Deification Is Our Destiny (Part 1)
"Do you not know that we shall judge angels?" (1 Corinthians 6:3)
Pagan cults perform sacrifices to ingratiate themselves with their gods. The purpose of Christian cult sacrifice in the Mass is different – it is to become deified; namely to become as God ourselves. Sacrifice is not only the means of achieving deification, it is the very process and means by which deification occurs. This can only be achieved and maintained by a Eucharistic union between God and each individual man.
At the core of every human being is loneliness. Our primary feeling is separation. While we may have close relationships, deep down we are always aware that other beings and material objects are not us. God himself notes regarding Adam, “It is not good for man to be alone,” and he creates Eve as a companion for him. But the void cannot be completely filled by other beings or objects, only temporarily satisfied. Of this reality Blaise Pascal wrote,
This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.[1]
St. Augustine wrote, “Thou hast made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”[2] This abyss and the restlessness it causes are purposely placed there so that we will seek God who is our destiny and in whom lies our ultimate greatness. As great as a human being is, he is still limited. By himself, he cannot overcome his own individual sense of limitation and separation.
As the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” states:
The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature": "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."[3]
The quotes in this passage come from 2 Peter 1:4, Mark 8:34, and the Church Fathers Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Aquinas. No more authoritative and orthodox sources than these can be found.
St. Paul says “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). He assumes that his audience is familiar with the many authoritative references declaring that the angels will be judged by God (Isaiah 24:21-22; 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6; Revelation 21:10). The clear message is that we will be as gods, doing God’s work alongside him. Jesus repeatedly calls us his “brothers” and “adopted sons” of God. We were, after all, created in his image. Adam and Eve’s original sin was in grasping for divinity on their own by believing the words of the serpent, who promised, “Ye shall be as gods,” but meaning something completely different, namely, that they shall be as gods to themselves. However as we will discuss in future posts, this divinity is selfish and futile. It assumes that man can be a god, but how can a limited being be unlimited on his own? Shared divinity is the deepest longing and the birthright of man; that is what we can expect as “sons of God.”
As Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:
The heart of Jesus’ intention in choosing his followers is that they might be with him: above all. Jesus wants to share his life with us, and this too—the longing to be with Jesus—should be the gravitational pull to which all our desires should hasten. The Greek phrase και εποιησεν δωδεκα ινα ωσιν μετ αυτο used here is normally translated quite weakly. It does not say that Jesus merely “appointed” twelve apostles, but that he actually made (εποιησεν) those men such. He transformed very ordinary and unpromising men into active vessels of divine grace, a feat only God himself can accomplish through a work that merits the name of re-creation. And the final goal of this transformation is first and foremost that the apostles “might be with him” (ινα ωσιν μετ αυτου) a strong purpose clause revealing the deepest mind and Heart of Jesus in the work of redemption. Now, this primordial purpose of the apostle’s vocation to “be with Jesus” must by no means be construed in the sentimental sense of warm companionship and safe conduit to salvation. Rather, we must give the verb “to be” here its full ontological weight by understanding the divinely appointed goal to be nothing less than deification: If the apostles are called to be with Jesus, it is because they are called to be what Jesus already is—the perfect theandric unity of the divine and human natures. Ultimately, we are called to live the very life of God in and through our union of shared existence with the only-begotten Son.[4]
Forgotten or unknown by virtually everyone, including those who identify themselves as Christians, is the purpose for which we were created. Jesus himself tells us clearly and directly in John 10:34 when he quotes Psalm 81:6, which reads: “I said, ‘You are gods. And you are all sons of the Most High.’” When Jesus later says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the End” (Revelation 1:8), it is the equivalent way of saying in the Greek alphabet that in his person everything exists from A to Z. He is the source and beginning of all things, but he is also the “end” of all things, which is another way of saying that he is the purpose and goal of all things. The purpose of everything that exists, including every individual human being, is Christ, who is the incarnate and sacrificed God. The majority of people today feel that fulfilling as many sensory and material desires as possible is the “end” or purpose of life. There are some believers, Muslims and many uncatechized Christians, who do recognize that there is a God; but to them, the afterlife is simply a place where they will finally gratify the sensory and material desires that eluded them on earth. There are still others who intuit that the fulfillment of selfish desires is not the key to happiness but do not recognize God. To many of these people, the afterlife consists of an obliteration of the self into a greater cosmos or consciousness. This would at least offer the possibility of blunting the pain of separation by making the prison larger, but it does not come close to solving the problem. It only makes the problem permanent and hopeless. Many pagan and Eastern traditions are this way. Unfortunately, the obliteration of the self seems a self-defeating way to achieve happiness. The way for a conscious person to be happy is to stop being a fully conscious self-possessed person? That is self-hatred. The more reasonable way to happiness would seem to be the way that allows for the person to be their fullest and best self—the way that allows them to completely and fully exist.
If you ask the typical Christian which is the most important event in their faith, you’d receive different answers. Many might say Christmas, but the more spiritually sophisticated would likely say Easter. After all, Christmas only has meaning because it makes possible the events of Holy Week, where Jesus as the Lamb of God accomplishes a perfect and permanent sacrifice to the Father and defeats death. Our Lord’s Ascension forty days after the Resurrection seems nearly forgotten. However, as Merikakis points out, Christ’s purpose for us is that we live an eternal shared existence with him. At the Ascension, the human body enters into the Godhead and becomes a part of the community of the Trinity for eternity. At the Incarnation, God becomes a man, but it is at the Ascension that man becomes God. The purpose of our creation and the goal of our existence is to be deified and live forever, body and soul, with and within the perfect family of persons of the Holy Trinity.
The hypostatic union in the fully divine and human person of Christ causes the deification of all human nature. But even more profoundly, the human body itself is deified and definitively brought into the Trinity at the Ascension as the glorified Jesus enters into heaven body and soul. In addition, while we have a common identity as humans through a shared human nature, each individual human has his own individual identity, an individual nature, that is purely his own. If the deification process were not also an individual one, people in hell would also be “deified” as part of the general deification of human nature that occurred at the Incarnation. Man did not choose whether God would become Man, but a man does individually choose whether he wants to participate in becoming God. Our collective and individual deification happens through an active and ongoing eternal process of love. Love is the force that connects individual persons, just as the various elements of the physical universe are connected through specific physical forces. People in hell declined to be deified when they rejected the umbilical connection between them and God—his love. They do not participate in the internal life of the Trinity by which deification occurs. They are eternally separate and profoundly alone.
How come no one shouts these amazing things from the rooftops? How come the degraded modern Church spends its time talking about “social justice,” the “periphery,” pagan notions of Earth worship, gauzy ideas of peace and happiness on Earth—in short, all of the hoaxes and lies of secular culture? What a cheat! Deification is the fundamental and enduring promise of Christianity. Once that is understood, it orders everything in an individual’s life. Our mortal lives are nothing more and nothing less than an engagement period, readying ourselves to be espoused to the Trinity forever through the incarnate divine person of Christ the Bridegroom made possible by Christ who is the Lamb of God.
[1] Blaise Pascal, Pensées trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966) 75 (148).
[2] Augustine, Confessions trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961) 21.
[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 460. https://usccb.cld.bz/Catechism-of-the-Catholic-Church/136/.
[4] Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003) p.37.