From Mud to Glory: St Irenaeus and Deification

By the end of the first millennium, deification had become the principal way the Eastern Church would speak of God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. The gospel promises many blessings—forgiveness of sins, deliverance from bondage, victory over death, baptism in the Spirit, eternal life in the Kingdom—but all these blessings would eventually be comprehended under one primary theme—theosis. To be saved is to be reborn into the life of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. In Christ, we are given to participate in the one God and so made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As St Athanasius the Apostolic would famously declare in the fourth century: “For God was made man that we might be made God” (On the Incarnation 54).

Yet it would take years of prayerful reflection upon the Scriptures and the Eucharist for preachers to reach such boldness. Given the Church’s struggle to speak the gospel in a pagan world filled with deities, such language would have been easily misunderstood. But the groundwork was laid in the late second century by the great theologian St Irenaeus of Lyons. In his writings we encounter the foundational Trinitarian grammar of theosis.¹ Irenaeus did not, of course, use the word, but the reality it names permeates his theology. His vision unfolds within the divine economy (οἰκονομία)—the “single, unified purpose or plan which God has for the whole of his creation.”² This economy begins with God’s creation of the cosmos and his fashioning of the human being in the divine image, continues with the embodiment of the divine Word in the womb of Mary, and culminates in the glorification of the flesh and the eschatological renewal of all things. Irenaeus thus provides a narrative of deification centered in the Incarnation: “The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, through his immeasurable love, became what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he is himself” (Against Heresies V pref.).

The End Reveals the Beginning

When we read a story, we start on the first page and continue until we reach the last. But when we read the biblical story, Irenaeus tells us, we must first jump to its conclusion. Only then can we understand what God intended when he created Adam. The creation of humanity and its eschatological consummation belong to a single divine economy whose meaning is disclosed in the glorification of Jesus Christ. The cosmos is created from the eschaton, and the eschaton is inaugurated on the cross. The end reveals the beginning. Or as Irenaeus puts it: “the beginning appeared at the end” (AH 1.10.3). The crucified and risen Lord is the Alpha and the Omega. John Behr incisively observes:

Irenaeus is clear that the only perspective from which one can contemplate the economy of God, from its beginning to its conclusion, is from the end point, the apocalyptic opening of the Scriptures at the end of the ages in the light of the Cross of Christ.³

For Irenaeus, protology and eschatology are thoroughly, from beginning to end, Christocentric.⁴

This eschatological perspective governs Irenaeus’s understanding of God’s creation of humanity as presented in Gen 1:27 and Gen 2:7 (when read together, as did Irenaeus). Scripture teaches us that the first human being, Adam, is made in the divine image; yet it is Jesus, the Second Adam, who is the archetypal image. Although Adam precedes Jesus in the historical sequence, Jesus is prior in the economy. In his Incarnation, the true image becomes visible in the flesh originally fashioned in the Garden. Christ is the first true human being:

In former times it was said that man had been made according to the image of God, but it was not yet shown; for the Word was as yet invisible, according to whose image man had been made. Wherefore also he easily lost the similitude. When, however, the Word of God became flesh, he confirmed both these: for he both showed forth the image truly, since he became himself what his image was, and he re-established the similitude after a sure manner, by assimilating man to the invisible Father through means of the visible Word. (AH V.16.2)

Here we find the theological foundation for the economy of salvation. The Word through whom the Father created the world becomes human himself, thereby revealing both the perfection of the human being and the final destiny of mankind. Adam is the “type of the one to come” (Rom. 5:14); Jesus is the prototype. Irenaeus provocatively describes the necessity of the Incarnation in these words:

Because the Word, the Fashioner of all things, prefigured in him the future economy relating to the Son of God on behalf of the human race, God having predetermined the first, the animated human that is, so that he should be saved by the spiritual one; for, since the Saviour pre-exists, it was necessary that the one to be saved should also exist, so that the Saviour should not be without purpose. (AH III.22.3)

You might want to re-read the above passage, as it’s one of the most surprising in patristic literature. Scholars have long debated its meaning. Yet when we have grasped that Irenaeus is reflecting upon the single divine economy from the eschatological end to the protological beginning, it begins to make an odd kind of sense. Creation and salvation together belong to the one divine economy. Given that the crucified, risen, and returning Jesus Christ is the Savior of humanity, the divine Word has always been the Savior; therefore it was necessary for God to create human beings for him to save, “so that the Saviour should not be without purpose.” As Behr elaborates:

In Adam, the Word sketched out in advance what would be revealed and established in the Son of God, Christ himself. The description of Adam as a ‘type’ implies the prior existence of the one of whom he is a type. As such, the one who was to come exists before Adam; it was by him and for him that Adam came into existence, and, furthermore, as he exists as the Saviour, Adam came into existence to be saved by him. Thus, though only appearing at the end, this one is, nevertheless, the true beginning. ⁵

God’s salvific intention, therefore, reaches beyond the recovery of a lost paradise. Adam’s disobedience subjected humanity to the dominion of sin, corruption, and death: “As our race went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one” (AH V.21.1). This victory is accomplished through the cross: “By his passion the Lord has destroyed death, nullified error, destroyed corruption, overcome ignorance; he has manifested life, displayed the truth and given incorruption” (AH II.20.3). The telos of the divine economy is nothing less than the eschatological perfection of humanity, joyously lived in communion with the Father through the Son in the Spirit. Christ restores what was lost in Adam and accomplishes what Adam did not attain. Salvation is both restoration and fulfillment.

The Human Being: Created for Glory

“So from this earth, while it was still virgin,” Irenaeus reports, “God ‘took mud from the earth and fashioned man,’ the beginning of humankind” (Demonstration 32). The human being is the handiwork of the divine Artist, molded by his two hands, the Word and the Spirit. The work of salvation is continuous with the work of creation.  At every step along the way, he remains intimately involved in the formation of humanity, patiently bringing it toward its intended perfection.

But what exactly was the mud creature’s original condition? Christian theology typically thinks of Adam as possessing a state of perfection that he subsequently lost through disobedience. Irenaeus tells a different story. Adam was created good yet immature. He had only begun his journey toward the fullness of human existence. He was, as Irenaeus describes him, a child who needed to grow:

It was necessary for man to be first created; and having been created, to grow; and having grown, to become mature; and having become mature, to multiply; and having multiplied, to grow strong; and having grown strong, to be glorified; and having been glorified, to see his Lord. (AH IV.38.3)

Irenaeus addresses the question of why God did not create humanity perfect from the beginning. His answer turns upon the distinction between the uncreated God and his creatures. God is eternally perfect; creatures receive their existence from him and must grow into the perfection for which they have been created. Irenaeus elaborates in this long passage:

If, then, anyone say, “What then? Was not God able to have made man perfect from the beginning?” let him know that, as far as God is concerned, inasmuch as He is always the same and ingenerate, all things are possible to Him. But those things made by Him, because they have a later beginning of creation, must for this reason be inferior to Him who created them. For it was not possible for things recently created to be uncreated; and since they are not uncreated, on this account do they fall short of the perfect. And since these things are of a more recent origin, so are they infantile; and since they are infantile, so are they unaccustomed to and unexercised in perfect discipline. For certainly it is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, yet she does not do so, since the child is not yet able to receive stronger nourishment. So too, it was in the power of God Himself to grant perfection to man from the beginning; but the man, on the contrary, was unable to receive it, since he was still an infant. And for this reason our Lord, recapitulating all things in Himself, came unto us in these last times, not in such a manner as He Himself was able to come, but in such a manner as we were able to behold Him. He could have come to us in His ineffable glory, but we were not able to receive the greatness of that glory. Therefore, as if to infants, He who was the perfect bread of the Father offered Himself to us as milk, since His coming was in keeping with a man. This He did so that we, being nourished, as it were, from the breast of His flesh, and from such a course of nourishment becoming accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God, might be able to contain in ourselves Him who is the bread of immortality: the Spirit of the Father. (AH IV.38.1)

“Infant” here is a literal translation of the Latin word infans, but scholars suggest that the underlying Greek word is νήπιος (nēpios), i.e., infant or child. We need not, however, think that Irenaeus imagined Adam and Eve as literal infants. He never specifies an age for them, though there are indications he may have thought of them as prepubescent. Whatever their physical age, Irenaeus clearly regards them as immature in their spiritual and emotional condition. They lacked the capacity to receive the glory of God. The human being must learn to receive the divine gifts. Growth requires time, experience, obedience. But humanity’s perfection ultimately awaited the coming of Christ himself. M. C. Steenberg offers this interpretation of the immaturity of Adam and Eve:

The state of infancy of which Irenaeus is speaking seems, above all else, to be a state of want: the first man is a child because he “falls short of the perfect,” because he cannot receive perfection, because he cannot endure God’s greatness… This monumental gulf between Adam and God, a gulf founded here in Adam’s own being as newly created man, is not one of physical distance nor deprivation of grace, but the natural difference of being that exists between Creator and created. One is infinite, the other finite; the distinction between the two is of the highest order. It is this concept which grounds the notion of radical incompleteness that stands as a driving theme behind Irenaeus’ larger conception of humankind. There is almost no section of his corpus that does not resound with the idea that humanity, commencing in Adam, stands at the base of an ascent into the perfection for which it is destined, perilously far from its goal yet offered full guidance and support for the duration of the journey… This full humanity, the whole and complete man, is for Irenaeus unequivocally the person of Jesus Christ. It is He who is the true image of God into which humanity was created and in whom all other human persons may come to their own full maturity.⁶

Irenaeus therefore understands creation dynamically. The creature fashioned from mud is called to become a participant in divine life. Adam’s infancy is fitting because the human being was created for a perfection that lay ahead. The incarnate Christ reveals the fulfillment of the divine plan. In him we behold what it means to be fully human.

Recapitulation in Christ

The heart of Irenaeus’s soteriology is his doctrine of recapitulation. The Greek word anakephalaiōsis means summing up or gathering together under a head. Irenaeus draws upon St Paul’s declaration that God intends to sum up all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10). In becoming human, the eternal Word enters the history of humanity and gathers that history into himself. He retraces the path of Adam, confronting the temptations and disobedience that brought humanity into bondage. “God recapitulated in himself,” Irenaeus writes, “the ancient formation of man, that he might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify the human being” (AH III.18.7). Herein lies our redemption—the healing and perfecting of the image in which we were originally made:

When he became incarnate, and was made human, he recapitulated in himself the long unfolding of human beings, furnishing us with salvation by way of a compendium, so that what we lost in Adam—to be according to the image and likeness of God—that we might recover in Christ Jesus. (AH III.18.1)

Recapitulation embraces the whole of Adamic existence. The eternal Son of God is born of a woman, grows from infancy to adulthood, experiences hunger in the wilderness, confronts the Devil and overcomes temptation, weeps at the death of Lazarus, struggles with the fear of death, and freely subjects himself to the agony of the cross, embracing the fate that all human beings must suffer.

By living a genuinely human life in obedience to the Father, Jesus heals the long history of disobedience that began with Adam. The contrast between Adam and Christ is especially apparent in the accounts of temptation. In his immaturity, Adam succumbs in the Garden of Eden to Satan’s deception and eats from the tree of knowledge. Jesus, confronted by the same adversary in the wilderness, answers Satan with the words of Scripture, the voice of his Father. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, he freely submits to the inevitable conclusion of his mission, “not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt 26:39). His obedience to the Father finds its supreme expression in his sacrificial death upon the cross, “redeeming us by his own blood” (AH V.14.3). As Irenaeus declares: “So, by means of the obedience by which he obeyed unto death, hanging upon the tree, he undid the old disobedience occasioned by the tree” (Dem. 34). The disobedience of the tree of Eden is redeemed through the obedience of the tree of glory.

Irenaeus also speaks of the recapitulation of Eve in the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose obedience reverses Eve’s disobedience:

And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck and, falling, died, so also by means of a virgin, who obeyed the word of God, man, being revivified, received life. For the Lord came to seek back the lost sheep, and it was man who was lost; and, therefore, He did not become any other formation, but being born from her who was of the race of Adam, He maintained the likeness of the formation. For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ, that “mortality might be swallowed up in immortality”; and Eve in Mary, that a virgin, become an advocate for a virgin, might undo and destroy the virginal disobedience by virginal obedience. (Dem. 33)

Note Irenaeus’s strong wording: “For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ … and Eve in Mary.” Given the Father’s predetermination to save humanity through divine recapitulation, it was economically fitting and proper that Christ be born of the Virgin Mary, whose faithful assent at the Annunciation would undo the disobedience of the virgin Eve. Thus the Theotokos is included in her Son’s redeeming work.

Adoption as Sons by the Holy Spirit

The salvific goal of the Incarnate Son’s work of recapitulation is the elevation of human beings as adopted sons. “For it was for this end,” declares Irenaeus, “that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God” (AH III.18.1). It is precisely here that we see in Irenaeus the gospel taking on the form of theosis. In recapitulating fallen humanity in his sanctified life, Jesus establishes himself as the head of a new human race. By baptismal union with him, we are reborn in the Spirit and incorporated into his filial communion with his Father:

For it was incumbent upon the Mediator between God and humans, by his kinship to both, to bring both to friendship and concord, and to bring it about that God would take the human to himself and that the human would give itself to God. For in what way could we be partakers of the adoption of sons, unless we had received through the Son participation in himself, unless his Word had not entered into communion with us by becoming flesh? Therefore he also passed through every stage of life, restoring all to communion with God. (AH III.18.7)

In recapitulating humanity, the eternal Son brings Adam and his descendants into participation in his own Sonship and communion with his Father. Irenaeus quotes Psalm 82.1, “God stood in the congregation of the gods, He judges among the gods,” and then remarks: “He refers to the Father and the Son, and those who have received the adoption; but these are the Church” (AH 3.6.2).

Consider also what our adoptive sonship ultimately entails: participation in the uncreated attributes of incorruptibility and immortality:

For this the Word of God became man, and the Son of God [became] Son of man, that man, mingled with the Word and thus receiving adoption, might become a son of God. We could not receive imperishability and immortality unless we had been united to imperishability and immortality. And how could we have been united with imperishability and immortality unless imperishability and immortality had first been made what we are, so that what was perishable might be absorbed by imperishability and what was mortal by immortality “that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:5)? (AH III.19.1)

Here, my friends, is deification! Because of the Incarnation of the eternal Son, humanity is now given to share in the divine life of the one God. “Deification moves from the image and likeness,” explains Eric Osborn, “by means of the trinitarian economy, to the vision of God which gives incorruptibility.”⁷

We have yet to consider the critical role of the Holy Spirit in our adoption as sons. In this passage Irenaeus describes the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the deification of humanity:

For this reason the baptism of our regeneration takes place through these three articles, granting us regeneration unto God the Father through His Son by the Holy Spirit: for those who bear the Spirit of God are led to the Word, that is to the Son, while the Son presents them to the Father, and the Father furnishes incorruptibility. Thus, without the Spirit it is not possible to see the Word of God, and without the Son one is not able to approach the Father; for the knowledge of the Father is the Son, and knowledge of the Son of God is through the Holy Spirit. (Dem. 7)

The Spirit leads us to the Son; the Son presents us to the Father; and the Father crowns our adoption as sons with the gift of life everlasting. Irenaeus directly connects rebirth in the Spirit to our adoption as children of the Father:

Therefore Isaiah says,… “For the Spirit will come forth from me and it is I who made every breath” [Isa 57:16], properly setting the Spirit in God, who in the last days has spread it forth on the human race by adoption. (AH V.12.2)

Irenaeus draws a crucial distinction between the life bestowed in creation and the new life bestowed through adoption:

For the Father bears the creation and His own Word simultaneously, and the Word borne by the Father grants the Spirit to all as the Father wills. To some He gives after the manner of creation what is made; but to others [He gives] after the manner of adoption, that is, what is from God, namely generation. And thus one God the Father is declared, who is above all, and through all, and in all. The Father is indeed above all, and He is the Head of Christ; but the Word is through all things, and is Himself the Head of the Church; while the Spirit is in us all, and He is the living water, which the Lord grants to those who rightly believe in Him, and love Him, and who know that “there is one Father, who is above all, and through all, and in us all” [Eph. 4:6]. (AH V.18.2)

Our adoption is thus a new generation, a birth into the divine life that transcends our original creation. As Behr comments: “Those … who receive the adoption of sons in Christ receive life as the life-creating Spirit himself, vivifying them permanently ‘inside and out.’”⁸

Hence we must think dialectically. To be baptized by the Spirit into the ecclesial body of the risen Christ is to be adopted as children of the Father; to be united to the Son is to be reborn in the Spirit. The logic must be run both ways if we are to grasp Irenaeus’s Trinitarian grammar.     

Conclusion

Osborn invites us to think of the single divine economy of humanity’s deification as unfolding in three seasons:⁹

• The first season is creation and God’s fashioning of the first human beings and their historical movement through the successive dispensations of Adam, Noah, and Abraham. This is a time of pedagogy as God accustoms human beings to his grace and presence, harmonizes them “to the symphony of salvation” (AH IV.14.2), and prepares them to receive his incarnate Son and the gift of the Spirit.
• The second season is the new covenant of God’s enfleshment as the Second Adam and his recapitulation of human history through death and resurrection. “The cosmic cross implanted (infixus) in creation becomes visible,” comments Osborn. “In his incarnation and death Christ has gathered up (in compendio) the whole history of salvation and restored the image and likeness of God in man.”¹⁰ This is the season of the Church, which “has been planted as a garden [paradisus] in this world” (AH V.20.2). In this garden, the faithful eat the words of Scripture and feast upon the Body and Blood of Christ, as they look forward to their final deification in the Kingdom.
• The third season will begin with the return of Christ in glory, when he shall raise the dead, judge the living and the dead, and consummate his work of recapitulation. The divine economy that began with the creation of Adam will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection of humanity and the gift of imperishable life. The children of God will enter into their promised inheritance, beholding forever the glory of their Father shining forth in his Son. “When we come to the end of all our pilgrimage,” Osborn declares, “our final vision shall be the face of him who was born of Mary.”¹¹

St Irenaeus’s narrative of salvation would be appropriated and adapted by later theologians. Origen, St Athanasius, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Cyril of Alexandria—each developed elements of his narrative as they sought to proclaim the gospel of theosis. Yet its truth is already anticipated in the bishop of Lyons’s celebrated words:

For the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God by the creation already gives life to all the beings living on earth, how much more does the manifestation of the Father by the Word give life to those who see God! (AH IV.20.7).

1. “Although he never employed the language of theopoiesis or theosis, already present in the theology of Irenaeus are all the essential elements of what would come to be regarded as the characteristically patristic understanding of sanctification as divinization: restoration of prelapsarian likeness to God and incorruptibility, initiated by the union of human nature with divine nature through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the Eternal Son, appropriated existentially as adoption by God and infusion by the Holy Spirit, and finally perfected eternally through the face to face vision of God.” Jeffrey Finch, “Irenaeus on the Christological Basis of Human Divinization,” in Theosis (2006), 86-87. ↩︎
2. Denis Minns, Irenaeus (2010), 69. ↩︎
3. John Behr, Irenaeus of Lyons (2013), 145. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 185. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 146. Irenaeus is not engaging in the kind of speculation that would be raised in medieval theology: Would God have become man if Adam had never sinned. He is exegeting Scripture and therefore only thinking only in terms of the biblical story. ↩︎
6. M. C. Steenberg, “Children in Paradise,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004), 15-16. ↩︎
7. Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyons (2003), 132. ↩︎
8. Behr, 155. ↩︎
9. Osborn, 115-116. ↩︎
10. Ibid., 115-116. ↩︎
11. Ibid., 210. ↩︎

Fr John Behr on Origen on the Psalms

Thinking Trinity

Thinking Trinity: The Radical Homoousion by Fr Aidan “Fedora” Kimel

Read on Substack

A God-Sized Event: Thomas and the Revelation of the Crucified God (John 20:24-29)

By John Stamps

In Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, the opera’s climax arrives when Count Almaviva, who has been trying to seduce Figaro’s bride, Susanna, discovers that the woman he thought he was seducing is actually his own wife in disguise. He falls to his knees and begs her forgiveness, singing the words the audience has been longing to hear: “Contessa, perdono!” (“Countess, forgive me!”)

John’s Gospel has its own climactic recognition scene, and Thomas finally gives voice to what perceptive readers have known all along. The Fourth Gospel is traditionally symbolized by an eagle soaring into the theological heights, but its characters spend much of the story stumbling around on the ground. Thomas stands at the end of a slew of Johannine misunderstandings. Nicodemus misunderstands new birth. The Samaritan woman can’t make heads or tails out of living water. The crowds grossly misunderstand the bread of life. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Repeatedly, eyewitnesses see and hear Jesus without grasping who stands before them. The problem is never merely the absence of evidence. It’s the mystery of recognition!

But Thomas, one of the Twelve, who was called “Twin,” was not with them when Jesus came. Therefore, the other disciples kept saying to him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and thrust my finger into the mark of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will never believe and trust.” (John 20:24-25) 

Thomas is often portrayed as the disciple obsessed with empirical evidence. But Thomas has a more basic question: Can the man who was crucified really be alive? It’s startling to realize that Thomas does not demand to see the risen Jesus. He demands to see the crucified Jesus. The issue is continuity. He wants to know whether the Jesus who appeared was the same Jesus who was nailed to the cross. Thomas’s demand is grotesque. He does not merely request to see the wounds. He insists on thrusting his finger into the nail marks and his hand into Jesus’ pierced side. Only then, he says, will he believe and trust.¹ Only when Thomas encounters the risen-indeed-but-still-nail-scarred Lord does he finally utter the confession toward which the entire Gospel has been moving: “My Lord and my God!“

At the same time, Thomas refuses the other disciples’ testimony. They repeatedly tell him, “We have seen the Lord.” Yet he stubbornly refuses to believe them. Their witness is not enough. Unless he pokes and prods for himself, he will not believe and trust.² Marianne Meye Thompson provocatively suggests that Thomas’s error may lie “not in his empiricist refusal to believe what he could not see, but in his historicist refusal to trust the apostolic witness to the resurrection.”³ Thomas demands something that will soon become impossible: he insists upon occupying the historical position of the eyewitness.

Thomas’s situation is uncomfortably familiar. We occupy pretty much the same epistemic position as Thomas. We were not present in the upper room. We did not stand beside the empty tomb. We did not place our hands in the wounds of the risen Christ. Like Thomas, we encounter the resurrection through others’ testimony.

Our instinct is to solve this problem with certainty. We seek a form of knowledge stronger than somebody else’s witness. We want our own direct access. We want proof. We want to upgrade martyria—witness—to epistēmē, a form of knowledge that feels more respectable, more secure, and less vulnerable than second-hand testimony. Thomas voices precisely that temptation we feel.

Yet John’s Gospel consistently places witness at the center of its understanding of faith. John the Baptist bears witness. The works of Jesus bear witness. The Scriptures bear witness. The Father bears witness. The Spirit bears witness. Mary Magdalene bears witness. Now the disciples bear witness: “We have seen the Lord.“

This helps explain why I have translated πιστεύσω (pisteusō) as “believe and trust.”⁴ Throughout John’s Gospel, believing is never merely accepting a proposition. It involves entrusting oneself to the one who is believed. It includes confidence, fidelity, reliance, and commitment. When Thomas declares, “I will never believe and trust,” he is not merely withholding intellectual assent. He is refusing to entrust himself to the testimony he has received.

Thomas seeks certainty above and beyond mere witness. Yet John’s Gospel refuses to abandon the category of witness. The risen Christ does not replace testimony with certainty. He creates yet more witnesses. Thomas refuses to trust them. The irony is lovely. Despite himself, Thomas will soon become one of them.

Put Your Hand Into My Side

And after eight days, again his disciples were inside, and Thomas was with them. Jesus comes while the doors were shut and stands in their midst and says, “Peace to you!” Then he says to Thomas, “Bring your finger here and see my hands. Bring your hand and thrust⁵ it into my side. And do not become faithless, but faithful.” (John 20:26-27) 

It is again the eighth day. Jesus continues his work of new creation. On this eighth day, his particular piece of handiwork is Thomas. After demanding assurance that the risen Lord is the very one who was crucified, Jesus issues an astonishing point-blank command to Thomas. Jesus honors Thomas’s presumptuous request. Eight days earlier, Jesus had redirected and deflected Mary’s attempt to cling to him. Now he commands Thomas to come even closer: “Bring your finger here and see my hands. Bring your hand and thrust it into my side.“

Thomas gets the answer he sought. The cruciform wounds remain. The glory of the resurrection has not erased the shame of the crucifixion. The risen Lord still bears the history of his suffering. The stigmata are not discarded; they are glorified.

But there is one more surprise. Jesus already knew Thomas’s brazen demand. Thomas had made it when Jesus was absent, yet Jesus repeats it almost verbatim. Nobody had reported the conversation to him. Nobody explained anything. But before Thomas reaches for Jesus’ wounds, Jesus has already dug deep into Thomas’s doubts. We might think the story is about Thomas recognizing Jesus. Nope. Jesus recognizes Thomas first.⁶

Then Jesus addresses Thomas directly: “Do not become faithless, but faithful.” Jesus is not asking Thomas to acknowledge yet another fact or rearrange his mental furniture. Faith is thicker than that. He summons him into the posture of faithfulness itself—a life of trust and fidelity. In short, Jesus wants Thomas to become what he has refused to trust: a dependable witness. Thomas must move beyond skepticism and entrust himself to the risen Lord standing before him and to the testimony already given by his fellow disciples.

For Those Who Have Not Seen: Thomas and the Faith of the Church

Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus says to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed and trusted. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe and trust.” 

The best (and the most outrageous) commentary I know on this passage comes from the Easter Orthodox Vespers service for St Thomas Sunday:

O strange wonder, that grass should touch fire and be safe! For Thomas thrust his hand into the fiery side of Jesus Christ our God, and was not burned by touching.

St Romanos the Melodist suffered no doubt that Thomas thrust his hand into Christ’s fiery wounds. The image is shocking, but it captures the scene’s wonder. Thomas encounters not merely a resuscitated corpse but the living God. The wounds remain, yet they blaze with divine glory.⁷

And then Thomas utters the high-water mark of Christology in John’s Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” The confession answers the Gospel’s opening words. John began his Gospel by declaring that “the Word was God.” We readers have known from page one who Jesus is: the divine Logos made flesh. But now, at the story’s apex, one disciple finally catches up with us. “My Lord and my God!” The eagle has landed.

Thomas’s confession resonates deeply with Israel’s Scriptures. Thomas’s confession is not invented on Easter morning. Its language belongs to Israel’s worship. The psalmist prays:

Arise, O Lord, and give heed to my cause, O my God and my Lord, to my case. (Ps. 34:23 LXX [35:23 MT])

Thomas now directs that same language to the risen Jesus. The confession is therefore more than an acknowledgment that Jesus has returned from the dead. It is an act of worship. The crucified and risen Jesus now receives the worship that Israel offered to the God of Israel.

First-century readers would also have sensed the confession’s strident anti-imperial overtones. Calling Jesus “my Lord and my God” stood in striking contrast to the acclamations offered to the emperor. Suetonius reports that Domitian delighted in being addressed as Dominus et Deus noster (“our Lord and God”). Whether or not John consciously intended this contrast, Thomas’s confession leaves no room for rival claims to ultimate lordship. The crucified Jesus, and not Caesar, is “my Lord and my God.“⁸

Thomas’s confession changes not only how we speak about Jesus but how we speak about God. The resurrection has not simply vindicated Jesus. It has revealed God’s identity in the crucified and risen Christ.

There is no way to describe Jesus’ resurrection except as “a God-sized event.” Jesus is not a resuscitated corpse. He is not a ghost. He is not a zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. The risen Jesus challenges the very categories we use to understand reality. If he is indeed Lord and God, then Easter also challenges our assumptions about what it means for God to be God. As David F. Ford observes, the Jesus who stands before Thomas is “incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended to his Father, and breathing his Spirit.” Resurrection does not return Jesus to the old creation. It manifests the life of the new creation, a life that only God could create.⁹

Yet the God whom Thomas confesses has conquered death without ceasing to be the Crucified One. The risen Jesus still bears the wounds of his crucifixion. What are we to make of them? St Gregory Palamas asks this question precisely. How can the risen Christ display wounds when his body is no longer subject to suffering or death?

So how then did he have the scars? On the one hand, a body that is mortal and capable of suffering could not display scars and perforations and remain sound and healthy. But a body free from suffering and death can display the scars and perforations it previously suffered to whomever it wishes, and yet remain no less free from suffering and death.¹⁰

The risen Christ can display the wounds of his suffering without becoming subject to suffering or death again. Resurrection does not erase the history of suffering and death. The wounds remain. But their power does not.¹¹

When we describe the resurrection as “a God-sized event,” we do not mean that it is merely spectacular, overwhelming, or even obvious. We are not describing Zeus hurling thunderbolts or Odin leading the warriors of Valhalla into battle. We expect God to look like Zeus. The Gospel insists that God looks like Jesus. In Jesus, God becomes exceedingly inconspicuous, if not teeny-tiny indeed: concealed within a virgin’s womb, laid in a manger, washing the feet of his disciples, and finally hanging dead upon a Roman cross. From womb to tomb, divine power takes the form of self-giving love. Divine glory appears under the form of humility.

Even the resurrection itself hides God as much as it reveals him. The risen Christ is mistaken for a gardener. He appears quietly behind locked doors. Mary recognizes him when he calls her by name, and the disciples recognize him when he shows them his wounded hands and side. A God-sized event does not overwhelm the world by force. It challenges what we mean by God. The resurrection is a God-sized event precisely because the God who acts is the crucified God.

Thomas’s confession takes us beyond abstract speculation about divine attributes. It forces us to ask who God truly is. Meeting Jesus is meeting God. Meeting Jesus is our burning bush. How do we know who God is? Look at his wounds.

But what about us? We will never see those wounds. Jesus accepts Thomas’s confession, then immediately turns his attention beyond Thomas.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe and trust.

With this beatitude, the Gospel turns outward. The story is no longer about Thomas alone. John addresses every subsequent generation of Christians who must rely upon apostolic testimony rather than direct sight. The blessing falls not upon the eyewitness but upon us, the Church.

Thomas believed and trusted because he saw. We believe and trust through the witness of those who saw. The risen Christ reserves a special blessing for those who receive that witness and entrust themselves to him. The final word of the Thomas story is therefore not doubt but testimony, not sight but faith, not Thomas alone but the countless generations of Christians who confess with him: “My Lord and my God.”

But how are those who have not seen to believe and trust? John does not leave the question unanswered. After pronouncing the blessing, Jesus disappears from the scene, and the evangelist steps forward. The fourth wall comes down. John turns from telling us what Mary, the disciples, and Thomas saw and speaks directly to those of us who saw none of it. We have not been given Thomas’s eyes or his hands. We have been given something else: a written Gospel. “These things have been written.”

Epilogue: These Things Have Been Written—Faith, Witness, and Life for Those Who Have Not Seen (John 20:30–31)

Footnotes

1. Theophylact observes that Thomas does not reject the other disciples’ testimony because he thinks they are liars, but because he judges their report impossible. His skepticism stems from the resurrection’s unprecedented nature rather than suspicion of the witnesses. Theophylact adds, with characteristic wit, “Gullibility is a sign of light-mindedness, but stubborn resistance to truth is a sure indication of thick-headedness.” Blessed Theophylact, The Explanation of the Holy Gospel According to John, trans. Fr. Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 2007), 301. ↩︎
2. Careful readers of John’s Gospel cannot help but remember Jesus’ earlier rebuke to the royal official: “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will never believe” (4:48). Thomas’s demand for sight echoes the attitude Jesus had earlier criticized. Ironically, in both cases, Jesus graciously grants the request. His purpose is never to reward unbelief but to lead unbelievers beyond signs to faith. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, vol. 2 (Anchor Bible 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 1045. ↩︎
3. Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 13.  ↩︎
4. BDAG: πιστεύω – 1. to consider something to be true and therefore worthy of one’s trust, believe. 2. to entrust oneself to an entity in complete confidence, believe (in), trust. 3. entrust. 4. be confident about. 5. think/consider (possible). ↩︎
5. Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek: trans. to throw, hurl, to throw down, overthrow, to place, toss, put (often fig. ), to drop, to set aside, drive back ↩︎
6. John offers no explanation for Jesus’ knowledge, nor does he seem interested in supplying one. Throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus repeatedly knows what others have not yet revealed (1:47–48; 2:24–25; 4:17–19; 6:64; 11:11–15; 13:11). Thomas’s hidden conversation belongs to this recurring Johannine motif. ↩︎
7. Raymond E. Brown argues that John deliberately omits any statement that Thomas actually touched Jesus, suggesting that the invitation itself elicited Thomas’s confession. Brown, 1046. John is certainly silent on the point. Yet Jesus’ imperatives (“Bring your finger… bring your hand…“) read more naturally as genuine commands than as mere suggestions. ↩︎
8. Thompson, John, 426-427.  ↩︎
9. David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 410. ↩︎
10. St Gregory Palamas, Homily 17, §18, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Graeca 151, cols. 220–236; my translation from the Greek.
    Πῶς οὖν εἶχε τὰς ὠτειλάς; Θνητὸν μὲν σῶμα καὶ παθητὸν οὐκ ἂν ὠτειλάς τε καὶ διατρήσεις ἐπιδεῖξαι δύναιτο, καὶ σῶον καὶ ὑγιὲς διαμένειν· τὸ δὲ ἀπαθὲς καὶ ἀθάνατον ἔχει καὶ ὠτειλὰς δεικνῦναι καὶ διατρήσεις ἃς προϋπέστη καὶ οἷς ἂν θέλῃ καὶ μένειν οὐδὲν ἧττον ἀπαθὲς καὶ ἀθάνατον. ↩︎
11. Hartwig Thyen, commenting on John 20:27, cites Calvin’s dismissal of the inference that “Christ’s side is still pierced, his hands are still perforated” as ridiculous. Against Calvin, Klaus Wengst insists that the issue is not our “childish” conceptions but “what constitutes Jesus’ identity. He is not an unscathed victor figure, but permanently characterized as one who is wounded.” Thyen adds that the great painters seem to have understood this better than many great theologians when they depict even the judge of the world as the pierced one. Hartwig Thyen, Das Johannesevangelium, 2nd corrected edition, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 6 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 765. ↩︎

Christine Kimel: The Quiet Mystic

My beautiful wife Christine is a quiet mystic. She would not describe herself that way, yet on occasion she has been given visions—a vision of Christ/Aslan after the loss of our daughter through miscarriage and a vision of angels during the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. Two years ago she shared her story at a Hoot & Holler gathering here in Roanoke and more recently she was interviewed by Lee Hunsacker in which she shared her glorious vision of angels. That interview, as well as the recording of her H&H talk, is now available for your edification. I invite you to give it a prayerful listening. It begins at 24.10.

Website version

Apple Podcast version

Spotify Podcast version

What Remains Is Gift

Jonathan McCormack, David Bentley Hart, and Whether Anyone Remains

Mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, 1st–3rd century. Painted from life, buried with the dead. Each one someone.

Everything turns on a simple question: when we lose ourselves, in prayer or in love or finally in death, is anyone still there? If not, then love was only ever God loving himself through masks, and the dead are not given back as themselves.

In The I That Is Not Mine published here on Eclectic Orthodoxy earlier this week, Jonathan McCormack has put the question with unusual nerve: when the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”?  He walks a long way with the Advaitin, granting that the possessive ego may vanish and the wall between knower and known grow porous. Then, at the last step, McCormack holds back. “Separation is unreal,” he writes, “but distinction is not.” And he ends on a single word: what remains, when the ego is gone, is gift.

I agree with McCormack’s conclusion and I have no quarrel with his phenomenology. McCormack himself puts the point well: “the phenomenology underdetermines the ontology.” An experience in which only “I AM” seems to remain does not, by itself, tell us how many subjects there are. The question is not what we feel but what we are. Answering readers in the comments, McCormack has given his answer: the creature enjoys “non-exteriority without numerical identity.” It has no being outside God, yet it is not God.

He then asks, candidly, the question on which everything turns: “How far can ‘participation’ be intensified before the distinction between participation in divine actuality and being a mode of divine actuality becomes difficult to state?” In plain terms: how close to God can we come before we stop being ourselves? It is the right question, and I will argue three things about it: McCormack’s formula cannot answer it, Hart’s metaphysics cannot answer it either, and the answer is the word McCormack saves for last.

⁂

A figure in a dream can say “I am not the dreamer,” and it would be right. It thinks, it speaks, it is this figure and no other, with its own face and its own part in the story. It has no exterior to the dreamer’s mind; there is nowhere for it to stand outside the dream. It depends on him completely, having no being of its own for a single instant. It is not numerically identical with him. And the dreamer is in no way constituted by it; he would be himself without this dream. Every condition McCormack sets (non-exteriority, complete dependence, the absence of numerical identity, the asymmetry he rightly calls essential) the dream figure satisfies, and it can even ask, as he does, who is saying “I.” And still it is nothing but the dreamer’s dreaming.

I agree with every one of these conditions. They are true of every creature, and the classical Christian tradition taught them long before Hart. My point is only that they are not enough: they are true of the dream figure as well. Mind you, I do not suggest that Hart thinks we are dreamt. I mean only that his conditions do not exclude it. Add a real activity of its own and nothing changes: souls in the Hindu tradition act and bear their karma, and Spinoza’s modes strive to persevere in being.

Why does this matter? Because no one can love a figure in his own dream. He can only enjoy his own dreaming; there is no one there to love him back, and no one to lose. A self that meets every one of these conditions and is still a dream figure is no one to love, and no one to be given back.

Nor is this merely a thought experiment. The Hindu theologian Rāmānuja taught exactly “non-exteriority without identity.” Souls, for him, are real, many, distinct from Brahman and wholly dependent on him, and they are still Brahman’s prakāra, his modes, the body of which Brahman is the self. McCormack’s formula describes a Hindu monism almost word for word, so it cannot be what separates Christian theology from monism. The line between a creature and a mode has to be drawn somewhere else.

Phenomenology will not draw that line either. A dream figure that fell silent and searched itself for a self would find only the dreamer, and an Advaitin would say the search had succeeded. Experience alone cannot tell us what we are; the stillness feels the same whether anyone is in it or not. Theosis may one day bring experience and truth into perfect transparency, so that we know as we are known. But transparency only shows us what we already are; it cannot decide it. The Advaitin expects it to disclose Brahman, the Christian a creature held in love, and the way there looks the same to both. The question has to be settled on other ground.

⁂

That line was drawn at Nicaea, and it requires no special training to grasp. The Church confessed two ways in which something comes from God, and Christians still say it every Sunday: the Son is “begotten, not made.” The Son is begotten: he receives the Father’s own nature, whole God from whole God, distinct as person and identical in what he is. The world is made: it receives from God a being that God is not, by will and from nothing. Will and nature are one in God, so the difference cannot lie in two faculties within him. It lies in what comes forth. The Son is what God is. The world is what God is not. The Son, being what God is, cannot not be; the world, being what God is not, need not have been. How God gives a being that is not himself, with nothing outside him to make it from, the Church has never explained. It confessed it, and refused every account that would make the world a part of God. The whole Arian controversy turned on keeping these apart, because only the first relation yields God, and only the second yields a creature.

McCormack has a word for the way the world comes from God, the word his essay ends on: gift. Note that a gift has two sides, someone who gives it and someone who receives it. A gift that turned out to be the giver would not have been given at all. When God creates, he gives an existence that becomes the recipient’s own in the very act of being received; the dreamer, by contrast, only lends his mind to the figure he dreams. Before the gift there is nothing there to receive it; the creature exists as the one being given to. Hence it cannot be dissolved back into its source. The Son receives the Father’s own nature and so is God; the creature receives a being that is not God’s nature, and so is wholly its own. Here lies the difference between participation and mode, a difference in kind that no change of degree can reach. Intensify participation as far as you like; a gift will never become a mode, because a mode is never given a being of its own.

McCormack offers an image for the creature: a “living mirror” that “contains nothing of its own” and becomes most fully itself “in receiving what it cannot produce.” The image gets half of the gift right, the half a monist would also accept: everything the creature has comes from God. What it leaves out is the other side. A mirror receives light only by reflecting it; the light plays across its surface, and nothing in it sees. A person is someone to whom the light is given and in whom it becomes his own seeing.

And what is given is never a bare self. McCormack puts it beautifully in the comments: theosis “doesn’t save us from our particularity; it saves particularity from possession.” What is given is this life, these relations, this history, received over time. The possessive ego may die; what it tried to own does not die with it, because it was never its own to lose. It was given, and what God gives he does not take back.

⁂

Can Hart supply this? McCormack insists that he can. Hart’s monism, he explains, is not “identity monism,” in which “finite beings are appearances, modifications, or temporary differentiations of the one divine substance.” It holds that there is “only one infinite and underived actuality of Being,” which can “give rise gratuitously to genuinely finite created actualities.” Here I must be fair. Hart affirms real natures, real creaturely acts and secondary causes, and he has no wish to make the creature a mask; against Hegel, he insists that God gains nothing from the world. If his monism were only what McCormack describes, the question would be the one already asked: what makes the distinction real? Nor does Hart want the person lost. To his credit Hart has insisted for years that we are saved with our histories and our loves. The question is only whether his metaphysics can give him what he wants.

But the texts say more. Creation from nothing does not settle the matter, since Hart himself calls it “the most radical and rigorous formulation of the metaphysics of emanation imaginable.” In The Light of Tabor, God is “the one Nature of all natures, of which human nature exists entirely and solely as a mode,” and Hart repeats the point in his Substack essay Expression and Being: all created natures are “modes of the infinite expressiveness of God in the Logos.” The same essay answers McCormack’s question about the “who” directly. Finite subjectivity, Hart writes, is “a unique expression and contraction of that original actus,” “always a unique personal instance” of the one identity of mind and being, “nothing but the impartation of being in an instance of the here and now.” In plain terms, each of us is a single, finite instance of God’s one act of being. Notice what is missing. The finite subject is the impartation; nowhere is it the one to whom being is imparted. And the essay closes by calling all that exists “the expression of personhood—or, rather, of the Person of all personhood.” The irreducible “who” McCormack hopes for is, on Hart’s account, an instance of the one Person.

Hart does now say something welcome. “A truly expressionist ontology,” he writes, “requires a wholly unnecessary creation,” not because God might have chosen otherwise but as “an entirely modal assertion about the total ontological contingency of the created.” Put plainly: the world need not exist, though not because God could have done otherwise. I welcome the first half. If it means that the world truly need not have been, without picturing God choosing among options, I agree. But contingency is not otherness. A dream figure is wholly contingent, since the dreamer need never have dreamed it, and it is still nothing but his dreaming. A contingent mode is still a mode.

Nor does Hart distinguish creation from the generation of the Son by kind. Christ, Hart writes, is the one in whom “the eternal utterance of the Father in the Logos by the Spirit” and “the created repetition or reverberation of that utterance in the finite” are one. If creation is the reverberation of the Word, its difference from the Word is the difference of an echo from a voice, a difference of degree; and the line between creature and mode that Nicaea drew was a difference of kind. A world like that is not given. It is expressed.

Why does the difference matter? Because there are only two ways to come from God and be truly someone. One is to receive God’s own nature, as the Son does, and then one is God. The other is to receive a being of one’s own, and then one is a creature, a gift. An expression of God that is neither is only God appearing in a particular form, no one in its own right. If we are expressions, there is in the end no one but God. If we are gifts, there is someone to love, and someone to be given back.

So when McCormack wagers that perfect participation will disclose created persons “precisely as irreducible modes of address and communion,” I can take his wager only with a distinction. If by “mode” he means what Maximus calls tropos, the manner in which a created nature exists, there is nothing to correct. But the mode in Hart is a mode of the divine nature, and a mode of God is God in a particular form; it can never be fully someone other than God. What McCormack is reaching for, the irreducible “who” that can say “you,” is a gift.

⁂

The question becomes sharpest in Christ. McCormack writes that for Hart, Christ’s humanity “is most perfectly and completely human precisely because it is wholly transparent to the divine Logos.” I agree entirely. But it leaves a plain question standing, one any Christian can answer. A mode of a nature is that selfsame nature in a particular form. So: is Christ’s human nature a mode of his divine nature? If it is, then Christ has one nature appearing in two ways, and that is exactly what the Council of Chalcedon ruled out when it confessed two natures “without confusion, without change.” If it is not, then Christ’s humanity is truly other than his divinity: created, received, and wholly his own, and his perfect transparency to the Father is a creature’s openness to God, held perfectly as a gift. That is the Christ McCormack wants. He is also the prototype of theosis, of which every deified life is an icon: a union in which the creature becomes most fully itself, because the closer it comes to God, the more completely it is given to itself.

One nature or two? Everything McCormack hopes to keep depends on the answer, and the Church gave it long ago.

⁂

Return, then, to his question. When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”? Not the possessive ego, the self that imagined it owned its life; that was always a fiction. Nor God speaking through a mask, which would make the person a disguise. The one saying “I” is the one being given to: a self that never owned its existence and therefore cannot lose it, because it has always held its being as received. That is why the one we have lost can be given back as herself. She was a gift from the beginning.

McCormack ends: “What remains is gift.” He is right. It was the answer to his own question from the beginning, the only way to state the difference between participation and mode, and the only ground on which a Christian nonduality can remain Christian: not a theology of modes, in which the many return to the one, but a theology of gift, in which the many are given, and given, and given, and never taken back.

** Note (Oct 14, 2026): Quotations from “Expression and Being” are from the version published Oct 7, 2026. Hart has since revised the essay; among other changes, the phrases “always a unique personal instance” and “nothing but the impartation of being in an instance of the here and now” no longer appear.

Who Art in Heaven

Why God, who is everywhere, seems so far away

Our Father, who art in heaven. The familiar beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. I have said those words more times than I could possibly count. Strangely it took me an embarrassingly long time to even notice that the very first thing the prayer does, prior to petitioning for bread or forgiveness or deliverance, is to put God somewhere else. There, apparently, and not here. In heaven, a word we still hear as a direction: up, and far.

We know better, of course. God is everywhere, we rightly believe it, and our catechisms are quite firm on the point. But experience has taught me that what we believe and what we pray for have never been on the best of terms. We have all been there, praying and waiting for something to happen that did not happen, and we all know which of the two usually wins. God is everywhere. But yet, God seems very far away.

Near the end of a late afternoon Intro to Orthodox Theology class a few years ago, I was asked by a student why a God who is everywhere should feel so far away. I gave him an answer. Sure, it was a competent answer, full of the right distinctions, and I remember his reaction, a polite nod. He had asked about his prayers, and I had answered him about God’s attributes. This essay is my second attempt at an answer.

For a long time I assumed the distance was the problem, the thing faith existed to fix, and I noticed that theologians mostly seemed to agree, though they fixed it in opposite ways. Some pulled God closer by blurring the line between him and the world, until the creature looked like a ripple on the divine surface, pleasant enough, I suppose, if a little unsure of its own existence. Others shrugged, called the distance by its modern name, absence, and let the matter rest. It took me years to see that the two camps agreed on the one thing that mattered. Both assumed that distance meant empty space, a gap lying between two things, something to be closed or else despaired of.

But what if nothing lies between us at all? What if the distance between God and me is something I am?

❦

Everything I have has been given to me, beginning with the plain fact that I am here at all. I did not make myself. God’s existence is simply what he is, and belongs to him as nothing else can; mine comes to me from another, and I hold it as one holds a gift, on account of the one who gave it. And every gift has two sides, someone who gives it and someone who receives it. Here the picture of the ripple fails. A ripple is nothing other than the sea itself in motion; take away the moving sea and there is no ripple left over. But what God gives me is not a piece of himself. It is an existence of my own, and a gift that turned out to be the giver would not have been given at all. So there are two of us, God and me, and the difference between us is real. But notice where it lies. Nothing stands between a giver and the one he gives to; they meet in the giving itself, and I exist only as the one receiving. That difference is the distance I began with. It is no empty space I must somehow cross. It is the form of my being received.

The Fathers at Nicaea, who by all accounts were not given to sentimentality, saw why that qualification matters. Receiving alone does not make a creature. The Son also receives everything from the Father, and the Son is God. What matters is what is received. The Son receives the Father’s own nature, whole and undivided, so that his receiving marks a difference of persons within the one God and no distance of kind at all. I, however, receive otherwise. I am given a being that God is not, brought forth by his will from nothing rather than begotten from his nature.

I should pause on the word will here, because it tends to bring to mind a God leafing through possible worlds like a man choosing a tie. I mean nothing of the kind; nothing in God deliberates. I mean only that the world is not required by what God is. The Son belongs to the divine life itself, so that God would not be God without him; the world, however, adds nothing to a God already complete. The Son is begotten of what God is, and that begetting is love’s own life. The world is given by a God who needs nothing more. The one is begotten, the other given.

I have taken to calling this, for want of a better phrase, the distance that is us.

❦

Nearly everything I know about distance I learned from space. My parish is 40 some miles from my driveway; my oldest friend lives on the other side of the continent. Distances of that sort are measured. But the distance that is us is of another kind entirely. There is no road between God and the creature, no medium, no measure. God is not elsewhere the way the far country in the parable is elsewhere, and no amount of travel will bring me nearer to him.

Nor, and this took me longer realize, is it a distance of degree. For years I carried a picture of creation as type of staircase of light, with God at the top and everything else arranged on the steps below, the angels bright, the ground rather dim, and ourselves somewhere in the middle, squinting upward. It is a lovely picture and a very old one. The problem is that a fainter light is still the same light. On the staircase, the creature differs from God only as dusk differs from noon. Dusk, given enough sunlight, becomes noon. The distance that is us belongs to another order. No brightening crosses it, since my being is received and God’s is not, and received being is no dimmer version of the being that gives it.

A better picture, albeit still imperfect, is the relation between an author and a character in her novel. Where is the character, in relation to the author? The question simply dissolves. She is not across the room, nor tucked in a drawer; there is no distance between them in any sense a surveyor would recognize. And yet the difference could hardly be greater. The author is real in a way the character is not, and everything the character is, down to the last gesture, comes from her.

The picture fails at one point, and I have come to love that failure more than the picture. A character is only imagined, a passing shape of the author’s mind, and however vivid she may be, she cannot answer back. But the creature can, it can answer back. Why? Because it holds an existence that is truly its own, an act of being that belongs to it and to no one else, even though every bit of it is received, and the proof is that it can turn toward its maker and speak. The Psalter is one long record of creatures answering back, in praise and in complaint, sometimes in the same breath. Not so with a novel’s character — it has never turned on the page to address her author like that. (I have written elsewhere about what it means for a creature to receive its being, in The Wound That Receives.)

I recall when I first encountered the word diastēma as a graduate student at St. Andrews, reading Gregory of Nyssa late into the night in student housing that never quite got warm. Gregory called the creature’s side of this difference diastēma, which means interval or extension. Whatever has a beginning, he says, is stretched out; it unfolds in time, passes from what it was toward what it will be, and is never present to itself all at once. God, by contrast, is adiastatos, without interval. He does not unfold, since nothing in him is still waiting to arrive. I remember coming to the realization that I was nothing but interval: a human being stretched between a beginning I did not choose and an end I cannot see.

That, I think now, is the heart of it. I do not stand on one side of the distance and look across at God on the other. There is no other side to stand on. I am the distance that is us, given being. My becoming and my reaching are what received existence looks like from my lived experience, and becoming and reaching have belonged to the gift from my very start.

❦

I do think it seems natural to suppose that a God so unlike us must also be very far from us. But the Christian tradition says that the reverse is true.

At Pascha our church fills up, people crowding on the side and in the back. By the time the procession comes back in from the dark, candles lit, we are packed so tightly that you can hardly lift your arm to cross yourself without apologizing to someone (even worse in the choir!). It is the happiest, jubilant crowd I have ever seen, and it illustrates, rather beautifully, why creatures keep their distance from one another. Two bodies cannot stand in the same place; one must shift if the other is to have room. We jostle because we are the same sort of thing, laid out on the same plane, each taking up room the other might have had.

But God does not jostle. He is no single thing among others, no larger item in the inventory of the world, and so he competes with nothing and needs no one to step aside for him. He is present in the very act of giving by which I exist at all, while the existing itself belongs to me. The difference of kind that seemed to explain his remoteness turns out to explain his nearness. Only what is wholly other can be wholly near.

The distance, moreover, runs one way, it is asymetrical. Think of the father in the parable, who sees his son “while he was yet a great way off” and runs. The son’s distance was a runaway’s, which ours, as creatures, is not; but the shape of the thing is the same. All the distance in that story lay on the son’s side. The father never had any. So it is with us: we are far from God in the sense that we are not God, while God is never far from us.

Augustine said it better than anyone has since. God, he confessed, is more inward to me than my own innermost self and higher than my highest. The two halves of the sentence hold each other up: precisely because God is higher than the highest, he is closer than the closest. A God who was merely very large would indeed be far off. The God who is beyond every kind is nearer to me than I am to myself. Which is why the sense of distance in prayer, painful and real as it can be, is never a report that God has gone. Gregory of Nyssa would say it is what the nearness of an inexhaustible God feels like to a finite mind that cannot hold him. I wish in hindsight I had known to tell my student that.

❦

I have come to think the best evidence for all of this is no argument at all, but a handful of things we do almost every day without thinking. Whoever gives thanks, whoever loves, whoever respects and honors a neighbor, is already living in the distance that is us, and a metaphysics that abolishes that distance makes nonsense of every prayer its adherents pray.

Take thanksgiving. A few winters back I stood in a canyon out in the Joshua Tree desert and shouted my own name at the massive rocks to hear it come back. It came back, a little quieter each time, and I remember thinking, rather absurdly, that the canyon had never once thanked me. I gave it my loudest shout and it echoed back. But an echo cannot thank the voice. It is only the voice returning, and it has nothing of its own from which to say thank you. Thanks requires two, a giver and one who receives, and the one who receives must be genuinely someone. The Church calls its central act the Eucharist, which is simply Greek for thanksgiving, and the name is quite exact. Our first and final word to God is gratitude, and gratitude is only possible for someone genuinely other than the one thanked.

Or take love. There is a strand of spiritual writing, very old and often very beautiful, that speaks as though the highest union with God would be a kind of dissolving, the self poured out like a drop of water into the sea until nothing of it remains. I have never been able to make that picture quite square with anything I know about love. There is an elderly couple at our church who have stood in the same spot on the left side of the nave for as long as I have attended. When he helps her after the Liturgy it is perfectly obvious that the point of their long union has never been to become one person. Love delights in the beloved. It needs someone to be delighted in and someone to do the delighting. The union for which we were made is closer than any dissolving could be, precisely because both remain, and the creature is gathered to God as itself.

And take the neighbor. The distance that is us holds between each of us and God, and so it holds, in a lesser way, between each of us and everyone else. Every person I meet is also given. Her being does not come from me and is not mine to arrange, and she cannot be folded into my plans for her without some violence being done. I suspect a great deal of cruelty begins at the moment one person forgets that another is a gift and starts treating her as a possession. To see the distance that is us is to see every face as something. some one, that arrives from beyond me, asking to be received.

❦

If the distance is the shape of our being, then the Incarnation might seem to present a difficulty, since surely in Christ God closed the distance at last. What he did is more astonishing. He entered it.

When the bishops at Chalcedon, in AD 451, set out to define how God and humanity are joined in Christ, they chose their words with the great care. The two natures, they said, are united without confusion and without separation. Without separation, because in Christ God and humanity are one person, as close as closeness can be. Without confusion, because the humanity is never melted down into the divinity, and remains in him fully human and fully received. And here is the wonder of it: divine and human natures do not belong together by nature. Nothing in either makes the other its natural extension. Chalcedon joins what nature never joined, and joins it without mixture, and so the union is sheer gift. Paul’s word for it is emptying (Phil 2:7). The Son takes what was not his own, and the flesh he takes remains flesh, glorified and never dissolved.

In Christ, then, the distance that is us is inhabited, and it remains. God comes to live on the creature’s side of it, as a creature, without ceasing to be God. And because the one who comes is the Son, whose whole being is to receive from the Father, we are drawn in him into that receiving, so that our own reception of being comes, by grace, to share in his.

This matters most where life is hardest, because the distance that is us is also where things can go wrong. A creature that is genuinely other can turn away, can be wounded, can be stretched past bearing. When we suffer, the temptation is to wish the distance gone, to want God to end our creatureliness so that nothing could ever hurt us again. God heals in another way. He comes into the distance where the wound is, takes the wound as his own, and heals it from within, and the cross is the place where he stands furthest into our side of the distance, all the way down to death.

Each Sunday when I partake of the chalice, the priest or deacon says my name. The servant of God Robert partakes. I stand there with my arms crossed over my chest, and the gift is given to me already waiting for it. Creation was not like that. Before the gift there was no one to receive it; no creature stood waiting at the door when God gave being, and the one who receives came to be in the very act of receiving. That receiving, then, is no mere passivity, the undergoing of something by a thing already there, since there was nothing already there to undergo it. It is the creature’s first act, the act of being given to itself. The distance that is us arrives with the gift, as its shape. God does not first lay out an empty space and afterward fill it. In giving, he gives the receiver too.

❦

Those who read the last part of my series on apophasis, You Cannot Finish God, will remember Gregory’s word epektasis, the soul’s endless reaching toward a God it can never exhaust. I won’t repeat that story here. I only want to add what it looks like once the distance that is us is in view.

Gregory’s most beautiful telling of it comes in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which I think are the loveliest thing he wrote. The bride of the Song rises in the night to seek her beloved, and no sooner has she found him than she hears him call again: arise, come away. Gregory reads every finding as the start of a new seeking. The soul, he says, goes from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that never come to an end. She is never finished with love, because the one she loves is never finished giving.

Only an extended being can go on beginning like that. God has no beginnings; he is whole, and nothing in him waits to arrive. The creature, stretched out in time and desire, can begin again forever. The bride’s endless beginnings are the distance that is us, lived without end.

And there, it seems to me, is the answer to the fear I started with. I had imagined that distance from God was the problem, and that heaven would be the moment it finally closed. Gregory sees it the other way round. Heaven is the distance become felicity. It can never be abolished, since the infinite is inexhaustible by the finite. But in the life to come it will no longer be felt as absence. It will be the form of the creature’s endless receiving, more of God forever, without ever reaching the bottom of what there is to receive.

Gregory is usually read as answering an old worry here, one Origen had raised before him: that souls come to rest in God might grow sated with the good, as one tires even of a magnificent banquet, and fall away again. But satiety is only possible where the good can be exhausted. A creature forever receiving more of an inexhaustible God never reaches the point at which desire could slacken, and so the very distance that once made the fall possible becomes, in the end, what makes it impossible. What we now suffer as the ache of distance is the first stirring of that endless beginning.

The gifts of God, Paul says, are irrevocable. If God is as the Gospel says he is, none whom he has called into being will in the end be lost to him.

Our Father, who art in heaven. I think of the prayer differently now. The prayer sends God nowhere at all. Heaven names the difference between the One who gives and the ones who are given, and that difference, it turns out, is the only place he has ever met us. The distance that is us is the form of the gift, and the first thing God gives when he gives us ourselves.

The I That Is Not Mine: A Hartian Account of Theosis and Nondual Experience

by Jonathan McCormack

When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who—or what—is saying “I”?

The question is more dangerous for Christian theology than it first appears. Christianity has always possessed a language of self-loss almost violent enough to satisfy any nondualist: one must die to oneself, lose one’s life in order to find it, cease to live so that Christ may live within, become poor in spirit, empty oneself, pass beyond images, concepts, possessions, even the anxious ownership of one’s own virtue. The great ascetical traditions do not promise the modern self a more polished version of its familiar sovereignty. They promise its undoing.

And yet Christianity has usually insisted, with equal force, that salvation does not culminate in the disappearance of the person. The creature is not a veil that God finally tears away from his own face. Deification does not reveal that there was only one subject all along. The saint does not awaken from the dream of being Peter or Mary or Macrina into the discovery that the only real “I” is God.

What, then, actually happens to consciousness in theosis?

David Bentley Hart does not provide a phenomenological manual of deification, and it would be misleading to pretend that he does. What he provides is something in certain respects more provocative: a metaphysics of consciousness, creation, freedom, participation, and Christ in which a remarkably nondual phenomenology becomes conceivable without the metaphysics of numerical identity. If his account is followed inward—if one asks not only what it says reality is, but what reality so constituted might feel like when transparently known—then theosis begins to look less like the supernatural decoration of an otherwise ordinary ego and more like a transformation in the very grammar of the word “I.”ⁱ

Hart himself has invited the comparison. At the beginning of You Are Gods he remarks that the essays might have borne the subtitle “Studies in Vedantic Christianity,” though he adds that “Neoplatonic Christianity” would say more or less the same thing. The provocation is instructive. Vedānta need not function here as an exotic metaphysics imported into Christianity; it can serve as an unusually lucid conversation partner for truths about participation, consciousness, and deification that Hart believes belong already to the Christian metaphysical inheritance.ⁱⁱ

What follows takes Hart’s metaphysics seriously enough to ask what it might mean in experience. The question is not whether Hart has secretly written a Christian Advaita, nor whether the Upaniṣads secretly teach Orthodox theosis. It is simpler and stranger: if the deepest ground of every finite act of consciousness is the divine Logos, if human nature is made for deification, and if Christ is the perfect transparency of the human to the divine “I AM,” what should awakening to that truth be like?

The “I” Deeper Than the Ego

Ordinary consciousness is almost inseparable from possession. My body, my memory, my projects, my wounds, my convictions; even my consciousness seems to belong to me as an interior chamber into which the world occasionally sends reports. Behind these possessions we imagine an owner, a small metaphysical monarch who says “I” and takes the saying itself as evidence of sovereignty.

Hart’s anthropology is inhospitable to this picture. The empirical ego is not the source of consciousness but a finite psychological organization of a spiritual depth it neither creates nor contains. The Christian contemplative tradition has spoken of the nous, the scintilla or spark of spirit, the deep heart; and Hart is quite willing, in comparative contexts, to place beside these terms the Sanskrit ātman. But this depth should not be imagined as a second, natureless subject hidden behind the psychological person. It is the depth of this created life, whose consciousness is received rather than self-grounding. God is “nearer to me than my inmost parts.” At the root of the creature’s finite “I am” is the uncreated “I AM,” the Logos through whom every rational nature exists and knows.

This is the point at which Hart’s recent Christology becomes especially daring. In Jesus, on his account, the human psychological consciousness is perfectly transparent to its divine ground. There is no interval of sin, no defensive opacity, no false possession separating the human act of consciousness from the eternal Logos whose incarnate life it is. Christ is not less human because his humanity is wholly transparent to God. He is the revelation of what humanity looks like when nothing in it resists its own divine ground and end.ⁱⁱⁱ

For the rest of us, consciousness is lived in exile from this transparency. We take the finite contraction for the source. We hear the word “I” and imagine that the little empirical speaker has manufactured the voice.

Theosis would therefore not add a divine object to the contents of consciousness. It would change the relation between consciousness and its own depth. The “I” that had seemed private and self-originating becomes transparent to the I AM that was always nearer than the ego to itself.

This is not yet Advaita. But phenomenologically it begins to approach territory in which an Advaitin would feel at home.

Hart comes closer to describing this transition in Roland in Moonlight than his more systematic works might lead one to expect. There he distinguishes the ordinary ego from a depth that is “I more deeply than the ego is I,” and speaks without embarrassment of the “oceanic experience of the ego’s dissolution into fuller existence.” The language matters. What is dissolved is not consciousness into vacancy, but the ego into a more comprehensive mode of life.^iv

Elsewhere in the same book he describes the highest level of nous or ātman as possessing a kind of “sublime anonymity”: at that depth, he says, “we’re all one and the same in a sense,” while the individual soul acts as a prism through which the light of being is differentiated into the private experience of this or that finite subject. The image gives the Hartian problem an almost Vedāntic sharpness. The light is universal; the refraction is particular. Mystical consciousness may therefore feel like a return toward the light before its refraction without requiring the prism itself to be unreal.^v

When the Self Cannot Be Found

Suppose contemplative purification actually succeeds in quieting the ordinary machinery by which the ego continually announces itself: memory rehearsing its injuries, fantasy constructing futures in which it is finally secure, desire measuring the world by usefulness, judgment arranging persons into allies and threats, the nearly continuous murmur of self-reference.

What remains?

A Christian sometimes answers too quickly: “the person.” But the person is not an object one discovers sitting at the bottom of the mind after all other objects have been removed. One may search experience for the owner of experience and find nothing at all resembling the substantial little self one expected. Nor should “person” simply be treated as another name for a natureless hypostasis hidden behind experience. For Hart, hypostasis and nature are inseparable: concrete existence is always the actuality of a nature, while personhood names a richer first-personal and expressive structure of being.

Hart’s metaphysics gives us no reason to fear this discovery. If the creature possesses no self-subsisting act of being, why should contemplation uncover one? The self is not an interior idol. Its deepest reality is participation.

Thus an experience of “no-self” could, within a Hartian ontology, be entirely truthful at the phenomenological level. What disappears is the ego as proprietor: the fiction that there exists somewhere within consciousness a self-begotten owner who possesses being, agency, and awareness in its own right. The contemplative does not necessarily experience a more magnificent private soul behind the ordinary ego. There may instead be a strange translucency: consciousness without the familiar weight of possession, awareness no longer curved obsessively back upon itself.

Hart’s writings repeatedly return to specular images for created consciousness: mind as a finite participation in divine light, receiving rather than originating the radiance by which it knows. If one follows that imagery phenomenologically, the contrast is between an opaque empirical ego and a “living mirror” whose very perfection consists in transparency. A perfect mirror does not cease to exist because it contains nothing of its own; it becomes most fully itself in receiving what it cannot produce.

Perhaps the Christian mystical paradox can be put this way: the self may disappear as possession precisely as the person begins to appear as gift.

The Vanishing of the Doer

Something similar occurs with agency.

Modern freedom is haunted by the image of an uncaused chooser standing before neutral alternatives. The more completely an action originates from me alone, uncontaminated by nature, desire, reason, grace, or final cause, the more authentically mine it seems.

Hart regards this conception as nearly unintelligible. A rational act is free not because it erupts without cause or purpose, but because intelligence apprehends a good and desire moves toward it without obstruction. Freedom grows with knowledge. The more perfectly the Good is known, the less arbitrary the will becomes; and at the limit, perfect freedom is a determination so complete that sin becomes impossible.^vi

Now ask what such freedom would feel like.

Ordinary agency is full of friction. I deliberate, resist, force, second-guess, compel myself, regret. The will is experienced almost muscularly, as though a small inner agent were pushing the body and world from behind.

But if freedom is perfected as the will becomes transparent to its true Good, then increasing freedom may produce decreasing awareness of willing as effort. Action begins to feel less like self-assertion and more like consent, attraction, even spontaneity. The good act happens from the deepest truth of the agent without the familiar drama of an ego watching itself choose.

At the extreme, perfect agency might phenomenologically resemble non-doership.

Here the nineteenth-century Bengali Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) becomes unexpectedly relevant. Ramakrishna moved with unusual freedom between ecstatic devotion to Kālī and other personal forms of God and the disciplines of Advaita Vedānta; in his mature teaching he distinguished jñāna, the realization of nondual Brahman, from vijñāna, a fuller realization in which the world and personal devotion return as manifestations of the same divine Reality. His language of agency can be startlingly absolute: “I am the machine and God is the Operator”; “I am the carriage and God is the Driver.” Ayon Maharaj has accordingly reconstructed this dimension of Ramakrishna’s thought as a form of hard theological determinism. Yet Ramakrishna also insists on spiritual effort, moral responsibility, and the impossibility of simply adopting divine doership as an intellectual excuse.^vii

Hart would not accept the metaphysics of creaturely agency as illusion. His account of divine causality is noncompetitive: God does not act instead of the creature but gives the creature its very power to act. Primary causality does not occupy the space of secondary causality. Hence an act can be wholly dependent upon God and wholly the creature’s own. In a recent formulation, Hart makes the point still more sharply: there is one actuality of being, imparted to creatures in finite modes, so that genuine creaturely action is the divine act truly active in the creature. By contrast, to be governed by pathos—to be merely moved or qualified from without—is, to that degree, a privation of actuality. The paradox is exact: surrender of egoic doership can mean not less agency but more, because the person becomes less passively driven and more freely expressive of the Good.^viii

Phenomenologically, however, the two accounts may come surprisingly close. The felt distinction between “God’s action” and “my action” can disappear even while the metaphysical distinction between primary and secondary causality remains.

Paul’s “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me” may be less a paradox of grammar than a phenomenology of perfected agency.

The World Becomes Interior

There is another boundary theosis may unsettle: the border between consciousness and world.

The Cartesian picture imagines an interior mind facing an exterior universe. Consciousness is a chamber; the world stands outside it. Knowledge then becomes a mysterious traffic between two alien domains.

Hart’s metaphysics of consciousness rejects the picture at its foundation. Mind and world can meet because both already participate in Logos: subjective intelligence is open to objective intelligibility because reality is, at its roots, rational through and through. Hart sometimes describes this relation in nuptial terms. Knowing is not the collision of two sealed substances but a union in which being gives itself to mind and mind receives the form of being.

If that is true, contemplation might alter not merely what one sees but the felt topology of seeing itself.

The world may cease to feel simply “outside.” Beauty is no longer an object over there inspected by a spectator over here. The tree, the face, the light upon stone appear with an almost interior intimacy; while consciousness, conversely, seems no longer enclosed behind the forehead but opened outward into the intelligibility it receives. The distinction between knower and known does not have to vanish metaphysically for their opposition to vanish phenomenologically.

Christian mystical literature has often described such moments through light: not merely seeing a luminous object, but finding oneself and the world together disclosed within illumination.

Again, an Advaitin would recognize something here. The subject-object structure has softened. The old dyad has lost its hardness.

But Christianity has not yet said that subject and object were numerically one all along.

Nor is the language of coincidence merely ours. In Roland in Moonlight Hart gathers Eckhart’s “God’s ground is my ground,” Plotinus’s return of nous to its divine source, Augustine’s God who is more inward than the inmost self, and Islamic accounts of delimited being returning to nondelimited Being around what he calls “the real experience of a final coincidence of being and knowing in God or the transcendent ground of all.” He then locates there the meeting of the unity of mind and the unity of being.^ix

The phrase “final coincidence” is dangerous only if coincidence is immediately translated into numerical identity. Hart’s own metaphysics does not require that translation. It allows the opposition of knower and known to be overcome in an act of participation whose intimacy can be total without turning the finite knower into the uncreated source of knowing.

Christ at the Center

We can now return to the dangerous question: when the empirical ego becomes transparent, when possessive agency subsides, when subject and object cease to confront one another as alien realms—what remains at the center?

Hart’s answer is not anonymous consciousness.

It is Logos.

The deepest divine “I AM” is not an impersonal field into which persons occasionally crystallize. It is the one infinite life of God, eternally Father, Son, and Spirit; and the Logos is the Father’s divine Word, Image, and self-expression within that Trinitarian plenitude. Thus the ground of finite consciousness is not anonymous awareness. It is participation in a divine life that is already knowledge, love, and delight. Infinite consciousness is not solitude.

This matters enormously. For if the deepest ground of my consciousness is participation in the divine I AM through the Logos—if my created logos subsists only in the uncreated Logos—then theosis does not reveal that my finite “I” was a mistake. It reveals that my “I” was never self-originating. The center is not removed; it becomes transparent to a deeper divine ground that it did not create.

Christ is therefore not merely an external religious object contemplated by the Christian mystic. The incarnate Logos is the perfect human manifestation of this transparency: the human “I” wholly open to the divine I AM without confusion of created and uncreated. The finite subject’s capacity to say “I” is grounded in that divine life, while its own particularity remains created, historical, and received.

Theosis is not the creature becoming the Logos by nature. It is the creature becoming transparent to the Logos by participation.

This makes Paul’s sentence almost unbearably exact: “I live”—the created hypostasis remains—“yet not I”—the possessive empirical center has lost its sovereignty—“but Christ lives in me.”

Not I, yet I.

The grammar of theosis is neither simple identity nor simple duality.

What If the Advaitin Is Describing Something Real?

At this point the comparison with Advaita can no longer be avoided.

Suppose we believe the Advaitin about the experience—not automatically about every metaphysical inference drawn from it, but about what contemplative consciousness can actually undergo. Suppose the familiar ego can disappear; suppose consciousness can seem centerless and without a second; suppose action can occur without a felt doer; suppose the boundary between knower and known can become strangely porous; suppose acquisitive desire can fall silent and what remains can be experienced as luminous being, awareness, and bliss.

Must a Christian say that such an experience is false?

A Hartian metaphysics gives no obvious reason to do so.

Hart himself is unusually hospitable to the language of Vedānta. In The Experience of God he deliberately employs the Sanskrit triad sat-cit-ānanda—being, consciousness, bliss—as a cross-cultural name for the classical metaphysical conception of God. He does not thereby become an Advaitin. But he does deny that Christian theology owns a fundamentally different ultimate reality from the one toward which the great metaphysical traditions gesture when they speak of infinite Being, infinite Consciousness, and infinite Bliss.^x

If finite mind exists only as participation in infinite Consciousness, if its being is donated at every instant by infinite Being, and if every rational desire is drawn ultimately toward infinite Bliss, then contemplative consciousness might indeed discover that its ordinary separateness was in some sense unreal.

The decisive question is: unreal in what sense?

Advaita answers, in its classical Śaṅkaran form, that the deepest Self is nonindividual Brahman. The plurality of localized subjects belongs to conditioned consciousness; liberation reveals that Ātman is Brahman.

A Christian answer shaped by Hart would make a smaller and decisive claim: separation is unreal, but distinction is not.

No experienced boundary between God and creature need remain. No sense of autonomous possession need remain. No competitive relation between divine and human agency need remain. The subject-object dyad may become phenomenologically transparent. Yet none of this requires the finite person to become numerically identical with God.

Nonduality, on this account, would mean non-separation through participation.

The Christian could therefore listen to the Advaitin’s “I am Brahman” neither with easy assent nor with easy dismissal. Perhaps the experience is disclosing something Christianity has too often obscured beneath images of God as a very large object standing over against very small objects. Perhaps what is discovered is the impossibility of existing outside the divine act.

The dispute begins only when one asks what the word “I” finally means.

The Adamic Heart

Here St Sophrony introduces another possibility—one that may be as radical, phenomenologically, as universal Self-consciousness, but moves in a different direction. Hart supplies much of the metaphysical grammar here: participation, noncompetitive causality, the divine ground of consciousness, and the natural telos of deification. Sophrony, writing from within the hesychast tradition and in an explicitly experiential register, supplies something Hart generally does not attempt: a phenomenology of what such transparency can become in prayer.

For Sophrony, the destruction of egocentric individuality does not leave a private soul contemplating God in splendid isolation. Grace enlarges consciousness. The human hypostasis acquires what might be called an Adamic consciousness: humanity ceases to be an abstraction composed of billions of remote individuals and becomes “the whole Adam,” one human life borne within prayer.

This universality is not achieved by discovering that every person is secretly the same subject.

It is achieved by love.

In the prayer of Gethsemane, Christ bears the tragedy of Adam—all human history, suffering, sin, abandonment—as his own. Sophrony regards this not merely as a moral example but as a revelation of hypostatic existence. When the Holy Spirit draws a human person into the prayer of Christ, the heart expands beyond the limits of private biography. Another’s suffering becomes interior without ceasing to be another’s. The person prays not merely about humanity but, in a sense, from within humanity’s common life.

This is a very different answer to the problem of universal consciousness.

One trajectory says:

localized I → universal Self.

Sophrony’s trajectory is closer to:

localized ego → hypostatic person → universal communion.

The first overcomes limitation by expanding identity. The second overcomes isolation by expanding love.

And the phenomenology may, at certain points, be remarkably similar. The boundaries of the private ego become permeable. Consciousness is no longer confined to personal interests. The suffering and joy of others are experienced with an immediacy that ordinary individualism cannot explain. The person becomes, as Sophrony says in various ways, dynamically commensurate with humanity.

But the grammar remains relational. There is still prayer. Still address. Still “I” and “Thou.” Indeed, the more universal consciousness becomes, the more intensely personal its relation becomes.

This is why Gethsemane may be a better Christian icon of cosmic consciousness than an ocean.

The saint does not dissolve into the sea.

He discovers the sea inside his heart and begins to pray for every drop.

Light Without Possession

Sophrony’s phenomenology of uncreated light adds another dimension. In moments of profound grace, ordinary self-observation can cease almost entirely. The body may become weightless or disappear from attention; chronological time may lose its ordinary succession; visible creation can seem insubstantial beside the overwhelming reality of divine light. Yet Sophrony insists that true hypostatic existence does not vanish. Paradoxically, the persona blossoms precisely when egocentric self-consciousness falls silent.^xi

This is extraordinarily close to the distinction we have been pursuing.

The disappearance of egoic self-reference is not the disappearance of the person.

The vanishing of temporal succession is not the annihilation of history.

The permeation of consciousness by divine light is not the conversion of creature into divine essence.

The person becomes transparent without becoming unreal.

And because the light is personal—the manifestation of the living God rather than an anonymous metaphysical luminosity—the culmination of contemplation remains encounter. The Christian mystic may pass beyond concepts, images, discursive prayer, and ordinary subject-object distance, yet the final structure is still face-to-face.

This is perhaps where Christian and Advaitic nonduality approach one another most closely and divide most profoundly.

The convergence is therefore more intimate than doctrinal summaries might suggest. The Christian hesychast and the Advaitic contemplative may each discover that the familiar ego was never the depth of consciousness; that action need not be experienced as the exertion of a private will; that the old partition between an interior spectator and an exterior world can become strangely insubstantial; and that desire, once relieved of its anxious need to possess, can fall into a stillness that is anything but lifeless. Yet precisely here, where the phenomenologies seem nearest, their interpretations begin to divide. For the Advaitin, such transparency may disclose the nonindividual Self; for the Christian, it may disclose a created consciousness whose deepest interior is already open to the uncreated presence of God. The disagreement concerns not whether the ego can disappear, but what—or who—is revealed when it does.

Hart himself gives the paradox an almost programmatic form in Roland. The spiritual end, he suggests, is “a perfect personal identity that’s also a perfect dispossession of self.” He can therefore place Buddhist insubstantialism and Vedāntic essentialism surprisingly near one another at one level: both can expose the pitiable littleness of the possessive ego. Dispossession does not manufacture a new person beneath the ego; it allows personal identity to become more fully manifest as openness and hospitality to the other.

That formulation is especially important here. It means that the Christian alternative to Advaita need not be the preservation of an egoic kernel against dissolution. Hart can concede the dispossession almost without reserve. What he refuses to surrender is the personal identity that becomes manifest through that dispossession.^xii

But the Christian adds: at the heart of this silence is not less relation but infinitely more.

The divine I AM is not solitary: the one divine life is eternally Father, Son, and Spirit.

Desire After Desire

There remains one final phenomenological puzzle. If theosis is fulfillment, why does anything still move?

Many descriptions of liberation speak of desirelessness. If desire means the ache of incompleteness—the reaching of a deficient self toward something it lacks—then perfect beatitude should indeed extinguish it.

Hart agrees, but only after distinguishing desire from deficiency. Divine love is not need. Plenitude can be ecstatic. Fullness can overflow, give, receive, delight. And for the finite creature, participation in infinite beauty need never become static possession. Gregory of Nyssa’s epektasis becomes here the proper image of beatitude: an endless movement into God in which every fulfillment enlarges the capacity for further delight.^xiii

So the phenomenology of deification contains another apparent contradiction.

Craving ceases.

Desire becomes infinite.

There is no longer the anxious motion that says: I need this object in order to become whole. But there remains—and intensifies—the ecstatic motion by which fullness goes out of itself toward inexhaustible Beauty and toward the beloved other.

This may help explain why reports of awakening can sound simultaneously desireless and saturated with love. Nisargadatta Maharaj could speak of realization as the end of personal craving while also describing love as the natural expression of awakened being; Ramakrishna could contrast selfish kāma with the sweetness of prema and insist that the liberated lover still wishes to taste the sugar rather than merely become it.^xiv

Perhaps the Christian need not dispute the cessation.

Perhaps the dispute concerns what comes after it.

Not One, Not Two

We can now answer the question with which we began.

When the ego falls silent and only “I AM” seems to remain, who is saying “I”?

A strict Advaitic answer ultimately identifies the deepest Self with Brahman. The Christian disagreement is not adequately stated by calling Brahman simply “impersonal.” The sharper Hartian question is whether ultimate actuality could be metaphysically less than personal if first-personality, freedom, and expressive agency are genuine perfections of contingent being. A ground wholly devoid of the power of personhood would somehow have to produce an actuality absent from itself.

A Hartian Christian answer is stranger, and Roland in Moonlight brings us surprisingly close to it.

The “I” is genuinely mine, because I am an irreducible created person and not a divine disguise. This does not mean that a natureless “who” exists behind or prior to created nature: my hypostatic singularity is the concrete actuality of this created nature, while personhood names the expressive, first-personal depth in which that life can become gift and address. Yet my capacity to say “I” is not mine as possession. It is received from the uncreated Logos whose presence is more intimate to consciousness than the empirical ego is to itself. In theosis, the possessive center becomes transparent; agency ceases to feel competitive with grace; the world becomes interior to consciousness without being absorbed into it; desire loses the form of lack and becomes delight; and the heart expands toward the whole Adam.

At the center stands Christ: the human life in which there is no interval between the created act of human consciousness and the divine I AM of the Logos, no sinful opacity, no refusal of the Father, no private good defended against universal love.

The Christian destiny is to become transparent in that same direction.

Not to become Christ by ceasing to be ourselves, but to become ourselves in Christ.

This is why theosis can be genuinely nondual without becoming a metaphysics of identity. The opposition disappears; the distinction remains. God is not over there. The creature is not outside God. Grace is not an alien force. The divine will is not a rival will. The other is not a foreign object. And yet communion does not resolve into a solitary consciousness talking to itself.

Perhaps this is the peculiar Christian form of nonduality:

not the discovery that there has only ever been one “I,”

but the discovery that every true “I” lives from the divine I AM, and therefore can become infinitely open to every “you.”

Sophrony’s Adamic consciousness then ceases to look like an exotic mystical achievement and begins to look like the flowering of personhood itself. The heart becomes universal not because the many were unreal, but because love can make the many interior to one another without abolishing their faces.

And perhaps this is why the language of deification so often trembles between self-loss and self-discovery. The ego must indeed die. The imagined proprietor must vanish. The private center must be displaced. There may come a point at which the mystic searches for the old self and simply cannot find it.

But what remains is not nothing.

What remains is gift.

Light.

Christ.

The whole Adam.

And an “I” that at last no longer needs to belong to itself in order to be real.

Footnotes

i David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013); You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022); and The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). The phenomenological development offered here is my own.

ii Hart, You Are Gods, introduction, where he notes that “Studies in Vedantic Christianity” might have served as a subtitle.

iii Hart, The Light of Tabor, especially the discussions of person, nature, and Christ’s human consciousness.

iv David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2023), in the discussion of the ego, nous/ātman, and mystical consciousness: “I more deeply than the ego is I” and the “oceanic experience of the ego’s dissolution into fuller existence.”

v Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the same discussion of “sublime anonymity,” the sense in which “we’re all one and the same,” and the soul as prism.

vi David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019), 172–91; Hart, “What Is a Truly Free Will?,” Public Orthodoxy, April 24, 2020.

vii Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942), 176, 379–80; Ayon Maharaj, “Hard Theological Determinism and the Illusion of Free Will,” Journal of World Philosophies 3, no. 2 (2018): 24–48.

viii David Bentley Hart, “Expression and Being – First Half: Personhood and the Good beyond Beings,” Substack, September 29, 2026. Hart describes being as expressive actuality, genuine creaturely action as participation in the divine act, pathos as privation of actuality, and personhood as an expressive structure irreducible to a merely impersonal ground.

ix Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the comparative discussion of Eckhart, Plotinus, Augustine, and Islamic mystical metaphysics and the “final coincidence of being and knowing in God.”

x Hart, The Experience of God, especially the use of sat-cit-ānanda as a cross-cultural expression of the classical metaphysical understanding of God.

xi Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is, especially the descriptions of uncreated light and the flowering of the persona/hypostasis under grace.

xii Hart, Roland in Moonlight, in the later discussion of selfhood, love, Buddhist insubstantialism, and Vedāntic essentialism: “a perfect personal identity that’s also a perfect dispossession of self.”

xiii Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite; You Are Gods.

xiv Ramakrishna, Gospel, on kāma, prema, and tasting rather than merely “becoming” sugar; Ayon Maharaj, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality (Oxford University Press, 2018), on Vijñāna Vedānta.

***

Jonathan McCormack is an attachment specialist and therapist trained in New Zealand whose work explores attachment, contemplative practice, theology, and the nature of the self. His writing has appeared on Jonathan Pageau’s The Symbolic World, among other publications. He is currently completing Vedantic Christianity: Trinity, Nonduality, and the Mystery of the Person, a book-length exploration of Christian and Vedāntic understandings of consciousness, personhood, deification, and nonduality.