Deification in the Summa Theologiae: A Structural Interpretation of the Prima Pars

DEIFICATION IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: A STRUCTURAL INTERPRETATION OF THE PRIMA PARS A. N. WILLIAMS University ofPuget Sound Tacoma, Washington WHAT IS HUMAN DESTINY? To become God. That, at least, was the belief of the earliest Christians. Such an understanding is evident in the letters of St. Paul (Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 15:49; and 2 Cor 8:9) and the first Christians found it in the pages of the Hebrew Bible (Ps 82:6, quoted in John 10:34). Above all, the nascent theological tradition pointed to 2 Peter 1:4: "Thus has he given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from corruption that is in the world because of him, and may become participants in divine nature." As the tradition reflected on these texts, deification became the dominant model of salvation and sanctification in the patristic period, from Ignatius of Antioch to John Damascene, in the West (in the writings of Tertullian and Augustine) as well as in the East.1 Although the doctrine retained this place of pre-eminence in Eastern theology, at some point it ceased to be the prime model for salvation for the West. Conventional wisdom would 1 Good, concise accounts of deification can be found in Jules Gross, La divinisation du chretien d'apres les peres grecs: Contribution historique ala doctrine de la grace (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1938); Dictionnaire de spiritualitt!, ascetique et mystique, doctrine et histoire , s.v. "divinisation"; William G. Rusch, "How the Eastern Fathers Understood What the Western Church Meant by Justification," in Justification by Faith: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue 7 (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985); and G. W. H. Lampe, "Christian Theology in the Patristic Period," in A History of Christian Doctrine, ed. Hubert Cunliffe-Jones (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978). 219 220 A. N. WILLIAMS maintain that the point of breakage occurred in the Middle Ages, when the West focused first on the doctrine of the atonement and later on justification. Like much conventional wisdom, this account contains a germ of truth; deification lost its dominance at some point, for it clearly no longer occupies such a position in our time, signs of its renascence notwithstanding. Where the conventional wisdom errs, however, is in locating the break in the Middle Ages, for the greatest of all medieval Western theologies, the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, contains a highly developed doctrine of deification. Indeed, the doctrine of deification pervades the Summa. If Western readers have failed to notice it, we may conjecture they have done so for two reasons. The first is that it is precisely pervasive and not localized: one finds no question "Whether Human Persons Are Deified?" in the pages of the Summa. Second, Western readers may be unable to see the doctrine simply because they are unfamiliar with it. Because this model of sanctification has been absent from Western theology for so long, Western readers do not recognize either the paradigmatic structure of the doctrine or the language that traditionally conveys it. To see the Summa's doctrine of deification, then, we must first describe it in its classic, which is to say patristic, form. Deification may be distinguished from other doctrines of sanctification in that it refers the question of human holiness in the first instance to the doctrine of God. Sanctification consists simply in participation in divine nature. To describe the transformation of the human person, therefore, we do not undertake principally to specify virtues like gentleness or courage, or powers like healing or levitation. Rather, the description of sanctification departs from a distinctive description of God. One of the prime characteristics of a doctrine of deification, then, lies in the integral connection between theology and anthropology. A second mark of this doctrine is the particular doctrine of God that forms its basis, balancing two conflicting impulses. On the one hand, God is the giver who not only creates, but invites the creature into communion. On the other hand, in a Christian context, which takes for granted the distinction between creature and Creator, the divine distinctiveness must be upheld, DEIFICATION IN THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE 221 against the threat of an encroaching, albeit unwitting, pantheism ; moreover...