Mankind’s Purpose
in Life: Deification

It is extremely daring for someone to talk about deification, without having witnessed it himself. Through the mercy of Almighty God, and our Savior Jesus Christ, we have dared that which is above our power.

We have to do this so as to make clear that the only Orthodox pastoral teaching is that of deification, not of man’s moral perfection, without God‘s Grace, according to Western standards.

We have to do this to make us all long for the best things, and thereby struggle for the noblest, capable of quenching the soul’s thirst for the Absolute, Triune God.

The question of our life’s destination is of prime importance, as it concerns the most important matter for man: the purpose of existence on earth. If man takes the correct stand on this issue, if he realizes his true destination, then he is capable of facing correctly, the minor and other daily affairs of his life, such as his relationship to his fellow men, his studies, his profession, his marriage, and the bearing and upbringing of his children. However, if he does not take the right stand on this basic issue, then he will fail in the other purposes of his life.

Endowed with “the image”, man has the full blessing of God to acquire “the likeness”, to attain deification. The Creator, God by nature causes men to become god by Grace. God, endowed man with the gifts, “according to his image”, so he may ascend very high, so he may acquire with them a likeness to his God and Maker: to have, not an external, moral relationship with him, but a personal union with his Creator. It is, perhaps, very audacious, even to say, and think that our life’s purpose is to become gods by Grace. However, the Holy Bible, and the Fathers of the Church did not conceal this from us.”

– “The Deification as the Purpose of Man’s Life”, Archimandrite George, Abbot of the Monastery of St Gregorios of the Holy Mountain

“Every Orthodox Christian is placed between two worlds: this fallen world where we try to work out our salvation, and the other world, heaven, the homeland towards which we are striving and which, if we are leading a true Christian life, gives us the inspiration to live from day to day in Christian virtue and love.

But the world is too much with us. We often, and in fact nowadays we usually forget the heavenly world. The pressure of worldliness is so strong today that we often lose track of what our life as a Christian is all about. Even if we may be attending church services frequently and consider ourselves “active” church members, how often our churchliness is only something external, bound up with beautiful services and the whole richness of our Orthodox tradition of worship, but lacking in real inner conviction that Orthodoxy is the faith that can save our soul for eternity, lacking in real love for and commitment to Christ, the incarnate God and Founder of our faith. How often our church life is just a matter of habit, something we go through outwardly but which does not change us inwardly, does not make us grow spiritually and lead us to eternal life in God.”

– Fr. Seraphim Rose

“Orthodox anthropology teaches that man is created to participate in the life of God. This is the essential meaning of the Scriptural account of the creation of man, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him…” (Gen. 1:26-7)

For Orthodox anthropology, the term “image” has a different meaning from the term “likeness”. “Image may be seen as the potential inherent in man for sanctification, while “likeness” refers to its perfection. When it is God’s good pleasure to unite with the human being, man perceives within himself the action of a Divine force which transfigures him and makes him no longer just potentially godlike—in the image of God—but actually godlike in likeness of being.

Man was not originally created in a state of completed perfection. He was, however, endowed with the unique freedom to choose either to live in pursuit of achieving his full potential, or else to digress toward the desecration and defacement of his true dignity as man. Only through the proper use of his God-given freedom can man cooperate with divine grace in restoring the image of God within him and attain to the likeness with God for which he was created.”

– Saint Silouan the Athonite

According to Orthodox teaching, mankind’s sanctification, illumination, and deification are not to be understood as a morally progressive occurrence. Through divine phenomenon in many single moments, God’s likeness is healed and restored within mankind.

Knowledge of God according to St. Gregory Palamas

Taken from the book “Orthodox Psychotherapy” by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

When a person rises from bodily knowledge to the soul’s knowledge and from that to spiritual knowledge, then he sees God and possesses knowledge of God, which is his salvation. Knowledge of God, as will be explained further on, is not intellectual, but existential.

That is, one’s whole being is filled with this knowledge of God.

But in order to attain it, one’s heart must have been purified, that is, the soul, nous (intellect) and heart must have been healed. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt.5,8).

Let us look at things more analytically.

As I have indicated, Barlaam insisted that knowledge of God depends not on vision of God but on one’s understanding. He said that we can acquire knowledge of God through philosophy, and therefore he considered the prophets and apostles who saw the uncreated light, to be below the philosophers. He called the uncreated light sensory, created, and “inferior to our understanding”. However, St. Gregory Palamas, a bearer of the Tradition and a man of revelation, supported the opposite view. In his theology he presented the teaching of the Church that uncreated light, that is, the vision of God, is not simply a symbolic vision, nor sensory and created, nor inferior to understanding, but it is deification. Through deification man is deemed worthy of seeing God. And this deification is not an abstract state, but a union of man with God.

That is to say, the man who beholds the uncreated light sees it because he is united with God.

He sees it with his inner eyes, and also with his bodily eyes, which, however, have been altered by God’s action.

Consequently theoria (vision of God) is union with God. And this union is knowledge of God. At this time one is granted knowledge of God, which is above human knowledge and above the senses.

St. Gregory explains this whole theology in places throughout his writings. But since it is not our intention in this chapter to make a systematic exposition of his whole teaching about the knowledge of God, we shall limit ourselves to analyzing the central point in it as it is presented in his basic work “On the Holy Hesychasts,” known as the Triads. Again we must add that we shall not present the whole teaching as it is set out in that book, but only the central points. After each quotation we shall give the reference.

Here is a characteristic passage in which he briefly presents this teaching: “One who has cleared his soul of all connection with things of this world, who has detached himself from everything by keeping the commandments and by the dispassion that this brings, and who has passed beyond all cognitive activity through continuous, sincere and immaterial prayer, and who has been abundantly illuminated by the inaccessible light in an inconceivable union, he alone, becoming light, contemplating by the light and beholding the light, in the vision and enjoyment of this light recognizes truly that God is transcendently radiant and beyond comprehension; he glorifies God not only beyond his nous’s human power of understanding, for many created things are beyond that, but even beyond that marvelous union which is the only means by which the nous is united with what is beyond intelligible things, “imitating divinely the supra-celestial minds” (2,3,57).