Theosis or deification is typically considered an Eastern Orthodox concept.  Yet it does crop up fairly often in the writings of Western theologians.  One such is Augustine of Hippo.  In his blog Alvin Rapien collates several Augustinian quotes pertaining to theosis and comments on them, prefacing his remarks with a concise description of what theosis is.  One such quote is reproduced below.  Augustine is at pains to stress that theosis is a participation in the life of God and not a transformation of our created essence into the divine essence.

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So also, just as His inferior circumstances, into which He descended to us, were not in every particular exactly the same with our inferior circumstances, in which He found us here; so our superior state, into which we ascend to Him, will not be quite the same with His superior state, in which we are there to find Him.  For we by His grace are to be made the sons of God, whereas He was evermore by nature the Son of God; we, when we are converted, shall cleave to God, though not as His equals; He never turned from God, and remains ever equal to God; we are partakers of eternal life, He is eternal life.

Richard Hooker (1554-November 3 1600) is almost universally recognized as the single greatest Anglican theologian.  His Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, essentially a treatise on ecclesiology, is a defense of the Elizabethan settlement against the criticisms of Puritans and other radical Protestants.  But it also affirms the validity of the reformed English church in the face of critiques by Roman Catholics.  A very good assessment of Hooker and his work may be found in chapter 4 of Anglicanism and the Christian Church, by Paul Avis, a theologian and priest of the Church of England (Edinburgh, T&T Clark 1989).  I have excerpted what Avis has to say about Hooker's approach to tradition, which appears on pp 66-67.

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The term tradition will serve to designate this third component [along with Scripture and reason] of Hooker's synthesis, though practice, experienceand consent are all involved.  They constitute the third and final test or touchstone of religious truth.  "Where neither the evidence of any law divine, nor the strength of any invincible argument otherwise found out by the light of reason, nor any notable public inconvenience" are decisive, "the very authority of the church itself...may give so much credit to her own laws, as to make their sentence touching fitness and conveniency weightier than any bare and naked conceit to the contrary".

There is a fundamental conservative principle underlying Hooker's thought at this point and it belongs to the uniformitarian presupposition that he shared with all European culture before the eighteenth century.  Truth was eternal.   What was right was right for all times and places.  Universal consent was equivalent to nature itself, and the voice of nature was as the voice of God.  Let us be loath "to change, without very urgent necessity, the ancient ordinances, rites and long approved customs of our venerable predecessors...antiquity, custom and consent in the church of God, making with that which law doth establish, are themselves most sufficient reasons to uphold the same, unless some notable public inconvenience enforce the contrary".  If and when it does, Hooker immediately goes on, the church has authority to respond by altering its practice.

James I of England, also known as James VI of Scotland (1566-1625), was, unlike many Supreme Governors of the Church of England, genuinely interested in religion and theology.  His greatest accomplishment in these areas was his sponsorship of the Authorized Version of the Bible.  His high-church tendencies can be seen in his appreciation of the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and in his largely futile efforts to maintain episcopacy in the resolutely Presbyterian Scottish kirk.  A statement of his personal faith is found in A Premonition to All Most Mighty Monarchs, Kings, Free Princes, and States of Christendom (1609), reprinted in The Anglican Tradition:  a handbook of sources (GR Evans and J Robert Wright, eds, 1991 SPCK/Fortress.  It appears on pp 206-207 in the latter source.

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I will never be ashamed to render an accompt of my profession and of that hope that is in me, as the apostle prescribeth.  I am such a Catholic Christian as believeth the three Creeds, that of the Apostles, that of the Council of Nice [Nicaea], and that of Athanasius, the two latter being paraphrases of the former.  And I believe them in that sense as the ancient Fathers and Councils that made them did understand them, to which three Creeds all ministers of England do subscribe at their ordination.  And I also acknowledge for Orthodox all those other forms of Creeds that either were devised by Councils or particular Fathers, against such particular heresies as most reigned in their times.  I reverence and admit the Four First General Councils as Catholic and Orthodox.  And the said Four General Councils are acknowledged by our Acts of Parliament, and received for orthodox by our Church.  As for the Fathers, I reverence them...For whatever the Fathers for the first five hundred years did with an unanime consent agree upon, to be believed as a necessary point of salvation, I either will believe it also, or at least will be humbly silent, not taking upon me to condemn the same.  But for every private Father's opinion, it binds not my conscience...every one of the Fathers usually contradicting others.  I will therefore in that case follow St Augustine's rule in judging of their opinions as I find them agree with the Scriptures.  What I find agreeable thereto I will gladly embrace.  What is otherwise I will (with their reverence) reject.  As for the Scriptures, no man doubteth I will believe them.  But even for the Apocrypha, I hold them in the same accompt that the Ancients did.  They are still printed and bound with our Bibles, and publicly read in our Churches.

Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), a great proponent of Laudian Anglicanism, was during his lifetime known publicly as a great preacher.  Out of the public eye he turned his personal chapel into an oasis of high-church liturgy during a time when the standard worship on offer in most English parishes was Morning Prayer in a surplice.  Even more privately, but perhaps of more lasting significance, were Preces Privatae, a manuscript of private prayers that was not published until long after his death.  The inspiration for these prayers came from many sources, including the medieval West and the Patristic East.  "An Act of Adoration" is found on page 198 of an online version of the prayers, a link to which may be found in the "Anglicans" section of the outer sidebar.

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O God the Father of heaven,
who hast marvellously created the world out of nothing,
who dost govern and uphold heaven and earth with thy power,
who didst deliver thine only begotten for us unto death;
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
who didst will to be incarnate of a virgin,
who hast washed us from our sins by thy precious blood,
who rising from the dead didst ascend victorious to heaven:
O God the Holy Ghost, the Comforter,
who didst descend upon Jesus in the form of a dove,
who coming upon the apostles didst appear in fiery tongues,
who dost visit and confirm with thy grace the hearts of the saints:
O sacred, higher, eternal, blissful, blessed Trinity,
always to be praised, yet always unspeakable:
O Father good,
O Son loving,
O Spirit kind,
whose majesty is unspeakable,
whose power is incomparable,
whose goodness is inestimable:
whose work is life,
whose love is grace,
whose contemplation is glory:
Deity, Divinity, Unity, Trinity:
Thee I worship, Thee I call upon,
with the whole affection of my heart I bless now
and for evermore.

For today's commemoration of St Sergius, we have a short video about the monastery he founded.

Alexei V Nesteruk is a researcher in cosmology and quantum physics at the University of Portsmouth in England and is an Eastern Orthodox Christian.  As such, he is one of the relatively few scholars engaged with the interaction of science and Orthodox  theology.  He explores many facets of this topic in Light From the East:  Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Fortress 2003).  Of interest is the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor and the great stress he lays on the discovery of God through the contemplation of the logoi of created things (logoi in this context referring to the underlying principles or patterns of created things, which are a reflection of the Divine Logos, the Creator of the universe.)  Nesteruk discusses Maximus' conception of logoi on pp 25-27 of his book.

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The problem that arises is how to demonstrate the presence of the Logos from within the created realm.  The clue to this demonstration can be found in Maximus the Confessor's theology of the logoi.  According to Maximus, it is the divine Logos (Word of God) that holds together the logoi of created things (that is, their immutable and eternal principles).

Maximus considered the contemplation of the logoi of created things to be a mode of communion with the Logos leading ultimately to mystical union with God.  The fundamental aspect of this communion is that, because it is exercised through the purified intellect (nous), the contemplation of the logoi is not the same as either empirical perception or mental comprehension.  It is a mode of spiritual vision of reality in which the ontological roots of things and beings have their grounds beyond the world.  This Christian contemplation of creation as if it were "from above" or "from within"--and not through external sensible or internal mental impressions--is significantly different from what is now normally accepted as taking place in scientific experience.

Indeed, science usually thinks of itself as starting from experiments and measurements, from things that constitute our sense of ordinary reality, though sometimes mediated by experimental apparatus.  There is, however, another aspect of all scientific investigation that involves the shaping of contingent empirical findings into a theory.  This requires access to symbolic language (for example, mathematics), which makes it possible for us to talk about the entities behind the outcomes of our measurements.  This takes place regularly when, for example, physics talks of elementary particles, fields, global geometry, the totality of the universe, and so forth.  All these "objects" are known to us only through their effects and are representable in our minds only with symbolic images.  In other words, their physical existence is affirmed in terms of their symbolic images.  We understand at present that this way of looking at reality corresponds to what we call human rationality.  The source of this rationality is hidden in the mystery of the human hypostasis, the human person.

The human person, made in the image of God, "is not identifiable with the body, or the soul, or the spirit.  It arises from another order of reality".  In other words, "the transcending character of human hypostasis...cannot be manifested within the relationship between body and soul--for they form one nature--but only in relation to something which is not of human nature, ie superhuman".

It is only because of the existence of this divine dimension in human beings that it is possible to infer from nature to God.  Only because of this dimension can we hope to unveil the divine intentions behind created things through the principles and ideas that are introduced into science by means of human rationality.

According to Maximus, the divine Logos is present in all things, holding their logoi together.  Thus the world is filled with the divine reality, and humans, in accordance with their logos, can have knowledge of the logoi of things.  Maximus expresses this thought in a characteristic, quite modern way when he speaks of the presence of the divine in the structure of the created world:  "Indeed, the scientific research of what is really true will have its forces weakened and its procedure embarrassed, if the mind cannot comprehend how God is in the logos of every special thing and likewise in all the logoi according to which all things exist".

Maximus contends that people know things from nature in their differentiated mode--that is, they see creation as divided into parts--and that this perception always confuses them.  The natural contemplation of things means the knowledge of the principles of existence of those things in their differentiation.  The fundamental step, which is made at this stage of mediation, is to contemplate all sensible creation in its oneness through finding that all the logoi of sensible things can be united in one divine Logos, which constitutes the principle of creation.  To achieve this contemplation, people mus be detached from sensible creation so as to see things spiritually.  Maximus compares this kind of contemplation of natural things with the angelic knowledge of sensible things, for angels know the logoi of sensible things directly, "from above".  Because the incarnation, according to Maximus, takes place both in the words of the Scripture and in the logoi of things that are held together in the universal Logos, spiritual ascent through the contemplation of the logoi of creation leads finally to the Logos-Christ.  The knowledge of things of the world thus acquires all the features of participation in the Divine:  "On the account of the presence of the Logos in all things, holding their logoi together, the world is pregnant with divine reality, and knowledge of it--through the rational quality of humans, their own logos--is itself a kind of communion with God, a participation in divine things through the aims and purposes that are recognized in creation"...

It is characteristic of Maximus and of the Greek Fathers in general that they could transcend spiritually the material world, the world of nature, in order to contemplate its logoi and through this contemplation praise the creator of the natural world...The Fathers never worshiped nature, only its creator...Praying to the Creator does not remove the distinction between God and the creation.  This safeguards the position of the Fathers from pantheism.  God and nature are not identical, but one may seek access to nature in order to find God.

For today's feast I offer an address by Metropolitan Kallistos.  Please be aware that the talk is in several parts.