Eastern Orthodox spirituality: Union with God in Theosis

Theology Today, Apr 1999 by Wesche, Kenneth Paul

By being instructed in the knowledge of the true God you shall henceforth be a student of God, a co-heir with Christ, for you have become God, you have been made divine, having been begotten of immortality. This is the meaning of the proverb, "Know thyself." It means, learn the process of being made divine. For the process of coming to know yourself is contingent upon the knowledge that comes in the process of receiving the divine call.30

THEOSIS IN ITS ESCHATOLOGICAL AND EVANGELICAL CHARACTER

In the space I have left, I will briefly set forth the vision of theosis in its eschatological and missiological character. It should not be that difficult to see how the mystagogical vision of theosis, in which the baptized "put on Christ" and are united to his death and are made to live "in" Christ as Christ is made to live "in" them, when integrated with the notion of the eschaton, would translate into a philosophical model of "being" as a mystery of communion in ecstasis. The eschatological vision sees the eschaton-the Kingdom of Heaven-breaking into history and history being taken up into the eschaton outside of time-space to become one with the Kingdom of Heaven. When eschatology is translated into philosophy, the mystagogical vision of theosis presents the self of the baptized as itself a mystery of ecstatic movement in which the self is truly itself when it moves outside of itself in love to be taken up into the divine self of Christ, at the same time that the self of Christ comes out of himself in the love of the Father to give himself to the baptized.

Identifying the human soul as the bride and mother of Christ, yet seeing the baptized as a child born of the union between Christ and the soul, implicitly sets forth a distinction between the soul as the universal prima materia or as the church, and the self as the particular child of the soul. The classical philosophical distinction between the universal and the particular is translated into Eastern Orthodox theology's distinction between "nature" and the "hypostasis." Nature is the universal or the essence, the hypostasis is the particular, a distinction that is fundamental for Orthodox theology. "Nature," in keeping with the eschatological character of Eastern Orthodox mystagogy, and following the meaning of the Greek physis that it translates, is defined in its "essence" as "movement." Movement implies a beginning and an end, or a telos, therefore a purpose, so that human being in its very nature as movement is teleological or purposive. Being is the purposive movement of nature (and here one could argue whether this is a Christian translation of Plotinus, or if Plotinus and Christian theology are each one expressing in their own way the same archetypal reality) that yearns to be perfected in a consummating union with the Logos, its origin, who "became flesh and dwelt among us." The purposeful movement of nature that constitutes its being is therefore an ecstatic movement of love in which the creature strives to transcend itself and to unite with the uncreated, just as the uncreated in love has moved outside of itself to unite with the creature.