St. Gregory Palamas once said, The Logos became flesh, and the flesh became Logos.  Taken out of the context of Orthodox Tradition and the finely balanced doctrine of Christ held by the Orthodox Church, this statement might seem shocking or even heretical, but it is because St. Gregory’s formulation was closely tied to the entirety of Church Tradition that this radical statement of the reality of deification expresses the profound paradox of the truth of the Incarnation.  The statement is strongly Cyrilline in its inspiration, recognising that, as Donald Fairbairn has acknowledged in his important book Grace and Christology in the Early Church, Cyrilline Christology implies that Christ’s own humanity has received the adopted divine sonship that the Son naturally possesses: Christ’s humanity is His deified humanity and, what is more, His deified humanity is made equally the adopted son of God by grace that the Son is by nature. 

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that in Orthodoxy in particular the significance of John 1:14, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, stands out as a defining feature of all subsequent Orthodox theology.  This is not to deny the importance of the prologue to the Gospel of St. John to other confessions; it is, of course, fundamental to all Christian confessions in its statement of Christ’s divinity and the cosmic dimension of the Incarnation.  However, it is in the strong embrace of the idea of theosis in the Greek tradition that Orthodoxy finds it particular expression.  It is not an exaggeration to say that essentially every controversy of any significance in the Orthodox world before 1453 was a controversy over the nature or possibility of deification, which is to say the nature or possibility of God’s Redemption of mankind and the reception of His saving grace. 

If God became man that men might become gods, in the famous statement reiterated by St. Athanasios (following a long tradition stemming back to St. Clement of Alexandria), the reality of God’s becoming man and the integrity of His remaining fully God were essential to the entire rationale for the Incarnation itself.  If the paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation was to make any sense, it must retain the possibility of the deification of men for which the Word undertook to take human flesh and a rational soul.  Central to this is the reciprocal relationship of the two transformations: the changeless becoming of God taking the form of a servant, obedient unto death, yea, even death on a cross and the transfiguration of created flesh into illumined and deified flesh raised by grace to the level of divinity according to energy. 

As the Orthodox on the Traditional Church Calendar marked the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord this past weekend, which our New Calendar Orthodox bretren marked two weeks ago, we were reminded of the meaning of the Psalmist’s declaration that You are gods (Ps. 82:6) and shown the way to our fully restored state of purified, illumined and deified human nature shining with the uncreated light of Mt. Tabor.  This is the purpose for which every man has been created; this is the reality of our salvation realised before us in the living witnesses of the saints and martyrs who have received the perfection of harmonious synergeia between their wills and the will of God; this is the transformation of flesh by grace confirmed in the icons of Our Lord, His Mother and the holy saints and prophets; this is the participation in the Life of God made possible through partaking of the Holy Sacraments.  God became man that men might become gods–this is as essential to the truth of the Faith as believing on the reality of the Resurrection, for they are in fact one and the same thing.  Without Resurrection, deification is impossible, and without the possibility of deification the Resurrection of Christ was in vain for the salvation of our race.