure.” Thus, salvation, for Athanasius, is primarily an intimate re-union with God and not a matter of attaining to likeness in the qualities of the self-absorbed Monad.

This personal dimension of restoration to the divine life leads Athanasius to emphasize the downward activity of God and describe salvation primarily as sonship, or adoption. One of Athanasius’ dicta often quoted from his writings is that “God became man so that men might become gods.”25 In the context of Athanasius thought, this statement underlined God’s initiative in bringing humanity into renewed fellowship with himself, and as a result, make men divine by grace as he, God, is divine by nature. This does not imply that we become gods in the same way as the true God. Similarly, when speaking of people becoming sons of God through adoption in Christ, Athanasius makes it clear that this image of salvation does not mean replacing the natural Son of God with the sons by adoption. Rather, it points to the intimate nature of loving relationships between God and human beings as we become adopted as sons and daughters of God the Father. Explaining this idea with a reference to Galatians 4:6, Athanasius affirms: “But this is God’s kindness to man, that of whom He is Maker, of them according to grace He afterwards becomes Father also; becomes, that is, when men, His creatures, receive into their hearts, as the Apostle says, ‘the Spirit of His Son, crying, Abba, Father.’”26 The content of this personal salvation for Athanasius is so closely identified with the very life of God, his love and intimate relationships, that to be saved by God’s grace means nothing less than to possess God in one’s life in a way that is even more secure than it was for Adam and Eve at the moment of their creation.

Both Lossky and Athanasius felt compelled to respond to the challenges of their time perceived as undermining the Christian truths, and both of them developed influential theological models. Being prominent representatives of the same Eastern tradition, these thinkers shared the fundamental truths of Christian faith and at the same time differed in the way they understood and explained the essence of Christianity—man’s salvation as union with God. As we have seen, their different understandings of God and his relation to the world led them to quite opposite conceptions of theosis. Lossky’s preoccupation with the essence and energies in God suggests that salvation is primarily about gaining a set of divine qualities and thereby diminishes the role of Christ, while Athanasius’ relational concept of God helped him to explain the personal nature of salvation. As Evangelicals we can greatly benefit from Athanasius’ thought as we teach and preach about God and salvation from the personal perspective and be better equipped for a dialogue with those from the Eastern Christian tradition.

Athanasius of Alexandria
Athanasius (c. AD 296 – 373) was a renowned church father and bishop of Alexandria. He is especially known as the “champion of Nicene orthodoxy” during the Arian controversy. Born to Christian parents in Alexandria, Egypt, Athanasius early on received philosophical and theological training in the city’s famous Catechetical School.

One of his earliest works was On the Incarnation of the Word of God in which he defended the full deity and humanity of Jesus before the onset of the Arian Controversy. He is also the first person in church history to provide a list of the books in the New Testament canon that included all 27 books currently accepted as authoritative.

The Arian controversy began about 319 when Athanasius was secretary to Alexander, bishop of Alexandria. A presbyter named Arius accused
Alexander of heresy regarding the nature of Christ. Arius himself taught that Christ was not coeternal with God the Father. Rather, Christ was the first and greatest of all creatures. Alexander, supported by Athanasius, believed that Christ was coeternal with the Father and equally divine. The controversy eventually led to the Council of Nicea in 325 where Arius’s views were condemned and the Church’s belief in the full deity of Christ was set down in the Nicene Creed.

Viacheslav Lytvynenko is a former professor of historical theology at Donetsk Christian University in Ukraine, and is presently doing doctoral studies in Greek patristics at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

Notes
1Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167-88.
2George Florovsky, “Patristic Theology and the Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” in Collected Works (MA: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1974-89), IV, 17.
3Vladimir Lossky, Spor o Sofii (Paris: The Brotherhood of St. Photius, 1936).
4This work was first written and published in 1944 as a series of essays under the title Essaisur théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient and then translated into English as The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church thirteen years after that. In this article I have used the following English edition: Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (New York: SVS Press, 1998).
5The major challenges to which Lossky felt compelled to respond were primarily the need for a clear presentation of Orthodox spirituality to the Roman Catholic neo-Thomism and countering the growing attraction to secular philosophy of existentialism.
6Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001),14.
7Ibid.
8Lossky, Mystical Theology, p. 30.
9Georgios Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man: St. Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox Tradition (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), 87-95.
10 One of the classical examples of this idea is Karl Rahner’s statement that “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity
is the ‘economic’ Trinity” in his The Trinity (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), 22.
11Panagiotes Chrestou, Partakers of God (Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox, 1984), 20-21.
12Lossky, Mystical Theology, 121.
13Ibid., 204.
14Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003), 132.
15Chrestou, Partakers of God, 28.
16Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 111.
17Ibid., 78.
18For a recent criticism of Lossky’s thought for giving primacy to essence over persons, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2006), 63-64.
19Athanasius, Against the Greeks, chs. 2 and 35, in Archibald Robertson (ed.), Select Writings and Letters of Athanasius of Alexandria, NPNF 4(Michigan: Eerdmans, 1978).
20Confession of Arius and his Companions to Alexander of Alexandria, 6, in H.-G. Opitz (ed.), Athanasius Werke (Berlin, 1934); trans. is mine.
21Ibid., 6; trans. is mine.
22George Prestige, Fathers and Heretics. Six Studies in Dogmatic Faith, with Prologue and Epilogue (London: SPCK, 1940), 91.
23See, for example, Against the Arians, 2.51; 3.19.
24Ibid., 1.44.
25On the Incarnation, 54, in Robert Thomson (ed. and trans.), Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
26 Against the Arians, 2.59.

(First published in Areopagus Journal Vol. 12 No. 3 – Eastern Orthodoxy)