Nielsen’s Nook

The Spiritual Writers: Salvation, Asceticism, and Deification (2 of 2)

• Original participation
• Analogous Freedom of the Image of God
• Sin as a consequence of servitude to the demonic
• Redemption as a recapitulation of the human nature in the risen Christ

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Many aspects of the ascetical tradition of the Christian East can present to the Western observer a Pelagian aspect.... [If] one remembers the conception of the image of God as it prevails in the Greek Fathers, the problem of the relationship between grace and human freedom is on a different level from that which opposed Augustine to Pelagius in the West. Nature, and therefore true freedom, presuppose communion with God in grace.... It is not the blasphemous juxtaposition of divine grace and human effort but the concrete realization in Jesus Christ of man's primitive image. (p 124)

The more one loves, the more one gives oneself to the fight, in one's body and in one's soul, in order to accomplish the commandments, the greater the communion one achieves with the Spirit into the spiritual growth of the renewing of the mind; acquiring salvation by grace and divine gift, but receiving by faith, by love, and by the effort of free choice, progress and increase in the measure of this spiritual age....Thus, eternal life will be inherited by grace, but also in all righteousness, since it is not only through the divine grace and power without human collaboration (?????????) and effort that progress is made... (p 125)

nature

When the Spirit establishes his dwelling in man, the latter can no longer stop praying, for the Spirit never ceases praying in him. Whether he sleeps or stays awake, prayer is not separated from his soul. (p 127)

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