ABSTRACT
As this paper will end with a twentieth-century neologism, we may begin by noting that the noun theôsis appears to have been the creation of Gregory Nazianzen in the fourth century.1 Behind Gregory, however, stands the celebrated dictum of Athanasius: “he became man, that man might become God” (On the Incarnation 54.3). Behind the patriarch stands the earlier Alexandrian notion of theopoiêsis underwritten by Christ’s quotation of Psalm 82.6: “I have said ye are gods, and children of the most high” (John 10.34). For Origen,2 as for Clement,3 the consummation of the divine plan in humanity is the completion of the image of God by his likeness, which was promised to humanity on the eve of its creation but not yet conferred on Adam when he was fashioned from the soil. Neither this distinction nor a concept of theôsis can be ascribed without reservation to Irenaeus;4 nevertheless, it was evidently as true for him as for every Catholic theologian after him that the narrative which begins with the creation of humanity in the image of God is brought to its climax when the supernal image of God assumes humanity. As we shall see, he differs from other thinkers in this tradition in maintaining that the esh of the Word incarnate is not only the means of communicating his image to humanity but a constitutive part of that image and indeed the precondition of its incipient presence in us. Christ is the perfect man because every human being is an imperfect Christ.
