Pints With Aquinas - 137: Becoming God (Deification/Theosis), with Fr. James Brent O.P.

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

Today I chat with Fr. James Brent O.P. about that very interesting line in the Catechism of the Catholic Church from St. Athanasius, "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God" (CCC 460). Enjoy! SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform  

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Well, in today's episode, we're going to ask Thomas Aquinas about a line from the catechism that says that the Son of God became man so that we might become God. What on earth does that mean? What is deification or theosis? Joined around the bar table with us today is Father James Dominic Brent, an excellent Dominican who works with the Thomistic Institute to help us understand it all. Enjoy the show. G'day, welcome back to Pints with Aquinas. This is the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. We are going to be diving into deep theological and philosophical waters today, as I already kind of intimated in the introduction.

today, as I already kind of intimated in the introduction. In paragraph 460 of the Catechism, it says, the Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. All right, so far so good. The average Catholic reads that, even perhaps the educated Catholic reads that, I think, yep, okay, that's fine. Well, it continues, 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. All right, that's fine. That's saying Irenaeus. We can keep going.

We're not too scandalized by that. Well, these next two quotations, okay, might be where the scandal begins. It shouldn't, but it does. The first quote is from St. Athanasius. The second is from our man, St. Thomas Aquinas, okay? For the Son of God became man so that we might become God. What? so that we might become God. What? All right. And then the next quotation comes directly from Aquinas, 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. Now, upon reading that, maybe this is the first time you're hearing it, you think, wait a minute, I thought Mormonism was about becoming gods. I thought Christianity

was a monotheistic religion. What does this mean? Well, that's what we'll be talking about today. So be sure to stick around to the end of the episode so that you can hear the whole thing. And I think it'll give you a greater appreciation, not just for some sort of vague, theoretical, abstract theological point, but it'll help you understand what God has planned for you. Enjoy the show. Father James Brent, thank you for being on Pints with Aquinas. Thank you. It's great to be here. Not sure if you knew this or if Aquinas discusses it somewhere, but every time we have a Dominican on the show, an angel gets its wings. I'm not sure if you... Yeah, he's never said anything. Okay, maybe I should go back and maybe I shouldn't be leading this podcast. It's

great to have you with us. Tell us a little bit about yourself. So, I'm a Dominican friar and I teach at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. I teach philosophy here. I travel around the country quite a bit, giving a lot of retreats for college students and young adults. Yeah, just all over the place. And yeah, that's what I do. I love the Thomistic Institute. I love that y'all are dedicated to, you know, bringing the wisdom of the Catholic tradition, especially Thomas Aquinas, to college settings. What do you find are the questions that college students are having? What are the problems, the difficulties they're running up into that y'all are able to help them with?

Well, there's a lot of them. It depends on the topic that the Thomistic Institute is speaking on in a particular place. Recently, I was up at Yale in Connecticut and was giving a talk there. We had a day-long conference on free will. And in that kind of context, one of the big questions that always comes up is just the reductionist view of the human being. Like, you know, human being is just nothing but chemicals and those chemicals operate according to certain laws of nature and so all of our everything that happens in our lives is just basically the unfolding of predetermined

chemical events yeah yeah what do you say about that so It leads to a sort of fatalism, doesn't it? Totally. Yeah, there's no such thing as free will or free agency, if that's what reality is. Punishment becomes, sorry to interrupt you, punishment becomes a sort of cruelty. Why would you put somebody in prison or execute them or whatever if they couldn't help it? Yeah, punishment presupposes some kind of responsibility for what we do, and responsibility for what we do presupposes that it's truly I who do it. And if it's truly I who do it, it can't be simply my chemical parts that are doing it. Yeah. Have you, I know this isn't the topic for today,

but I'll be darned if I don't chase this down because it's super interesting. Sam Harris has spoken about this, you know, and I'm not sure if you've gotten to interact with any of his work or have found that interesting. But, you know, it might be too simplistic to say, you know, like if a man comes into my house and murders my wife and a lightning bolt hits my wife and kills her, would those who say there's no such thing as free will say, you know, just like you wouldn't give the bolt of lightning, you know, a guilty complex by kind of lecturing it? So the same thing with a person? I doubt it's that simple, though, wouldn't it?

Well, because if you're saying that a human being is just nothing but chemicals operating according to the laws of nature, then in effect, we're not different from a lightning bolt or any other purely material physical phenomenon. But we can be persuaded still, can't we? Like even without free will, can't I be persuaded by prison? I would say, yeah, if there's a kind of conditioning that takes place there, like you would with a dog or a cat. You can condition them in various ways. But there's more going on when we put people in prison than simply conditioning. There's some kind of answerability or responsibility for what they do. answerability or responsibility for what they do. And it's hard to explain how, yeah, how can there be such responsibility for what people do unless they're doing it freely?

Yeah. Really what's at stake is whether there are human beings as we think of them. As we think of them, we think of ourselves and each other as answerable for our actions and if there's no such thing as free will we're not really answerable for our actions that's why even to say that we're able to be persuaded by prison persuasion presupposes that we have a reason and um reason is something higher than just chemical reactions going on if it's if there's no such thing as free will or reason, then you're not being persuaded, you're just being conditioned one way or the other. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff,

and I'm sure that there are many intellectually lonely Catholics on university campuses that are really interested in these things, but maybe they look around them and they don't find a lot of other people who share their interest in these very interesting philosophical issues. So it must be a breath of fresh air when you all come to campus. Yeah, there's people that sometimes share the interest, but the thought of Thomas Aquinas isn't even in the discussion. Yeah.

And so one of the things the Thomistic Institute does is introduce Thomas Aquinas into the discussion. does is introduce Thomas Aquinas into the discussion. Well, today I'm excited to talk about a very interesting topic, that of sometimes called divinization. Yeah. We can become gods. Maybe our launching pad could be the catechism of the Catholic Church. Sure. The topic of divinization is often a shocking one, especially when you put it like you just did, that we, by the grace of God, become gods.

And people are convinced, even devout Orthodox practicing Catholics, when they first hear that, are shocked. They say, no, that can't be what the Church teaches. Well, let's clarify. In fact, it does. Yeah, I'm sure there's Catholics who are listening to this who don't even know what we're talking about. So maybe before we even respond to some of the concerns they will have, let's address it and just kind of explain what it is a little.

Maybe I'll just read this quick paragraph here in 460 from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It says, The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature, for this is why the Word became man, It says, might become God. And there's that jarring line. 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. All right. So this kind of sounds, smacks of Mormonism, maybe it sounds a little Buddhist. What are we talking about here? It can. I just want to point out one thing that the last two sentences of that paragraph are quotes. One of them, the most blunt one, is from St. Athanasius, for the Son of God became man so that we might become God. That's one of the fathers of the

church and one of the principal defenders of orthodoxy at a time in the history of the church when, you know, the divinity of Christ was being denied. So, this is one of the most solid saints, right, we have. I mean, all the saints are solid, but this one is particularly known for being a defender of orthodoxy. And then the second line there, 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 a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. So, we're not dealing with obscure figures. We're dealing with a solid kind of theological tradition that comes down in the church from the time of the fathers to our own day and passes through people like St. Thomas Aquinas.

But I also want to give you some other quotes just to kind of reinforce that this is a solid part of our tradition, not only in the eastern side of the church, which really tends to emphasize this, but also in the western side of the church. So here's Saint Augustine from one of his sermons. He says, we carry mortality about with us. We endure infirmity. We look forward to divinity. For God wishes not only to vivify, but also to deify us. When would human infirmity ever dare to hope for this unless divine truth had promised it? So what St. Augustine is saying is that God has promised us in the gospel to deify us, to transform us into God in some important way. Right.

There's another piece of evidence for this that's important. In the liturgy of the church, I'm talking now about the Roman Rite. The Eastern Rites are filled with references to this, but even in our Roman Rite, there's a prayer that is said at each and every Mass that affirms this doctrine of divinization. And it's at the moment in the Mass when the priest or the deacon is mingling the water with the wine and preparing the chalice. And the priest or the deacon says a secret prayer. That means it's not said out loud, so usually the people don't hear it. And the prayer goes like this, by the mingling of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

So, at each and every Mass, there's an affirmation of our hope that we will come to share in the divinity of Christ. And that's said each time the drop of water is put into the wine. Very interesting. Do you think that it's fair to say that there's more of an emphasis placed on theosis or deification in the East than there is on the West? Surely they talk about it more in the East. And why is that, do you think? That's a hard question to answer.

One of the reasons I think is because they are quite intent on responding to what they consider to be common errors of the West about the meaning of salvation and justification. I think it's their way of responding, first of all, to Protestant errors that say that justification consists nothing of the imputation of righteousness externally to those who are being saved, but that does not consist of a transformation of the person who is being saved. Mere snow-covered dunghills, huh? Right, right. So the Catholic Church in the West denies that and says, no, justification is not a mere extrinsic imputation of righteousness. There's actually a transformation that takes place. And that's what grace does. It makes us holy. And I think that what the East does is they say,

okay, that's true, but it doesn't go far enough. What is holiness? What is this transformation? How deep does it go? It's transformation into what? Or transformation into who? And that's where they come along and emphasize, this is transformation into God. Maybe it would be helpful if you told us what we're not saying. It's sort of like when we try to explain to a Protestant, well, we pray to Mary, and this is what we do, and this is how we do it, and this is the scriptural justification. Sometimes it can be helpful to begin with what we're not saying. We're not saying Mary is God. We do not worship Mary. And after you've said what we're not saying, people can sometimes be a lot more open to what you are saying. So,

what does it not mean when we say that we'll be made gods? That's a great way of proceeding. So, even in the East, where they strongly emphasize this doctrine of theosis or divinization, they want to say, and they do say if you read their writings, this. We are not claiming that a human being will ever be simply equal to God. ever be simply equal to God. There's always going to be a distinction between the creator and the created. And the distinction between the creator and the created, that will never go away. So even when divinization is complete and we're living in heaven with God, fully divinized, we won't be the creator. We won't be equal to God. We won't be him by nature. There will always remain some distinction.

And we won't become omniscient and omnipotent either. Yeah, not by nature. That's right. And we'll always have a limited share in his being. Okay. That's right. That's right. So that's what we're not saying. We're not asserting equality or that there will ever be this simple equality. There will always be a limited, finite sharing in what God is by each of the creatures who are divinized. That being said, there's a real, true share in being what God is. We will be God not by nature, but by grace or by a special gift that transforms us. I wish I could nod approvingly and say, yes, I get it, but I don't get it. And if I don't get it, I have to suspect a lot of others don't get it as well. Because we're saying,

you know, God became man so that man might become God, but we're not saying man might become God. So then we're saying, okay, so he doesn't become equal to God, but he participates. But he in some sense is God. That's right. He participates in God or shares in God. So you're right. We're standing before a mystery and we need to unpack it. So there's a couple ways we can do that. There's a number of scripture passages we could walk through. That'd be great. Step by step. Yeah, lest anyone think that this is merely an orthodox reaction or something. Yeah, that's right. Some of the church fathers got wrong. No, this is soundly in the scriptures themselves, and it's just a question of learning to look at the right passages sort of in the right order.

and it's just a question of learning to look at the right passages sort of in the right order and if we do that um it starts to become clearer as we go we can start to do that okay all right so i think a good place to begin is with the theme of adoption or mystical adoption so it's it's an important part of the gospel proclamation that God created us in order to adopt us into the life of the Holy Trinity. And that's really all over the place. But here's a passage in Galatians chapter 4, verses 4 to 6, where St. Paul says this. When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. See, this is, permit me to interject here, this is really interesting, because it sounds like we're getting down to that imputation versus being sanctified distinction. Because on the one hand, if I adopt a child, in a sense, I suppose you would say he becomes part of my family.

I have him, necessarily. But it doesn't mean I've... But here we have Paul talking about we receive the Spirit. So it's not just a matter of him adopting. It's like taking us under his house. That's right. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's important.

I'm glad you brought up because what this passage does is it sets up an analogy for us. which occurs all over the place of adoption, where you have someone who, for whatever reason, his or her natural parents will not raise them. And so another family that has different life blood takes this child into their home. Okay. That's adoption. And a human adoption at the human level, there's a legal transaction where you could say the rights of parenting are transferred from the natural parents to the adoptive parents. But in human adoption or natural adoption, But in human adoption or natural adoption, the person who's adopted still does not share the very lifeblood of the adoptive family. That's right. And there's a great Thomistic theologian by the name of Father Juan Arantero.

And he was the teacher of Father Garagula Grange, who was one of the great Thomists of the 20th century. And the way that Juan Arantero explains mystical adoption is this, that there's a difference between mystical adoption and human adoption, between supernatural adoption and natural adoption. And the difference is precisely this. In human adoption, the adoptive child does not share in the very lifeblood of the adoptive family. But in mystical adoption, it's not only a legal claim that the adoptive family has on the adopted child, but the adopted child in some way even begins to share the very lifeblood of the family into which he's adopted. And so there's a kind of sharing of the very being of the family you're adopted into. And that's the significance of God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba. We enjoy the sonship of the son in the sense that his very sonship is our sonship and ours is his. Does this process take place while on earth?

It begins while on earth. So in baptism, it begins. Receiving the life of God, in a sense, sanctifying grace. Yeah, that's right. Sanctifying grace is that very life. And the Lord Himself uses the analogy of the vine and the branches. I'm the vine, you are the branches. If you stop and really contemplate that

and consider the connection between vine and branches, it's one organism. It's one life. And all the life, the vitality, the sap, the energy of the vine flows into all the branches. And the branches live the very life, the same life, as the vine. And that's what begins in our baptism. And it's meant to grow.

So we've switched over images now from adoption to the vine and branch, but it helps us to clarify what happens in this mystical adoption. In the mystical adoption, when we are adopted, we receive something of the very life, the very being of the family we're adopted into, the Trinity. And it's the spirit of the sun that comes to dwell in our spirit. I'll give you an analogy from Fulton Sheen. He used to say, if I could take the spirit of Shakespeare and put it in you, you'd write poetry like Shakespeare. If I could take the spirit of Mozart and put it in you, you'd make music like Mozart. If I could take the spirit of Mozart and put it in you, you'd make music like Mozart. If I could take the very spirit of Jesus Christ and put it in you, you would live the life of Jesus Christ.

And yet I think most of us are Pelagians or semi-Pelagians, at least intellectually, in that we still somehow think that this is just a matter of us seeing the example of Christ and trying our best to act like him. Yeah, that sets you up for some pretty depressing days because, I mean, who can really work their way by sheer willpower up to such a level of moral perfection that we could conform to the very, you know, pattern of Jesus Christ himself. Have you looked into what Lutherans and other Protestants think about this? I have not looked... How do they wrestle with these passages? I've not looked into it in great detail, but the Protestants I've spoken with down through the years, many of whom have been my friends, they want to draw a distinction between justification and sanctification. And they say that, yes, there's some kind of process of sanctification that works within us, but it's really and truly different from our justification. So they're working with a whole host of distinctions that we just don't work with. And we don't draw that distinction between justification and sanctification the way we do.

And furthermore, I've never heard any Protestant say that sanctification comes to divinization in the last analysis. They just don't have that kind of metaphysical account of salvation the way that the Church of the Fathers does. Yeah. All right. Well, you shared that one verse from St. Paul. Sure. About the Spirit coming into us, making us adopted sons who can legitimately cry out, Abba, Father. So what's the next step? You said there was a series of these scriptures. Sure. So here's one that's kind of a bridge. In the first letter of John, chapter 3, verse 2, it says this, Beloved, we are God's children now. So there's the theme of adoption again. We are God's children now.

We've been adopted thanks to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Spirit and the work of the sacraments. We are God's children now. Then it goes on. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. So this is very interesting. It connects our being God's children with being like him. So from the sonship follows likeness. That's a very important thing to consider as well. A lot of the fathers of the church used an analogy that went like this. Suppose you had a child who was an orphan, you know, kind of out on the streets

and there was a King who adopted him and the King had a son, a Prince. And you know, this adopted child is brought into the home and he becomes a son, but now he has to learn how to act in this new house. He can no longer act and he no longer needs to act like he did when he was on the streets. He doesn't need to live in fear. He doesn't need to be lying all the time. He doesn't need to engage in theft. So he can leave those things behind. But what he needs to do is learn a new way of acting and a new way of being. And how can he learn that? By looking to his elder brother. And he can look to the elder brother and see someone who he can imitate and be like. And that's what happens. We're adopted into the family of the triune God.

And when we're adopted, we're adopted as sons, but we're also like Christ, who is the son, par excellence, first of all, but he's also like our elder brother in this household. our elder brother in this household. So we're meant to grow into his likeness more and more. And there I think you can say we do meet up with the intuitions or kind of the common sense of Catholics. They'll say, yeah, yeah, we should be like Jesus Christ. We should be like him. That's right.

We should be like him. We should be like him. That's right, we should be like him. But it's not merely an external likeness, but it's like a likeness that's actually sharing in his very life, his very activities, his very way of being, his form of life becomes ours. Here's another analogy that the fathers of the church would use. That's very powerful. Think of a fire that's burning. Yeah. It's on fire. Now think of a, like if you took an iron bar or like a poke,

a poker and you put it in the fire and you let it kind of heat up there until it gets red hot, then you pull it out. The poker is like the fire now. But it's not just simply like a copy, it shares in the very heat of the fire itself. It is, in way on fire with the fire that is in the fireplace. So it maintains its essence. It doesn't become absorbed into the hole. It's not like a drop of water dropped into the ocean. That's right. But it's also not just simply an extrinsic copy of the original. It actually has its heat from the original, from the fire itself. And its own heat is a sharing and a likeness in the fire, a sharing in the fire and a likeness of the fire. And it reflects the very fire from which it received its heat.

You see that? Yeah. That's another way to think about likeness. I like that a lot. That's a great analogy. Helpful. Yeah, that really sets us up for where we're going with later on when we get to participation. But there's a, this theme of likeness is very important. In 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 18, St. Paul says, and we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being changed into his likeness. Wow. There are so many scripture verses like that, that if you weren't that familiar with the scriptures, say, and a holy person you knew, say a priest in his homily, began speaking like that, you'd be like, whoa, what is this new teaching? I mean, so many of these passages from St. Paul,

as St. Peter himself said, are difficult to understand. Yeah, the passages are right there. We hear them in the church all the time, but their meaning, as they've been traditionally understood, needs to be unpacked. A lot of the preaching has just overlooked this for a long time. You said earlier that Orthodoxy may have been responding to the Protestant and Catholic claims. Now, in saying that, you weren't saying this was not a consistent teaching throughout the Church, because it has been ever since the time of the Fathers. But have you noticed an uptick in emphasis on it since the time of the fathers. But have you noticed an uptick in emphasis on it since the time of the Protestant Reformation in the East?

Does that make sense? Like you're responding to something? Yeah, I can't speak for the East. It seems to me to be a pretty consistent theme that they preach even from before the time of the Reformation. So it seems to be something that's just kind of been a continual theme of theirs. I would say that it's been in the West too, but it's just not been preached. It's in a lot of spiritual authors, but... Yeah. Here's a question from one of our listeners, Philip Haddon.

He wanted to ask you, he said, every time I've heard a Latin Rite priest speak on the issue, they want to make very clear on what it doesn't mean, I guess, by theological terms. As I've heard many Eastern Rite talk about theosis, why does the Latin Church seem to stray away from such language and ideas to where deification seems to be hardly known in the West. Do you agree with the,

the, where he's coming from? And do you understand the question? Well, I would agree that, uh, the doctrine is not widely known in the West. What I would disagree on is that we want to,

there's something that we just want to shy away from. Yeah. Well, certainly you don't want to. No, I want to go in the opposite direction. I want everyone to know about this. Maybe it's so deep and so rich that not a lot of people have spent time reflecting upon it, and so therefore can't speak meaningfully on it and just end up talking about what it doesn't mean. Yeah, I think a simpler answer to the question is just simply that the preaching in the Western Church for the last at least five centuries has really strongly emphasized our moral obligations and the need to act in the world in a morally good way for the improvement of the world. And that has been the emphasis of the last five centuries.

Here's a question for you which may be related, since I know that you spend time with, well, what is your relation with the Eastern Church? Do you celebrate the Divine Liturgy or no? I don't celebrate it. I will occasionally visit Eastern Catholic churches and concelebrate, and I have a number of friends who are Eastern Catholics, but I'm not bivirtual, yeah. Well, we've been going for about three and a half years to a Byzantine church, and I've noticed a marked difference or a lack of scrupulosity in the East, but I see it much more in the West. Maybe that's just anecdotal, but do you think there's something there, like maybe because of this overemphasis on how we ought to act and obligation?

I think there's a manner in which moral teaching is done that has emphasized our obligations and duties. Whereas in the East, as far as I can tell, they still operate very much out of the patrimony coming down from the fathers of the church and the neptic fathers that conceives of the human person as a being who has a heart, and the heart is embattled by thoughts and passions. And we're all on this journey of being purified of thoughts and passions that are dragging us away from God and away from the path of divinization and illumination. And so we need to go to confession and repent and be renewed.

But it's really a kind of doctrine of the passions and thoughts, but without a lot of reference, at least on a regular basis, to the moral law. However, if you look at their catechisms, they do make, you know, they have the Ten Commandments. They're right there. And the passions and the disordered passions and disordered thoughts are defined with reference to the commandments of God, and the liturgy refers to the commandments of God. But it's the manner in which it's preached, it seems to me, that makes a difference. There's an emphasis in the East that I appreciate about healing the sick person so that the sick person can be healthy, a.k.a. holy. No, that's right. But the same image is found in the West. You can find healthy, a.k.a. holy. No, that's right. But the same image is found in the West.

You can find that in St. Augustine. And maybe there's something we should do here is distinguish theology and doctrine. Because I think sometimes people look at emphasis placed on certain teachings in the East and the West. And certainly I know there's a lot of people in the Orthodox Church who would say Catholics are heretics. But I think there can be genuine reconciliation on some of these issues, and it might have to do with how we express doctrine. Do you know what I'm saying? For sure. If you look at Mark's gospel and then John's gospel, you could imagine how it would have come about if a church grew out of John's gospel and they only had John's gospel,

and another church grew out of Mark's gospel, and then looking at each other saying, we believe totally different things. But of course, as Christians, we realize, well, this is the expression of doctrine, maybe? How would you put it? Right. The way the church describes the differences between the East and the West or between the various churches within the Catholic church is that there are different patrimonies that come down from the Fathers. And these patrimonies consist of different liturgies, but not just different liturgies, but different commentaries on the Scriptures and different ways of approaching God and the spiritual life. And they are, yeah, I like the word patrimony because it signifies a whole like approach to life and a whole approach to the mysteries that have been revealed that are handed on to you from your fathers. We learn, I mean, the understanding

here is that we learn as persons how to live how to worship how to approach god how to do this thing called the catholic faith and the catholic life you learn how to do that from your fathers from a from from ways of approaching these things that come down to you from your fathers and it just comes as a surprise first of of all, to a lot of, you know, Catholics of the Latin, right, that there are other patrimonies besides the Latin West that comes down, you know, by way of Ambrose and Augustine and Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and all of those that come down to us through the West, that there's a whole other set of patrimonies in the East that come down from, for example, St. Marin in the Maronite Church or, um, since, uh, the Cappadocian fathers and the way that they influenced, you know, the,

the Greek and Melkite and, and even Russian to some extent, churches. And there's different patrimonies in each of those. And, yeah, the difference of patrimonies, we're talking many generations of handing on the faith and the practice of the faith. The difference of patrimonies is reflected in emphis in preaching and modes of spiritual direction. I mean, a good example, for example, is that the Eastern patrimonies have really kept alive and emphasized strongly the importance of fasting. The Western Church has almost entirely lost its sense of the importance of fasting.

almost entirely lost its sense of the importance of fasting. Right. In fact, it's lost it so much that even Pope Benedict XVI addressed in one of his letters for Lent, I believe it was in 2008 or 2009, around there, I can't remember which year exactly, when he basically says to the whole Church of the West, we need to recover the sense of fasting and the importance of fasting. And my Eastern Catholic friends really are critical of Latin Catholics. You guys never fast. Well, even Philip's fast, which is approaching, which is that time of preparation before Christmas. I mean, this is a lighter fast than the Great Fast that precedes

Easter, but it's, yeah, it's definitely a solid fast. So is the fast prior to, you know, the assumption of Our Lady, the translation of Our Lady, or however you want to put it. Yeah, and my Eastern Catholic friends tell me that when you go through Lent, you know, what they call the Great Lent, fasting continuously and hard for the whole period, it really changes the way you experience the Triduum, right? Oh, indeed. The three days. Indeed.

It is like a bloody party. Let me tell you, like divine liturgy the morning of Easter. I have to share this anecdote with you. We were in Dallas visiting my in-laws, and we went to celebrate the Divine Liturgy on Easter. And they had this beautiful tradition in this Byzantine church that every time we said, Christ has risen from the dead, he has trampled death by death, everyone in the congregation stomped their feet when we said trampled. trampled. I felt like if at some point, you know, father brought out a tray of shot glasses of vodka, I'd be like, oh yeah, this makes sense. This is a party, you know, and yeah, you can't party if you're always feasting. Feasting doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, that's right. Well, I know you said you had a series of these, these, these verses. I don't mean to kind of get us off track, but, but I think right away, just these three that you've shared perhaps have put some of our questions to rest, because I think some people,

when they first hear this, that men might become God, they think, well, it sounds heretical, and even if it's not heretical, it just seems unnecessary. Like, why bother saying it at all? But just like what you've said, we become adopted children of God. We become like God. All of this is taught within sacred scripture. That's right. And yeah, we can go a step further. There's another theme. We can call it the fullness, the fullness. So Ephesians chapter three, verses 17 to 19, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the power to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth,

and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. That's worth sitting with, to be filled with the fullness of God. I think now you are really starting to get into divinization, being filled with the fullness of God. You're a temple of the Holy Spirit. Right. How does Thomas talk about this? He has a series of technical distinctions that are important for our purposes and well he gets them

from the fathers of the church and other places that there's two different ways you can say that something is okay so if you say um a triangle is three-sided okay when you say that being three-sided isn't just a description of a triangle it's like reveals the very essence of the triangle right you're telling me what triangularity is yeah if you refer to a blue triangle then you're referring to an accidental aspect right yeah that's right so now um when we look at something like, you know, when you're playing pool, you've got the rack to rack up the balls there on a pool table. You've got the rack is triangular. a triangle? Is it really three-sided? I mean, each one of those three sides, it doesn't quite exactly have a perfect angle at the joint and it's not perfectly straight. So can you say it is a triangle? Well, is it three-sided? It sort of, in a way, it imitates it. It's kind of sharing in triangular. It's triangular. Triangular-ish. Yeah, that's right. It's kind of sharing in triangular. It's triangular.

Triangular-ish. Yeah, that's right. It's triangular-ish, but it's not a pure triangle. It's not the very essence of triangularity. It's not exemplified there, right? So if you say that the rack, this is three-sided, are you revealing the very essence of this thing? Not really. It's more of a description in some way of the thing. Okay?

It's likewise with when we say that human being is God. When you say that Jesus is God, he like is God in the sense that that's his very essence, right? That's his very being. One of his natures is the divine nature. Whereas with us, when we're filled with the fullness of God, of God. We have God in us, moving us, shaping us, forming us, but we're more like the pool rack. It's triangular, it falls short in some way. So, you could say we're divine, but we're not, or divinized would be the better way to put it. But that falling short doesn't have to do with a deficiency in our nature, right? Right. It has to do, well, to some extent, yes, and to some extent, no.

So there is the fall. And because of the fall, we're held back from being exactly what he is. But it's not only that. Because we won't be held back by the fall in the beatific vision. That's right. But we will still be finite and limited. Yeah. And that isn't a deficiency. That's just part of what it means to be me.

To be part of what it is to be a creature. That's right. So we will always be, we could say, limited, finite versions of God. Okay. But we won't be equal, as versions of God. Okay. But we won't be equal, as we said earlier. But still, to be a finite, limited version of divinity? That's pretty good. Yeah.

Right. And being American is probably great, too, but this sounds even better. Yeah, that's right. But to be filled with the fullness of God. That's how some people describe Mother Teresa. I never met her, but I know a number of people that did meet her. And they all describe the same thing, even though they met her at different times and places. Yeah. Even though they met her at different times and places, they all say when that woman walked in the room, the entire room was just filled with the presence of God.

You could just feel it. It's like she was a walking tabernacle. That's, I think, an experience that people have had that's a kind of glimpse of divinization. Yeah, that's powerful. That is what I've heard, too. So that's not, she was not just legally imputed to be a daughter of God or legally imputed to be just. She was transformed. Yeah.

And she was so transformed that she was filled with all the fullness of God. I'm thinking of this article, let's see here, in the Prima Pars, question 12, I'm looking at article 5. And in the Respondio, he begins, Aquinas begins, everything which is raised up to what exceeds its nature must be prepared by some disposition above its nature. This seems to be a place where he's talking about divinization, yes or no? Yeah, yeah, that's right. We're raised up, we become more than human. So, Mother Teresa is a human being, like any other, but she was raised up. God worked in her in such a way that she became something more than just human. She was sharing in God's own nature. She was filled with all the

fullness of God so that people recognize there's something different about her. There's something more to her than there is to just a human being as human. Now, I think in that passage in question 12, Aquinas is talking about the knowledge of God and he's talking about... Yeah, the article is whether the created intellect needs any created light in order to see the essence of God. Yeah. So he goes on in that article to talk about how we will receive the light

of glory so that we can see the very essence of God. Now he's talking about the next life, right, in heaven. And he says we will become deiform. The very form of God will form us. Yeah, deiform. Yeah. Filled with the fullness of God. Yeah. What does that mean? Now, if you ask me,

all I can say is, that's a mystery, right? We have to go to heaven to find out exactly what that consists of. Here's the sentence from him. He says, the glory of God hath enlightened it, the society of the blessed who see God. By this light, the blessed are made deiform, that is, like to God, according to the saying, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him, and we shall see him as he is. He's working there with a philosophical principle that he gets from Aristotle, that the knower becomes the known. And so, if you know God, you become God. Let me give you an example to illustrate the philosophical principle that the knower becomes the known. If you think of an experience you've had, Shirley, of like reading a

novel, have you ever spent time reading a novel or fiction where you just get so engrossed that you're like in it? All of my listeners know what I'm going to say. I just read The Brothers Karamazov and I don't want to read anyone else ever again yeah so i got totally engrossed in that yeah so you have that yeah if you have that experience when you're reading a novel like you you go into the story you become what you know there's a great poem by wallace stevens where he talks about how the reader becomes the book yeah you forget time. You forget that it's cold or that something was happening right beside you.

You're no longer in, like consciously or mentally, you're no longer in the world that you ordinarily live in. And mentally or consciously, you go into the world of the book. Yeah. And you live there. It's a beautiful experience, which is why it's so sad when I meet people who don't read fiction. Yeah. I mean, you can do the same thing with philosophy and theology.

I know Aquinas was often absorbed in thought. Right. Such that he forgot what was going on around him. Like that famous story of him having dinner at the emperor's, was it? Yeah. Where he slammed his fist on the table and ran and blurted out, that'll settle the manichees. Exactly. He was engrossed in the truth. He was considering it so intensely. Yeah, that's where he lived, in the truth. Now, take the experience then of reading a novel or reading some fiction and being engrossed in it like that, where the reader becomes the book.

And now instead of thinking of a novel, think of God himself, where you become so—you know God. You become so engrossed, so absorbed, so lost in God, that you become God. That's what Aquinas is saying. It happens in heaven, in the beatific vision. Now, I know that we could speak for hours on this. I'm sure you could teach a university course on this and still just be scratching the surface. It's not very fair to you or to our listeners to just do this, but this has been really powerful. And I wanted to close today's episode by asking how this changes my prayer life or how this ought to affect my spiritual life now, not somewhere in the future when I'm finally holy, although it'll affect it then as well,

but now. How should this change the way I think about God and prayer? It changes what you can ask for. You ask for a deeper realization within us of the light and the life of God Himself. You just ask to be brought into that union with him more and more. That's the first thing we can do is it changes what we pray for, for ourselves and for one another. But also, you can start to approach the sacraments differently. When you approach Holy Communion and you believe in the real presence, believe in the real presence. I mean, you're to become aware that you're so, you have the opportunity to become so close to God that you can take his very being into you and you can become united with him in your very being so that his life, your life become one.

Gosh. Gosh. Yeah, we're getting dangerously close to the theology of the body here, aren't we? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, and the body can be affected by this divinization. That's partly why we reserve relics. You know, it's the understanding that these aren't just nice psychological reminders, there's a sense that the very material of the saints has been sanctified and changed by belonging to these divinized people.

That's why relics have effects in exorcisms and things like that. They're not just psychological reminders there. They have a kind of power. What would you recommend that people read? So they're listening to this and they would like to learn more. Are there talks online that you'd recommend? Are there certain books you'd recommend people read? There's a book recently out from Ignatius Press on divinization by Father David McConey, and that's a great book to read. Okay. And any talks at the Thomistic Institute that you know of? Not that I know of, but that doesn't mean there aren't.

It only tells us there's such a vast number of talks at the Thomistic Institute now that I don't know if anyone can keep track of it. I also couldn't imagine many university students reaching out to you all saying, let's talk about deification. It's not necessarily something a lot of us think to ask questions about, unfortunately. I think we should have some things on this. There's a book by Father David Maconi called The One Christ, St. Augustine's Theology of Deification. That would be a great

book a person could read. Have you read The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus? I know of it, but I haven't. I think this would be something that Eastern Christians might point to when this topic comes up of deification too. So it's a beautiful book, very well written. There's another book by Father David McHoney. It's edited. It's actually a collection of essays. Okay. Also by Ignatius Prescott, called To Be the Children of God,

The Catholic Theology of Human Deification. Well, that sounds great. Yeah, sometimes those shorter essays can be a lot more manageable than trying to dig into something thick and academic-like. His first book would be a more intense read of St. Augustine in particular. This one would be more for a kind of the average reader. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

I've learned a lot today because I haven't given it a great deal of thought until this discussion. I'm hearing about it more and more in the Divine Liturgy and in the writings of the Eastern Fathers. Yeah. But I've been wanting to delve into it a little deeper. So thanks for helping me do that. Sure. There's a great surprise for a lot of people waiting in this doctrine of deification. Yeah, indeed.

Well, Father James Brent, thank you so much for being on Pints with Aquinas. My joy. Thank you, Matt. Okay, everybody, thank you so much for listening to this whole episode of Pints with Aquinas. As I said, deep theological waters, but important ones. So thank you so much for being a listener. I want to suggest a couple of ways that you can get involved and connected with the community of Pints with Aquinas. Of course, we have a private community on Patreon. So if you get a lot out of these episodes and you want to give back, even for as much as a dollar a month, that'll give you access to our exclusive Patreon-only community. We have a group on Facebook that a fan runs. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Perhaps you want to start a pints with aquinas chapter in

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