Abstract In this paper, the author, starting from articles in the recent Oxford Handbook of Deification (2024), discusses some crucial points of the doctrine of deification in ‘Eastern’ thinkers like Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas, in order to compare these two thinkers with the similar doctrine in Thomas Aquinas. The paper tries to identify where the problems lie and focuses on the concept of created grace as a challenge. Even if that constitutes a problem, the reading of some central texts seems to suggest that there are points at which there are at least some ‘structural likenesses’ between the ‘Eastern’ and the ‘Western’ opinion.
Torstein Theodor Tollefsen (2026) studied this question.