In our latest episode, Consciousness and the Cross, Michael and I talk a little about theosis, but I don't think we define the term. That's a bit of a job hazard for people like us who don't trust definitions and are always pitching and moaning about "calcification" and "ossification" and how words, once fresh and dangerous, tend to harden into lifeless doctrine. Theosis is one of those words that resists that fate—because it describes something that can’t be fully captured in language. It’s not a theory or a doctrine to be believed in but an experience to be undergone.
Here's the most basic, neutral description of theosis I could come up with: Theosis is the process of becoming one with God. That’s it. No fuss, no muss—just the bare truth that Christianity, in its most radical and mystical form, has always insisted on: that we are meant not just to worship God, but to participate in God. 2 Peter 1:4 puts it bluntly: "You may become partakers of the divine nature." Athanasius said it even more shockingly: "God became human so that humans might become God."
I think I've said it on the podcast by this point, but my favorite kind of "theology" is poetry. Poetry uses language but doesn't get stuck in language. It uses language to push beyond itself. The following poem, We Awaken in Christ's Body, by Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022 AD) and translated by Stephen Mitchell (1989), is therefore maybe a better description of theosis than anything I could write. Here is a poem that (for the most part) relates a direct and mystical experience—not just an idea about God, but the overwhelming reality of divine union:
We Awaken in Christ's Body
Symeon the New Theologian
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.
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