29.

 Give the definition of theosis.

            Theosis is the process of deification or divinization, whereby Christians become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). St. Dionysius the Aeropagite states in his writings that the spiritual life has three stages: purification, illumination, and perfection. This explanation is likewise given by all the Holy Fathers of the Church. Moreover, as Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos goes on to add, these stages are not to be conceived as water-tight compartments, but as degrees of participation in the grace of God.

            The Orthodox Church teaches that to become a god is the final goal at which every Christian must aim. St. Basil the Great expressed this idea when he described man as a creature who has received the order to become a god, and St. Seraphim of Sarov likewise taught of the necessity of theosis when he explained that the goal of each Christian is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. Also, as a prior chapter noted, St. Athanasius stated that God became man that man might become god.

            In speaking of theosis, it is necessary to refer back to the distinction between the essence and energies of God (vide chapter 8 answer 4). With this difference in mind, Vladimir Lossky explains that the union to which Christians are called is neither hypostatic (as in the case of the human nature of Christ), nor is it substantial (as in that of the three divine Persons). Instead, it is a union with God in His energies, or union by grace, making people able to participate in the divine nature, without their essence becoming thereby the essence of God [Cf. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 85 ff]. Orthodoxy understands that grace is the very energies of God Himself. Through the ministry of the Holy Spirit — a ministry that involves both general and special activities — these energies are mediated to mankind.

            In Orthodox America, a periodical of Orthodox traditionalism, the editor Mary Mansur explains that man became ill when the nous (what the Holy Fathers call the eye of the soul) became darkened by sin. It was overcome by reason and became subject to the passions, and the result was the disruption of the whole inner functioning of the soul, she explains. As Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos adds:

Man's basic problem is to learn to see his internal malady, which is specifically the captivity and darkness of the nous.... If we ignore our inner sickness, our spiritual life ends up in an empty moralism, in a superficiality [“From the Bookshelf: The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition,” Orthodox America, vol. 18, no. 6, 2000, p. 11].

And that is the point where Western theology is. The metropolitan also states that when we understand Orthodoxy as a therapeutic method, it becomes clear that the:

... Mysteries and all the ascetic tradition of the Church are meant to lead us where Adam was before the fall — that is, to the illumination of the nous, and from there to divinization, which is man's original destination [Ibid].

Deification (theosis) should be the goal for all Christians. As the quotes from Scriptures and the Fathers in this work show, there is a solid biblico-patristic basis for the tradition of this teaching.