Apotheosis

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Apotheosis is the raising of a human being to the rank of a god. The Greek word means, almost literally, a making-divine, and it has covered two very different things: the public act by which a state declared a dead ruler a deity, and the inward transformation by which a soul was said to become divine while still alive — or, more often, in the act of leaving the body behind.

The older sense is civic and mythological. Greek tradition told of heroes taken up among the gods — Heracles burned free of his mortal part, Asclepius struck down and then enrolled in heaven — and Rome made the same gesture an instrument of the state. After Julius Caesar’s death a comet was read as his soul ascending, and the Senate formally enrolled him among the gods; with Augustus the procedure became regular. A dead emperor judged worthy was declared divus by senatorial decree, given temples and a priesthood, and at the funeral an eagle was released from the pyre to carry the spirit upward. This was apotheosis as an act of law and politics, not a private mysticism: it conferred a status, marked the continuity of the dynasty, and drew, even at the time, open scepticism — the deathbed quip ascribed to the emperor Vespasian, that he felt himself becoming a god, is recorded precisely as a joke.

A second sense runs alongside, and means something more interior. In the Platonic tradition the philosopher’s task was framed as becoming like god so far as is possible, and the later Platonists made the soul’s ascent toward its source the whole point of the discipline. The Hermetic writings speak of a rebirth in which the initiate is remade and comes to share in the divine nature. Early Christian theology took up the same vocabulary and turned it to its own ends: the Greek Fathers spoke of theōsis, deification, the teaching — most compactly put in Athanasius’s formula that God became human so that the human might become god — that grace lifts the believer into a real participation in the divine life, without the creature ceasing to be a creature. Eastern Orthodoxy holds this as central doctrine still.

The two senses are easy to confuse and worth keeping apart. The first is a public honour granted to the dead by other people; the second is an inward change claimed for the living, granted from above. The resemblance is partly an accident of a single elastic word, and partly real: both rest on the conviction that the line between human and divine is not fixed, and can, under the right conditions, be crossed. What the traditions dispute is who may cross it, how, and whether the crossing is conferred by a council, achieved by ascent, or given by grace.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — XIII. (XIV.) The Secret Sermon on the Mountain · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna)

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