Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 7, Part I

Chapter 7 introduces us to theosis:

Early Christians were taught they could grow to be like Jesus – fully human, but filled with his Spirit’s power, a power that nothing could destroy.  Instead of seeing them as weak and powerless (the empire’s view of them), the church was offering them the power of divinity.

The charioteer

Church in Ishan, Turkey – 10th c.

Early Christians closely connected the sun with the Son.  The weekly Lord’s Day and Easter were the days of the sun and resurrection; the Gospel of John and early church sources associated Jesus with divine light.    When they saw this fresco of a charioteer (at the lower edge of the apse) in a church in Turkey, Brock and Parker concluded that he was mostly likely a Christian saint, completing his theosis, his divinization.   As Ephrem the Syrian wrote –

The saints have ascended to the firmament and opened it,

one of them cleft the air with his chariot;

the Watchers rejoiced as they met him.

Theosis: growing into the image of God

The idea of human divinity was pervasive in early Christianity.  The concept of  theosis (that is, to become like God, to take on the divine nature) captures how the Holy Spirit helps people dwell in paradise. 

Within a generation of Jesus’ death, Christians were being taught that they gained the same powers of divinity as Jesus Christ through their baptism. 

Theosis was not just for the individual; it was a group process. The earliest Christian church attracted slaves, peasants, women, the disaffected, and other very ordinary people.  These people joined communities which enabled them to become ‘partakers in divinity,’ and gave them a status greater than that of those who exploited them. Thus theosis was a collective activity of the whole community, embodied in love – which is not just an individual achievement but a social reality.

Ephrem described theosis as teamwork, like climbing a mountain together: 

The clouds, their chariots fly through the air;

each of them has become the leader of those he has taught;

his chariot corresponds to his labors,

his glory corresponds to his followers. 

Irenaeus taught that baptism delivered the spiritual power to resist evil, and that the church was the paradise in which the faithful were nurtured and matured in faith.  The power granted through theosis required personal discipline and community participation to be used ethically and responsibly. 

Confession: medicine for sin

Christians understood that theosis could not be fully achieved in this life; though baptism had washed away all sins, power could be misused – and temptation was pervasive.  

Christians could commit virtually unpardonable sins.  Following the Decian persecutions (249-251), during which many (including bishops) abandoned their faith, Cyprian declared that ‘divinity had come to the rescue,’ and offered a way for the benefits of baptism to be renewed: through penance and confession. 

Grave sins required penance because, if unaddressed, they poisoned networks of love, truth, compassion and justice.  Sins broke relationships, and rehabilitation required penitents to take responsibility for their behavior.   

Penance was the medicine that would make them well enough to return to the Eucharist.  The community guided and corrected its members through prayer and social pressure; in a world where solidarity with others, shared knowledge and community life were essential to survival, reliance on the community was the key to personal strength.

Until the 6th century, public confessions were required for killing, adultery, and apostasy. From Christianity’s earliest centuries, leaders taught that Christians could not shed human blood for any reason.  Even after Christian principles of ‘just war’ emerged in the 5th century, the church maintained prohibitions against war.  Soldiers were expected to undergo penance before partaking of the Eucharist.  The church’s moral stand on shedding human blood, while never adequately lived out, held for a millennium; as late as the Norman invasion of England in 1066, warriors went to monasteries to do penance for killing. 

Equality in paradise?

But when it came to women, many men clung to the social attitudes of their time, rather than accepting the full implications of theosis.  The  pater familias was the fundamental building block of Roman control; Roman culture imposed a hierarchical family structure, with women subservient to men.

As elite males entered Christian life, they incorporated the classic Roman virtues into theosis. These classic virtues – (from the Latin vir, man) defined manliness through the ideas of courage, control, and dispassion, and they were often mixed with Greek ideas of the power of masculine nous (mind) over feminine aesthesis (senses).  Just as men were to dominate women, the virtues were to rule over the passions. 

Baptism could cleanse the soul of polluting passions, opening a person to the spirit of discipline and the control of feeling and desire. Jerome pictured the ideal man as one who regulated his body ‘as a charioteer does his pace.’  The body was a chariot, and the mind the charioteer. 

Virtuous women were also to control their emotions, desires and bodies.  They were also to display the manly virtues of courage, fortitude, temperance, and justice, and eschew the passions. (Nonetheless, they were to submit to men.)

After Constantine approved Christianity, more and more elite men joined the church. New virtues – to guarantee men’s submission to church authority – were added to the list of traditional manly virtues.  Now men were to were to keep their manly virtues, but also take on the traditional feminine qualities of submission and humility in relation to God. (These new virtues had previously been assigned to women, to lower-status men, and to slaves.) 

St. Augustine was among the ‘new males’ who incorporated previously feminine virtues into their ideas of sanctified humanity.  His struggles with his passions led him to conclude that virtue could not be achieved through force of will. This required the grace of the Holy Spirit – and the grace of a sanctified and sanctifying community. 

Augustine’s understanding of Christian spirituality eventually embraced the passions, because passionate desires can lead the soul to God.  But still, his affirmation of the passions – associated with the feminine – did not lead Augustine to regard women as the equals of men. 

But contemporary scholarship has demonstrated that some Christian communities did promote equal relationships.  Ephrem, in the eastern tradition, respected the spiritual power of women and lauded their courage and boldness.  And women themselves did not simply accept their insubordination.... 

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on the next post,

Theosis and women