ABSTRACT
According to St Maximus the Confessor’s doctrine of deication, the salvation of humans culminates in a transformation of their being into a divine mode of existence. This divine mode is not just metaphorically understood, but is held to be a real ontological change from one condition to another in such a way that a human being is ‘wholly imprinting and forming God alone in himself, so that by grace he himself is God and is called God’.1 And if this is considered a real ontological change, one might hope to detect the conceptual tools Maximus uses to describe it. That is the subject of the present chapter. However, it might also be the case that an ontological description has shortcomings and is not able to penetrate the condition of deication as such. We might in short run up against a mystery that is better described metaphorically. At the end of the chapter we shall see how one metaphor used by Maximus in a certain context somehow exceeds our conceptual limits. Maybe metaphor reveals the numinous character of being made divine better than conceptual analysis does.2
