Theosis in White Harlem
Columbus Avenue and One Hundred Seventh Street. An Albanian restaurant serves red snapper with pineapple-mango salsa on a thirty dollar prix fixe. White Harlem, in the notable phrase of America’s Greatest Living Philosopher, who grew up here. George Carlin, I mean, who was awarded the AGLP title by the late Robert Anton Wilson, who should know. It was Wilson whom the Heff anointed with the mission of crafting a Playboy Philosophy, which he did, out of little bits of Aleister Crowley, Ayn Rand, and Alfred Korzybsky stuck together with the glue of certain chemical agents then well known.
This was pretty much a Mexican neighborhood back in the days, infested by druggies and dealers, but the Mexicans would watch your back once they got used to seeing you around, especially if you were a young woman, as a high school friend of mine was. Not the sort of neighborhood you would expect a Russian Orthodox church, then or now, much less a new one. But it is here that Father Yakov Ryklin, chaplain at Columbia University a half a mile uptown, moved his little flock from a chapel at Union Theological Seminary. Just as well, I think; a seminarian who moonlighted for the Board of Education confided that the Satanists in the dorms were using it at night. The new church, which occupies the ground floor and basement of a residential building, is, despite the profusion of icons, almost Quakerly austere. Father is doing the carpentry himself, and it is well done and artful. The great icons have been commissioned, and he urges us to keep coming by over the years to see how it is getting on.
This evening Father Yakov is hosting the hopefully named First Annual Alexandr Men Memorial Lecture, in honor of the charismatic Russian priest murdered, presumably by the KGB, in 1990. (The death threats did not object to the fact that a minister of the Gospel was exercising ever greater influence in what was still the Soviet Union, but to the scandal that the man was a Jew.) The meeting has been organized by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, a child of the Old Left whose own personal pilgrimage led him from the Christian and Missionary Alliance to the Orthodox See of Sendai in the North of Japan, who supports himself here as a college librarian. (Seraphim’s druglessly psychedelic Theology of Wonder begins at the site of Batushka Alexandr’s assassination, and brings together Kaballa, Charles Williams’ Arthurian Torso, and Arthur Machen’s wonderful story “The Great Return.” Among other things. Many other things.)
The speaker is Dr. Michael Christensen, head of Drew University’s D. Min. program, and his topic is Theosis, a central theme of Orthodox life and thought, and one dear to the heart of Father Men. The idea is that through the incarnation of the Word of God we ourselves become, as the Prince of the Apostles put it, partakers of the divine nature, the title of a scholarly collection edited by Christensen. Saint Paul goes even further than Saint Peter, writing over and over again that through the incarnation as it manifests in our own human lives all of creation is eventually taken up into the divine Mystery, what some have called the Cosmic Christ and others, following Teilhard de Chardin, the Omega Point. Theosis isn’t just a Catholic and Orthodox thing; it is central to the Wesleyan tradition in which Drew remains rooted, as John Wesley himself was a deep student of the Greek Fathers. In the audience is Michael Allison, planetary scientist at the Goddard Space Center with an office above the real Tom’s Restaurant from Seinfeld, who spoke to a few of us on retreat last weekend on the exploration of space and the terraforming and settlement of other planets as the cosmic destiny God has called us to, in which (he hopes) Jews and Christians will find their reconciliation. And others as well, I might add; with the unbounded universe as our inheritance, need we kill each other over a few acres of Palestine, when the whole Earth is to be the Holy Land of a myriad galaxies?
There are still those who would deride Theosis as New Age moonshine, asserting dourly that God became man, not to raise us to the Godhead, much less to take the universe into this incarnation, but merely to die a miserable death to appease his own anger and save a few from the general damnation of the species. Evangelicals they call themselves—absurdly, because, Scripture is against them. I shouldn’t throw stones, as I was raised Roman Catholic and learned this late medieval nonsense in Sunday schools taught by people who should have known better. After all, the Catholic Church has never denied the tradition of the Fathers, though Augustine (in moments he later repented) and especially Anselm of Canterbury (though his thought was more nuanced than might appear) teetered on the slippery slope that led to… well, to Calvin and Knox and two presidents of Princeton, Jonathan Edwards and T. Woodrow Wilson.
What a God! The thing about religion, that makes it of ultimate concern to all of us, believers, or not, is that we, and I mean all of us, we grow to resemble what we worship. Beware the man or woman who does not honor a Creator or Redeemer, but bows down before the Accuser, whose Hebrew name is Satan. Satan in the White House is not just a late night horror movie, but a nightmare that has haunted at least one pope of Rome. The last stretch of the road to Abu Ghraib runs from the streets of iconoclastic Geneva through the pleasant meadows of Princeton, where Kuyper preached the corrosive gospel of neo-Calvinism, whence Wilson set out to make the world safe for neoconnery.
I keep returning to the words of the great and greatly neglected Edwin Muir:
The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.
Perhaps you will see some trace of Muir’s greatness even in these few lines, and even more the cause of his neglect:
The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,
Pagan and Christian man alike will fall,
The auguries say, the white and black and brown,
The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all
Invisibly will fall:
Abstract calamity, save for those who can
Build their cold empire on the abstract man.
There is no abstract man here in White Harlem tonight, and no mirthless myrmidons of the cold empire. Tyranny, torture, and terror are on the march to Armageddon, and those who resist will be assimilated because resistance itself, if it is resistance merely, is already assimilation. But here we see the futility of empire itself in the face of Theosis. The power that scatters the universes like seed into the vastness of space here begs humbly for permission to incarnate in the most fleeting thought, the most seemingly inconsequential act of the most obscure of mankind.
We are all fools—only the wise know it—the unholy fools the secret agents of the holy ones. The George to believe is not Bush but Carlin. T. Woodrow Wilson? Better Robert or Colin or Peter! Let us make the world safe for greater and holier follies. Should an Alexandr Men appear here we would no doubt do away with him as expeditiously as did our Russian friends, and with as little or as much to show for it. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is history. The Project for the New American Century isn’t even that and never will be. The Middle East is dying to become American, but only in the most depressingly literal of senses. More to the point, we are all dying to become human, but we are not dying alone. That is the folly of the Cross, which this little storefront church is here to witness to –the all but unbelievable message that it is God who dies, with us and in us and for us so that we ourselves might be raised from the dead with God, in God, for God, and, yes, as God—and as gods.
No doubt the gangs of addicts and pushers will go on torturing, tyrannizing, and terrorizing this small neighborhood of the universe. That’s what they do. It’s called history. But there are poems to be written, songs to be sung, space elevators to be built, galaxies to be explored and planets brought under the plough. Government will not do these things. We will do them. God will do them. It can start as small as you like, with a seed of mustard, or a warm smile for a surly waitress.
Comments
Satan in the White House is not just a late night horror movie, but a nightmare that has haunted at least one pope of Rome.
WHICH “pope of Rome,” Frank?
Aside from that little quibble, this understanding of what it means to be “Christian” is precisley my own.
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That alleged Pope should have worried more about
Satan in the Vatican than in the White House
which, in the scheme of things, remains less
important. As far as I’m concerned, the
skullduggery in the White House, CIA, Pentagon,
Congress, etc., even though it approximates
satanism on a regular basis, has yet to equal the “Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer” supposedly held in St. Paul’s Chapel in the Vatican, but linked with concurrent satanic rites here in the U.S., on June 29, 1963,
barely a week after the election of Paul VI.
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This joker connects Calvin and Knox to neoconservatism on a lark. He skips from orthodox Christianity to lame speculation about the cosmos and “terraforming”.
This might be the lamest article I have ever read on this site, and I visit daily.
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Admittedly, this article is entirely too “pro-Catholic”, despite being “pro-Eastern schismatic”, to garner much positive comment.
Also, the “Calvanists” can’t control themselves when it is pointed out that the Methodists are trending toward the True Faith, so they get upset about that as well.
In the long run, the strongest of the strongest Calvanists will ask “what’s wrong with homosexuals getting married and having abortions and getting divorced?”
Catholic (the vast, vast) minorities will say “people shouldn’t have gay marriage, get divorces, or have abortions”.
Meanwhile, Protestants (the descendants of today’s Calvinists) will say “what’s wrong with homosexual marriage, divorce, or abortion? What are you, some sort of “fascist”?
Sadly, the future of the Old Faith in America is already labeled as “fascism”.
The challenge is to remain true to the Old Faith, and not actually become Fascist (take note, Sid Cundiff - interject you tirade here...you’re welcome).
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Perhaps I am a bit lame after all. But I’d rather limp along in the right direction than tear off hell-bent for election the other way. I don’t think Woody Wilson’s Calvinism is in dispute, perhaps neocal rather than paleocal; his desire to reform the world by force of arms is obviously neocon — obviously to anyone to whom “neocon” is anything but a codeword for “Jew.”
The Pope I had in mind was JP II; I take the Enthronement of Lucifer as the figment of the fevered imagination of a former Jesuit, who had been well paid to strongarm the Fathers of Vatican II on behalf of another religion.
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Actually I found this an interesting diversion, at least as food for thought.
But another part of me can’t help wondering what Homer Simpson would think about “theosis.”
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Ah, yes, I recall that wonderful scene of Homer kneeling in prayer: “Of course I don’t have to tell You all this stuff — You’re ominvorous!”
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Come to think of it, Homer’s malapropism calling God “omnivorous” is a good metaphor
to remind us all of our ignorance and misunderstanding of the mind, and nature, of God. St Augustine acknowledged the impossibility of ever really understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and many orthodox doctrines as enunciated in our feeble mortal languages probably sound, to God, as childish and naive and confused as Homer Simpson saying “omnivorous.” Homer’s salvation is more through his faith than through his garbled theology.
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For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” was written by Holy Father Athanasios the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria, in De inc., 54, 3: PG, 192B, in his refutation of Arius during the First Ecumenical Council.
2nd-Peter 1:4 By whom he hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature:flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.
Theosis is indeed a reality
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M. Swartz wrote:"This might be the lamest article I have ever read on this site, and I visit daily.”
It’s easy to dismiss a work of prose as “lame”. It’s a little more like work to actually offer refutation of a point or two, or even to explain what you see as “lame”. Why not try a little work, Mr. Swartz? You may even be able to persuade someone else to your viewpoint.
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Whoa dude, sometimes truth comes from the barrel of a bong.
I have to agree with Mr. Shwartz, this article is lame. It has about it the air of a late night high school bull session. Pass the hashish brownies.
George Carlin is America’s Greatest Living Philosopher? Balderdash! Such a claim is hardly worthy of consideration much less the energy of refutation. Robert Anton Wilson is the kind of stuff you read in high school before you’ve heard of Plato or are too stupid or lazy to read him. Your article displays the same sensibility as Wilson’s: a spicy mix of names and concepts that titillate the neurons but seldom engender thought. Aleister Crowley! Playboy! Satanists! The flippin KGB dude! Wow! Cool!
I have no problem with Theosis. No. More than that. I revere such an awesome reality and gift, just as I revere the Eastern Fathers, but they deserve a better treatment than your post.
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@ abiello, “this article is lame. It has about it the air of a late night high school bull session.”
What do you think the discussions between Jesus (around 35 years old) and his young Apostles sounded like in circa 30 AD? What, do you think Jesus did nothing but declaim and proclaim somber, humourless lectures to his 12 best friends and constant companions?
(Gloss: this is why, despite our marginal differences, I have so much respect and admiration for our John Zmirak, who understands that Christianity is inseparable from a sense of humour, and fun and creative imagination.)
There is a place for solemnity (and my respect for that place is what keeps me, if not a “Roman” Catholic, still a sincerely “catholic” and “orthodox” kind of Christian.) But there’s also a place
- ESPECIALLY in Christianity! - for humour and for freedom of the imagination.
What IS Christianity IF NOT “freedom of the imagination”? We believe God became Man and rose from the dead - now, isn’t THAT just a PERFECT topic to sort out in “late night bull sessions” among young men in circa 33 AD?
Faith in Christ REQUIRES imagination, and freedom to play - meaning, freedom to explore EXTRAordinary ideas - because isn’t Christianity the most extraordinary idea of all?
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Indeed, the Fathers deserve better, much better! As for Mr. Carlin being America’s greatest living philosopher, I must admit I have often taken a rather dim view of America’s living philosophers; citing RAW as my authority gives sufficient notice of how seriously to take the claim! I do not care to dispute the notion that Plato is in general superior, but I would still rank RAW higher than the former New Jersey governor who did more than anyone else to destroy Western civilization in Europe — yes, more than Hitler, for whom he paved the way.
I claim no special expertise on Mexicans, and cheerfully defer to Fred Reed, no bleeding heart liberal, on that matter. My recent impressions of Mexicans in New York, Friday evening and this morning, happen to be highly favorable as well. No doubt as always we attract the better sort here.
And thanks for the “Wow, Cool,” Dude!
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Good point, Mr. Ball. We must have the freedom to discussion and above all to play.
My sentence about the high school bull session was qualified by the characterization in the rest of my post. I don’t think the discussion of Jesus and his disciples had the sensibility of Mr. Purcell’s post, at least as I described it!
And hey Frank, dude, don’t mention it.
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For those interested in Theosis
http://www.geocities.com/apotheoun/theosis
There is also a link on the right to the Fathers on Theosis
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What do you think the discussions between Jesus (around 35 years old) and his young Apostles sounded like in circa 30 AD? What, do you think Jesus did nothing but declaim and proclaim somber, humourless lectures to his 12 best friends and constant companions?
Given that he knew why he was here, yeah, I think the conversations were rather solemn somber and sober.
He was about his Father’s business.
I know it is much easier for us to think of Jesus as just another guy kicking back and jaw-boning with his buddies but by the time he was 12 he was teaching in the Temple not doing stand-up in the Catskills.
The idea of Theosis is in exactly the opposite direction of imagining Jesus (35?) having all night bull sessions like we do.
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Frank,
Excellent, if eclectic piece and dovetails with the
homily I heard yesterday at my Catholic parish. I
believe in the writings of both JPII and B16 you will
find they are working to recover the theme of Theosis.
“...to anyone to whom “neocon” is anything but a
codeword for “Jew” “
Amen. One finds in some commenters here an oppostion to
neoconservatism that is based on bigotry and not any
real intellectual or moral depth.
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Questioning myself, especially in the light of Mr. Purcell’s humble, good-humored response, I reread his article, including the hyperlinks this time. There under the link “Theology of Wonder”, I read:
“many circles within the Orthodox church today, where the “default setting” is one not of affirmation but of refutation. Many Orthodox Christians today—at least, those who are making themselves the most heard—are more apt to negate, to criticize or ignore that which arises from outside the Orthodox church, than they are to affirm what is good, true, beautiful, what is of Christ, everywhere, throughout God’s creation...”
and
“...critics [should] resist the temptation to attack what may appear to be an “easy target”, and simply relax for a moment, make the sign of the cross, and read again from the beginning.”
Well, I still don’t like the tone, but I am resolved to read all of Mr. Purcell’s posts (This is the first I have read.) to try to understand better his point of view. In addition I will try to articulate in a less wise-assed way what it is I take exception to here.
Life is a balance between restraint and freedom, unity and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. I suspect that it is the interplay of these principles that is often at the root of many Left/Right conflicts, and those on this site that have swirled around the questions of religious liberty etc. (Maurras love classical order and despised Romantic disorder.) Given that, it seems to me that Mr. Purcell’s thought as displayed in this article is too eclectic, too inclusive. It lacks a thorough informing by a principle of order.
To take this a step further, and at the risk of stirring up a hornet’s nest, East and West fall within these categories as well: The East is the home of mysticism; that Eastern love poem, The Song of Songs, along with the writings of St. Dionysius has nourished the mysticism of the West. In the West reason has attained virtuosity, even to the point of devouring itself as can be seen in scientism. (This point has not been missed by contemporary Eastern theologians!)
The conclusion is that East and West, like that above mentioned principles, are complementary, not contradictory. As Pope John Paul II said, the Church must begin again to breathe with both lungs.
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As to Lucifer, the word comes from Lucem Ferre, which means bringer of light and it was about a fallen Babylonian King and in the original hebrew text it was Helal son of Shahar [heleyl, ben shachar] who persecuted the children of Israel.
Jesus said “I am the bright and morning star and the root and offspring of David” The bright and morning star is a reference to what we now know as Venus, the planet of love, also known as the bringer of light because it rose before and ‘brought’ the sun [light]. It is also the evening star. The temple of Venus was built in the Old city of Jerusalem.[See wikipedia URL below] It doesn’t mean that Jesus is Lucifer or Satan. Those who do not read past the King James version confuse Satan with Lucifer and a fallen angel. Somehow, as many things do, the fallen king metamorphisized into a fallen angel to rule eternally in hell.
The Holy Sepulchre, originally a site of veneration for the Christian community in Jerusalem, had been covered with earth, upon which a temple of Venus had been built.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Sepulchre
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“… I take the Enthronement of Lucifer as the figment of the fevered imagination of a former Jesuit, who had been well paid to strongarm the Fathers of Vatican II on behalf of another religion. “
The idiocy of the above statement is
incredible. This is exactly the kind of
statement I expect from a typical
American Catholic. Anybody who knows
anything about Fr. Malachi Martin, his
scholarship, the vows he maintained after
he left the Jesuits, and his integrity
would realize that Frank Purcell’s opinion is—I don’t wish to be too uncharitable—worthless.
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Fred is married to a Mexican.
Paco is the perfect new world citizen. He is just fine with the new low-budget version of freedumb here in the States.
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“[I]t seems to me that Mr. Purcell’s thought as displayed in this article is too eclectic, too inclusive. It lacks a thorough informing by a principle of order.”
You can’t argue with an “it seems to me!” But it seems fair to say that if my thought has an informing principle of order I haven’t, at least here, brought it out of the closet. Some of you may have gathered that I once devoted a good bit of attention to American philosophy, to Charles Peirce in particular. I accept his claim to be a Scholastic, if not precisely a Scotist. I’m a bit and more than a bit of a Thomist myself — I say this knowing that at least one of our authors deplores the Angelic Doctor as a modernist heretic — as do a great many of my Orthodox friends.
As for Father Martin, I was reading his books before many of you were born. They got flakier and flakier and I stopped. I don’t know about his early work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but I don’t recall its being cited by legitimate scholars. And this lurid novel of Satanism in the Vatican, well there was an English author, whose name I forget, who did that sort of thing better. Dennis Wheatly, was it? Let the poor man rest in peace. Both of them. Montini too.
I know Mr. Reed is married to a Mexican. It says so in the essay I linked to. I am married to a Brahmini of Bengal. If I had a lawn you could burn a hacky-cross on it.
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“I am married to a Brahmini of Bengal.” - Frank
You should read the conservative classic _Camp of the Saints_, which Chilton Williamson in _Conservative Bookshelf_ ranked as one of the best conservative novels of all time.
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They got flakier and flakier and I stopped.
Frank’s experience in reading Malachi Martin was exactly the same as mine. I gave up reading his ravings when I noticed them on the same shelves in redneck Christian bookstores as Jack Chick comic books and Dispensationalist and anti-Catholic tracts. He had turned himself into an enemy of the actual “Body of Christ” on earth.
And when Paul VI Montini referred to the “odour of sulphur” in the Vatican, I’m sure he was referring to atheist-leaning modernists and not to “Satanists.” Paul VI was not a superstitious man.
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Mr. Purcell, you wrote:
“You can’t argue with an “it seems to me!”
Certainly you can and so can I, and that is, in fact, what we are always arguing with. This is so because each of us being creatures has only a perspective on reality, and so we reason with each other in order enrich the other with our perspective. Of course some perspectives are more limited than others, and some people try to turn away from reality, but this can never be done completely: everyone has something to report.
You then wrote:
“But it seems fair to say that if my thought has an informing principle of order I haven’t, at least here, brought it out of the closet. “
My objection is not that your thought in general has no informing principle, but that your thought as displayed in this article lacks a thorough informing by an ordering principle. (Underline “as displayed in this article” and “thorough.")
Since my last post I have read with interest your article on Russell Kirk, and begin to see better your intellectual affinities. Thank you for your reply.
Mr. Purcell, you wrote:
“You can’t argue with an “it seems to me!”
Certainly you can and so can I, and that is, in fact, what we are always arguing with. This is so because each of us being creatures has only a perspective on reality and so we reason with each other in order enrich the other with our perspective. Of course some perspectives are more limited than others, and some people try to turn away from reality, but this can never be done completely: everyone has something to report.
You then wrote:
“But it seems fair to say that if my thought has an informing principle of order I haven’t, at least here, brought it out of the closet. “
My objection is not that your thought in general has no informing principle, but that your thought as displayed in this article lacks a thorough informing by an ordering principle. (Underline “as displayed in this article” and “thorough.") Of course, perhaps it is there and I missed it.
Since my last post I have read with interest your article on Russell Kirk, and begin to see better your intellectual affinities.
Thank you for your reply.
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Opps. Somehow my last post multiplied itself in this little incubating box!
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And when Paul VI Montini referred to the “odour of sulphur” in the Vatican, I’m sure he was referring to atheist-leaning modernists and not to “Satanists.” -Digby
Sounds, to me, as he was referring to Mamona or Mammon perhaps meaning ill-gotten riches or that some in the Vatican were serving two masters. St. Jerome (Dial. cum Lucif., 5) “No man can serve two masters”, and then adds, “What concord hath Christ with Belial?
Belial is synonymous with Satan; also the demon of impurity; also known as prince of darkness; wickedness. It does not mean ‘non-believer’ [Atheist]
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To anyone interested in the topic of theosis, I would recommend the works of Jean Borella, particularly “The Secret of the Christian Way”. (Or here, for francophones: http://jean.borella.neuf.fr/ )
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The writer must have attended a strange catechism class. In mine they taught us that the incarnation happened because of God’s great love for us.
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Mr. M. Van Oosbree,
While, as my posts above show, I do not accept everything that Mr. Purcell has written, there is no contradiction between God becoming man because of his great love for us, and God becoming man so that we might become gods. It is because he loves us that he wishes to elevate us.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church 460, citing Scripture, the Fathers, and St. Thomas Aquinas says:
460 The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”
(http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p122a3p1.htm)
Take Mr. Salvo’s advice and read Jean Borella, esp. Part III of his book “The Sense of the Supernatual”, “The Rediscovered Life of Faith: The Deifying Glory.”
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The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.
That’s Mormonism.
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@ abellio, “Opps. Somehow my last post multiplied itself in this little incubating box!”
That sounds like a plot for a science-fiction-horror movie about Rudy Giuliani having sex with himself and multiplying himself in ballot-boxes all over the land.
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Thanks for this piece. The pointer to Muir is especially appreciated. It appears you still haven’t quite grasped the chronology of RAW’s involvement with the Hefner enterprise, but I don’t suppose it matters much in the great scheme of things. Though again I’ll suggest that to affect this sort of dismissive familiarity it is really important to get things absolutely right.
I find myself in sympathy with some of abellio’s comments, which I would link to my reservations about tone expressed here and previously. This kind of sticky style seems unnecessarily cartoonish to me: I keep hoping you’ll quit the joking and expound a bit more clearly on issues of signal importance, but maybe that’s someone else’s job and I’m just impatient with my own slow progress.
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Mr. Ramus, you wrote:
The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.
That’s Mormonism.
Two points:
1) The passage from the CCC I quoted, quotes in turn four passages:
a) 2 Peter 1:4
b) St. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies
c) St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
d) St. Thomas Aquinas, Smaller Work # 57, Sermon on the Feast of the Body of Christ
You noted that on the surface these passages are similar to the Mormon doctrine of “exaltation.” Let’s assume for a moment that it is the same. Unless you reject as the quotations as spurious, you must hold that these four saints taught Mormonism.
But since you only quoted Aquinas perhaps you meant only to accuse him of Mormonism. If so, how would you distinguish what he says from what the rest say?
2) The traditional teaching of theosis or deification as represented by these quotes is not the same as the Mormon doctrine of exaltation, although it is superficially similar. But in order to truly understand these respective doctrines we must understand them in context. The Mormons hold that God the Father and God the Son where once men who have been exalted to the status of gods, and that other man can follow this path of progression.
(http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/basic/godhead/farms_man.htm)
Godhood for them is not really different from creaturehood. It is something more on the order of assuming an office.There doctrine is metaphysically incoherent, and indeed is the product of a materialist mentality that lacks any true metaphysical understanding.
On this count the traditional Catholic doctrine of deification is poles apart in that it assumes a metaphysical worldview, and, indeed, the reality of the metaphysical. It is because there is an analogia entis, a hierarchical community of being that God can become man and raise man to a greater participation in his life. The traditional doctrine does not mean that man can become God the Father or God the Son, but that man can, because he was created in God’s image, and if he chooses, grow ever more like God without ever ceasing to be a creature.
John Ball wrote:
“That sounds like a plot for a science-fiction-horror movie about Rudy Giuliani having sex with himself and multiplying himself in ballot-boxes all over the land.”
That would indeed be a horror! Although it wouldn’t be so bad if this little Taki comment box were a ballot box and all the Taki commenter could multiply their votes!
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Abellio: Finitum non capax infiniti.
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Petre Rame,
“Intellectus noster ad infinitum in intelligendo extenditur: cuius signum est quod, qualibet quantitate finita data, intellectus noster maiorem excogitare potest.”
Intellectus humanus est capax infiniti.
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