Theosis Quotes

“Christ was made man that we might be made God.”
― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

“If you, free as you are of every weight
had stayed below, then that would be as strange
as living flame on earth remaining still."

And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

“God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life. In the divinizing humanity of Christ, bruises become balm.”
― Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation

“But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man ... might become the son of God.”
― Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies

“Dusty, dark, cold, and hard, coal has no beauty of its own, but when it is consummated by fire it is beautiful and becomes what it was designed to be.”
― Frederica Mathewes-Green, At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy

“He who aspires to divine realities willingly allows providence to lead him by principle of wisdom toward the grace of deification. He who does not so aspire is drawn, by the just judgement of God and against his will, away from evil by various forms of discipline. The first, as a lover of God, is deified by providence; the second, although a lover of matter, is held back from perdition by God's judgement. For since God is goodness itself, he heals those who desire it through the principles of wisdom, and through various forms of discipline cures those who are sluggish in virtue.”
― St. Maximos the Confessor

“The crucial distinction can be discerned by differentiating between deification, an ontological sharing in the Godhead in which the human literally becomes divine, and theosis, a participation in the life of God the Father through union with Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit which the human becomes truly human.”
― Marcus Peter Johnson, One with Christ: An Evangelical Theology of Salvation

“God sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit.”
― Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God

“And of all illumination of which humanity can partake, none is comparable to the discovery of the potential divinity of the human being, the awareness that the human being is a god-in-the making.”
― Nicolas Laos, The Meaning of Being Illuminati

“For then will be perfectly fulfilled in our case that prayer of our Saviour in which He prayed for His disciples to the Father saying that the love wherewith You loved Me may be in them and they in us; and again: that they all may be one as You, Father, in Me and I in You, that they also may be one in us, when that perfect love of God, wherewith He first loved us has passed into the feelings of our heart as well, by the fulfilment of this prayer of the Lord which we believe cannot possibly be ineffectual. And this will come to pass when God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath, and that unity which already exists between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our hearts and minds, so that as He loves us with a pure and unfeigned and indissoluble love, so we also may be joined to Him by a lasting and inseparable affection, since we are so united to Him that whatever we breathe or think, or speak is God, since, as I say, we attain to that end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in His prayer hopes may be fulfilled in us: that they all may be one as we are one, I in them and You in Me, that they also may be made perfect in one; and again: Father, those whom You have given Me, I will that where I am, they may also be with Me. This then ought to be the destination of the solitary, this should be all his aim that it may be vouchsafed to him to possess even in the body an image of future bliss, and that he may begin in this world to have a foretaste of a sort of earnest of that celestial life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection, that the mind purged from all carnal desires may daily be lifted towards spiritual things, until the whole life and all the thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer.”
― John Cassian, ON PRAYER

“According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: "Never will man see My face and live" (Exodus 33:20).
Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God.
If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism).”
― Archimandrite George, Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life