the flesh which He has assumed, and at the same time deified. “Un terme cher aux Pères du IVe siècle, de nous déifier” (Denis, Philosophie d’Origène, p. 458). This θεοποίησις or θέωσις is more than a metaphor even from the first; “vere fideles vocantur θεοί, non naturâ quidem, sed τῇ ὁμοιώσει, ait Athanasius;” Casaubon, In Epist. ad Eustath. “We become ‘gods’ by grasping the Divine power and substance;” Clement, Stromata, iv. That the Platonists had thus used the word of τὸ πρὸς μείζονα δόξαν ἀνυψωθὲν is clear. Synesius in one of his Hymns says to his soul:— “Soon commingled with the Father Thou shalt dance a ‘god’ with God.” Just as elsewhere (in Dione, p. 50) he says, “it is not sufficient not to be bad; each must be even a ‘god.’” Cf. also Gregory Thaum. Panegyr Origenis, §142. When we come to the Fathers of the 4th century and later, these words are used more especially of the work of the Holy Spirit upon man. Cf. Cyrill. Alex.: “If to be able to ‘deify’ is a greater thing than a creature can do, and if the Spirit does ‘deify,’ how can he be created or anything but God, seeing that he ‘deifies’?” “If the Spirit is not God,” says Gregory Naz., “let him first be deified, and then let him deify me his equal;” where two things are implied, 1. that the recognized work of the Holy Spirit is to ‘deify,’ 2. that this “deification” is not Godhead. It is “the comparative god-making” of Dionysius Areopag. whereby we are “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pet. i. 4). On the word as applied to the human nature of our Saviour Himself, Huet (Origeniana, ii. 3, c. 17), in discussing the statement of Origen, in his Commentary on S. Matthew (Tract 27), that “Christ after His resurrection ‘deified’ the human nature which He had taken,” remarks, “If we take this word so as to make Origen mean that the Word was changed into the human nature, and that the flesh itself was changed into God and made of the same substance as the Word, he will clearly be guilty of that deadly error which Apollinaris brought into the Church (i.e. that the Saviour’s soul is not ‘reasonable,’ nor His flesh human); or rather of the heresy perpetrated by some sects of the Eutychians, who asserted that the human nature was changed into the Divine after the Resurrection. But if we take him to mean that Christ’s human nature, after being divested of weakness after death, assumed a certain Divine quality, we shall be doing Him no wrong.” He then quotes a line from Gregory’s Iambics:— “The thing ‘deifying,’ and the thing ‘deified,’ are one God:” and this is said even of Christ’s Incarnation; how much more then can it be said of His Resurrection state, as in this passage of the Great Catechism? Huet adds one of Origen’s answers to Celsus: “His mortal body and the human soul in Him, by virtue of their junction or rather union and blending with that (deity), assumed, we assert, qualities of the very greatest kind.…What incredibility is there in the quality of mortality in the body of Jesus changing, when God so planned and willed it, into an ethereal and Divine” (i.e. the matter, as the receptacle of these qualities, remaining the same)? It is in this sense that Chrysostom can say that “Christ came to us, and took upon Him our nature and deified it;” and Augustine, “your humanity received the name of that deity” (contr. Arian.).