Theosis (at root the same notion as sanctification, exaltation or deification) is the general idea that throughout our earthly mortal lives we are supposed to become (in some way) more like God, or perhaps more like "a god".
"Supposed to" because this is why we are sustained alive -- After all, why stay-alive (in the past and now) rather than simply dying and achieving salvation as soon as we choose to follow Jesus Christ to eternal life?
(Because that would surely be a more certain salvation: To die at the split second we converted, at the instant we made a commitment to follow Jesus. There must therefore be a very important reason why it does not happen.)
But theosis is difficult to conceptualize except in the rare instance of the greatest Saints; who have very obviously become more divine throughout their mortal lives (head in Heaven, feet still upon earth - as the Eastern Orthodox say).
It has often, and truly, been observed that becoming a Christian does not (or only seldom) make somebody overall a better person - so that, if theosis is indeed an integral aspect of genuinely Christian living, then the process doesn't seem to work very well...
I have, therefore, found it difficult to explain to myself - in some kind of comprehensible 'model' - what is supposedly going-on with theosis - but I now think I may have found a useful picture of the process, as it is intended to operate.
My assumption is that we have a primal self - which could also be called our real, true or divine self; and it is this which is eternal, and has existed from eternity. My primal self is "encased" within a mortal and temporarily-incarnated self; which is (approximately) our body and our personality - that which other people observe, and which interacts with The World.
The process called theosis describes the transformation of my primal self, across a timescale of eternity; but at present intended to be achieved by interaction-with, and learning-from, the experiences of my mortal self in this world.
So -- if I succeed in my God-given task of learning from the experiences God has set-up for me in this mortal world; then it is my primal self that is positively-transformed by this learning.
And it is this process of positive transformation of the primal self that can be called theosis.
This model may explain why it is that theosis is not necessarily (or usually) observable in a Christian individual.
What is happening is that the primal self is being-transformed positively and eternally - but the bodily behaviour and actions, and personality level motivations and thoughts; are Not (or not usually) being transformed.
So the primal self is getting-better when we learn Godly-lessons from our life experiences - whether or not the mortal self improves... or even gets worse!
This depiction maybe explains why and how it is that we may know someone who we are convinced has a Good Heart (i.e. the primal self); despite that his behaviour is clearly sinful and not improving; or exhibits grossly inconsistent, incoherent or chaotic behaviour.
And, on the other side; why it often seems (to our intuitive inference) that someone who leads "a Christian life", who seems to think and do the Right Things, who is nice, socially responsible, devout, a good neighbour etc.; may strike us as heartless, cold, unloving - and certainly Not improving as a result of his continued-living.
Or why we perhaps are sure that we our-selves are being made better by being-a-Christian; despite that we continue to sin in the same ways as much as ever, or in new ways, or backslide repeatedly - or even behave (to an external observer) overall worse than we did before becoming a Christian.
Another aspect of this mismatch between primal self and mortal self, is that it becomes understandable why God would allow (or even want) such a divergence.
The reason why we are sustained alive is to challenge us with repeated and multiple interactions with this world: experiences that are intended as learning opportunities.
And this situation may be easier to arrange if our mortal selves are Not (or not much, or only unevenly) positively transformed by life.
After all; the ultimate value of this mortal life is not within this temporary world, where nothing lasts and everything dies; its ultimate value is found in Heavenly life everlasting.
12 comments:
This is very good! It broadens the scope of eternal significance quite convincingly. de Chardin's "spiritual beings having a human experience" springs to mind, albeit with new, added layers of meaning and significance.
I hadn't thought about this within the specific framework of theosis, but I have arrived at similar conclusions about spiritual freedom (which is a major aspect of theosis if you stop to think about it).
I am certain that there are people out there who consider themselves hopelessly enslaved and trapped, but who are actually quite free spiritually. By the same token, there are surely people who are or have made considerable advancements in theosis but these advancements remain undetectable from the perspective of their mortal selves.
@Frank - Glad you liked it. I have found this "primal self" notion quite helpful, so far.
I wrestle a lot with the question of why some people become saints, while most of us seem to make no progress at all. And I do believe that saintliness and holiness are real things in people. But it is puzzling and frustrating how little progress we ourselves appear to make when I know that it is a real, achievable phenomenon.
One thing I have noticed among the modern / contemporary saints and elders is that many of them appear to have been almost preternaturally "called to holiness" from a very young age. I am speaking of Eastern Orthodox holy men. Many of the lives of these modern elders describes how as children they had a palpable connection to God, felt the presence of angels and saints, engaged in a deep prayer and liturgical life, exuded a holy innocence and charity, etc. from a very young age, and this was noticed by and remarked upon by ordinary people. This is not to make light of their struggles, which were very real. Rather, it is to point out that there often is a youthful call to holiness that never leaves them.
"And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Matt. 18:2-3.
To adopt the terminology that Dr. Charlton is introducing here, perhaps their "primal self" is less buried beneath the "mortal and temporarily-incarnated self", or is able to achieve a more harmonious and externally visible union of those two aspects of themselves than the vast majority of us.
(I am not saying that childhood sanctity is the only way to sainthood; there are obviously many counter-examples. But it is prevalent enough that I am convinced there is a form of grace and power there that is a real phenomenon.)
@Daniel: "the question of why some people become saints, while most of us seem to make no progress at all."
Well, my idea in this post is to suggests that some people may be making "invisible" progress, because the primal self is what matters. But only if they learn the right lessons from their mortal experiences.
I personally Don't find it hard to understand why some become saints and others can't, because I believe in an eternal pre-mortal spirit existence; so that souls are incarnated into this world having very different natures and pre-mortal experiences.
If instead we were all incarnated 'identically', all exactly as good/evil as each other by nature, then it would indeed be hard for me to understand such widely different life trajectories.
Bruce, Valentin Tomberg wrote that when we advance on the path of spiritual discipleship , we ourselves notice very little of this advance. Other people and higher beings notice it, but not we ourselves. It is not possible for us to know what we attain in the positive sense. Human beings are unable to say whether there is progress in their inner spiritual development. There is a sign however to indicate some progress. It is the fact that one becomes inwardly ever more isolated, what were once group concerns asking the same questions and concerns becomes ever narrower, with very few following the same path.
According to my understanding we have a soul, your primal self, which stays in higher worlds but sends an aspect of itself down to the physical world where it may learn the needed lessons. After death this mortal self, the one we normally think of as our complete self, is gradually reabsorbed into the soul whence it came, returning to its source with the garnered experience. This does not mean we have two selves but that only part of the totality of what we are is known to us in the limited spectrum of material life. The saints are those whose primal self is already more developed for whatever reason. The ordinary man or woman may still have some way to go to bring his or her primal self to spiritual maturity.
This is a fascinating notion, Bruce, and I think an important discovery: congratulations. You are right: the key question is, why don’t we just vanish from this world the instant after we are converted, and cleansed? The traditional answer is that, while we are indeed cleansed from sin at and by both Baptism and the Rite of Reconciliation, we are not by them cleansed from the damaging causal effects of past sins (our own, and those of others) upon our character: as still engaged with our bodies and our mundane histories and present circumstances, we remain stultified in our rational wits, always somewhat handicapped, crippled; thus concupiscent, and so subject to temptation to acts that, under cosmic justice, are suboptimal – are, i.e., unjust, irrational. The whole structure of this cosmos – and for us, most pertinently, of our mundane selves – encodes and so promulgates the defects of its past, on into its future. So, we have work still to do in this life, to become purely holy; to become our true, divinely intended selves. But, as injured by our ontological inheritance from the sins of our past, our equipment for this task is defective. Thus almost nobody achieves saintliness before dying; so, there is provided for us Purgatory, the post mortem extension of the purgation of our defects, begun already here below with our conversion and absolution, to a completion proper to life everlasting in heaven.
But that doesn’t quite answer the question, does it? So our mundane equipment is damaged, despite our cleansing from sin; so what? Why don’t we just abandon it at the moment of conversion, and go straight to heaven, without passing Go, and without collecting $200?
My hunch after many years thinking about metaphysics is that such an abandonment must not be ontologically possible. There must, i.e., be a reason that the details of the history of our world – right down to this morning’s eggs and bacon – matter to the achievement of its final end, so much so that they cannot be done without, if the whole shooting match is to turn out as intended.
Perhaps it comes down in the end to something quite humble, such as that this morning’s eggs and bacon matter crucially to the achievement of salvation for many thousands of souls not yet born to our world’s history, whose lives have from all eternity been provided for – in part, yet crucially – on the basis of those eggs and that bacon. Think of Merlin’s awful reproach to Jane Studdock.
OK, so the completion of our natural earthly lives is somehow crucial to the whole shooting match – including, of course, our own portions thereof. Fair enough, I suppose.
There is also this: can one get into heaven – into heavenly purity, i.e. – without being pure in fact; which is to say, pure in act? I don’t see how. So, even after conversion and absolution, there must be a process of purgation.
All of that will perhaps seem rather irrelevant to many of your readers. What follows might not.
I have several times in vivid dreams and trances brought about by what was to outward appearances a temporary loss of consciousness experienced standing in a glorious room with other beings, all of us glorious, and looking down upon this world from a world supersidiary and far nobler, and then with their support and encouragement of girding my loins to descend again into my present earthly life, here to fight. This was distasteful, but important; so important as to warrant my fall – temporary, but nonetheless ugly – into the sordid twilit struggle of our world. I remember bracing myself for the ordeal, and then suffering it; a painful reduction of power, agency, glory, indeed size. Somehow my true self remained behind in that supersidiary world, in rather the way that the player of a video game remains in the world of which the game is but a subsidiary department. Yet my descent was not into a world inconsequential, such as that of a video game. It was into a world important, in itself utterly real – so real as to matter importantly in stacks of worlds supersidiary to itself.
Perhaps it is only that the Great Chain of Being can’t be completely realized in all its glory unless all the links thereof are likewise realized, and reach their proper ends.
NB: it was not so much that my True Self had to descend into our world in order to learn. Rather, he had to descend in order to do combat; to kill bad guys, to destroy evil.
@Kristor - Thanks for the kind words.
What I am trying to do, here and elsewhere, is understand some-thing by a single act of comprehension, all at once. I don't feel I have understood a thing, if that understanding is spread-out across a chain of inferences, of which I grasp only a piece at a time.
To what extent this is the case for other people is hard to say, but for me it is inbuilt.
Purgatory seems to address a real question (essentially ignored by protestants), but as an answer it leaves too much either unsaid or unexplained.
The question concerns to what difference the experiences, efforts, choices etc of our mortal life, make a difference to our resurrected eternal life.
My understanding is that we can only carry forward into Heaven only that of-us which is wholly good and loving. To put is simply, if we have led a good life, then we carry forward *more* of our mortal selves, than someone who has failed to learn God's lessons from this mortal life.
Thus, salvation is available to anyone who repents and follows Jesus; but if that person has (u to that point of choice) "wasted his life", opposed God and divine creation, argued that sins are good etc - that *all that* will need to be *left-behind* at resurrection into Heaven.
So this imaginary "evil-person" who has a last-minute conversion, will indeed go to Heaven; but once he is in Heaven, he will be a smaller and lesser Being compared with a Saint (or a better person) - because he has necessarily left-behind so much of his early experiences and his earlier self, as incompatible with Heaven.
"… salvation is available to anyone who repents and follows Jesus; but if that person has (u to that point of choice) "wasted his life", opposed God and divine creation, argued that sins are good etc - that *all that* will need to be *left-behind* at resurrection into Heaven.
So this imaginary "evil-person" who has a last-minute conversion, will indeed go to Heaven; but once he is in Heaven, he will be a smaller and lesser Being compared with a Saint (or a better person) - because he has necessarily left-behind so much of his early experiences and his earlier self, as incompatible with Heaven."
Brilliantly stated. This seems exactly correct to me. It also aligns well with what many saints have written.
An afterthought: on the assumption that there is for each of us already in Heaven a perfect Original version of our selves – who is, perhaps, for each of us our Guardian Angel, and ab initio the perfect fulfillment of our natures – what then would be the ultimate point of importing any remnant part of our worldly selves into everlasting life in Heaven? What value would that importation add to the Heavenly world? Why do worlds supernal to ours bother with the worlds beneath them in the first place?
The answer, it seems clear to me, is that beauties concretely achieved in any world merit sempiternal preservation and elaboration. In our Fallen world, a perfect musical composition could never achieve a perfect performance. But each of its imperfect performances would merit permanent preservation in the divine memory – which is to say, in concrete reality, in facticity – so that the boundless number of equally perfect performances, with all their elaborations and variations, could build upon that ontic inheritance, so as to explore the available volume of resolutions of the challenge posed by any such performance, so as to express and concresce all its potential beauties.
As with musics, so with lives.
@Kristor - "It also aligns well with what many saints have written."
Yes, it "saves the appearances" but on the basis of a somewhat different underlying "model".
wrt "An afterthought: on the assumption that there is for each of us already in Heaven a perfect Original version of our selves – who is, perhaps, for each of us our Guardian Angel, and ab initio the perfect fulfillment of our natures – what then would be the ultimate point of importing any remnant part of our worldly selves into everlasting life in Heaven?"
I have a different understanding of time as sequential - or rather, indivisible from Beings. But the way I usually think about this question of "what then would be the ultimate point of importing any remnant part of our worldly selves" is that we are (and always have been) each unique individuals; so whatever of any individual Being is imported into Heaven, is an irreplaceable addition to Heaven.
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