Theosis: The Eastern Parallel

Eastern Orthodox theology uses the word theosis — deification, divinization — to describe the goal of human existence. The human soul is made to participate in the divine life, to be genuinely transformed by union with God, to become by grace what God is by nature. This sounds alarming to Protestant ears shaped by a sharp Creator-soul distinction, but the Eastern tradition is not claiming that the soul becomes God in the sense of losing its human nature and absorbing into the divine essence.

The theologian who gave the Eastern tradition its most precise philosophical vocabulary for this was Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth-century monk from Mount Athos who was defending the practice of hesychasm — contemplative prayer aimed at the direct experience of God — against the charge that such experience was impossible given God's incomprehensibility.

Palamas made a distinction that the tradition has used ever since: the distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. God's essence is absolutely transcendent, unknowable, unapproachable by any finite soul. No one participates in what God is in His innermost being. The asymptote on the essence side never closes. But God's energies — the real activities and self-communications by which God genuinely acts in and toward creation, what might be called the outward radiance of the divine life — these the soul genuinely and really participates in. The soul does not absorb into God. The soul is genuinely transformed by its real participation in what God communicates of Himself.

This is the philosophical expression of the asymptote. The essence side of the line never closes. We remain human. But the distance on the energies side is not a distance of absence. It is a distance of endless discovery — the soul moving forever into the inexhaustible self-giving of God, always receiving more, never reaching the bottom of what there is to receive, because the giver is infinite and the giving does not stop.

The Eastern tradition speaks of theosis as beginning in this life and continuing beyond biological death. In this it is closer to the framework of this book than the Western purgatorial model. The continuation is not the soul working to purify itself. It is the soul continuing to receive what God has been giving since the moment of new birth — moving deeper into the relational knowing of John 17:3, discovering in the absence of the fog of mortality that the knowing is richer than it had appeared from inside time.

Inexhaustible giving into inexhaustible receiving, forever. That is the asymptote from the inside. That is what the human soul is made for. That is what poverty of spirit positions us to inhabit.