Orthodox Deification (Theosis): What It Means
Orthodox deification (theosis) is participation in Christ's divine life by God's uncreated grace, not a change of our nature. It is received in and through Christ, the Church's sacraments, and the indwelling Holy Spirit. Scripture and the Fathers (notably St. Gregory Palamas, St. Maximus, and St. Silouan) ground this hope; the practical call is repentance, prayer, obedience to Christ's commandments, and regular participation in the Divine Liturgy.
Note: This article is an automatically generated transcript of an audio lecture. It was transcribed and lightly reworded for readability using automated tools, so it does not reproduce the speaker’s exact words. For the original, listen to the recording linked below.
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Key takeaways:
- Deification is participation in Christ's life by God's uncreated grace, not by nature.
- The Church's sacraments and Divine Liturgy are the concrete means of deification.
- Saints retain personal identity while participating personally in God's divine life.
- Love of and communion with the saints helps initiate believers into grace.
- Deification calls for obedience to Christ's commandments, prayer, patience, and sacramental life.
Fr. Alexis Torrance on the Commandments
A little earlier this morning I tried to sketch out the meaning and significance of the commandments of Christ: how they all cohere and mutually illumine one another, how they reveal to us divine life. Through embracing them we come into contact with their author and source, our Lord Jesus Christ himself.
The commandments demonstrate our equality before God because no matter where we find ourselves, we can always take hold of some commandment supremely — as we never tire of saying, the commandment of repentance and the commandment of love. We have all received the same commandments, the same summons to divine life.
Many people these days worry a lot about the question of vocation, their place in life, about pursuing marriage or monasticism, about what kind of job or degree they should get and so on. These are important questions, and sometimes in our life they acquire a necessary level of urgency. But in the end these questions of vocation are in fact secondary questions.
Our vocation is primarily and fundamentally to keep the commandments. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these things shall be added unto you," says our Lord. Everything falls into place. All is resolved beneath the protecting veil of this pursuit of the kingdom. If we do this, the Lord provides whatever it is we need for our salvation. And he stills, he quietens all our anxieties about the secondary questions of vocation that so often paralyze us today.
Consider the liberating words of a father who has accompanied us throughout this set of lectures, St. Silouan the Athonite. He says, "Everyone in this world has his task to perform, be he king or patriarch, cook, blacksmith or teacher; but the Lord whose love extends to every one of us will give greater reward to the man whose love for God is greater." The Lord gave us the commandment to love God with all our hearts, with all our minds and with all our souls.
But without prayer how can one love? The mind and heart of man therefore must always be free to pray.
You see how the issue of our specific job or earthly vocation is secondary and beneath our common heavenly vocation. Yes, he explains that whatever job or station in life we have, we ought to try to arrange it as best we can to facilitate the living out of the way of the commandments through prayer. But even the best outward arrangement given to us by God for keeping the commandments — by which I mean the monastic life — even this can be lived badly, without love, and so without profit to the soul.
Again, the same principle is elucidated for us by St. Nicholas Cabasilas. "The law of the spirit," he says, "is with reason a law of friendship, and consequently trains us in gratitude. This law makes it no less possible to exercise our skills, and it places no obstacle in the way of any occupation. The general may remain in command, the farmer may till the soil. The artisan may exercise his craft, and no one will have to desist from his usual employment because of it."
One need not betake oneself to a remote spot nor eat unaccustomed food — I have had the pleasure of doing that, but I didn't have to. Nor even dress differently, nor ruin one's health, nor venture on any reckless act; it is possible for one who stays at home and loses none of his possessions constantly to be engaged in the law of the spirit.
You see again how we all share a common calling, a common vocation, no matter what the external circumstances are.
Now, does this mean that every kind of job or external circumstance is equally conducive to keeping the law of the Spirit? Of course not. We know, for example, that the high calling to "go, sell all that you have, give to the poor and come follow me" is especially conducive to the way of the Lord, a direct imitation of Christ. The point is rather that access to the grace of the Holy Spirit does not depend on these external feats. God can visit us wherever we may be, in whatever material condition.
If only we turn to him with a broken, contrite and grateful heart.
Deification, Christ, and the Church
I say all this at the outset both to continue my line of thought about the commandments last time but also to emphasize that the lofty theme of deification that I'm trying to discuss — with fear and trepidation — is one that applies to all of us, not just to a few chosen monks and nuns. The Son of God took upon himself our common human nature. He who was consubstantial with the Father became consubstantial with us in order to offer all of us, without exception, the possibility of sharing his divine life. The basis for the possibility of deification is not whether or not we meet external criteria, like whether we are more or less monastic. The basis for the possibility of deification is the Incarnate Christ and the invitation he gives us to share in his divine life by being engrafted onto his deified body, which is the Church.
Only one is holy, as we chant at every Divine Liturgy: "One only is holy." This means, strictly speaking, there is only one saint, Agios, and that's Jesus Christ. He nonetheless makes us holy, saints, deified, when we're joined to him, the Holy One.
The goal of deification is intimately connected with our rebirth in holy baptism and our participation in what St Gregory Palamas calls the divine ray of Christ's precious body and blood. It is in the bosom of the Church that the grace of deification manifests itself palpably and concretely in human lives. The aim of Christian life, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov so famously explained to Nikolai Motovilov, is our conscious and inalienable acquisition of that grace, the grace of the Holy Spirit. Of course, that grace is freely lavished upon us through the Church's sacraments. But when, as Father Demetrius has far more eloquently explained than I can, our will is out of sync with the divine will, when we would rather fulfill our own desires, our gnomic will, than Christ's commandments, we then bury, waste, and squander that treasure freely given, and hinder its work in us.
We must not lose sight of the goal of deification, brothers and sisters. We must never diminish or dilute the grandeur of the Gospel, never lower the bar and claim that God does not really want to make us His children. This is in fact a very dangerous path, a path of self-justification, which saps our spiritual strength and ultimately shuts us out of the kingdom.
Saint Sophrony the Athonite warns about this in no uncertain terms. He writes, "In God's pre-eternal providence for man we are meant to participate in his being, to be like unto Him in all things, and we as Christians must never renounce our goal lest we lose the inspiration to storm the kingdom of heaven. Experience shows all too clearly that once we Christians start reducing the scope of the revelation given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit, we gradually cease to be attracted by the light made manifest to us. If we are to preserve our saving hope, we must be bold. We must be bold."
We must keep before our gaze the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. However distant we on an individual level are from that vision ourselves, otherwise we distort the message of salvation. We turn it into something else and we even risk full apostasy. This issue lay at the heart of the Hesychast controversy in the 14th century. St Gregory Palamas was the champion of the hesychasts and an ardent defender of the reality of our deification in Christ by uncreated grace or energy. St Gregory repeatedly insists on the necessity of upholding the reality of deification, and that this reality is powerfully experienced as a pledge and a foretaste in the Church already here and now, especially among the saints.
If we are among those who don't yet have the experience of the saints, and I dare say we all are in that state, we can nonetheless be initiated into the mystery of deification, to quote Saint Gregory, by the respect, faith, and love that we show to such persons who have the experience, to the saints.
He's echoing here Christ's words, "He who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward." You want a shortcut, a secret, a mystery? There's one. If we are not saints, let's at least love the saints. Let us be the friends of the saints, the deified.
Analogy and Degrees of Participation
Then, slowly, the grace of the Saints will begin to rub off on us, and we too can receive their reward though we are unworthy.
We could think about it by analogy—an imperfect analogy; analogies are always imperfect.
Think of the Sun and the planets orbiting the sun. The sun is, of course, the Sun of Righteousness himself, Christ our Lord. He is the source of light and grace and deification for all mankind. To have any hope of eternal life we need to be a planet orbiting the sun.
If we're not orbiting the sun—if we're not orbiting Christ—the hope of deification is lost.
Those who boldly pursue the commandments of Christ are like the planets near the sun. They bask in the sun's rays and heat and participate in it more intensely. The closer they are, the faster they orbit.
Many monks and nuns are like Mercury. Mercury is far hotter than Earth and goes around the sun four times faster. They attend services at least four times more than we do.
But Mercury and Earth and even Neptune are doing the same thing: they're all orbiting the sun. The intensities are different, but the orientation and what holds everything together is the same — it is shared.
Unfortunately, in my case I'm like Pluto. We thought it was a planet for a while. It orbited the Sun very slowly, but then we realized it's not a planet. Oh well. But don't be like me; don't be a Pluto. If you can't be a Mercury, at least try to be Earth. If you can't be Earth, at least try not to go further out than Jupiter or Saturn.
Deification: Dangers and Clarifications
Deification is our common task. Its basis and source is Christ Himself. Deification thus constitutes the meaning of life, and we need to talk a little about what we mean by deification, sometimes rendered divinization or just transliterated from the Greek as theosis. It can easily be misunderstood because there is a dangerous and even luciferic understanding of deification—one that animated our original fall. You remember that the argument the devil used to tempt our first parents to disobey God and eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was that "ye shall be as gods." There is a demonic version of deification in which we arrogantly and proudly attempt to seize God's place, to usurp God's throne, to be gods instead of God on our own terms and not in communion with him.
But just because there is a demonic version of deification does not mean that there is not also a correct and truthful understanding of the term. The Fathers explained this to us, beginning at least with Saint Irenaeus in the second century: the problem was not with deification as such—this was indeed our destiny—but with trying to grasp at it in disobedience, in defiance, and out of due season. Our nature collapsed in Adam and was handed over to corruption and death, not because of deification as such, but because of our sin, which used deification as a pretext that actually completely enslaved us to the material world and to the cycle of pleasure and pain that animates that world, as Saint Maximus discusses. We partook out of due season of what God had intended us to partake of at the appropriate time, and thus even the tree of life became inaccessible to us.
Our first sin has been variously described in the tradition, and we've heard some of those descriptions: self-love, philautia, pride, disobedience, arrogance, even gluttony in a way—we didn't fast as we were supposed to. We could also describe it as impatience, and my Presbytera pointed this out to me earlier this week. She showed me a quote from W. H. Auden, a British author, who puts our first sin in these terms. It reflects well, I think, what many of the Fathers understand by the fall. Auden writes, "Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of paradise, because of impatience we cannot return."
It reflects something that we have in the Gospel. Salvation hinges in some passages on endurance, on patience. "In patience you will gain your souls," says our Lord, and again, "He who endures to the end, who is patient to the end, will be saved." Salvation itself hinges on patience.
Through the mystery of godly patience we can be brought to the mystery of deification.
Despite the fact that some people—even some Christians—accuse us Orthodox of being deluded and even pagan for upholding the reality of deification, it is in fact a sad delusion to deny it.
Our Lord declared, "Is it not written in your law, I said, 'Ye are gods'?" He then explains that He called them gods unto whom the Word of God came. So He points out, subtly, that being called "gods" is not a forbidden title or a prohibited goal.
But it depends upon communion with the Word of God, who is ultimately Christ Himself.
Deification by Grace, Not by Nature
Even more powerfully, we find the lofty goal of deification articulated most beautifully in Christ's high priestly prayer. In John, chapter seventeen, He prays, "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one. I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and I have declared unto them thy name and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them."
Simply put, this is what deification is: to share in the divine life, to become partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter puts it. This is not something we can achieve on our own, as we saw most clearly with the fall of Adam and Eve.
To try self-confidently to achieve deification with our own means is indeed completely delusional; it is to repeat the fall over and over again. We cannot, from within nature, find the resources to attain what transcends nature. Technology, for example, can never deliver the promise of eternal life preached in the Gospel, which is the promise of deification, however sophisticated it becomes and however long it extends our lives on this broken and corrupted earth.
Deification is anchored not in our work but in God's work, the great work and divine mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of Christ. As Saint Maximus writes, "All the divine mysteries are surpassed by the mystery of Christ; and this mystery is definitive of every conceivable perfection in all things either present or to come, and it exists above and beyond every limit and boundary. It is in Christ, and in Christ alone."
To approach deification, then, is to approach Christ and his deifying, life-giving body. This is none other than the path of the divine commandments, which lead and deliver us to Christ's embrace. The commandments give us the shape and the content of deified life, of being "perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect." But there is more to say about the parameters of what we mean by deification, what it is and what it isn't.
As we said, there are distorted views which we must avoid at all costs. What are some of these distorted views of deification beyond what we already said about trying to be gods in defiance or in opposition to God?
One such distorted view is that we are or can become gods by nature, that we are or can become consubstantial with the Holy Trinity. Beloved brothers and sisters, we and the saints are not gods by nature. We can never become gods by nature.
If we were gods by nature, then we would be the creator of the universe by nature. We would, by nature, have no ignorance and no limitation; we would be almighty, omnipotent, ever existing, immutable, invisible, and so on.
If we were by nature gods, we would not be by nature creatures, human beings. Our nature would disappear; it would dissolve into the divine. Some people understand deification in this way in some other world religions, for example, but we absolutely do not.
Deification is not the dissolution of our identity or consciousness into some great ocean of being, some impersonal or transpersonal absolute. We do not lose or shed our nature or its natural properties in being deified. We do not cease being creatures by nature.
Hypostatic Union and Personal Identity
Related to this, we also do not as Orthodox understand our own deification in terms of either transforming into one of the members of the Trinity — completely losing our identity by being morphed, for example, into the identity of the Son of God — or by becoming new members of the Holy Trinity, what in technical theological terminology would be called hypostatic union. We do not have union by nature or union by hypostasis. When a saint is deified, he or she does not become a fourth, fifth, or thousand-millionth member of the Holy Trinity — which would be absurd; it would not be a Trinity anymore to begin with — nor does the saint disappear into Christ through union with him in the sense of being dissolved into one of the persons of the Trinity.
Their identity is retained. Their personhood — hypostasis, the Greek term that's often used — remains. The saints do indeed undergo a personal union with God. Their personal identity is filled with divine life. They see God face to face, and they know even as also they are known. But that is not the same thing as hypostatic union in theology.
The term hypostatic union applies in a strict sense only to our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, one of the Holy Trinity, who in His person, in His hypostasis, took our nature to Himself, united it to Himself, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.
It is because of the hypostatic union that we can be united to God and ingrafted into the humanity of the Son of God in his holy body, which is the Church. In doing so we do not lose our specificity or our personhood. We actually find our identity there, as Christ says, "He who loses his life for my sake and the Gospel's, the same shall find it and keep it unto eternal life."
This is what the image of Christ as the vine and we the branches means, or Christ as the head of the body and we the members of the body, or He as the Bridegroom of the Church and we the Bride. We do not become new members of the Trinity, adding divine nature to our human nature, but we do inherit the divine life by being joined to the person or hypostasis of the Son, "in whom dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily."
So we are not deified by nature; we do not undergo hypostatic union ourselves. How then do we describe this ineffable deification? How do we articulate the way this mystery unfolds, in which our identity and our personhood are not only retained but elevated and fulfilled, even while being completely united with a life — the divine and uncreated life of God himself — which is not ours by nature?
We can never speak adequately about things that are ineffable by definition, but we do so in a general way in our tradition by speaking about deification by grace — deification by grace, not by nature, not by hypostatic union — by the energy of God rather than the nature of God.
St. Gregory Palamas on Energy and Grace
St. Gregory Palamas constantly defends this position in his writings, and he puts it quite succinctly in his letter to Bessarion. There he speaks about our union with God and lays out the options: either we're deified by nature, or we're deified by hypostatic union, or we're deified by the grace or energy of deification.
He writes, "It has never come into the mind of any one whatsoever that God should be united to a human being according to essence, so that the essence or nature of God and the essence and nature of humanity should be one; and to be united according to the divine hypostasis or person, so that there should be one hypostasis or person of what has been united without confusion. This belongs only to what was assumed by the Lord, which, untouched by any stain, became wholly enriched by the Divine grace and energy. Since each of the deified is deified through being united with God, but not with the Divine Essence nor with the Divine Person, it necessarily follows that they are deified by the Divine grace and energy."
"As Gregory surnamed the Theologian also understood," he adds (quoting his namesake from the fourth century), "Christ is called such — that is, the Anointed One, Christ — because of the Godhead; for this anointing of the humanity of Christ does not sanctify by energy, as in the case of other Christs, that is, anointed ones, which we all become by being chrismated into the Church, but by the presence of the whole of the one anointing."
St. Simeon and the Twofold Human
Christ is the source of the anointing of divinity upon humanity. We receive it through the grace of the anointing that flows from him. That is the difference between the hypostatic union and our union by grace.
Saint Simeon the New Theologian, in the eleventh century, expresses the same thing many times. "Having become one, I and He with whom I am united, how shall I name myself? God, jewel in nature and one in hypostasis, that is," he writes, "Jesus Christ, has made Me double; making Me double, He gave Me two names, as you see; behold the difference: I am man by nature, but God by grace."
The mystery of the Christian life is encapsulated in these lines. Christ our God took to himself our nature to restore the image that had fallen of old. He restored the image and furnished the perfection of the divine likeness. When we are united to Christ, we thus attain our high goal of being truly in the image and likeness of God.
As human beings, we are twofold creatures: soul and body. A human person is always both, not just one or the other, which is why, though we die, we look for the resurrection of the dead. We are always soul and body together as a human person. But in order to be fully human, in order to attain the purpose — the logos God has for us inscribed in our very being — we need, in a way, to become not just twofold, not just soul and body, but threefold. We need the divine grace of God to be mixed with this rational clay, to raise our soul and our body to participate in the divine life, to be clothed with the divine glory.
Saint Simeon again articulates this rather poetically: "Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the one God we worship. God, soul and body, is man created in the image of God, who is deemed worthy to be God."
Personhood, Communion, and the Saints
Several of the saints used the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in a very careful way to illustrate how our own deification does not involve any loss in our personal identity, but rather its fulfillment. We do not believe in an impersonal God. We do not even believe in a mono-hypostatic, mono-personal God.
God is one yet triune; the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are irreducible to one another, and yet they each possess the fullness of the Divine Nature. Each is fully God and irreducibly distinct, and God remains one.
The divine persons are differentiated not on the basis of any natural attributes but on the basis of their relations one to another, their hypostatic personal attributes. Personhood, in other words, is absolutely fundamental to the Christian understanding of being itself, of God himself.
God is personal in an absolute sense, never transcended by any impersonal or abstract category.
Deification can thus be understood as the complete and perfect fulfillment of our personal identity, never its erasure or destruction. In that fulfillment we do not set aside or escape our nature; it is gathered up and healed within us, as the epistle of Saint Maximus the Confessor on love so eloquently expresses it. The saints gather up the fragments of nature within themselves.
This is why, when the saints are touched and enveloped by the grace of deification, they not only experience communion with the transcendent God, but they likewise burn with intercession, an undying love for their neighbor and even for the whole world, all of created nature of which they are a part.
Deification is not individualistic or egotistical. It is the opposite. It makes us true persons in communion both with God and with our neighbor. It expands us, enlarging our heart in St. Paul's terminology to contain in a mystery, as far as we are able, our great God as well as the world that God created and came to save.
Saints, Liturgy, and the Life Hid in Christ
When we read the Synaxarion this morning, which recounted the life of Saint Benedict of Nursia, we heard how at the end of his life he had a vision of divine light in which he saw the whole world. St Gregory Palamas read and loved the life of St Benedict and used him as an example of what a deified life looks like: communion with God and, in that communion, an embrace of the whole world. So St Benedict encourages us to pursue this path.
The saints are the spiritual men and women who live out the deified life in a tangible, powerful, and salvific manner, not only for themselves but on behalf of all of us. The saint is a cosmic event, a super-cosmic event.
Saint Paul captures this experience—the saints’ being caught between communion with God and communion with neighbor—when he writes, "I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. Nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you." His love for God and his love for neighbor coexist with such intensity that his mortal frame is about ready to burst.
In our current condition, the saint says man cannot contain the fullness of grace. When grace comes in great measure, the saints forget the earth initially. They forget the earth from love of God. Yet this intensity of divine love, to the point of forgetting the earth, paradoxically gives birth in turn to love for the world.
"Should such a one," says Saint Silouan, "think of the world? In that state the love of God will constrain him to pray for the world even unto tears."
I've been trying to speak a little about the lofty heights of deification, far beyond my measure, because we need to have our goal and purpose always set before us. Saint Mark the Ascetic says quite pithily, "To journey without direction is wasted effort." We need to know what we are orienting our life towards, what we are trying to orbit around.
The deified life is the life hid with Christ in God. It is a life that bears all the fruits of the Spirit in abundance: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. It is life in accordance with the law of the Spirit, the law of liberty, the law of Christ, a law that transcends the narrow, legalistic sense of law. This life gives birth to spiritual men and women in the bosom of the Church, investing them with a world-transcending power to bridge apparently unbridgeable chasms and to bear the burdens of those in the depths of passion and despair with Christ-like love and mercy.
This is the mark of the spiritual man or woman. If we cannot attain this ourselves, let us at least make such spiritual people our friends—both the saints already departed and the saints who continue to labor upon the earth. Let us love the Church, which is the source of our deification; let us love her services, especially the Divine Liturgy, which we cannot tire of repeating.
On this point, Saint Gregory Palamas wrote in his confession of faith, "We embrace all the traditions of the Church, written and unwritten, and above all the most mystical and all sacred mystery and communion and assembly (or synaxis) of the Divine Liturgy, from which comes the perfection of the other mysteries."
So what if you cannot become a hesychast living in the desert? You can achieve the same goal if you make the Divine Liturgy the heart of your life, the sun around which your life orbits. Saint John of Kronstadt calls the Divine Liturgy "the life of the light of our souls," and he served daily Liturgy. You all have free access to that light as Orthodox Christians, which is nothing less than the divine light of deification. Approach it with deep reverence, with humility, confession and thanksgiving, with the fear of God, with faith and with love, and you will receive a foretaste, even here and now, of what all the saints keep telling us about the meaning of life, which is disclosed and made manifest in our deifying union with Christ our Lord.
May we all attend to this, beloved brothers and sisters, by the grace, mercy, and loving-kindness of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom is due all glory, honor and endless worship and praise.
Frequently asked
How is theosis different from becoming God by nature?
Theosis is sharing in God's uncreated life by grace, not acquiring the divine essence. Orthodox theology rejects becoming a god by nature or entering the Trinity as a new hypostasis. Saints remain distinct persons who receive and participate in divine energies; they are perfected, not ontologically transformed into the Creator.
What role do the sacraments and Divine Liturgy play in deification?
The sacraments, above all the Eucharist celebrated in the Divine Liturgy, are the ordinary means by which the Church bestows the grace of deification. Through chrismation, baptism, the Eucharist and continual prayer in the liturgy, believers receive the deifying energies of Christ and a foretaste of the divine life here and now.
How can laypeople pursue deification in everyday life?
Laypeople pursue theosis by keeping Christ's commandments, cultivating repentance and continual prayer, attending the Divine Liturgy and the sacraments, loving and learning from the saints, and exercising patience and charity in daily duties. Vocation and occupation are secondary; the primary task is fidelity to the law of the Spirit lived within the Church.
