On Deification and Sacred Eloquence

Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich

Louise Nelstrop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000691085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

This book considers the place of deification in the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle, two of the fourteenth-century English Mystics. It argues that, as a consequence of a belief in deification, both produce writing that is helpfully viewed as sacred eloquence.

The book begins by discussing the nature of deification, employing Norman Russell's typology. It explores the realistic and ethical approaches found in the writings of several Early Greek Fathers, including Irenaeus of Lyons, Cyril of Alexandria, Origen, and Evagrius Ponticus, as well as engaging with the debate around whether deification is a theological idea found in the West across its history. The book then turns its attention to Julian and Rolle, arguing that both promote forms of deification: Rolle offering a primarily ethical approach, while Julian's approach is more realistic. Finally, the book addresses the issue of sacred eloquence, arguing that both Rolle and Julian, in some sense, view their words as divinely inspired in ways that demand an exegetical response that is para-biblical.

Offering an important perspective on a previously understudied area of mysticism and deification, this book will be of interest to scholars of mysticism, theology, and Middle English religious literature.

1
Defining deification: realistic models

Deification is an arresting term, capturing everything God has destined for us, everything Christ desires to achieve in us.¹

Introduction

The above quotation is taken from David Meconi’s short introduction to Orthodox thought in the Patristic East, Union with Christ: Living with God, which may seem an odd opening to a book on two fourteenth-century English mystics. However, I hope to show that discussion of deification in the Early Church is a fruitful place to begin an evaluation of Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich. Meconi’s quotation signals that deification is central to the theology of the Early Church, a position that theologians of all persuasions are increasingly embracing. I hope to illustrate that an understanding of Early Christian thinking on deification is helpful in elucidating the extent to which Rolle and Julian also advocate forms of deification. For this reason, this book begins with a study of Patristic ideas on deification in the Christian East and in the light of this considers the extent to which similar ideas are now being mooted across the theological history of the Christian West. This focus on the Christian East is to some extent necessitated by the paucity of research into deification in the Christian West and scholarly disagreement as to whether deification formed a central concern within the West prior to its evident existence in late medieval mystical texts from the Rhineland and the Low Countries. However, even admitting a greater understanding of the West’s theological relationship to deification, I believe that an understanding of how ideas of deification developed within the Early Church provides a useful sounding board against which to measure the writings of Julian and Rolle. In approaching the study of these two mystics from this angle, it is important to stress that I am not suggesting that either was directly influenced by Greek Patristic thought.

What I hope to achieve in the opening two chapters of this book is to detail ideas of deification found in some of the writings of Greek Early Church Fathers, exploring whether such thinking was also in evidence in the Latin West. The chapter makes use of Norman Russell’s typology, in which, as I discussed in the introduction, he divides Greek Patristic accounts into two types – the realistic and the ethical – which I believe Julian and Rolle respectively mirror. I also aim to elucidate the important relationship between deification and Christology in Early Church thinking, which also appears to be an important concern for both Rolle and Julian. There has been far more scholarly interest in authors who advocate the realistic model, perhaps because many of those within the ethical strand have, for reasons other than their thinking on deification, been viewed as potentially heretical. We will therefore begin with realistic models, focusing in this chapter on accounts which revolve around ideas of adoption, sharing in the Trinitarian relationship, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and some form of ontological transformation. To repeat Russell’s statement quoted earlier: ‘The realistic approach assumes that human beings are in some sense transformed by deification. Behind the latter use lies the model of methexis, or participation, in God’.²

The realistic is an approach to deification that Russell finds particularly within late Alexandrian theology. It is an approach that is tied into the chris-tological discussions through which the Church established its thinking over the nature of the Incarnation. As Russell states, ‘The realistic or sacramental approach, which envisaged an ontological transformation of the believer by the Incarnate Christ, was to be developed during the christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries by Athanasius and Cyril’.³ Yet although its fullest form before the seventh century is found in the thought of Cyril of Alexandria, Russell argues that its roots lie in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons.⁴ These two rather different realistic accounts nicely illustrate many of the key contours within Russell’s realistic trajectory. It is important to stress, however, that for neither Father was deification a theme discussed in its own right. Irenaeus does not even mention it by name and neither author treats the topic systematically. In what follows I will outline Russell’s approach to these two Fathers as well as more recent thinking on the meaning of deification in their thought since despite Russell’s being a relatively recent monograph, a number of the studies on which Russell draws have already been challenged and superseded.⁵

1. Irenaeus of Lyons

Although themes relating to deification appear in the late first to early second-century Apologists,⁶ it is widely accepted that the idea of deification was first properly introduced into Patristic Theology in the late second century by Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus developed an extremely complex soteriological schema over which there is some scholarly disagreement,⁷ the same holds true of his account of deification.⁸ As Gross and Russell note, the material that relates to deification in Irenaeus’ writing was, for the most part, written in opposition to Gnostics who denigrated the body. In mooting a route to deification Irenaeus intentionally emphasised the body’s worth, which he held to be made in God’s image.⁹ In this relation Gross attributes to him a ‘physical’ idea of deification, meaning that it includes the body.¹⁰ Fairbairn comments that ‘this [latter] emphasis is so strong in Irenaeus that Harnack and others have argued that he understood salvation to be little more than the attaining of immortality for the human body’.¹¹ This is, however, too narrow a understanding of Irenaeus’ soteriology, and so thinking on deification, in which he also stresses the restoration of the human spirit through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.¹² Irenaeus links the latter to the restoration of the divine likeness that humanity lost at the Fall. Although it is not entirely clear whether the likeness restored through the Incarnation and the indwelling of the Spirit is the same as that which was lost or something greater, what seems more certain is that for Irenaeus likeness to God was always a state into which humanity was intended to grow.¹³

The need to restore this possibility led Irenaeus to argue that restoration was therefore contingent on Christ having lived through all life’s stages from childhood to adulthood, thus redeeming each one. As Irenaeus states,

For, in what way could we be partaken of the adoption of sons, unless we had received from Him through the Son that fellowship which refers to Himself, unless His Word, having been made flesh, had entered into communion with us? Wherefore also He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God.¹⁴

Irenaeus maintained that it was only because he was fully human that Christ was able to restore this possibility of sharing in God’s likeness.¹⁵ Yet restoration was also dependent on Christ being fully God, since only as such was he able to offer humanity a share in his incorruption. As Russell clarifies,

Against the docetism of the Gnostics, Irenaeus taught that the Incarnation was a true union of God with man, of created with uncreated. Without this ontological basis the soteriological purpose of the Incarnation could not have been made effective. The Incarnation took place in order to recover what was lost in Adam and to complete humanity’s growth to full maturity.¹⁶

Full maturity for Irenaeus meant deification – a state always intended but which the Fall had disrupted. It was a spiritual pathway which the Incarnation had restored albeit, according to Mark Edwards, via a different route.¹⁷ As Edwards puts it, ‘there was therefore a Plan A which was not identical with the one that is now unfolding’.¹⁸ Not that deification was fully attained in this life exactly – for Irenaeus deification was a journey towards God that the Christian begins at the moment of baptism, but it remains nonetheless a future hope – the fullness of which the Christian looks forward to.¹⁹ As Edwards clarifies,

Irenaeus could not say of us that whatever is to be done is done already, but he could say this of Christ, whose eternal ministry has no end any more than it has a beginning, while his ministry on earth is already complete…. At some point in history, God in his plenitude became man, in order that at some unrevealed date in the future man in his fullness may become god.²⁰

This latter point is also one that we find stressed by later Church Fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa.²¹

For Russell, the realistic nature of Irenaeus’ account of deification is most clearly evidenced in what has become known as the ‘formula of exchange’ (tantum quantum or admirabile commercium), an idea that Irenaeus developed in relation to several scriptural passages, including 2 Corinthians 8.9 and Philippians 2.6–8.²² Irenaeus claims that God became man in order that humans might take on the qualities of Jesus via adoption. This idea appears several times in Irenaeus’ anti-Gnostic writing, Against Heresies (Adversus haereses). For example, in Book Five he states: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through his transcendent love become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself’.²³ Or as he states in Book Three:

For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.²⁴

In the latter passage, we clearly see Irenaeus linking the idea of exchange to that of adoption. As Russell clarifies quoting Irenaeus, what this entailed was that ‘through the divine sonship a human being is “mingled with the logos” and becomes a dwelling-place of God (AH 3.19.1; 3.20.2)’.²⁵ Likewise, Fairbairn stresses that for Irenaeus what amounts to deification depends on entering into a relationship with God from which incorruption results. As Fairbairn writes of Irenaeus: ‘to be united to Christ is to share in his eternal life, his incorruption’.²⁶

In contrast to von Harnack who held deification an incursion of Greek philosophy into early Christian thought, Russell stresses that the principle underlying Irenaeus’ exchange formula is biblical.²⁷ As in the early second-century writings of Justin Martyr, Psalm 82.6 acts as a stimulus for Irenaeus.²⁸ In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus cites the verse three times, on each occasion interpreting it in like manner.²⁹ His first usage appears in Against Heresies 3.6.1, and Carl Mosser argues that it seems clear that his opponents had quoted various scriptural verses as evidence that there was a multiplicity of gods – thereby bringing Jesus’ full divinity into question.³⁰ Irenaeus appears to use this verse to counter such a position, stressing that when the Psalmist speaks of ‘gods’, in both verses 6 and 1,³¹ he does so to indicate that Christians have been adopted as sons and are therefore gods, but only by adoption through grace. They are not gods by nature as Christ is. As Irenaeus states:

He [the Psalmist] refers [in verse 1] to the Father and the Son, and those who have received the adoption; but these are the Church. For she is the synagogue of God, which God – that is, the Son himself – has gathered by himself…. But of what gods [does he speak in [verse 6]]?… To those, no doubt, who...