Communicatio idiomatum

The author of this short e-book, really a speech given at a scholarly conference, is a professor of patristics at an Orthodox seminary.

The speech discusses the Eastern Orthodox view of salvation as “theosis”, or the divinization of man. Sophrony of Essex was a British monk who published the works of Silouan the Athonite, a Russian ascetic who lived at Mount Athos in Greece. Both men emphasized “love of enemies” as an important part of the path to theosis.

Most of Veniamin's speech, however, deals with the tricky theological questions involved in the idea that man can become like God. Needless to say, the professor never solves them – it's no “solution” to say that man is divinized according to “God's energies” rather than “God's essence” (the “energies” are supposed to be uncreated), or to cock surely claim that, of course, human nature was hypostatically united with the Divine Person of Christ.

A strict Western theologian might wonder if the good professor isn't really a covert Monophysite heretic! After all, the notion of theosis does imply that human nature somehow becomes divine, which is surely verboten according to the Christological formula adopted at Chalcedon…

I know it’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize these old theological squabbles, but surely a notion such as theosis is at bottom mystical, so mystical that it can't *really* be comprehended through theological formulae…?