Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Theosis: Raising Human Nature Above Its Primordial and Present States?

Continuing our discussion of perfection vs. free will in pre-Fall and post-Second Coming human nature, specifically in response to Jason's post below and in continuance to my previous post.

To begin, I would disagree with your statement that "God would not intentionally create something 'imperfect'. That God intentionally made man imperfect or as a 'work in progress' would not gain theological countenance by most Christians." Scripture is vague enough on the exact details behind the Eden metaphor that a wide range of interpretations exists. While the view that Adam was not created perfect might be the case in the various branches of Protestantism, it is at least slightly less clear in Catholicism and, as the bulk of this post will address, is definitely not the case in Eastern Orthodoxy.

To touch on Catholicism briefly -- my point with the Catechism quote was that, while it may not be the prevailing view of most Catholics today, the idea that human nature can be perfected beyond where it stood prior to the Fall is at least implicit in the thought of some of the Church Fathers. Revisiting the quotes in the passage I cited below, we find St. Leo commenting that "Christ's inexpressible grace gave us blessings better than those the demon's envy had taken away." In other words, the Cross won humanity back what we lost in the Fall and gained us something additional. The St. Thomas quote also seems to go down this road -- "There is nothing to prevent human nature's being raised up to something greater, even after sin."

Again, this is largely implicit and other Catholics certainly take the view that Adam represented primordial human perfection. But what is implicit in some Catholic writings is quite explicit in the Orthodox view of human nature, the Fall and the purpose of the Incarnation. For example, in Partakers of God (which is theoretically available online -- but the link is broken as I write this), contemporary Orthodox scholar Panayiotis Christou comments:

Perfection was not offered complete to him from the beginning...[this] would constitute coercion. But, rather, perfection was set before him as an objective to be attained...

Created nature has an inherent tendency and possibility of change because its very existence derived from a radical change, the emergence of being out of nonbeing. Primeval man lived freely and consciously for a period of unknown duration and walked on the road of spiritual development, strengthening his will and cultivating his spiritual faculties. He did not simply keep his nature intact, but constantly shaped it into an integral psychosomatic entity; and he did not allow himself to be dominated by the powers of irrational nature, the powers of time and space.

During this effort, there came a time when man...went astray and found himself off the road to perfection.


So, in the Orthodox view, God did not create man as a static, already perfect being. Rather, God created man as a being with the potential for perfection. In Orthodox thought, this potential for perfection goes beyond any hypothetical definition of perfect human nature and contains the possibility that man might achieve a divine form of perfection. This concept is called theosis, a Greek word that literally means "divinization" or "deification." Contrasting man's pre-Fall state with his potential, St. John Chrysotom wrote that "In the beginning of creation the Creator created man in the image of God, while now He has united man to God. Then he was given authority to rule over the fish and the animals. Now God has raised our new beginning above the heavens...man acquires immortality and is deified. Now, indeed, God and mankind have become one race."

To Western, especially Protestant, eyes this might look like blasphemy on the surface. Orthodox theologians, however, draw a distinction between God's essence and energies. Since God's essence is infinite, the process by which man becomes like God must also be of infinite duration and thus cannot ever result in a created being ontologically becoming a fully divine being. However, through the cultivation of a closer relationship with God, man can gradually absorb enough of God's energies to transcend his initial nature, gaining elements of God's perfection in addition to human perfection.

As with most people in the Catholic and Protestant traditions, many concepts in Orthodox theology are new and unfamiliar to me, including theosis. So, at this point, I will not attempt to argue in favor of theosis -- rather, I will simply provide an outline of how, if we assume it to be true, theosis could overcome the paradox that began this discussion.

If human perfection before the Fall was, indeed, an example of perfection and could not be raised to something higher while still being human, then we are faced with the fact that the highest possible state of human nature still contains the possibility of sin. Thus, while human nature prior to the Fall could be described as perfect in a human sense, it also includes free will and the possibility of sin. God's nature, however, could (among other things) be described as perfect in a divine sense, which includes free will but does not include the possibility of sin. While God has free will and the knowledge of how to sin, His divine perfection precludes the possibility that He would ever sin.

As an unending process by which redeemed human nature progresses towards divine nature, could theosis lead to a point where man is close enough to God's nature to lose the possibility of sin while maintaining free will? If so, this would resolve the question of how the New Heaven and the New Earth would differ from the pre-Fall world -- since the few scriptural descriptions of the New Heaven and the New Earth describe it as without sin, we could assume that theosis will have brought man to a point higher than his pre-Fall nature, making the possibility of another Fall nonexistent.

Unfortunately, this line of thought brings up a host of equally thorny issues. For example, does it have any actual meaning to say divine nature includes the impossibility of sin? To oversimplify in the interest of brevity, in the most popular definition among mainline American Protestants, it does, since sin is "being bad" or breaking a series of divinely ordained rules. To a lesser extent, this rule-oriented conception of sin is also the most prevalent view in Catholicism. Naturally, one can debate whether or not God is capable of breaking His own set of rules.

In Orthodoxy, on the other hand, sin is seen less in a legalistic sense and more as actions which create a gulf between the individual and God. Many Orthodox thinkers seem to equate sin with a broken relationship between man and God that can be healed, rather than as the breaking of a set of rules. In a way, we might view "sin" as a process opposite to the process of theosis -- man moving away from his potential divine nature rather than moving closer to God. If sin is a description of man's relationship with God, then it is meaningless to question whether or not God can sin, since naturally God cannot have a relationship with Himself or damage that relationship.

To conclude, the Orthodox tradition contains the idea that human nature can be raised to something higher than what it was prior to the Fall. If this is true, then the pre-Fall world and the New Heaven and the New Earth may be very different places in terms of the possibility of sin.

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