Theosis

theosis is the Orthodox name for the goal of the Christian life: participation in the life of God. Athanasius put it in the sharpest form: God became man that we might be made God.

The formula needs its guardrails, and the tradition supplies them. A human being deified does not become a fourth person of the Trinity, does not cease to be a creature, and does not merge into the divine ousia, which remains unknowable. Participation is in God's energeia, his activity, and that distinction was defended at length in the fourteenth century.

Nor is theosis a technique or an achievement. It is the work of grace in a life given to prayer, the sacraments, repentance and love of neighbour.

Follow this theme through the archive

• Athanasius of Alexandria

  Bishop of Alexandria, exiled five times, whose defence of the Nicene confession held the line for half a century, and whose thirty-ninth festal letter contains the earliest surviving list of the twenty-seven New Testament books.

  Father or writer

• Gregory of Nyssa

  Basil's younger brother, the most speculative of the Cappadocians, whose account of the soul's endless progress into God shaped Orthodox mystical theology.

  Father or writer

• Salvation, grace and freedom

  Not a transaction but a healing: what Orthodoxy means by being saved.

  Theme

• Salvation, grace, freedom and theosis

  Healing rather than settlement, and what it means to become by grace what God is by nature.

  Lesson