286 religious revolution now
Whenever we fi nd it expressed, we may be taken aback, for it seems on
its face to be blasphemous.
For example, in his sermon on the Feast of Corpus Christi, Aquinas
wrote: “Since it was the will of God’s only- begotten Son that men should
share in his divinity, he assumed our nature in order that by becoming
man he might make men gods.” Were it not for the worshipful lan-
guage of the Christian preacher- theologian and the sense of untroubled
orthodoxy in the ensuing discourse about the Incarnation and the Eu-
charist, we might suppose that we are reading from Feuerbach or Em-
erson rather than from Aquinas.
Had not Maximus the Confessor, writing six hundred years before
this sermon was delivered, invoked neo- Platonism in the ser vice of a
theology of deifi cation, which he— and many others— regarded as ortho-
dox, and which later came to exercise a major infl uence in the Orthodox
Christianity of the East? According to this view, there is an exchange of
natures between God and man: if God becomes man by condescension,
man becomes, and is called, God by grace.
What distinguishes the sacred from the profane voice in the devel-
opment of this conception, expressed by Aquinas and foreshadowed by
Maximus among many, is the teaching (based on revelation and expe-
rience) that our becoming gods is necessarily preceded, and made pos-
sible, by God becoming man. Becoming gods, if it is not to mean be-
coming like the gods of the Greeks and the Romans, untroubled by the
want of the infi nite, must mean sharing in the life of God. It must mean
that we become present to ourselves only by becoming, and by being,
more than ourselves. It must mean, to use the language of Nicholas of
Cusa, that by becoming God, which is to say by partaking in his nature,
we become identical to ourselves. If we remained only ourselves, we
would continue to be separated from ourselves.
Now our becoming gods is not just some instantaneous and elu-
sive transubstantiation that we undergo as the result of either grace or
works. It is a struggle that begins in our arousal from a diminished ex-
istence of routine and compromise and that continues in the change
of both self and society. Th e content of the change is presaged by the
doctrines of self and others and of spirit and structure that were la-
tent, but truncated, in the teachings of historical Christianity and of
its sister religions. It would be given fuller eff ect through movement