The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (review)

The doctrine of deification has become popular—almost fashionable—in many scholarly circles, but discussions of deification often suffer from insufficient historical context and from a lack of clarity about just what deification means and entails in a given author. In this volume, a substantially expanded and extended version of his 1988 Oxford D.Phil thesis, Norman Russell has given us a rigorous account of the historical development of the doctrine of deification and its technical terminology, and at the same time he has offered us clear conceptual categories for distinguishing different approaches to deification in the Christian tradition.

The stated subject of this book is "Christian deification from its birth as a metaphor to its maturity as a spiritual doctrine" (1). Russell straightaway presents the reader with his delineation of three different approaches to deification that he finds in the fathers: nominal, analogical, and metaphorical. The last category is further divided into ethical and realistic, and realistic is subdivided into ontological and dynamic. The nominal use is simply the ascription of the title "god" to human beings as a term of honor. The analogical is just the extension of the nominal by positing similarities between our status ("gods by grace") and that of Christ (Son of God "by nature"). The ethical approach "takes deification to be the attainment of likeness to God through ascetic and philosophical endeavour," while the realistic approach "assumes that human beings are in some sense transformed by deification" (1–2).

The title of this volume understates what in fact Russell accomplishes. The breadth of his treatment is genuinely breathtaking, overspilling the banks of the Greek patristic tradition alone. His opening two chapters present a fascinating account of the origins of deification in the Greco-Roman world and the complex matrix of early Judaism respectively. The author's nuanced handling of the variety of groups in Judaism is especially impressive. He then sets out on a trek through the Greek patristic authors, offering one chapter on first- and second- century developments (including Valentinian gnosticism), two chapters on the Alexandrian tradition (early and late), one on the Cappadocians, and a final chapter on the monastic synthesis culminating in the thought of Maximus the Confessor. In the epilogue, Russell offers condensed accounts of deification in the leading figures in the later Byzantine tradition from Leontius to Palamas, and he concludes with a survey of positions on deification among contemporary theologians, East and West. Leaving no stone unturned, the author summarizes in Appendix 1 the doctrine of deification in both the Syriac and Latin patristic traditions.

Besides the wealth of sheer historical information on the doctrine of deification, it is the way Russell distinguishes and assigns varying approaches to deification that makes this volume so interesting and valuable. As one main trajectory, he identifies a realist conception of deification in Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, and Athanasius (14), although his placement of Origen in the realist trajectory here is in some tension with his summary of Origen's model as "ethical, analogous and titular" later in the volume (163). As a second trajectory, he identifies a distinct ethical approach to deification in Clement of Alexandria and the Cappadocians, in whom imitation is paramount (14, 233).

The two capstone figures in Russell's account are Cyril and Maximus. It is Cyril's achievement to have effectively joined the moral life and participation in the sacraments (13), thus successfully integrating the ethical and realist approaches to deification (9). And it is to Maximus that Russell ascribes the recapturing and re-minting of the Eastern tradition through a successful integration of the philosophical approach of the Cappadocians with the ontological grounding of post-Chalcedonian Christology (14). The reader, however, is left in some doubt about the proper way to categorize Maximus's approach. In one context he is credited with integrating the realist and ethical accounts (9); in another he is assigned a version of deification "which is analogous and nominal...