This notion grew within the Church as chiliastic and apocalyptic Christianity faded away.  A favourite phrase was that the Incarnation, etc., “abolished death,” and brought mankind into a state of “incorruption” ([Greek:  aphtharsia]) This transformation of human nature, which is also spoken of as [Greek:  theopoiesis] is the highest work of the Logos.  Athanasius makes it clear that what he contemplates is no pantheistic merging of the personality in the Deity, but rather a renovation after the original type.

But the process of deification may be conceived of in two ways:  (a) as essentialisation, (b) as substitution.  The former may perhaps be called the more philosophical conception, the latter the more religious.  The former lays stress on the high calling of man, and his potential greatness as the image of God; the latter, on his present misery and alienation, and his need of redemption.  The former was the teaching of the Neoplatonic philosophy, in which the human mind was the throne of the Godhead; the latter was the doctrine of the Mysteries, in which salvation was conceived of realistically as something imparted or infused.

The notion that salvation or deification consists in realising our true nature, was supported by the favourite doctrine that like only can know like.  “If the soul were not essentially Godlike ([Greek:  theoeides]), it could never know God.”  This doctrine might seem to lead to the heretical conclusion that man is [Greek:  omoousios to Patri] in the same sense as Christ.  This conclusion, however, was strongly repudiated both by Clement and Origen.  The former (Strom. xvi. 74) says that men are not [Greek:  meros theou kai to theo omoousioi]; and Origen (in Joh. xiii. 25) says it is very impious to assert that we are [Greek:  omoousioi] with “the unbegotten nature.”  But for those who thought of Christ mainly as the Divine Logos or universal Reason, the line was not very easy to draw.  Methodius says that every believer must, through participation in Christ, be born as a Christ,—­a view which, if pressed logically (as it ought not to be), implies either that our nature is at bottom identical with that of Christ, or that the life of Christ is substituted for our own.  The difficulty as to whether the human soul is, strictly speaking, “divinae particula aurae,” is met by Proclus in the ingenious and interesting passage quoted p. 34; “There are,” he says, “three sorts of wholes, (1) in which the whole is anterior to the parts, (2) in which the whole is composed of the parts, (3) which knits into one stuff the parts and the whole ([Greek:  he tois holois ta mere sunyphainousa]).”  This is also the doctrine of Plotinus, and of Augustine.  God is not split up among His creatures, nor are they essential to Him in the same way as He is to them.  Erigena’s doctrine of deification is expressed (not very clearly) in the following sentence (De Div.  Nat. iii. 9):  “Est igitur