In the last issue of this article, I began sharing Maximus the Confessor’s ideas about Theosis or Divinization. Maximus maintained that God will recognize and divinize His own, that is, those who willfully employ their true nature. He maintained that an intense yearning for relationship with the Creator, as well as an ability to fulfill it, is bestowed upon the human race by God Himself, Whoever moves His creation toward its end in Himself. Maximus states that God sets in us an insatiable    desire for Himself and transposes willing humanity to divinization.

To know God, according to Maximus, means to seek His face without ceasing, to attain progressively to the divine vision which penetrates the darkness which is a part of this natural world. A part of our earthly experience is to come to see God as He presents Himself to us.

For Maximus, the union of God and the believer is fulfilled while preserving the differences between the two distinct natures, analogous to the sustained integrity of the two natures as found in the Person of Jesus, the Christ. Hence, although created in the image of God, human nature has yet to be fulfilled through the union of natures realized in God incarnate, Jesus. Maximus states:

For he did not come to debase the nature which he himself, as God and Word, had made, but he came that the nature might be thoroughly deified which, with the good pleasure of the Father and the co-operation of the Spirit, he willed to unite to himself in one and the same person.

It is my hope that my readers will sense the great difference between this Eastern understanding of mankind and that maintained in the Western world.

Divine essence, in the Eastern approach, remains inaccessible but humanity is able to rise above nature into a new mode of existence, that is, the human being inherits by grace that which belongs to God by nature.

Maximus understands divinization as involving the human constitution in its entirety. In the final act of homecoming, both soul and body will be granted resurrection, that is, the psychosomatic whole of the human being will be reinstated in its relationship with God. Maximus does not pose an absorption into God’s essence, but communion in divine energy, that is a transfiguration of mankind’s energy that is in tune with divine energy – mankind will come to see the world and human nature as God created it. If we were to translate this into simpler terms, humans will come to understand the true meaning and purpose of human life and how God’s Spirit – God’s energy – works within human nature to bring human beings to union with God through a true understanding of life. These thoughts are not necessarily easy to understand.     Reflect upon them.