APPENDIX C

The Doctrine Of Deification

The conception of salvation as the acquisition by man of Divine attributes is common to many forms of religious thought. It was widely diffused in the Roman Empire at the time of the Christian revelation, and was steadily growing in importance during the first centuries of our era. The Orphic Mysteries had long taught the doctrine. On tombstones erected by members of the Orphic brotherhoods we find such inscriptions as these: "Happy and blessed one! Thou shalt be a god instead of a mortal" ([Greek: olbie kai makariste theos d' esê anti brotoio]); "Thou art a god instead of a wretched man" ([Greek: theos ei eleeinou ex anthrôpou]). It has indeed been said that "deification was the idea of salvation taught in the Mysteries" (Harnack).

To modern ears the word "deification" sounds not only strange, but arrogant and shocking. The Western consciousness has always tended to emphasise the distinctness of individuality, and has been suspicious of anything that looks like juggling with the rights of persons, human or Divine. This is especially true of thought in the Latin countries. Deus has never been a fluid concept like [Greek: theos]. St. Augustine no doubt gives us the current Alexandrian philosophy in a Latin dress; but this part of his Platonism never became acclimatised in the Latin-speaking countries. The Teutonic genius is in this matter more in sympathy with the Greek; but we are Westerns, while the later "Greeks" were half Orientals, and there is much in their habits of thought which is strange and unintelligible to us. Take, for instance, the apotheosis of the emperors. This was a genuinely Eastern mode of homage, which to the true European remained either profane or ridiculous. But Vespasian's last joke, "Voe! puto Deus fio!" would not sound comic in Greek. The associations of the word [Greek: theos] were not sufficiently venerable to make the idea of deification ([Greek: theopoiêsis]) grotesque. We find, as we should expect, that this vulgarisation of the word affected even Christians in the Greek-speaking countries. Not only were the "barbarous people" of Galatia and Malta ready to find "theophanies" in the visits of apostles, or any other strangers who seemed to have unusual powers, but the philosophers (except the "godless Epicureans") agreed in calling the highest faculty of the soul Divine, and in speaking of "the God who dwells within us." There is a remarkable passage of Origen (quoted by Harnack) which shows how elastic the word [Greek: theos] was in the current dialect of the educated. "In another sense God is said to be an immortal, rational, moral Being. In this sense every gentle ([Greek: asteia]) soul is God. But God is otherwise defined as the self-existing immortal Being. In this sense the souls that are enclosed in wise men are not gods." Clement, too, speaks of the soul as "training itself to be God." Even more remarkable than such language (of which many other examples might be given) is the frequently recurring accusation that bishops, teachers, martyrs, philosophers, etc., are venerated with Divine or semi-Divine honours. These charges are brought by Christians against pagans, by pagans against Christians, and by rival Christians against each other. Even the Epicureans habitually spoke of their founder Epicurus as "a god." If we try to analyse the concept of [Greek: theos], thus loosely and widely used, we find that the prominent idea was that exemption from the doom of death was the prerogative of a Divine Being (cf. 1 Tim. vi. 16, "Who only hath immortality"), and that therefore the gift of immortality is itself a deification. This notion is distinctly adopted by several Christian writers. Theophilus says (ad Autol. ii. 27) "that man, by keeping the commandments of God, may receive from him immortality as a reward ([Greek: misthon]), and become God." And Clement (Strom. v. 10. 63) says, "To be imperishable ([Greek: to mê phtheiresthai]) is to share in Divinity." To the same effect Hippolytus (Philos. x. 34) says, "Thy body shall be immortal and incorruptible as well as thy soul. For thou hast become God. All the things that follow upon the Divine nature God has promised to supply to thee, for thou wast deified in being born to immortality." With regard to later times, Harnack says that "after Theophilus, Irenæus, Hippolytus, and Origen, the idea of deification is found in all the Fathers of the ancient Church, and that in a primary position. We have it in Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Apollinaris, Ephraem Syrus, Epiphanius, and others, as also in Cyril, Sophronius, and late Greek and Russian theologians. In proof of it, Ps. lxxxii. 6 ('I said, Ye are gods') is very often quoted." He quotes from Athanasius, "He became man that we might be deified"; and from Pseudo-Hippolytus, "If, then, man has become immortal, he will be God."

This notion grew within the Church as chiliastic and apocalyptic Christianity faded away. A favourite phrase was that the Incarnation, etc., "abolished death," and brought mankind into a state of "incorruption" ([Greek: aphtharsia]) This transformation of human nature, which is also spoken of as [Greek: theopoiêsis] is the highest work of the Logos. Athanasius makes it clear that what he contemplates is no pantheistic merging of the personality in the Deity, but rather a renovation after the original type.

But the process of deification may be conceived of in two ways: (a) as essentialisation, (b) as substitution. The former may perhaps be called the more philosophical conception, the latter the more religious. The former lays stress on the high calling of man, and his potential greatness as the image of God; the latter, on his present misery and alienation, and his need of redemption. The former was the teaching of the Neoplatonic philosophy, in which the human mind was the throne of the Godhead; the latter was the doctrine of the Mysteries, in which salvation was conceived of realistically as something imparted or infused.

The notion that salvation or deification consists in realising our true nature, was supported by the favourite doctrine that like only can know like. "If the soul were not essentially Godlike ([Greek: theoeidês]), it could never know God." This doctrine might seem to lead to the heretical conclusion that man is [Greek: omoousios tô Patri] in the same sense as Christ. This conclusion, however, was strongly repudiated both by Clement and Origen. The former (Strom. xvi. 74) says that men are not [Greek: meros theou kai tô theô omoousioi]; and Origen (in Joh. xiii. 25) says it is very impious to assert that we are [Greek: omoousioi] with "the unbegotten nature." But for those who thought of Christ mainly as the Divine Logos or universal Reason, the line was not very easy to draw. Methodius says that every believer must, through participation in Christ, be born as a Christ,—a view which, if pressed logically (as it ought not to be), implies either that our nature is at bottom identical with that of Christ, or that the life of Christ is substituted for our own. The difficulty as to whether the human soul is, strictly speaking, "divinæ particula auræ," is met by Proclus in the ingenious and interesting passage quoted p. 34; "There are," he says, "three sorts of wholes, (1) in which the whole is anterior to the parts, (2) in which the whole is composed of the parts, (3) which knits into one stuff the parts and the whole ([Greek: hê tois holois ta merê sunyphainousa])." This is also the doctrine of Plotinus, and of Augustine. God is not split up among His creatures, nor are they essential to Him in the same way as He is to them. Erigena's doctrine of deification is expressed (not very clearly) in the following sentence (De Div. Nat. iii. 9): "Est igitur participatio divinæ essentiæ assumptio. Assumptio vero eius divinæ sapientiæ fusio quæ est omnium substantia et essentia, et quæcumque in eis naturaliter intelliguntur." According to Eckhart, the Wesen of God transforms the soul into itself by means of the "spark" or "apex of the soul" (equivalent to Plotinus' [Greek: kentron psychês], Enn. vi. 9. 8), which is "so akin to God that it is one with God, and not merely united to Him."

The history of this doctrine of the spark, and of the closely connected word synteresis, is interesting. The word "spark" occurs in this connexion as early as Tatian, who says (Or. 13): "In the beginning the spirit was a constant companion of the soul, but forsook it because the soul would not follow it; yet it retained, as it were, a spark of its power," etc. See also Tertullian, De Anima, 41. The curious word synteresis (often misspelt sinderesis), which plays a considerable part in mediæval mystical treatises, occurs first in Jerome (on Ezech. i.): "Quartamque ponunt quam Græci vocant [Greek: syntêrêsin], quæ scintilla conscientiæ in Cain quoque pectore non exstinguitur, et qua victi voluptatibus vel furore nos peccare sentimus…. In Scripturis [eam] interdum vocari legimus Spiritum." Cf. Rom. viii. 26; 2 Cor. ii. 11. Then we find it in Alexander of Hales, and in Bonaventura, who (Itinerare, c. I) defines it as "apex mentis seu scintilla"; and more precisely (Breviloquium, Pars 2, c. 11): "Benignissimus Deus quadruplex contulit ei adiutorium, scilicet duplex naturæ et duplex gratiæ. Duplicem enim indidit rectitudinem ipsi naturæ, videlicet unam ad recte iudicandum, et hæc est rectitudo conscientiæ, aliam ad recte volendum, et hæc est synteresis, cuius est remurmurare contra malum et stimulare ad bonum." Hermann of Fritslar speaks of it as a power or faculty in the soul, wherein God works immediately, "without means and without intermission." Ruysbroek defines it as the natural will towards good implanted in us all, but weakened by sin. Giseler says: "This spark was created with the soul in all men, and is a clear light in them, and strives in every way against sin, and impels steadily to virtue, and presses ever back to the source from which it sprang." It has, says Lasson, a double meaning in mystical theology, (a) the ground of the soul; (b) the highest ethical faculty. In Thomas Aquinas it is distinguished from "intellectus principiorum," the former being the highest activity of the moral sense, the latter of the intellect. In Gerson, "synteresis" is the highest of the affective faculties, the organ of which is the intelligence (an emanation from the highest intelligence, which is God Himself), and the activity of which is contemplation. Speaking generally, the earlier scholastic mystics regard it as a remnant of the sinless state before the fall, while for Eckhart and his school it is the core of the soul.

There is another expression which must be considered in connexion with the mediæval doctrine of deification. This is the intellectus agens, or [Greek: nous poiêtikos], which began its long history in Aristotle (De Anima, iii. 5). Aristotle there distinguishes two forms of Reason, which are related to each other as form and matter. Reason becomes all things, for the matter of anything is potentially the whole class to which it belongs; but Reason also makes all things, that is to say, it communicates to things those categories by which they become objects of thought. This higher Reason is separate and impassible ([Greek: chôristos kai amigês kai apathês]); it is eternal and immortal; while the passive reason perishes with the body. The creative Reason is immanent both in the human mind and in the external world; and thus only is it possible for the mind to know things. Unfortunately, Aristotle says very little more about his [Greek: nous poiêtikos], and does not explain how the two Reasons are related to each other, thereby leaving the problem for his successors to work out. The most fruitful attempt to form a consistent theory, on an idealistic basis, out of the ambiguous and perhaps irreconcilable statements in the De Anima, was made by Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 A.D.), who taught that the Active Reason "is not a part or faculty of our soul, but comes to us from without"—it is, in fact, identified with the Spirit of God working in us. Whether Aristotle would have accepted this interpretation of his theory may be doubted; but the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias was translated into Arabic, and this view of the Active Reason became the basis of the philosophy of Averroes. Averroes teaches that it is possible for the passive reason to unite itself with the Active Reason, and that this union may be attained or prepared for by ascetic purification and study. But he denies that the passive reason is perishable, not wishing entirely to depersonalise man. Herein he follows, he says, Themistius, whose views he tries to combine with those of Alexander. Avicenna introduces a celestial hierarchy, in which the higher intelligences shed their light upon the lower, till they reach the Active Reason, which lies nearest to man, "a quo, ut ipse dicit, effluunt species intelligibiles in animas nostras" (Aquinas). The doctrine of "monopsychism" was, of course, condemned by the Church. Aquinas makes both the Active and Passive Reason parts of the human soul. Eckhart, as I have said in the fourth Lecture, at one period of his teaching expressly identifies the "intellectus agens" with the "spark," in reference to which he says that "here God's ground is my ground, and my ground God's ground." This doctrine of the Divinity of the ground of the soul is very like the Cabbalistic doctrine of the Neschamah, and the Neoplatonic doctrine of [Greek: Nous] (cf. Stöckl, vol. ii. p. 1007). Eckhart was condemned for saying, "aliquid est in anima quod est increatum et increabile; si tota anima esset talis, esset increata et increabilis. Hoc est intellectus." Eckhart certainly says explicitly that "as fire turns all that it touches into itself, so the birth of the Son of God in the soul turns us into God, so that God no longer knows anything in us but His Son." Man thus becomes "filius naturalis Dei," instead of only "filius adoptivus." We have seen that Eckhart, towards the end of his life, inclined more and more to separate the spark, the organ of Divine contemplation, from the reason. This is, of course, an approximation to the other view of deification—that of substitution or miraculous infusion from without, unless we see in it a tendency to divorce the personality from the reason. Ruysbroek states his doctrine of the Divine spark very clearly: "The unity of our spirit in God exists in two ways, essentially and actively. The essential existence of the soul, quæ secundum æternam ideam in Deo nos sumus, itemque quam in nobis habemus, medii ac discriminis expers est. Spiritus Deum in nuda natura essentialiter possidet, et spiritum Deus. Vivit namque in Deo et Deus in ipso; et secundum supremam sui partem Dei claritatem suscipere absque medio idoneus est; quin etiam per æterni exemplaris sui claritudinem essentialiter ac personaliter in ipso lucentis, secundum supremam vivacitatis suæ portionem, in divinam sese demittit ac demergit essentiam, ibidemque perseveranter secundum ideam manendo æternam suam possidet beatitudinem; rursusque cum creaturis omnibus per æternam Verbi generationem inde emanans, in esse suo creato constituitur." The "natural union," though it is the first cause of all holiness and blessedness, does not make us holy and blessed, being common to good and bad alike. "Similitude" to God is the work of grace, "quæ lux quædam deiformis est." We cannot lose the "unitas," but we can lose the "similitudo quæ est gratia." The highest part of the soul is capable of receiving a perfect and immediate impression of the Divine essence; by this "apex mentis" we may "sink into the Divine essence, and by a new (continuous) creation return to our created being according to the idea of God." The question whether the "ground of the soul" is created or not is obviously a form of the question which we are now discussing. Giseler, as I have said, holds that it was created with the soul. Sterngassen says: "That which God has in eternity in uncreated wise, that has the soul in time in created wise." But the author of the Treatise on Love, which belongs to this period, speaks of the spark as "the Active Reason, which is God." And again, "This is the Uncreated in the soul of which Master Eckhart speaks." Suso seems to imply that he believed the ground of the soul to be uncreated, an emanation of the Divine nature; and Tauler uses similar language. Ruysbroek, in the last chapter of the Spiritual Nuptials, says that contemplative men "see that they are the same simple ground as to their uncreated nature, and are one with the same light by which they see, and which they see." The later German mystics taught that the Divine essence is the material substratum of the world, the creative will of God having, so to speak, alienated for the purpose a portion of His own essence. If, then, the created form is broken through, God Himself becomes the ground of the soul. Even Augustine countenances some such notion when he says, "From a good man, or from a good angel, take away 'man' or 'angel,' and you find God." But one of the chief differences between the older and later Mysticism is that the former regarded union with God as achieved through the faculties of the soul, the latter as inherent in its essence. The doctrine of immanence, more and more emphasised, tended to encourage the belief that the Divine element in the soul is not merely something potential, something which the faculties may acquire, but is immanent and basal. Tauler mentions both views, and prefers the latter. Some hesitation may be traced in the Theologia Germanica on this point (p. 109, "Golden Treasury" edition): "The true light is that eternal Light which is God; or else it is a created light, but yet Divine, which is called grace." Our Cambridge Platonists naturally revived this Platonic doctrine of deification, much to the dissatisfaction of some of their contemporaries. Tuckney speaks of their teaching as "a kind of moral divinity minted only with a little tincture of Christ added. Nay, a Platonic faith unites to God!" Notwithstanding such protests, the Platonists persisted that all true happiness consists in a participation of God; and that "we cannot enjoy God by any external conjunction with Him."

The question was naturally raised, "If man by putting on Christ's life can get nothing more than he has already, what good will it do him?" The answer in the Theologia Germanica is as follows: "This life is not chosen in order to serve any end, or to get anything by it, but for love of its nobleness, and because God loveth and esteemeth it so greatly." It is plain that any view which regards man as essentially Divine has to face great difficulties when it comes to deal with theodicy.

The other view of deification, that of a substitution of the Divine Will, or Life, or Spirit, for the human, cannot in history be sharply distinguished from the theories which have just been mentioned. But the idea of substitution is naturally most congenial to those who feel strongly "the corruption of man's heart," and the need of deliverance, not only from our ghostly enemies, but from the tyranny of self. Such men feel that there must be a real change, affecting the very depths of our personality. Righteousness must be imparted, not merely imputed. And there is a death to be died as well as a life to be lived. The old man must die before the new man, which is "not I but Christ," can be born in us. The "birth of God (or Christ) in the soul" is a favourite doctrine of the later German mystics. Passages from the fourteenth century writers have been quoted in my fourth and fifth Lectures. The following from Giseler may be added: "God will be born, not in the Reason, not in the Will, but in the most inward part of the essence, and all the faculties of the soul become aware thereof. Thereby the soul passes into mere passivity, and lets God work." They all insist on an immediate, substantial, personal indwelling, which is beyond what Aquinas and the Schoolmen taught. The Lutheran Church condemns those who teach that only the gifts of God, and not God Himself, dwell in the believer; and the English Platonists, as we have seen, insist that "an infant Christ" is really born in the soul. The German mystics are equally emphatic about the annihilation of the old man, which is the condition of this indwelling Divine life. In quietistic (Nominalist) Mysticism the usual phrase was that the will (or, better, "self-will") must be utterly destroyed, so that the Divine Will may take its place. But Crashaw's "leave nothing of myself in me," represents the aspiration of the later Catholic Mysticism generally. St. Juan of the Cross says, "The soul must lose entirely its human knowledge and human feelings, in order to receive Divine knowledge and Divine feelings"; it will then live "as it were outside itself," in a state "more proper to the future than to the present life." It is easy to see how dangerous such teaching may be to weak heads. A typical example, at a much earlier date, is that of Mechthild of Hackeborn (about 1240). It was she who said, "My soul swims in the Godhead like a fish in water!" and who believed that, in answer to her prayers, God had so united Himself with her that she saw with His eyes, and heard with His ears, and spoke with His mouth. Many similar examples might be found among the mediæval mystics.

Between the two ideas of essentialisation and of substitution comes that of gradual transformation, which, again, cannot in history be separated from the other two. It has the obvious advantage of not regarding deification as an opus operatum, but as a process, as a hope rather than a fact. A favourite maxim with mystics who thought thus, was that "love changes the lover into the beloved." Louis of Granada often recurs to this thought.

The best mystics rightly see in the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ the best safeguard against the extravagances to which the notion of deification easily leads. Particularly instructive here are the warnings which are repeated again and again in the Theologia Germanica. "The false light dreameth itself to be God, and taketh to itself what belongeth to God as God is in eternity without the creature. Now, God in eternity is without contradiction, suffering, and grief, and nothing can hurt or vex Him. But with God when He is made man it is otherwise." "Therefore the false light thinketh and declareth itself to be above all works, words, customs, laws, and order, and above that life which Christ led in the body which He possessed in His holy human nature. So likewise it professeth to remain unmoved by any of the creature's works; whether they be good or evil, against God or not, is all alike to it; and it keepeth itself apart from all things, like God in eternity; and all that belongeth to God and to no creature it taketh to itself, and vainly dreameth that this belongeth to it." "It doth not set up to be Christ, but the eternal God. And this is because Christ's life is distasteful and burdensome to nature, therefore it will have nothing to do with it; but to be God in eternity and not man, or to be Christ as He was after His resurrection, is all easy and pleasant and comfortable to nature, and so it holdeth it to be best."

These three views of the manner in which we may hope to become "partakers of the Divine nature," are all aspects of the truth. If we believe that we were made in the image of God, then in becoming like Him we are realising our true idea, and entering upon the heritage which is ours already by the will of God. On the other hand, if we believe that we have fallen very far from original righteousness, and have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, then we must believe in a deliverance from outside, an acquisition of a righteousness not our own, which is either imparted or imputed to us. And, thirdly, if we are to hope for a real change in our relations to God, there must be a real change in our personality,—a progressive transmutation, which without breach of continuity will bring us to be something different from what we were. The three views are not mutually exclusive. As Vatke says, "The influence of Divine grace does not differ from the immanent development of the deepest Divine germ of life in man, only that it here stands over-against man regarded as a finite and separate being—as something external to himself. If the Divine image is the true nature of man, and if it only possesses reality in virtue of its identity with its type or with the Logos, then there can be no true self-determination in man which is not at the same time a self-determination of the type in its image." We cannot draw a sharp line between the operations of our own personality and those of God in us. Personality escapes from all attempts to limit and define it. It is a concept which stretches into the infinite, and therefore can only be represented to thought symbolically. The personality must not be identified with the "spark," the "Active Reason," or whatever we like to call the highest part of our nature. Nor must we identify it with the changing Moi (as Fénelon calls it). The personality, as I have said in Lecture I. (p. 33), is both the end—the ideal self, and the changing Moi, and yet neither. If either thesis is held divorced from its antithesis, the thought ceases to be mystical. The two ideals of self-assertion and self-sacrifice are both true and right, and both, separately, unattainable. They are opposites which are really necessary to each other. I have quoted from Vatke's attempt to reconcile grace and free-will: another extract from a writer of the same school may perhaps be helpful. "In the growth of our experience," says Green, "an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle. 'Our consciousness' may mean either of two things: either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. The consciousness which varies from moment to moment … is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called phenomena…. The latter consciousness … constitutes our knowledge" (Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 72, 73). Analogous is our moral history. But no Christian can believe that our life, mental or moral, is or ever can be necessary to God in the same sense in which He is necessary to our existence. For practical religion, the symbol which we shall find most helpful is that of a progressive transformation of our nature after the pattern of God revealed in Christ; a process which has as its end a real union with God, though this end is, from the nature of things, unrealisable in time. It is, as I have said in the body of the Lectures, a progessus ad infinitum, the consummation of which we are nevertheless entitled to claim as already ours in a transcendental sense, in virtue of the eternal purpose of God made known to us in Christ.