What did C.S. Lewis mean by 'Further Up & Further In'? Theosis!

Why your 'Mere Christianity' also needs C.S. Lewis' Robust Doctrine of 'Theosis'

Theosis as Eternal Growth Energized by God

In 2019, I had the opportunity to visit Yosemite National Park where I beheld a great valley filled with massive granite cliffs, cascading waterfalls, and towering Sequoia trees. These ‘mythical’ trees, which live in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, can grow to be over 300 feet tall and can live for over 3000 years (some of them were around before the birth of Christ)! Even though they do not live forever, these trees can be a type of symbol or ‘icon’ within God’s natural cathedral that points to eternal life in God. If disease and drought ceased, these trees could eternally grow upward and outward—- ‘further up and further in’ to the heavens.

C.S. Lewis captures this imagery when he speaks about the role of prayer.

“God is the thing to which he is praying-the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on-the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life-what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.” (Mere Christianity)

Prayer is like the process of photosynthesis in a Sequoia tree. The rays of the sun pierce the conifer leaves, and their energy is taken in by the plant cells (chlorophyll). This participation in the energy of the sun by the tree leads to the production of oxygen and food causing the Sequoia to grow. In other words, we all start out as pure, little saplings at our baptisms, but God is not content to leave us there. He wants to grow us and energize us with His Divine Presence until we become giants among the forest. Even then the process of growth will never cease and will continue into the New Creation (Revelation 21-22) and beyond.

Listen to St. Paul’s words in Philippians 2:12-13

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God is energizing in you, both to will and to energize for his good pleasure.”¹

This analogy of taking in God’s energy to grow us into His divine sons is called ‘Theosis’ (in the Greek tradition) or ‘Deification’ (in Latin tradition). Some Biblical scholars refer to it as Christification. Every Christian is called to become holy (the process of sanctification), but theosis adds a much deeper dimension to this process. We become godly or god-like. This is how Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity:

“God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better... but like turning a horse into a winged creature...It will soar over fences which never could have been jumped.” (Chapter 10)

Lewis goes on in another place:

“The command ‘Be ye perfect’ is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were "gods" and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him- for we can prevent Him, if we choose- He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and Jove as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”

St. Paul says it this way:

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).

Lewis stands in the great Christian tradition that always taught theosis in stating that we will become ‘gods’ (lower case ‘g’). This idea of theosis or divinization can bother some modern Christians when misunderstood. God is Infinite and Inexhaustible. He is Uncreated and Uncontainable. None of us will ever be that, and He alone deserves our worship. However, God does desire to energize His creatures with His own Life, which makes us into His sons and daughters. In this sense, we can be called ‘gods’ or ‘divine.’ (The Bible does refer to other creatures such as angels as ‘gods’ at times; see Psalm 8). We become ‘partakers of the Divine Nature’ as the St. Peter says:

“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness… that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4)

One image that I have found helpful comes from St. Maximus the Confessor (7th century) who describes theosis as placing an iron sword into a fire, such that it remains an iron sword but also takes on certain properties of the fire--light & heat-- by ‘participating’ in it. We creatures are the sword while God is the Divine fire. When the sword is dipped into God, we take on the properties of the fire (God) while remaining distinct from God. We become ‘deified’ but never replacing the Uncreated Trinity. Mary is a wonderful image of theosis, because she became the humble ‘Container of the Uncontainable’ God of the Universe for 9 months during her pregnancy.

St. Diadochos of Photiki (5th century) describes the dynamic process of growing in grace this way:

“Grace hides its presence within the baptized, waiting on the soul's desire; when the whole man turns himself wholly to the Lord, then in an unutterable experience it reveals its presence in the heart.... If man begins to advance by observing the commandments and unwearingly invoking the Lord Jesus, then the fire of divine grace diffuses itself even to the exterior senses of the heart.”

In Mere Christianity, Lewis summarizes the church father, St. Athanasius, when he says:

"The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God."

Other church fathers and theologians also describe theosis in this way:

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (180 AD): “He became what we are, so that we that we might become what He is.”

St. Thomas Aquinas: “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”

Dr. N.T. Wright says this: “If the Spirit of the Living God dwells within His people, constituting them as a the New Temple, then the work of this transforming Spirit can and must be spoke in terms, ultimately, of theosis, divinization.”²

This understanding of what it means to be human can radically change a person’s view of why God created the world, what it means to be human, and where the human story is headed (i.e. Heaven, New Creation). St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th century) and the eastern Christian fathers tended to even view Heaven as much more of a dynamic process of growth rather than static or simply rest. This is how Dr. Hans Bergsma summarizes St. Gregory’s view:

“Gregory speaks here of perfection as unending growth or progress in the life of God (epektasis)… It is the infinite goodness of God that secures for Gregory the notion of perpetual progress… He regards this as participation in the energies of God (as opposed to his nature or essence). Gregory’s notion that participation allows for continous (eternal growth) is an answer to… a more static view of the beatific vision.”³

C.S. Lewis seems to have the same view of St. Gregory concerning the Christian life and the nature of Heaven (further up & further in). He continues to unpack his understanding of theosis in Mere Christianity:

“In our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has-by what l call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

C.S. Lewis was once an atheist who thought we were mere mammals destined for ash and bone. He soon found out that Christ is the true myth and that, though we were made from the dust, we were meant to rise from it and touch the starry heavens. His books and novels point to a reality that we humans are a mixture of heaven and earth, biological life (bios) and spiritual life (zoe). We are both ‘soil creatures’ and ‘sky creatures.’ It seems that he wanted to share this captivating vision of humanity in Mere Christianity for those who had only heard the ‘fire insurance’ Gospel (believe to avoid Hell).

Today, our world of unbelievers and spiritual seekers desperately needs to hear the Gospel message where theosis, union with Christ, is at the heart of it all. Yes, human rebellion has happened and ruined everything. Yes, our Lord’s life, death, and resurrection has opened the floodgates for our own healing and forgiveness. But it doesn’t stop there. He unleashes and infuses His own Spirit, Grace, and Life into us so that we can rise above our animal selves in order to get the human story back on track.

When the children arrive to ‘New Narnia’ (a.k.a. Heaven or the New Creation) in The Last Battle, they are surprised to discover that they can run up water falls, further up and further into Divine Life, forever and ever. This is what our world desperately needs to hear: Jesus completes you. He completes your family. He completes our society, and Christ completes Creation itself. And it is through His Life and Energy that Creation will be set free, and you will grow into a giant Sequoia glorifying Him forever and ever if you will only say ‘yes’.

---

Want to learn more about how theosis connects to receiving Christ in the Eucharist (Holy Communion)? Then you will want to take my course called ‘Altar Above the Worlds’ for my paid subscribers here:

1. Frederica Mathewes-Green writes, “Grace is the presence of God, rather than something God dispenses. We say that God has an essence which is shared in common by Father, Son, and Spirit; but he also has “energies” by which he acts in the world, for example, filling the Burning Bush with fire. The destiny he intends for every human being is that we would likewise be filled with his fire / light / energy. “Energy” is a Greek New Testament word, energeia, which St. Paul used about 30 times (eg “God is energizing in you, both to will and to energize for his good pleasure,” Philippians 2:13). But when St. Jerome was translating the bible into Latin there was no good equivalent, so he used operatio and variants. For God to “operate” in the world is different from him “energizing,” being present in his own energies. So there was a subtle difference between Greek and Latin bible theology from the start. Western Christianity was built upon the foundation of the Latin translation, so some bible concepts are not as easy to grasp as in the East.” https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/frederica/writings/orthodoxy-and-catholicism

2. Dr. N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, volume 4, page 1021.

3. Dr. Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in the Christian Tradition. Pages 83-84.