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Abstract
The fathers of the Church, both eastern and western, were fond of characterizing the sanctification of human persons through the sending of the Son and the insufflation of the Holy Spirit in terms of participation in the divine nature (cf. II Peter 1:4), a grace which many of them also knew as divinization or deification. The modern disciples of St. Gregory Palamas, a fourteenth century monk of Mount Athos, contend against Augustine and his western progeny that if the being of God were not more than a simple, fully actuated essence, if God's uncreated energies or operations (also encompassing His will, attributes, thoughts, and glory) were not metaphysically external to His incommunicable essence, it would be impossible for creatures to participate in God without violating the integrity of the divine essence, this because the neo-Palamite school excludes analogical causality from its doctrine of participation and grace. After surveying the doctrine of participation and divinization among the pre-Christian authors of Greek antiquity and among the Apostolic Fathers and Apologists, we turn to analyze the thought of Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius on divinization or participation in the divine nature, with a view toward addressing the challenge set forth by the neo-Palamite school. In each case, the possibility of divinizing participation in God is established not upon a real distinction within God's uncreated life between communicable and incommunicable elements, but upon the enduring difference between the uncreated Son of the Father and the created humanity He assumed, healed, infused with the Holy Spirit, offered, and glorified. Whereas Clement and Origen emphasize the didactic or exemplary value of the incarnation, such that creatures are divinized principally by contemplating and imitating the divine Son made flesh, Irenaeus and Athanasius both locate the most decisive event at the incarnation itself, when human nature was divinized proleptically through its assumption by God the Son. To participate in the divine nature, as these fathers of the Church conceived it, is to acquire a supernatural, created likeness to God's infinite perfection through the uncreated, indwelling agency of the Son and the Holy Spirit.