Today is the memoria of St Basil the Great and St Gregory Nazianzen.
Gregory (329-389) was, alongside Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Fathers who played an important part in developing the Church’s teaching on the Trinity, incarnation and salvation.
One of the most striking features of Gregory’s theology is his teaching on “deification”. It is not always clear what Gregory means by this term, except that he attributes the work of “deification” (or “divinisation”; in Greek, theosis) to the Holy Spirit.
For St Thomas Aquinas, grace is “a certain participation in the divine nature by way of likeness”. This likeness consists in faith and charity, for faith imitates and participates in the act by which God knows himself (an act which is appropriated to the Son), and charity imitates and participates in the act by which God loves himself (an act which is appropriated to the Spirit).
In other words, in knowing and loving God (which we are able to do as a result of grace) we imitate and, in a certain sense, participate in God’s Trinitarian act of knowing and loving himself, and so participate in the divine nature by way of likeness and are constitutes “to the image of the Trinity”.
St Thomas’s teaching on grace represents the high-point of the theology of theosis which St Gregory played such an important part in developing.
Theology in the Greek Orthodox tradition draws heavily on the wisdom of St Gregory, and presents the doctrine of salvation by theosis in powerfully poetic and mysterious terms, but it is arguably St Thomas who offers the clearest explanation of how “deification” is to be understood.
8 comments:
This words of St. Thomas come to mind: ""Grace is nothing else but a certain beginning of glory within us."
St T's theology of grace is amazingly rich.
This is a wonderful post- with showing Thomas Aquinas in relation to Gregory in regard to likeness and theosis- do you have any background of how Aquinas would have learned the significance in the greek of Gregory or any specific passages that you are drawing from.
Occasionally I see Aquinas mentioning Gregory but not too often and not very explicitly.
Hi Julianna, thanks for your comment. I've put up a new post with some extended quotation from St Thomas on deification. I don't know to what extent he derived these ideas directly from Gregory. Much of his understanding of the Greek patristic tradition was derived via St John Damascene, of course.
If you can wade through her unreasonably dense prose, A.N. Williams' book, The Ground of Union, is an excellent comparison of Aquinas and Gregory of Palamas on the doctrine of deification.
This doctrine is making a big come back in Latin theology. It makes for a substantial response to contemporary gnostic theories of the divine human (e.g. Tolle and other new-agey gurus).
Fr. Philip, OP
Gregory doesn't view theosis as imitation, but an activity, specifically a doing the divine activities or energies. Hence there is no created simulitude or imitation between deity and humanity for Gregory as there is say for Aquinas or Bernard.
Williams' book is not very good for a few reasons. First it ignores the Capita, Palamas' major work, along with his crucial works on simplicity. Second, it glosses the distinction between essence and energies as an epistemological distinction in our minds and not in God. But Palamas explicitly denies this in a number of palces that Williams ignores.
Acolyte4236 - thanks. Can you recommend a good introduction to St Gregory Palamas?
There is nothing like the primary texts. The two primary ones in English are the Triads and the Capita. Neither are very long. Light-n-life also has a small work of his on the Spiritual Life. His dialog between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite is helpful.
As for secondary works, Meyendorff's introduction is adequate and then there's Papademetriou's introduction to Palamas. While not an exposition of Palamas, Duncan Reid's little book on Energies of the Spirit is helpful.
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