ABSTRACT

We are apt to associate deication, or divinisation, with the Alexandrian tradition. In its modern use this adjective is not so much geographical as heuristic – that is, the dogmas and methods of theological reasoning to which we apply it are thought to be characteristic of, but not conned to, the see of Alexandria in the early Christian centuries. It was common for scholarship in the twentieth century to assume that the early Christian world was evenly divided, both in its Christological teaching and in its principles of biblical exegesis, between the schools of Alexandria and Antioch. It was said, on little evidence, that the former was more Platonic and the latter more Aristotelian; and wherever the common sense of Aristotle was preferred to the Olympian conceits of his master, scholars were only too glad to return the Alexandrian heritage to the Copts. A new trend of thought in the Anglophone world, however, suggests that, while the Antiochene school is as parochial as its name implies, its Alexandrian rival is in fact nothing other than the ecumenical consensus in the age of the rst four Councils.1 Certainly it became so, thanks to those councils, and one aim of the present chapter will be to show that it always had some claim to be so, since the Christology of Cyril and Athanasius was also that of Gregory Nazianzen. My chief concern, however, is to rescue the Christology of the two patriarchs from the charges of incoherence that have been laid against it (sometimes on the evidence of their own friends), and to trace a logical path from their Christology to their doctrine of deication.