As I shared in the last issue of this article, before union with God can take place, two things must happen: God must reach out to us and we must respond. When God’s hand of grace is grasped by our hand of faith, the result is salvation, wholeness, union with God. We work with God, yet all is by grace. The notion of merit is foreign to the Eastern Church. Thus, although salvation is a gift of God, we do have a part to play in it. We need to grasp by faith the hand of Christ that is already extended to us. That grasping of the hand of Jesus by faith becomes a powerful tool for Theosis.
Most of the Fathers of the Eastern Church distinguish between the image and likeness in order to show the dynamic character of the acquisition of virtues and of deification. According to this distinction, God’s image in man determines the sum of possibilities for realizing the likeness – that is, the potentiality of the likeness of God as manifested in the Person of Jesus, the Christ. The likeness, however, is constituted by the image’s fulfillment. It consists of the image’s blossoming forth, consistent with its integral nature, and resides in the realization of its perfection. Whereas the image is natural, the likeness is virtual or acquired – it is to be realized by man’s free participation in God’s deifying grace. St. Basil explains the Genesis text in this manner: We possess one, image, by creation and we acquire the other, likeness, by will. In the first it is given to us to be born in the image of God. Being in the Iikeness of God is formed in us by the will. Our nature possess potentially what belongs to the will, but we procure this for ourselves through action. If in creating us, the Lord had not taken precaution in advance to say, “Let US make” and “in the likeness”, if He had not bestowed upon us the potential to become the likeness, we would not be able to acquire the likeness of God by our own might. But behold, He has created us potentially able to be like Him.
This idea forms the core of Eastern Spirituality!