In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 Deification and Assimilation to God In their explorations of the meaning of theosis or the gift that enables human beings to become koinonoi in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4), the early Fathers of the church had recourse to two main ideas, expressed in two key terms. The first idea was expressed in the term μέθεξις, understood in the sense of an ontological participation and transformation, while the second idea was expressed in the term ὁμοίωσις, understood in the sense of a profound personal and moral assimilation.1 In some ways, the second of the two terms proved the more basic and foundational, opening up to the imagination a more concrete range of possibilities for lived spiritual praxis, and able to be conceptually integrated with already-existing schemas of moral pedagogy. This was partly because the term already had long roots in the Platonic moral tradition, in which the goal of the life lived in pursuit of wisdom and flight from this world was understood to be “assimilation to God as far as possible” (ὁμοίωσις ϑεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν).2 But more importantly, it also had roots in the biblical tradition, in which, at least in the reading given by some exegetes, such assimilation to God was regarded as the God-given ideal for every human being who, fashioned according to the divine εἰκών or “image,” was also from the beginning designed to attain ὁμοίωσις or “likeness” to God (Gen. 1:26-27 LXX). Even a cursory reading of Henri de Lubac’s writings makes it clear that this classic patristic and medieval distinction between the image and likeness of God constitutes one of the main structural paradigms of his theology, standing beneath his articulation of the relation between created human nature and its 1. See Norman Russell,The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2. 2. Theaetetus 176b. The first formal definition of deification in the Christian tradition, given by Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth–sixth c.), echoes this Platonic formula: “Θέωσις is the attaining of likeness to God and union with him as far as possible.” Ecclesiastical Hierarchy I, 3 (PG 3, 376A). 193 vocation to deification. The image of God inscribed in the human person constitutes “a kind of secret call” to the supernatural fullness of life with Christ.3 What is less clear without a more focused analysis is the way de Lubac importantly links this distinction to two other vital binary pairings of his theology, namely, the distinction between letter and spirit in his articulation of God’s scriptural and historical economies, and the distinction between soul and spirit in his tripartite anthropology. It is the purpose of this penultimate chapter to expound the main points in de Lubac’s teaching in each of these areas, to relate them to one another by analyzing their relative convergence, and to outline their role and interaction in the movement of the human person toward deifying assimilation to God. Image and Likeness It is surely no accident that de Lubac’s earliest reading in the Greek Fathers, often snatched in free time during his formative years of exile in Britain—especially in Canterbury and Jersey in the second period after the war between 1919 and 1923—was of the Adversus haereses of Irenaeus of Lyons, a work of seminal paramountcy in the history of Christian thought for all sorts of reasons, but not least for its creative adoption and development of the image and likeness distinction.4 The distinction itself presupposes acceptance of a particular line of Old Testament interpretation that not all the Fathers of the church, not to mention modern exegetes, have found apparent or convincing. Some background comment on this question is called for. In their juxtaposition in Gen. 1:26, the Hebrew terms tselem and demuth, customarily translated “image” and “likeness” respectively, are commonly regarded as virtual synonyms. Being added to tselem “as an explanatory qualification,” Walter Eichrodt explains, the only possible purpose of demuth “is to exclude the idea of an actual copy of God, and to 3. Henri de Lubac, The Church: Paradox and Mystery, trans. J. R. Dunne (Shannon, Ireland: Ecclesia, 1969), 72. 4. Although Irenaeus was a bishop in Gaul, and his writings mostly survive only in Latin and Armenian translations, he originally came from Asia Minor, wrote in Greek his native tongue, and is commonly counted among the Greek Apologists. See further Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1 (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, nd), 287–93. On the image/likeness distinction in Irenaeus...

Share