6. The Spiritual Writers: Salvation, Asceticism, and Deification (2 of 2)

Relevant links:
John Meyendorff's Christ in Eastern Christian Thought.

Humanity's Relationship to God
The Image of God that every human being is represents the basic building block in understanding our relationship to God even after the Fall. The redemption of fallen humans required that Christ take on the same 'stuff' as they were and are. St. Athanasius writes, "The death of all was being accomplished in the body of the Lord, and on the other hand, death and corruption were destroyed by the Word which dwelt in that body." (p 118)

This dynamic of dying and purification lead us to the spiritual relationship of humanity to God in Christ. Major aspects of this Spirituality can be summarized as such:

• Original participation
• Analogous Freedom of the Image of God
• Sin as a consequence of servitude to the demonic
• Redemption as a recapitulation of the human nature in the risen Christ
  

Meyendorff, again, warns his Western readers that Anselm or the Augustinian vs. Pelagian controversy are alien paradigms to these Eastern concepts. Reading these alien paradigms into the Eastern will inevitably result in skewing our understanding of what the East is actually saying on their own terms.¹

During the time of the great controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the monks focused on the incarnation of the church in its heavenly aspect as opposed to the institutional structures rooted in this world [Dualism?]. They were preoccupied with realizing the participation in the divine life, from which Adam was deprived and which became accessible again in Christ.

As mentioned in previous chapters, Evagrius employed Platonic thought (viz. Metaphysics) explaining the Fall of the νους from its original dignity being now consigned to a bodily state. His system and terminology are based first of all on a distinction between praxis (πρακτική μέθοδος) and theoria (or γνωσις). The praxis was double edged. First there was the fight against the passions and second the practice of the evangelical commands. "The passions" (τά πάθη) were not simply a state of the soul but a means of the devil to enslave humanity. (p 119)

In speaking of this fight against the passions, Evagrius intimates that humans are most vulnerable when they are idle. Temptation is external to the human being who is the victim of the passions. All can be vanquished by faith which leads to continence and ultimately to apatheia (απάθεια), the supreme aim of the praxis. It is this arrival at impassibility in which a human being would find herself free to develop in herself the divine agape, consecrating herself entirely to theoria, "of which 'intellectual' and perpetual prayer is the most adequate expression." (p 120)

While for Evagrius the state of prayer is an impassible state, as a state of liberation it also implies dematerialization [neo-Platonic metaphysic]. Thus prayer for Evagrius is the 'prelude to the immaterial gnosis' (προοίμιον της αϋλου γνώσεως). "...[A]s for Origen," writes Vladimir Lossky, "the ψυχή (soul) would be for Evagrius a distortion of the νους (intellect), which moves away from God by becoming material." (p 121) Once liberated, the intellect can engage in theoria without being distorted by the passions which once held the intellect captive. Now the intellect contemplates in light of the Logos.

Ultimately the liberated can contemplate and know God himself, being predicated on the Origenist metaphysic that drew a "natural kinship" between the divine and intellectual. (p 121). In great (and this writer would say problematic) divergence from the Cappadocians and Pseudo-Dionysius, Evagrius blurs the distinction between Creator and creature when he writes, "God does not transcend the intellect; once purified, detached from matter and 'simple' in its contemplation, the intellect sees God as he is, in his essence." (p 122) The result being an extreme form of Pelagianism, being seen most extremely in the Isochrist monks, "who claimed that they became 'equal to Christ' by the restoration of their minds in contemplation of God..." (p 122)

Alternately, a tendency that excluded Platonic dualism enjoyed great influence, seeing humanity's way towards deification in a Christ-centered sacramental spirituality. The so called St. Macarius of Egypt (some think him to be Symeon of Mesopotamia).

The asceticism of Evagrius and Macarius must be understood in a more full orbed context, incorporating the assumptions about the nature of sin, the original destiny of humanity and salvation in terms of deification. For example, Evagrius taught that the passions were manifestations of the corruption of human nature. In other words, sin as an external action only manifests our "passionate" state. (p 123) This way of viewing sin gave way to the role of the "spiritual father", being a guide for the journey through this world.

Many aspects of the ascetical tradition of the Christian East can present to the Western observer a Pelagian aspect.... [If] one remembers the conception of the image of God as it prevails in the Greek Fathers, the problem of the relationship between grace and human freedom is on a different level from that which opposed Augustine to Pelagius in the West. Nature, and therefore true freedom, presuppose communion with God in grace.... It is not the blasphemous juxtaposition of divine grace and human effort but the concrete realization in Jesus Christ of man's primitive image. (p 124)

Or as Gregory of Nyssa writes, "What has been made in all aspects in the image of the divinity must undoubtedly possess in its nature a free and independent will, in order that participation in the divine advantages should be the prize of virtue." This doctrine of synergism (συνεργεία) is developed further in Marcarius:

The more one loves, the more one gives oneself to the fight, in one's body and in one's soul, in order to accomplish the commandments, the greater the communion one achieves with the Spirit into the spiritual growth of the renewing of the mind; acquiring salvation by grace and divine gift, but receiving by faith, by love, and by the effort of free choice, progress and increase in the measure of this spiritual age....Thus, eternal life will be inherited by grace, but also in all righteousness, since it is not only through the divine grace and power without human collaboration (συνεργεία) and effort that progress is made... (p 125)

A passage like the one from Macarius above will sound Pelagian or semi-Pelagian unless Eastern notions of participation and communion accepted. Human freedom and effort are to be understood as entailing participation in the divine life. This in turn assumes real communion with the Archetype of whom humanity is image. This is what the Christian East calls deification. This is for Athanasius and Cyril the very basis of the Gospel.

Deification implies then that the soul becomes one with God. Humanity is called to participate in God, without there ever being any confusion between God's nature and that of the person, without any diminution of human freedom. In this a person fulfills the destiny for which humanity was created.

Byzantine monastics sought to fill their minds with God pressing forward towards the goal of deification. One significant manifestation of this thought is seen in the Jesus Prayer an essential element of Byzantine hesychasm ('ησυχία rest or contemplation). Thus constant prayer is the mark of a mind truly freed from the passions. Isaac of Nineveh writes:

When the Spirit establishes his dwelling in man, the latter can no longer stop praying, for the Spirit never ceases praying in him. Whether he sleeps or stays awake, prayer is not separated from his soul. (p 127)

It is in Christ that humanity recovers his original destiny, rediscovers true freedom which perished in its slavery to Satan. In Christ humanity makes use of this regained freedom, working with the Holy Spirit, that a person may love and know God. It is deification (θέωσις) that gives the mystical character to Byzantine spirituality. 'Mystical' here is referring not to the subjective experience but the objective reality of union with Christ. As a person is the image of God, deification is the free and conscious participation in the divine life, which is proper only to humanity. As St. Athanasius gives in his great patristic principle: "If God did not become man, man cannot become God." (p 129)


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¹ I might add here how much I have enjoyed the interaction with Acolyte4236. While Meyendorff's point is well taken here, I - as a Westerner - do not know how to gain this understanding with out extended dialogue with those who do have these categories already in place.