That Union With God Is by the Grace of the Spirit

¹ Whoever declares that the perfect union with God is accomplished by imitation and relation alone, apart from the deifying grace of the Spirit—as it is among those of like character and who are loved by one another—and that the deifying grace of God is a habit of rational nature acquired through imitation alone, and not a supernatural and ineffable illumination and a divine energy, seen invisibly by those counted worthy and conceived inconceivably: let him know that he has fallen, without knowing it, into the deception of the Messalians. For by every necessity the one being deified will be God by nature, if deification comes to be by a natural power and is comprehended within the bounds of nature. Let such a one, then, not attempt to fasten his own perversion upon those who stand securely, nor to bring a blemish upon those whose faith is unblemished; but laying aside his opinion, let him learn from those who have had the experience, or from those taught by them, that the grace of the Godhead is altogether unrelated to nature, having within nature no receptive faculty of itself whatsoever; for otherwise it would no longer be grace, but the manifestation of an energy that operates according to natural power. And what comes to pass would be no marvel, if deification were according to a receptive faculty for deification; for then deification would reasonably be a work of nature, and not a gift of God, and such a one would be able to be God even by nature, and to be properly so called. For the power that belongs to each of the things that exist according to nature is nothing other than the unswerving movement of a nature toward its energy. And how does deification carry the one deified out of himself, if it is still comprehended within the bounds of nature? I cannot see. The grace of deification, therefore, is above nature, and virtue, and knowledge, and—as Saint Maximus says—all such things fall infinitely short of it. For all virtue, and our imitation of God so far as it lies in us, makes the one who possesses it fit for the divine union, but it is grace itself that brings to completion the ineffable union; for through it God wholly interpenetrates the worthy in their wholeness, and the saints in their wholeness wholly interpenetrate God in His wholeness, receiving God whole in exchange for themselves, having gained God alone as the reward that has counted the soul worthy in relation to the body.