Virtue and Deification in Christ
By Paul Rosenboom
The purpose of every Christian’s life is to become perfected in the divine, evangelical virtues commanded by Christ, i.e, the Gospel Law. “Be perfect,” says the Lord, “as your Father in heaven is perfect.”(Mt.5:48) Before the Incarnation of the Logos and the establishment of the Holy Church of Christ, the virtues, as taught by the ancient philosophers and spiritual guides, were vague, ego-centered, and, in their fullest extent, unrealizable. For the Christian, every virtue is divinely perfect in Christ, the God-Man, perfect in both His divinity and His humanity. Christ’s holy human nature becomes a cure for the fragmented and broken souls of men as the virtues of Christ’s human nature can be transmitted to the nature of every man in the life of the Orthodox Church.
The Church is the God-man Christ extended through the ages.(21) In His boundless love for man, the Lord has “transformed Himself, the perfect man, into the Holy Church, so as to transform all its members into perfect men.”(22) In the Church alone, of which Christ is the Head, men find the ultimate purpose of life - to be perfected in the Gospel virtues and become like Christ. As the Lord Christ dwells in the Church in all His fullness, so also do all His theanthropic virtues. Through the Holy Mysteries and the theanthropic virtues, men are renewed in the image of Christ, the God-Man. They are gradually transfigured, sanctified and deified by the divine energies, attaining the likeness of God by Grace.
The Church Fathers developed a profound anthropological teaching on the soul and the virtues. To the soul can be attributed three distinct but interrelated faculties:
The passionate faculty feels the carnal needs of the body and the spiritual needs of the soul and seeks their fulfillment from the will. The spiritual needs are the result of the Spirit of God uniting with the soul and imparting to it infinite aspirations, including the desire to live eternally, to seek and know the ultimate Truth and to live a good life. This faculty arouses not only these desires but the corresponding emotions of joy and sorrow.
The will, also known as volition, consists of good desires to acquire the virtues and also the self destructive desires for the sinful passions. The will, furthermore, bears a relation to the soul, as a rudder bears to a ship. The will is the heart and center of life; it is to the will that the passionate faculty and the intellect address themselves, the passionate faculty exciting the will and the intellect enlightening it, so that it may decide and act toward the fulfillment of its needs. If it acts according to conscience and the teachings of our Lord, the soul feels happiness and joy; but if it acts wrongly, the soul feels sadness and torment. The will, therefore, is most closely identified with the free man, or the person, who bears the responsibility for his own acts.
The intellect or cognitive faculty consists of the reasoning powers of the soul. The rational cognitive faculty may be understood to function on two levels: the level of logic and discursive reasoning on the one hand, and on the other hand, the level of intuitive reason, or rather, the noetic, where the intellect exercises inner attention, prayer, contemplation and watchfulness. The nous lies dormant until awakened by faith and then serves to guide the soul and spiritually anchor discursive reason.
The Orthodox Christian strives to cleanse and transfigure these faculties through the ascetic and liturgical life of the Church. Fr. George Kapsanis, the renowned former elder of Grigoriou Monastery on Mt. Athos, states: “Unless these three parts of the soul …are cleansed and harmoniously integrated, man cannot receive the grace of God within himself, and cannot be deified.” (23) In the Holy Church we find the grace-filled power to transform our lives, our thoughts, our feelings, our deeds. It is our intent in this final part of our essay on Personhood to clarify the meaning of deification in Christ by means of contemplating Christ and His tripartite human nature and the respective theanthropic virtues.
Our Lord, being fully human, like us in every way but for sin, also possesses a human soul consisting of these three faculties and a study of the human nature and soul of Christ as described in the Gospel reveals the harmonious integration of these faculties and their respective virtues.
The intellectual or cognitive faculty of Christ’s soul cognizes the depth and breadth of God and bears in mind the distinction between the true thoughts of God and the thoughts of the devil. This is the virtue of perfect wisdom: to always and in all situations discern the will of God and the opposing will of Satan. It is therefore a wise and unerring intellect, having the virtue of knowing the truth and discerning the falsehood opposed to it, and never confounding them.
The passionate faculty of Christ’s soul feels the primary need of doing all the will of God, including the need to fulfill the final design of God, that is, creating men after the image and likeness of God. “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work,” says the Lord.(Jn 4:34) Christ’s soul, loving God with all His heart and having as food and drink the accomplishment of the Father’s will, also experienced through His passionate faculty the divine joys and sorrows. The passionate faculty of Christ, besides feeling the needs of the soul’s nature, likes to have them satisfied in accordance with the will of God, and hates the lies of the devil, who promises a false and destructive satisfaction. This virtue of the passionate faculty is called sobriety, on the ground that it soundly and with wisdom and discernment, in accordance with the theanthropic intellect, loves good things and hates bad things, while experiencing the corresponding joy and grief.
The will of Christ, or the volitive faculty of Christ’s soul, receiving the enlightenment of the theanthropic intellect, acts always and everywhere in accordance with God’s will and law, and never in accordance with the Devil’s opposing will. "For I came down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me"(Jn 6:38). “Nevertheless, not my will but Thy will be done”(Lk 22:42). The corresponding virtues of the will or volitive faculty are discernment, and courage: discernment with reference to considering only views agreeable to the spiritual intellect; courage with reference to being willing and able to deny oneself and do the will of God, all the time rejecting and combating the will of the Devil.
The harmonious interaction and intercommunion of these three parts of Christ’s soul may be called goodness, or righteousness. The nature of the soul of the Logos is perfect, having grown and developed upon the perfect divine hypostasis of the Logos, and having suffered no sin or corruption of any kind; by contrast, the fallen nature of our soul is replete with sinful habits and corruptions, and desperately in need of regeneration in Christ.
Now, although the nature of the soul of the incarnate Logos surpasses the nature of our soul to a superlative extent in quality, nonetheless, it is identical to the nature of our soul. We too are called to wisdom, sobriety, discernment and courage in the spiritual life. In fact, the whole life of the Christian soul consists of the purified and transfigured coordination between the passionate faculty, the intellect and the will. In the Christian life, man is made an integral whole.
How do we purify these faculties of the soul? What are the means for healing the powers of the soul and restoring the soul to its lost wholeness? St. Theophan the Recluse says there are corresponding exercises that are recommended for the three faculties and he offers us the following guidance:
The development of the Christian intellect, according to St. Theophan, occurs when the truths of the Faith are deeply impressed on it through reading and hearing the Word of God, the writings of the Holy Fathers, the Lives of the Saints, mutual discourse among brothers in Christ and asking questions of an elder. The most fruit-bearing among these is the Word of God, but they are all sources of Truth. How one reads them matters. When you have found passages that inspire you, says the saint, write them down and save them for later use, when the soul has grown lukewarm. In addition, read slowly and if a passage does not touch the heart, stay with it until it does. Bear in mind, the goal is ”to clarify the truth and hold it in the mind until the heart tastes of it.” (24)
Developing the will so that the virtues would eventually constitute its very nature requires “toil and sweat.” Being infected with the spirit of sin, the will is healed by submission to the will of God, with denial of one's own and that of any other. The will of God is revealed through different obediences: foremost among them are obeying the commandments of Christ as well as one’s spiritual father and observing the order of Church services. In addition there are the dictates of civil and family order. Our roles in family life as well as the community can likewise be infused with the spirit of self-sacrifice and performed to the glory of God. For all these obediences to flow into the virtues, you must forcefully keep a true spirit of good works, doing “everything with humility and fear of God according to God's will and to His glory.” Interestingly, St. Theophan also advises: “…it is good to choose one outstanding virtuous work according to your character and station, and stick with it unswervingly-it will be the foundation or basis from which you can go on to others. It will serve you in times of weakness-it is a strong reminder and quickly inspires. The most reliable of all is almsgiving, which leads to the King.” (25)
Developing the passionate faculty means “developing within the soul the taste for things holy, divine and spiritual, so that when it finds itself amidst such things it would feel as though it were in its element.”(26) The passionate faculty must focus on the sweetness and blessedness of the Lord’s commandments. When the intellect casts its gaze upon the spiritual world, the heart should taste its sweetness and feel its radiant warmth. This cultivation of spiritual delight occurs in the liturgical cycle of worship and in one’s prayer life. The Orthodox Christian must become accustomed to prayer. “Through it the truths of the faith are also impressed in the mind and good morals into the will. But most of all, it enlivens the heart in its feelings. The first two go well only when prayer is present. Therefore, prayer should begin to be developed before anything else, and continued steadily and tirelessly until the Lord grants prayer to the one who prays.” (27)
To accustom yourself to prayer, you must have a rule of prayer and pray always with fear, diligence and attention. Such prayer is accompanied by standing, prostrations, kneeling and making the sign of the Cross. The prayer rule should never be abandoned but kept as prescribed. The most assured means toward ceaseless prayer is rooting the Jesus Prayer in one’s heart. “It illuminates, strengthens, enlivens, conquers all enemies visible and invisible, and leads us to God…The name of the Lord Jesus is the treasury of blessings, strength and life in the spirit.” (28)
The great spiritual Fathers emphasize the necessity of pure and virtuous living, which, together with true faith, is essential for salvation. To gain salvation, one must ascetically strive to acquire faith, prayer, fasting, mercy and every virtue. The lay elder (kosmo kalogeros) who instructed me in the faith wrote the following with regard to the virtues: “Impregnated by the words of Christ, the soul, by work, struggle, pain and tribulation, brings forth virtues: Faith, Hope and Love in relation to the true God; Humility, Meekness and Holiness in regard to the inner man; Justice, Kindness and Honesty with respect to all men; and Bravery, Discernment and Hatred (of vice) with respect to the evil one, the devil. When these virtues mature in the soul, the opposing vices are eradicated.” The Holy Mysteries and virtues together constitute an “organic and indivisible ascesis of salvation.” (29). The Gospel virtues “nourish one another, live in one another, and each is fortified by the help of the other. The Holy Fathers, Apostles, and ascetics are witnesses to this.”(30) In this light, all the theanthropic virtues are essential to man for salvation. Every Beatitude and every holy virtue taught in the Sermon on the Mount is an ethical dogma of Christian life.
We must every day compare ourselves with the Beatitudes of the Lord and ask our conscience whether our soul has acquired humility, repentance, meekness, righteousness, mercy, courage in the unseen warfare and other virtues. When we acquire the Beatitudes, we acquire in our hearts that love which is the bond of perfection. We must be prayerful, ever watchful, guarding the heart and mind. We must strive to be dispassionate and at peace. Most of all, we must learn to love God and our fellow man, even our enemies. All these blessed virtues are virtues of Christ’s human nature; moral beauty is found complete and perfect in the person of Christ. In Him we see the perfect man and know thereby what man is, and what it means to be human. Unless love of the moral beauty of Christ enters our souls, we cannot become virtuous. Without Christ, that is, outside of His Church, virtue is an empty word.
What then is the cause of the virtue and good quality of the human nature of Christ? Its growth and perfection in the Holy Spirit; “for the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him”(Lk.2:40). Christian life is nothing but the sacramental and ascetic effort to acquire the Holy Spirit. By the Holy Spirit, the Lord Christ enters a man and renews and sanctifies him. Christian life is nothing other than life with all the saints in and through the Holy Spirit. “All that we Christians have comes from the Holy Spirit and from Him alone.”(31) Our lives must be given to unceasingly serve God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength through Christ in the Holy Spirit. When the soul of the Christian, in humility, is united with the Spirit of God, and becomes wholly spirit and knows God intimately, passionately loves Him with all its heart, and acts always according to His will, this is deification. By desiring and knowing, choosing and doing, until our last breath, the will of God as revealed by Christ in His Church, we shall then become like God. In this light, the life of Christ is the true life of man. Herein lies the mystery hidden from eternity, and God’s Great Design.
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- St. Augustine, De Unitate Ecclesiae: On the Unity of the Church,
St. Justin Popovich, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (Birmingham, UK Lazarica Press, 2000) p.8
- Popovich, p.22
- George Kapsanis, Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life, Holy Monastery of St. Gregorious, Mt. Athos, 2006 p.52
- St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation, St. Paisius Monastery, Arizona, 2006 p.250
- Ibid., p. 252
- Ibid., p.253
- Ibid., p.255
- Ibid., p.258
- Popovich, p.72
- St. Justin Popovich, “The Mystery of the Personality of Metropolitan Anthony and His Meaning for Orthodox Slavdom”
- Popovich, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, p.16
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