THEOSIS - DEIFICATION - THE SUBLIME CALLING OF HUMANITY

"God became Man so that men might become gods." --- St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation

"...while God's inner essence is forever beyond our comprehension, His energies, grace, life and power fill the whole universe, and are directly accessible to us...When Orthodox [Christians] speak of the divine energies, they do not mean by this an emanation from God, an intermediary between God and man, or a thing or gift that God bestows. On the contrary, the energies are God Himself in His activity and self-manifestation. When a man knows or participates in the divine energies, he truly knows or particpates in God Himself, so far as this is possible for a created being...we are able to affirm the possibility of a direct or mystical union betweeen man and God - what the Greek Fathers term the theosis of man, his deification...There is union, but not fusion or confusion. Although oned with the divine, man still remains man; he is not swallowed up or annihilated, but between him and God there continues to exist an I- Thou relationship of person to person."

+Bishop Kallistos Ware from The Orthodox Way (1995-St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York)

"Divinization is the state of man's total transformation, effected by the Holy Spirit, when man observes the commandments of God, acquires the evangelical virtues and shares in the sufferings of Christ. The Holy Spirit then gives man a divine intelligence and incorruptibility. Man does not receive a new soul, but the Holy Spirit unites essentially with the whole man, body and soul. He makes of him a son of God, a god by adoption, though man does not cease being a man, a simple creature, even when he clearly sees the Father. He may be called man and god at the same time."

(Abp. Basil Krivocheine, St. Symeon the New Theologian (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1986), p. 389.)

G. I. Mantzaridis of the University of Thessaloniki writes in a recent work that deification is God's greatest gift to man and the ultimate goal of human existence.

It is that which from the beginning has constituted the innermost longing of man's existence. Adam, in attempting to appropriate it by transgressing God's command, failed, and in place of deification, met with corruption and death. The love of God, however, through His