Theosis

THEOSIS: PARTAKERS OF DIVINITY WITH GOD
PROF. M. M. NINAN
"Consider if the other things which Christ is said to be in a unity admit of being multiplied in the same way
and spoken of in the plural. For example, Christ is our life as the Saviour Himself says, 'I am the way and the
truth and the life.' ... for it is on account of Christ who is life in every one that there are many lives. This,
perhaps, is also the key to the passage, 'If ye seek a proof of the Christ that speaketh in me.' For Christ is
found in every saint, and so from the one Christ there come to be many Christs, imitators of Him and formed
after Him who is the image of God; whence God says through the prophet, 'Touch not my Christs.'"
(Origen. "Commentary on John 6: 3." Ante-Nicene Fathers. Ed. Alexander Roberts. Vol. 9. New York: S. Scribner's Sons, 1899. 353.
Print.)
"Now, we have presented these comments that we may flee being men with all our strength, and hasten to
become 'gods,' since, indeed, insofar as we are men, we are liars, just as also the father of the lie is a liar."
(Origen. "Commentary on John 20: 266." Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Books 13-32. Trans. Ronald E. Heine.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1993. 261. Print.)
"... ascended above all material things, that it may scrupulously contemplate God, [the mind] is made divine
by what it contemplates. We must say that this is what is meant when it is said that the face of the one who
contemplated God, conversed with him, and spent time with such a vision, was glorified. Consequently, the
figurative meaning of the glorification of Moses' face is that his mind was made godlike. It is in this same
sense that the Apostle said, 'But we all, beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled face are transformed
into the same image.'"
(Origen. "Commentary on John 32: 338-340." Commentary on the Gospel According to John, Books 13-32. Trans. Ronald E. Heine.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1993. 406. Print.)
"I beseech you, therefore, be transformed. Resolve to know that in you there is a capacity to be
transformed." The goal of the Christian life, according to Origen, is to see God face to face, and in so doing,
to be deified. The means to deification is by participation in divinity: that is, by contemplation of God in the
mirror of the soul which increasingly appropriates divine being. Thus "...nourished by God the Word, who
was in the beginning with God (cf. Jn. 1:1), we may be made divine" (Origen, Treatise on Prayer, xxvii.13).
Human deification is possible, according to Origen, because of God's humanization in Christ. In the descent
of divinity into the body of humanity, an historic mutation occurred - "human and divine began to be woven
together, so that by prolonged fellowship with divinity, human nature might become divine" (Origen, Contra
Celsum, 3.28). As the human soul partakes of divinity, the soul ascends to God in stages, purified in wisdom
and perfected in love. Eventually the soul passes through the "flaming sword" of the cherubim guarding
access to the Tree of Life, and returns to the Paradise of God. Origen's platonic vision is one of gradual
unification with God - the soul possessed and progressively perfected in time until all is reconciled, time is no
more, and "God is all in all" (On First Principles, XXXVI).
77