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. One word, two disciplines; and behind both lies a single assumption — that the boundary between the human and the divine is a frontier rather than a wall, and that under the right conditions it can be crossed.

The civic and mythological sense

The older sense is civic and mythological. Greek tradition told of heroes taken up among the gods, men who had begun mortal and ended otherwise. Heracles, having endured his labors and his last agony, was burned free of his mortal part on the pyre of Mount Oeta — the maternal flesh of Alcmene consumed, the paternal portion of Zeus carried up to Olympus, where he is received and married to Hebe, youth itself. Asclepius, the physician who learned to raise the dead, was struck down by the thunderbolt of Jupiter for trespassing on the gods’ prerogative over life and death, and then enrolled in heaven as the god of healing whose temples cured the sick by dream. These were not metaphors for the Greeks who told them. They marked out a class of being — the hero, the dead made luminous — that stood between mortals and the immortals, and they kept the crossing close at hand: a man known by name, a tomb, a cult, and then a god. Others were taken up living rather than through death — Ganymede snatched into heaven for his beauty, Dionysus’s mother Semele raised from the dead and renamed Thyone among the immortals — so that even within the one mythology the crossing came by several roads. The architecture of the mystery religions turned on the same hope, offering the initiate a changed relation to death and, in some, a promised share in the company of the blessed. Rome had its own founding instance close to hand: Romulus, the city’s first king, was said to have vanished in a storm and been seen afterward as the god Quirinus — the legend of a man become divine written into the origin of the state itself, ready to be reactivated when Rome began to make gods of its rulers in earnest.

Rome made the same gesture an instrument of the state, and gave it a procedure. The Romans drew a sharp lexical line their Greek neighbors did not: a deus was a god by nature, eternal and uncreated; a divus was a man made god, raised by public act after death. The first Roman to cross it was Julius Caesar. At the funeral games his heir Octavian staged in July of 44 BCE, a bright comet burned for seven days, and it was read as the dead dictator’s soul ascending — the sidus Iulium, Caesar’s star, struck onto coins and set above the head of his image. On the first of January 42 BCE the Senate formally enrolled him among the gods of the Roman state as Divus Iulius, the first such decree for a Roman. Octavian, now the son of a god, took to styling himself divi filius.

With Augustus the procedure became regular. A dead emperor judged worthy was declared divus by senatorial decree, the consecratio; he was given a temple, a flamen — a dedicated priest, as Caesar had his flamen Divi Iulii — and a place in the calendar of the state. The funeral enacted the ascent in plain sight. A wax effigy of the dead man lay in state and was mourned; the pyre was raised in tiers; and at its kindling an eagle, the bird of Jupiter, was released from the summit to carry the emperor’s spirit upward to the gods. A man of senatorial rank would afterward come forward and swear, on his oath, that he had seen the ascending soul rise from the flames — a sworn human witness was built into the very machinery of the apotheosis, the testimony itself a part of the procedure. This is consecration as an act of law and politics, not a private mysticism. It conferred a status, secured the legitimacy of the heir who proposed it, and bound the living dynasty to a divine ancestor. The careful distinction between deus and divus did much of the work: the emperor did not become a god of the same order as Jupiter, the eternal and uncreated, but joined a lower and recognizably Roman class of the made-divine, so that the honor stayed inside the categories of Roman religion rather than overturning them. It could also be withheld, or reversed: a hated emperor might be denied the rite, or suffer the condemnation of his memory, the deification running in both directions as a verdict on a reign.

The Romans themselves were not naive about it. The line ran between the political fact of the cult and any settled conviction about a soul among the stars, and the gap was visible enough to be joked about at the highest level. Suetonius records that the emperor Vespasian, dying of a fever in June of 79 CE and feeling himself about to be enrolled among the divi like his predecessors, remarked that he thought he was becoming a god. It is preserved precisely as a joke — the wry note of a practical man who knew exactly what the Senate would do with his corpse, and found the prospect comic. The cult was real, the temples were built, the sacrifices were offered; whether the man had gone anywhere was a separate question, and one a Roman could hold lightly without ceasing to keep the rite.

The interior sense

A second sense runs alongside, and means something more interior — not a status conferred on the dead from outside, but a change worked in the living soul. Its charter text is a single sentence of Plato. In a digression of the Theaetetus he sets the philosopher’s task as a flight from this world to the divine, and names its goal homoiōsis theōi kata to dynaton — becoming like god so far as is possible. The qualification matters: not to be a god, but to grow like one, in justice and wisdom and purity, as far as a mortal nature allows. The whole later history of Platonism can be read as a long commentary on that clause.

The later Platonists made the soul’s ascent toward its source the whole point of the discipline. For Plotinus the ladder of the virtues is precisely the means of that likeness — the political virtues set the soul in order, the higher, purificatory virtues detach it from the body, and at the summit it returns to its origin in the One, the source beyond being from which all things flow and to which the soul seeks to climb back. His treatise On Virtue opens by asking what it can mean to attain, as Plato says, likeness to God, and works out an answer in which the soul, purified, does not imitate a model so much as become what it contemplates. Where Plotinus trusted contemplation to make the climb alone, his successors — Iamblichus and after him Proclus — held that the soul, sunk in matter, needed the gods to reach down to it, and made theurgy, the divine work of rites that draw the gods into action, the indispensable instrument of the ascent. The interior psyche, in either account, is not merely improved but divinized, restored to a kinship it had forgotten.

The Hermetic writings speak of the same crossing as a rebirth. In the treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum known as the Secret Sermon on the Mountain, Hermes Trismegistus instructs his son Tat in a palingenesia, a being-born-again, in which the twelve torments of matter are driven out by the ten powers of God and the initiate is remade in mind. The text is unambiguous about the result. In Mead’s rendering, when the work is complete the teacher tells his son that “by this Birth we are made into Gods,” and can ask the pupil whether he does not know that he has himself been born a god, a son of the One. This is gnosis as transformation — a knowing that changes the knower’s nature, expressed through the divine Logos, the reason and word by which the cosmos is ordered and the mind ascends. The architecture is initiatory and inward; what it claims is nothing less than deification, granted from above and received in silence.

Early Christian theology took up the same vocabulary and turned it to its own ends. The Greek Fathers spoke of theōsis, deification — the verb theopoieō, to make divine, running through their language for what salvation finally is. The formula is put most compactly by Athanasius of Alexandria, who wrote in his treatise On the Incarnation that God became man so that man might become god. He was not inventing the thought: Irenaeus had said the like in the second century, Clement of Alexandria spoke of the Christian growing godlike, and after Athanasius the idea was sharpened by Gregory of Nazianzus and brought to its fullest development by Maximus the Confessor. The terminology of theōsis itself was fixed in Christian use by the writer who passed under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, who set the soul’s deifying ascent within an apophatic frame — the God toward whom it rises is beyond every name and concept, so that to be made divine is to be drawn into a light that is also, from below, a darkness of unknowing. What held all of them within a recognizably Christian frame was a single distinction, later sharpened by Gregory Palamas into the language of essence and energies: the believer is lifted into a real participation in the divine life — by grace, not by nature, sharing in God’s energies and not in his unapproachable essence — and so becomes god without the creature ever ceasing to be a creature. The line between Creator and creation is not erased; it is crossed by gift, and the one who crosses it remains on his own side of it even as he shares the other. Here the contrast with the Hermetic and Platonic ascent is exact and deliberate: where those traditions could speak of the soul recovering a divinity native to it, an original kinship with its source, the Christian doctrine insists that the divinity is wholly received and never owed — a participation, not a homecoming. Eastern Orthodoxy holds this not as a marginal mysticism but as the very content of salvation, central doctrine still.

Scholarship and sources

The two senses have generated two largely separate bodies of scholarship, and the modern study of each is recent. For the Roman civic cult, the decisive turn came with Simon Price, whose Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1984) treated the cult not as cynical flattery but as a coherent religious response to power, read through inscriptions, coins, and the categories of anthropology; Ittai Gradel’s Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford, 2002) extended the case to Rome and Italy and pressed the all-important divus/deus distinction. The deathbed quip belongs to Suetonius, Divus Vespasianus 23, whose Lives of the Caesars survives in the public domain in many translations.

For the interior sense, the patristic doctrine had no full-length modern study for more than sixty years until Norman Russell’s The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004) traced the theme from a second-century metaphor to a mature Byzantine doctrine, from Irenaeus to Maximus. The continuity between the Greco-Roman idiom of divinization and the Christian one is the subject of M. David Litwa’s Iesus Deus (Fortress, 2014). The Platonic root — the goal of likeness to God in the Theaetetus and its long reception — is set out in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s treatment of Plotinus’s virtue ethics, where the ascent of the soul through the grades of virtue is laid bare. The primary texts of the interior sense can be read directly: Plotinus’s Enneads in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, including the tractate On Virtue that opens from the Theaetetus formula; the Hermetic Secret Sermon on the Mountain in G. R. S. Mead’s version; and the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, where the language of theōsis takes its settled Christian form.

The two senses held apart

The two are easy to confuse and worth keeping apart. The first is a public honor granted to the dead by other people, a verdict of the living on a life already ended; the second is an inward change claimed for the living, granted from above and received in the self. The first leaves a man where he is and changes only his title and his cult; the second changes the man and may leave his title untouched. The resemblance between them 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) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): First Ennead, Second Tractate (On Virtue) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker)

→ Related: Psyche · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · The One · Gnosis · Jupiter · Asclepius · Plato · Platonism · Theurgy · Mystery Religions · Corpus Hermeticum · Soul · Logos · Consecration