BY GIORGIOS

MANTZARIDIS
TRANSLATED BY
JAMES L. KELLEY
ROMANITY PRESS
2017
SelfDeification and Deification in
Christ According to the Eastern
Orthodox Tradition[1]
By Georgios Mantzaridis
Translated by James L. Kelley

ROMANITY PRESS NORMAN, OK 2017

 In the Politics, Aristotle speaks of man's insatiability and the
boundlessness of his wants: The nature of desire is to be infinite, and most
men live to be satiated.[2] The world as a whole is very ill-suited for
satisfying mans wishes. This is even more apparent today as man extends his
conquests over the whole planet and even beyond it without feeling happier
or more fulfilled. Indeed, today we see that this accumulation of conquests
only adds to mans thirst to conquer. The satisfaction of his desires actually
intensifies man's greed.
This phenomenon may seem paradoxical, if viewed from the vantage
point of secular anthropology, but for Christian anthropology the situation is
not only conceivable but is even natural. In Christian teaching man is created
in the image and likeness of God, which means the distinctive marks of
divinityinfinity, perfection, immortality, etc.that characterize the
uncreated and transcendent God are present also in man, though he is both
created and limited. Therefore, the paradox is not centered in the desires and
aspirations of man, but rather constitutes his very nature and structure. It is
not that man per s aspires to the infinite, the perfect, the eternal, but rather
that, though man is created and thus perishable, he cannot fulfill the project
for which he was created without being guided to what is beyond the limited
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and the mutable; that is, without being deified.
Man innately desires deification. It is by following this aspiration that
man fulfills his task, achieves the purpose of his existence. As St. Maximos
the Confessor observes, God made us to participate in the divine nature and
its eternity and to become like unto Him through deification by grace.[3] Yet
the desire to become a god can also destroy man by turning him to the
perverse and the demonic. Indeed, it is this desire that led to mans original
fall. It is, in fact, the basis of every human act that sanctions and perpetuates
the fall. In the Doxastikon (Glory hymn) of Lauds of the Feast of the
Annunciation, the Orthodox hymnographer writes: Adam was led astray,
and desiring to become a god he could not. It is God who became man in
order to make Adam a god.
Man strove to be deified but was misled, because he tried to reach his
goal without God. He wanted to be the author and not the receiver of his
deification. But what man did not achieve through renouncing God, God
gave him through His Incarnation. God became man to deify man. For he
himself was made a man so that we could be deified.[4] The Body of Christ
as the Body of the Incarnate Word is the point of contact between God and
man that opens the way to deification. St. Athanasius the Great expressed this
in a concise manner when he wrote, While after the fall of Adam all have
been drawn away to their ruin, the first to be saved and deified is the flesh of
Christ, as the body of the Incarnate Word. So much so that, continues St.
Athanasius, being consubstantial with him we are saved by him, that is, the
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Lord leads us to the Kingdom of heaven and also to His Father.[5]
It is through the deification of Christs human nature that the first
fruits of our nature are deified and a new root created that is capable of
transmitting life and immortality to all of the branches. Each of the faithful
who are engrafted participates in the grace and the life of God. What created
being could receive verily all the power of the infinitely powerful Spirit apart
from one born in the womb of a Virgin, since it was the Holy Spirit who was
present, and the power of the Most High that overshadowed him? That is
why he received all the fullness of the Deity; as for us, we all receive from
his fullness.[6] Given that Christ has received from his Mother the Virgin
Mary His human nature, the Virgin is at the same time the mother of all men
who are members of the Body of Christ. In this way men commune with
God and reach deification in Christ as children of the Virgin Mary. It is
because of this that Saint Gregory Palamas presents the Virgin as the model
for the ascent of the Christian on the path of deification.[7]
Christ is not only the author of the path of deification, but is also mans
guide along it. The true path of deification is shown forth in the asceticism of
Christ, which culminated in His humble death on the Cross, which was in
accordance with the glory of God the Father. Man as created from nothing is
called to recognize the insufficiency of his own starting point in order to
worship God as the personal being who renounced all and who took nothing
for himself. Because he is a personal being and possesses nothing on his own,
man can receive and possess Gods own immanence, which is his archetype.
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In offering himself to Christ, man is converted to a mode of existence that is
consonant with the life of Christ.
Thus, the deification of man presupposes the mortification of man's
egocentrism. Insofar as man renounces himself for the sake of Christ[8],
insofar as he combats his own will in order to serve the will of God and
mortifies his self-love for in order to love God and neighbor, man contributes
to his own deification. He works to transfigure his innermost core, a process
that can be realized only in the Body of Christ, that is to say, in the Church by
the grace of the Holy Spirit. In this way the Christian accepts and vanquishes
death in Christ. What begins as obligatory in man becomes voluntary, and
nature is suspended by his free choice in dying willingly to the world.[9] A
staretz, who shortly before his death was asked if he wanted to die, replied: I
have not yet learned humility.[10] He realized that he did not yet possess the
ineffable humility of Christ. Perfection in humility is perfection in facing
deaththis is deification in Christ. All need to pass through the mystery of
death in order to achieve a more total likeness to Christ. It is through this
threshold, of which we are still ignorant, that our God and our Father calls us
into the realm of the unwaning Day.[11]
The deification of the selfish man is the opposite of deification in
Christ. While the former seems to be based upon humility and ascesis, in
reality it is rooted in self-sufficiency and self-exaltation. It is a deification of
natural forces and their interrelationsof the capacities of that man believes
he has generated through his own moral and spiritual evolution. But man can-
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not grant himself anything that does not originate with himself. Man cannot
offer up to himself that which surpasses his own nature! Man is created and
thus perishable. This is why the deification he seeks outside of God operates
within the limits set by death and is shown to be a lie by death. Yet it is this
deification that man generally prefers because it does not require one to
renounce the world and it seems to say yes to life.
Deification, defined in the writings of St. Dionysius the Areopagite as
assimilation and union with God as far as is possible,[12] is a gift from
uncreated God to created man. As St. Maximos the Confessor wrote, we
experience it by grace, but we do not cause our own deification, because it
surpasses nature; in truth, we do not have by nature the power to receive
deification,[13] and no creature by its own nature can create its own
deification.[14] The gift of deification is accessible to man because God has
come, in Christ, as a created man in the world and offered up His Body,
which Body is the Church. The work of Christ is the work of the Holy
Trinity; as God is One-in-Three, so is the work of the Holy Trinity one-from-
Three. In Christ man is recapitulated by God and led to the glory of His
Kingdom. This is revealed throughout the life of Christ, especially His
Transfiguration and His Ascension.
The Transfiguration of Christ occupies a central place in Orthodox
theology and worship. Its correct interpretation is crucial to an accurate
understanding of the Orthodox teaching on deification. According to the
Orthodox tradition, the Transfiguration was not a transitory change in the per-
5
son of Christ, nor was it the appearance of a particular radiation which had
not existed beforerather, the Transfiguration was the capacity that was
granted to the apostles to see, however partially, the natural glory of the
divinity of Christ that existed from the beginning in His divine-human
Person. St. John of Damascus wrote: He was transfigured, not receiving
something that he did not have, but revealing Himself to the disciples as he
truly was, opening their eyes and making the blind to see.[15]
On the other hand, it is by the Ascension of Christ that the work of the
divine economy and deification of man is fully realized. The Ascension of
Christ, as in His whole earthly life, does not affect just the individual, but
rather manifests the specificity and destiny of renewed man: What he
became, the Lord became for us and the life he lived, he lived out for us
for us He was raised and for us He ascended to heaven, preparing our own
resurrection and ascension to the aeons and to eternity.[16] The Ascension
of Christ liberates human nature from bondage to necessity and elevates it to
the glory of God the Father by the grace of the Holy Spirit: God raised us up
with Christ so that our sins may die He is resurrected us, and we are
assigned a place in heaven in Jesus Christ.[17]
The writings of the Church Fathers teach that Christ is the author and
the recapitulator of creation: Everything has been created by him and for
him.[18] Analyzing this passage, St. Nicholas Cavasilas remarks: Indeed
human nature has been constituted from the beginning in prevision of the
new man; it is also in light of the new man that the mind and desire were
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made; we have intellect that we may know Christ, desire that we may run to
Him, we have been granted memory in order to be mindful of Him, because
He is the archetype of our creation. Indeed it is not the old Adam that is the
model of the new, but the new Adam that is the model for the old.[19]
Undoubtedly, the fulfillment of both man and cosmos resides in Christ.
All human striving is Christological in the final analysis, despite differences
and variations, despite failures and perversions. Man seeks after Christ with
both reason and will, with both memory and imagination. But, like Adam,
man goes astray when he tries to realize his task of true existence by
following the pattern of the first man who fell. The result is a perversion of
the fulfillment for which man truly longs. Mans realization, which is
identified with deification, is not possible without Christ the Godman.
However, to be fulfilled in Christ, man must contribute his own faith
and his own effort. Man is called to offer himself to Christ and to cooperate
with divine grace so that his own moral and spiritual perfection can be
achieved. Without these preconditions, the deification of man would not be
possible. If self-deification is the cause of sin for the man without Christ, the
cause of sin for the Christian has been and continues to be the failure to
cooperate with the deifying grace of the Holy Spirit that is offered by God in
Christ. And though the man who sins without having heard about Christ and
His Church may try to excuse himself because he reaches for something
higher than do the others around him, the Christian feels the full weight and
the tragic reality of his own sin all the more keenly because the sublimity that
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sin promises to deliver is in fact unattainable.
The tradition of the Church distinguishes three stages in the progression
toward spiritual perfection: a) purification, b) illumination, and c) deification.
In the first stage the faithful fight to purify their souls from passions. In the
second stage the minds of the faithful perceive the logoi of beings, which
lead to the Word. The third stage is the mystical union of the faithful with
God, that is to say deification.[20] The distinction between the three stages
must not be understood in a mechanical manner, but rather as an icon of
mans progress in the life in Christ. Besides, by the grace of God, one man
can arrive instantly at a particular stage to which others fail to attain after
many protracted struggles. This is of particular importance to the faithful, for
to become the receptacle of divine grace is to strive relentlessly for it.
Divine grace is not available to the faithful as a created gift. The
uncreated God establishes a personal relationship with man, who participates
in the uncreated grace of His Spirit. This does not mean that the grace of the
Holy Spirit can be possessed in the manner of some material object in the
world or some abstraction in the mind. No, the grace of the Holy Spirit can
be safeguarded only by man maintaining communion with the Triune God.
Man communes with uncreated divine grace; he is not a passive receiver of
divine gifts. By participating in the uncreated grace of the Holy Spirit and
living as a member of the ecclesial Body of Christ, man remains in
communion with the personal God-in-Trinity and with his fellow men. This
fact is reflected naturally in the daily life of the faithful. And insofar as this
8
life in Christ and His Body is realized, the truth and authenticity of the life of
the faithful shines forth.
Certainly the Spirit is everywhere present and not remote from anyone.
But men subject to sin stray from the Spirit of God by their conduct: For sin
is movement away from God, not in terms of place but rather mode of
existence.[21] To manifest the power of the Holy Spirit, it is essential that
moral purity be guarded. For the Holy Spirit is present to all, observes St.
Basil the Great, but to those who are purified of passions, He reveals His
own power; His power is most abundantly received by those who are grieved
over the stains of their sins.[22] And further: An unregulated life is unfit
for receiving divine energy.[23] Moral impurity obscures man and renders
him a stranger to the grace of the Holy Spirit.[24] That is why virtue is an
indispensable condition of the spiritual life. Without virtue man cannot
become a receptacle of the Holy Spirit: That is why He requires that we
fight valiantly for the gift of grace, for the gift of grace is granted in the same
measure that one shares in the travails of those who suffer; it is indeed grace
that gives eternal life and unspeakable joy in the heavens, and it is the love of
suffering for faith that renders one worthy to receive the gifts of grace and
joy.[25]
Through its revelation to man, the grace of the Holy Spirit raises to
perfection mans love for God and neighbor. It is characteristic of the patristic
tradition that the three fundamental Christian virtuesfaith, hope and love
are related to the three stages of progress in the spiritual life, respectively.
9
Thus faith and hope are related to the first two stages, while love is related to
the third, that of deification.[26] Nothing makes man more receptive to the
grace of deification than love. And inversely the clear evidence of the
presence of deifying grace in man is the plentitude of his love, which is
manifested as love of neighbor.[27]
God, whose life imbues man with deification, is not one individual, but
three persons in communion. And the image of God, its trace in man, is not
limited to the latter as an individual, but extends to all human nature and
covers all social and interpersonal intercourse. So, deification is not a feat or
a prerogative of the individual, but rather is an ecclesial event. Deification is
the result of the efforts of the faithful toward perfection as members of the
Body of Christ, that is to say the Church, and for this reason it is referred to
as the communion of deification.[28]
The communion of deification is not a system of principles nor is it an
institutionit is not a string of objective values, nor is it something that can
be objectified. The communion of deification is a communion of persons.
And, since it is a communion of persons, it is a communion of love and of
liberty, a communion of giving and of utter wholeness in the divine image
and with the participation of the Trinitarian God. The person is not the
opposite of a group and the group is not subordinated to the person. The fact
of the gift does not diminish its fullness, because such wholeness is a
constitutive element of the gift. It is a fullness that is not a matter of quantity,
for it is not a unity that can be measured. The uniqueness is in the multiplicity
10
and the multiplicity is in the uniqueness.
The consubstantial and indivisible Trinity gathers up man in divine
glory out of love and philanthropy. Theophilus of Antioch lined it out
succinctly: God, Word, Wisdom, Man.[29] In this divine-human
communion there is a fundamental difference, though, for in the final analysis
God and man are separate, that is to say there is a difference between the
created and the uncreated that is never abolished. God is and remains
uncreated. But the uncreated God, who assumes and deifies the created
human nature in Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit, assumes and deifies
the entire human person by His own uncreated grace in the communion of
deification. Also, all that has been given to the human nature in Christ is
transmitted to all human persons that receive Christ and live as members of
His Body. Man becomes like unto Christ. But while Christ is God by
nature and man according to goodness, man remains man by nature and
becomes god by grace.[30]
The deification of man, which occurs in the Church as the communion
of deification, has an eschatological character. And the institutions of the
Church, as St. Basil the Great remarked, instruct the faithful to constantly
turn away from the spirit of the present age and to turn toward the
future.[31] The fullness of deification is manifested by the passage from
the grace of faith to the grace that is seen,[32] so that God is encountered
face to face.[33] But already during the grace of faith period, which is
the phase of this present life, the faithful have the experience of grace by
11
seeing. As St. John of Damascus writes, for we are now children of God
and what we will be has not yet been made manifest. We know that when this
time comes we shall be like Him, and we shall see Him as He is.[34]
The life in Christ is experiential. The notion that the faithful may during
the present life have the grace of the Holy Spirit without knowledge or
unwittingly is characterized by St. Symeon the New Theologian as
faithlessness and blasphemy. And as he points out, if the gifts of the Holy
Spirit are realized in us without our knowledge, without our feeling
anything, it is obvious that we have no consciousness of the eternal life that
flows into and remains within us, and we do not contemplate the light of the
Holy Spirit, but on the contrary, we remain dead, blind and insensible, both at
the beginning and at present. Therefore, vain is our hope and useless our toil,
since we live in death and are not conscious of life eternal.
The glory of God is experienced in this life, but it presupposes the
purity of the human heart: The pure in heart shall see God, Christ said.[35]
Doubtless, when purity is attained, vision follows. If, indeed, this purity
is achieved in the here and now, then the vision of it is found here and now,
but if you say that the vision is only attained after death, it follows that
purification happens only in the hereafter, and so we will never attain to
vision of God, since we will not, after death, be able to pursue
purification.[36] The man who experiences the glory of God is transfigured.
He becomes wholly Godlike. The uncreated God lives and acts in the created
nature of man. Also, as St. Gregory Palamas noted, In Paul Christ lives and
12
speaks, although it is Paul who lives and speaks; in the same way Peter works
death and gives life, although God and God alone gives life and takes it
away.[37] It follows that the deified man does not boast of his virtues and
his good works. Each of his good deeds and virtues is ultimately the result of
divine grace that acts in him.[38]
Deified man becomes the light of the world.[39] He receives and
bestows light. He has no self-generated light, and so he receives light. He is
not its source, but is the receptor and the transmitter of the light. Without
ceasing to be a created man, he receives by grace all that the uncreated God
possesses.[40] Man thus progresses toward unlimited and infinite perfection.
Since God is infinite, mans potential evolution is also endless.[41] As friend
of God and god by grace, man is in a sense free from the limits of space and
time. He becomes without beginning and without end, no longer leading a
time-bound life and no more agitated by lifes vicissitudes, but rather leading
an eternal, divine life, which does not crossed over by death, because within
it lives the Word.[42] Thus the deification of man, initiated by the
deification of the human nature of Christ, is offered as a gift to each human
person. This gift is revealed by the grace of the Holy Spirit within the course
of the present life and is manifested in its fullness in the future life. The
individual does not become an arithmetical unit in order to manifest the
whole, but rather he or she is revealed as unique and irreplaceable. In the
individual, the fullness is offered and is manifested. It is the mystery and the
gift of the Trinitarian God: All of mine are yours, and yours are mine
13
And the glory that you gave me I have given them, that they may be one,
even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be made perfect
in one.[43]
Man's attempt at self-deification points in a direction diametrically
opposed to deification in Christ. Self-deification, however, is the tendency of
the majority of men. The self-deified do not seek any kind of gift, but rather
wish for some elusive idea that sums up all possible human attainments.
Persons are used as arithmetical units for the manifestation of the whole. And
with this apotheosis of the whole, the freedom and uniqueness of the person
disappears. Indeed, self-deification is the philosophy of the superman and it
is identical with the various types of totalitarianism under which our
civilization has found itself chained.
Mans colossal quest for self-deification has today reached an impasse.
By alienating the human person and transforming him into a mere number
and a nameless cog in a complex, impersonal and uncontrollable machine,
the drive for self-deification leads the world toward alienation and
annihilation. The idol to which man has sacrificed his personhood purposes
to devour the entire human race. Faced with this terrible impasse, the Church
vigorously reiterates, in an unwavering manner, its eternal teaching of the
deification of man in Christ. Deification is not accomplished by annihilating
the person; deification is brought about by man's total realization as the
image of God, by which is revealed infinite and unlimited truth, without
beginning and without end, of the life and of the being of God. And this
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deification is always realized with the other members of the Church, which is
truly the Body of Christ and the icon of the Holy Trinity.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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NOTES

[1] Originally published as LA DIFICATION DE LHOMME, Contacts

40 (1988): 6-18.
[2] Aristotle, Politics II, 1267 B, 3-5.
[3] Chapitres divers 1.42, PG 90.1193 D.
[4] St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation 54.3, PG 25, 192 B.
[5] Against the Arians, 2.61, PG 26.277 B.
[6] St. Gregory Palamas, Defense of the Holy Hesychasts 3.1.34, trans. J.
Meyendorff, Paris 1959, p. 624. Cf. Colossians 2.9 and John 1.16.
[7] Cf. Phil. 11.9, Ephesians 1.21.
[8] Cf. Matthew 10.39; Luke 14.26.
[9] St. Maximos the Confessor, On the Our Father, PG 90.904 A.
[10] Cf. Archimandrite Spohrony, Voir Dieu tel quil est, Geneva, 1984, p. 82.
[11] Ibid., p. 49.
[12] St. Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1.3, PG
3.376 A.
[13] St. Maximos the Confessor, Chapitres Divers 1.55, PG 90.1209 C.
[14] Chapitres Divers 1.74, PG 90.1212 A.
[15] Homily On the Transfiguration 12, PG 96.564 C.
[16] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 21, PG 151.277 AB.
16
[17] Ephesians 1.5-6.
[18] Colossians 1.16.
[19] The Life in Christ 6, PG 150.680 AB.
[20] For more details on the stages of progression toward spiritual perfection,
cf. K. Rahner, ber das Problem des Stufeniveges zur christlichen
Vollendung, in Schriften zur Theologie, tome 2. Einsiedeln, 1956, pp. 11-34.
[21] St. Photios the Great, A Amphilique 170, PG 101.865 A.
[22] St. Basil the Great, Commentary on Isaiah, preface 3, PG 30, 121 C.
[23] Idem., PG 30, 124 A.
[24] Indeed the energy, grave and divine power present everywhere is
imparticipable and is as absent for those who by their impurity are unfit to
receive the light. St. Gregory Palamas, Against Akindynos 5.27.118, ed. P.
Chrestou, Gregory Palamas, vol. 3, p. 37.
[25] St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Plan of God, ed. W. Jaeger, vol. 8.1, p. 46.
[26] Cf. St. Maximos the Confessor, Chapitres divers 5.93, PG 90, 1388 CD.
[27] St. Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogy 24, PG 91, 713 A.
[28] Cf. St. Gregory Palamas, Apodictic Treatise 2.78, Works, vol. 1, p. 149.
[29] A Autolycus 2.15.
[30] St. Symeon the New Theologian, Ethical Treatises 10.731-33, ed. J.
Darrouz, Sources Chrtiennes vol. 129, p. 313.
[31] On the Holy Spirit 66, PG 32, 192 C.
[32] St. Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogy 24, PG 91, 713 A.
[33] I Cor. 13.12.
17
[34] I John 3.2.
[35] Matthew 5.8.
[36] St. Symeon the New Theologian, Ethical Treatises 5.115-25, p. 89.
[37] On the Divine and Deifying Communion 20, Works, vol. 2, p.154.
[38] Any virtue we possess is found in us because God works it in us. St.
Gregory Palamas, Homily 33, PG 151.416 D.
[39] Matthew 5.14.
[40] All that belongs to God belongs also to deified man by grace without
him being one with Gods essence. St. Maximos the Confessor, Questions to
Thalassios 61, Commentary 16, PG 90.44 D.
[41] Cf. St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 404.44 A.
[42] St. Maximos the Confessor, Ambigua, PG 91.1144 C.
[43] John 17.10, 22-23.

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