Disputatio VII: De Participatione et Ontologia Theoseos

On Participation and the Ontology of Theosis

Quaeritur

Utrum participatio sit ille nexus ontologicus inter creaturam et Deum, per quem homo fit particeps naturae divinae non per essentiae confusionem sed per gratiam communicationis; et quomodo ontologia theoseos describat modum huius participationis, qua Spiritus Sanctus causat realem communionem inter divinum et humanum.

Whether participation is that ontological bond between creature and Creator through which the human being becomes a partaker of the divine nature—not by confusion of essence but by the grace of communication—and how the ontology of theosis describes the mode of this participation, whereby the Holy Spirit causes a real communion between the divine and the human.

Thesis

Theosis is a real participation in divine life, constituted by the Holy Spirit. This participation is not metaphoric elevation nor essential fusion, but the Spirit’s causal communication of divine perfections in a creaturely mode. Thus participatio is the ontological relation in which the creature truly shares in God while remaining finite.

Locus Classicus

1. 2 Peter 1:4
κοινωνοὶ θείας φύσεως
“Partakers of the divine nature.”

Scripture itself dares the language of theosis. Participation is not mystical embellishment but the revealed grammar of salvation: divine life given, not divine essence seized.

2. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.3
Αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν.
“He became man that we might be made god.”

Participation has its ground in the Incarnation. The divine descends so that the creature may ascend—not by nature, but by grace.

3. Maximus Confessor, Ambigua 7
Ἡ θεοποίησις ἐστὶν ἡ τῆς μετουσίας πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν ἐνέργεια.
“Deification is the energy of communion with God.”

Participation occurs through divine energeia—a real operation binding God and creature without erasing distinction.

4. Augustine, De Trinitate XV.26
Deus fit omnia in omnibus, non natura sed gratia.
“God becomes all in all, not by nature, but by grace.”

What God is by essence, the creature becomes by participation; the distinction remains, yet communion is real.

Across these witnesses—from Peter to Athanasius to Maximus to Augustine—the same truth resounds: participation is the mode of salvation; the Spirit is its cause.

Explicatio

In Disputatio VI we saw that divine causality extends not only to creaturely being but also to creaturely speech. Here we advance a step further: the Spirit who causes words to be true also causes persons to be new.

This requires precision. The tradition speaks of participation in various ways—formal, exemplar, efficient, energetic, existential—but none of these, by itself, fits what is required.  What is needed is a participatio constitutiva. 

Let us formalize the structure. 

1. Two-Sorted Ontological Relation 

Assume a two-sorted ontological relation and let D_G denote a divine property (e.g., righteousness, life, wisdom), while D denotea the creature’s participated analogue. Then the relation: D_G → D expresses the Spirit’s causal act of communication. The arrow is not metaphor, imitation, or moral effort, but signifies an ontological procession: 1) divine life communicated, 2) not as essence, 3) but as gift. Thus, righteousness in God D_G becomes created righteousness D in the believer—finite, receptive, dependent, yet real.

2. Asymmetry Without Separation

Participation is one-directional for God communicates and the creature receives. God does not participate in the creature; the creature participates in God.

3. Pneumatic Mediation

Participation is not an abstract relation but a Spirit-caused communion. He is 1) the mediator, 2) the causal bridge, and 3) the giver of both being and union.

4. Transformation Without Confusion

The creature remains creaturely—finite essence, finite mode—yet becomes radiant with divine life. What is changed is not essence but participation.

5. Ontological Depth of Theosis

Theosis thus does not mean 1) moral imitation, or 2) conceptual analogy, or 3) symbolic representation. Instead it is the constitutive reception of divine life. Accordingly, the Spirit constitutes new being in the creature as the very form of salvation.

Explicatio Analytica: De Participatione Constitutiva

In analytic metaphysics, participation raises two problems:

1. How can the finite share in the infinite without contradiction?

2. How can divine properties be communicated without multiplying them?

The notion of a participatio constitutiva addresses both.

1. A Hyperintensional Distinction

Following Fine and Zalta, divine properties may be identical extensionally yet still distinct hyperintensionally. Thus: D_G (uncreated justice) and D (created justice) are not two justice-properties but two modes of the same attribute grounded in differing causal ontologies.

2. Constitutive Causality

Participation is explained not by efficient causation but by constitutive causality, the Spirit’s ongoing act that 1) grounds the creature’s being, 2) grounds its new disposition, and 3) grounds its ability to bear divine predicates.

Thus, participatory ontology fits cleanly within contemporary theories of: grounding (Fine, Schaffer), dependency (Rosen), hyperintensionality (Cresswell, Jago), and metaphysical explanation (Audi, Bennett). Participation becomes a constitutive grounding, not a property-transfer.

3. Avoiding Identity-Theory Pitfalls

Because divine and created modes are hyperintensionally distinct, participation avoids essential identity (pantheism), property multiplication (anti-simplicity), and nominalist reduction (anti-realism). Participation is the Spirit’s causal grounding of creaturely life in divine life, not an ontological blending. This analytic clarification is essential for making theosis intelligible in the contemporary intellectual horizon.

Objectiones

Ob I. Participation implies sharing in divine essence, violating the Creator–creature distinction.

Ob II. If divine attributes are communicated, they appear multiplied, threatening divine simplicity.

Ob III. Theosis replaces justification by faith with metaphysical transformation.

Ob IV. Participation language risks collapsing into Eastern Palamism, contrary to Lutheran theology.

Responsiones

Ad I. Participation concerns gifts, not essence. The creature receives divine life as communicated perfection, not as a shared essence. The distinction of essences remains absolute.

Ad II. Attributes are not multiplied; they are refracted. The same divine righteousness that exists uncreated in God exists createdly in the believer. There are two modes but one source.

Ad III. Faith is the mode of participation, not its competitor. Faith unites the believer to Christ; that union is precisely the participation by which righteousness is received.

Ad IV. Lutheran theosis follows from Christology, not from an essence–energies distinction. Participation is grounded in union with Christ and mediated by the Spirit, not in any metaphysical strata. It is fundamentally sacramental and pneumatic, not neo-Palamite.

Nota

The ontology of theosis completes the logic of divine communication, for in Disputatio IV, truth was duplex: inner and outer.  In Disputatio V, felicity and truth formed a circle and in Disputatio VI, divine causality grounded both speech and being. Here, in Disputatio VII, we see that being itself is communicative.

Thus salvation is not an external favor but a constitutive transformation grounded in divine causality: 1) The Word speaks, 2) the Spirit causes, 3) the creature receives, and 4) the result is participation.

Participation thus expresses the deepest grammar of theological realism: God gives Himself without ceasing to be Himself; the creature receives God without ceasing to be creature.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Theosis is the real participation of the creature in divine life.

2. Participation is constitutive, not merely moral or analogical.

3. The Holy Spirit is the causal mediator of this participation.

4. Divine attributes exist in two modes: uncreated D_G and participated D.

5. Participation preserves both divine transcendence and creaturely integrity.

6. The ontology of theosis is the completion of divine communication—speech becoming being, word becoming life.

Excursus: De Historia et Notionibus Participationis

On the History and Concepts of Participation

Participation (participatio) is one of the most enduring and yet least clarified notions in the philosophical and theological tradition. It is invoked whenever thinkers attempt to describe the relation between the finite and the infinite, the contingent and the necessary, the creature and the Creator. The term appears indispensable, yet its meaning has remained elusive. What exactly is the relation “by virtue of which” (δι’ ὃ) the creature shares in the divine? What sort of relation allows the creature truly to receive what properly belongs to God without collapsing the Creator–creature distinction?

The present disputationes have reached a point at which this question can no longer remain implicit. In Disputatio VI, we argued that the Holy Spirit is the causa principalissima not only of being but of speaking. In Disputatio VII, we advanced the thesis that the creature’s new being is constituted by a real participation in divine life. To proceed further—toward eschatological manifestation—we must clarify the very notion of participation on which these arguments depend. This Excursus offers a conceptual and historical map in order to situate the doctrine of participatio constitutiva, the pneumatological ontology that grounds the entire second movement of the Disputationes Theologicae.

I. Plato: Participation as the First Problem

Plato introduced methexis, participation, to explain how sensibles relate to the Forms. A beautiful thing is beautiful “by participating” in Beauty itself. Yet Plato never defines the relation. The “Third Man Argument” exposes the ambiguity: if the Form and the particular resemble one another by sharing a common property, then a further Form seems required ad infinitum. Participation was therefore necessary for Plato’s metaphysics but conceptually unstable, signaling the need for a deeper account of the “in virtue of which” by which the finite shares in the transcendent.

II. Aristotle: The Immanent Transmutation of Participation

Aristotle rejects Platonic participation in favor of immanent form. The relation between particular and universal becomes intrinsic: form inheres in matter rather than standing above it. Yet participation reappears indirectly in the act–potency schema. Potency receives act; act actualizes potency. Though Aristotle would not call this “participation,” the metaphysical structure is analogous: finite beings exist by receiving actuality from another. The immanentization clarifies metaphysics but does not yet explain how creatures might share divine life.

III. The Neoplatonists: Participation as Emanation

Neoplatonism reasserts participation through the doctrines of procession (proodos) and return (epistrophē). All beings emanate from the One and return toward it through a hierarchy of being. Participation becomes a metaphysics of ontological dependence. Yet the relation remains essentially metaphysical, not personal; it lacks a clear account of how the creature is actively constituted in communion with the divine. Moreover, participation is tied to ontological gradation rather than covenantal gift.

IV. The Patristic Reconfiguration: Participation and Grace

Christian theology reconfigured participation by rooting it in divine grace and the personal agency of the Spirit.

• For the Cappadocians, participation designates communion with the divine energies rather than the divine essence: a real sharing without confusion.

• For Augustine, participare Deo means to be drawn into the life of God by love: participation is affective, transformative, and pneumatic.

• Participation becomes relational, covenantal, and trinitarian—yet the concept remains suggestive rather than analytically defined.

Participation is now identified not with emanation but with grace.

V. Scholastic Clarification and Its Limits

Aquinas provides the most systematic account in the premodern West.
Participation is:

1. Two-sorted (creature shares in what is proper to God)

2. Analogical (effect reflects cause proportionally)

3. Limited (finite being receives in a finite mode)

This clarifies the metaphysical grammar, but participation remains primarily a way of speaking about perfections received by creatures. It does not yet provide a pneumatological explanation of how such participation is effected or sustained.

VI. Lutheran Reconfigurations: Union Without Confusion

While the Lutheran tradition does not foreground “participation,” it provides conceptual foundations:

• Luther’s unio cum Christo describes a real communion grounded in promise and enacted by the Spirit.

• The communicatio idiomatum in Christology provides an ontological precedent for participation that is neither essentialist nor merely moral.

• Gerhard and the Lutheran scholastics articulate the believer’s renewal as participation in divine life, yet without a formal metaphysics of participation.

The Lutheran tradition thus offers rich material but lacks a conceptual account that unites grace, ontology, and Spirit.

VII. Modern Attempts and Persistent Ambiguities

In the modern period:

• Lossky, Zizioulas, and the neo-Palamite tradition recover participation through the language of divine energies and ecclesial personhood.

• Rahner’s “supernatural existential” redefines participation as the horizon of human transcendence.

• Barth and Bonhoeffer reframe participation christologically and ecclesially.

Yet in many modern accounts, participation becomes either:

• existential-symbolic and thus it loses its ontological bite, or

• metaphysically abstract where it loses its pneumatic specificity.

What is lacking is a doctrine that is at once metaphysically precise, trinitarian, and causally grounded.

VIII. Toward a Clarified Concept: Participatio Constitutiva

The foregoing traditions, though profound, leave unanswered the central question: In what does participation consist? The present disputationes propose the following definition of participatio constitutiva.  Participation is the Spirit’s constitutive causality whereby the creature receives—really and ontologically—a finite correlate D of a divine perfection D_G, such that the creature remains creaturely, God remains wholly transcendent, and yet the creature truly shares in what belongs properly to God. Thus, participation is not imitation, analogy, moral conformity, exemplarist reflection, or metaphysical proximity.

It is causal reception—the Spirit’s inward act that constitutes the creature’s new being. Participation is therefore:

1. Ontological, for it gives being.

2. Pneumatological, for its agent is the Spirit. 

3. Christological, because it is mediated through union with Christ. 

4. Asymmetrical, since God communicates and the creature receives. 

5. Constitutive, because what is communicated becomes the creature’s new reality. 

This clarifies why deification is not essence-sharing but grace-sharing: the creature becomes luminous with divine life not by becoming divine essentia but by receiving divine actus.

Participation, properly understood, contains within itself an eschatological orientation. What is now possessed in grace is destined for manifestation in glory.

Thus, while VII established participation as ontological transformation, VIII will show participation as eschatological manifestation. This Excursus has clarified the formal concept at the hinge point between ontology and eschatology. Participation is the grammar of deification; manifestation is its consummation.

Transitus ad Disputationem VIII: De Manifestatione Eschatologica Veritatis

In the seventh disputation we beheld participation as the Spirit’s constitutive act, grounding both creaturely being and creaturely communion with God. Such participation is real yet incomplete; begun in time, it strains toward consummation. For every participation bears a teleology: what is received as grace seeks revelation as glory.

The hidden union of faith awaits its eschatological unveiling. The righteousness participated now will be manifested then. The divine life communicated secretly will be revealed openly. Thus, theology must now inquire how truth, which is presently mediated by word, Spirit, and participation, will appear in its eschatological fullness.

We therefore proceed to: Disputatio VIII: De Manifestatione Eschatologica Veritatis—on the unveiling of divine truth in glory, where participation becomes vision and the economy becomes consummation.