Participation in the Divine Nature: Aquinas and the Catholic Vision of Theosis – Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

Fr. Gregory Pine explains that, according to Aquinas, Christians are called to true divinization or theosis: by grace and the sacraments they really come to share in God’s own life without becoming God by nature, growing into intimate communion with the Triune God through Christ in whom this transformation is perfectly realized.

This lecture was given on October 3rd, 2025, at Duke University.

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About the Speakers:

Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P., is an instructor of dogmatic and moral theology at the Dominican House of Studies and the Assistant Director of the Thomistic Institute. He holds a doctorate from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He is the author of Prudence: Choose Confidently, Live Boldly and Your Eucharistic Identity: A Sacramental Guide to the Fullness of Life, and is co-author of Credo: An RCIA Program and Marian Consecration with Aquinas.

His writing also appears in Aleteia, Magnificat, and Ascension’s Catholic Classics series. In addition to the TI podcast, he regularly contributes to the podcasts Godsplaining and Pints with Aquinas, and Catholic Classics.

Keywords: Divinization and Theosis, Grace and Participation in God, Holy Spirit and Sanctification, Incarnation and Salvation, Life of Virtue and Holiness, Participation in the Divine Nature, Sacraments and Spiritual Transformation, Trinity and Divine Life, Union with God in Christ, Western and Eastern Christian Spirituality

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mysticinstitute.org.
0:25.4	So the question is specifically a question of Catholic doctrine, and so we're going to approach
0:30.4	it from a doctrinal perspective.
0:32.4	So it won't be so much apologetic as mystagogic, in the sense that we're going to kind
0:36.7	presume the mysteries, or we're going to
0:38.8	presume the datum of Christian revelation, and then on the basis of said datum, we're going to exposit its
0:44.8	intelligibility, or we're going to set forward kind of how it makes sense or why it makes sense,
0:49.2	or the beauty of its sensemaking. So the claim is that, so Christians believe that by virtue of your baptism
0:56.5	and the outworking of your baptismal grace, that you become gods after a manner.
1:04.0	Okay, so the claim is that in the Western tradition we refer to this doctrine as divinization or deification. In the Eastern tradition, we refer to this doctrine as demonization or deification.
1:11.7	In the Eastern tradition, we refer to this doctrine as theosis.
1:14.7	But the basic claim is that you are no mere mortal or you are not to consign yourself to living a merely human life,
1:22.9	that you can attain to the very life of God and that you can partake of it in a real way,
1:27.9	not just after the matter of theological poetry, but after the matter of lived experience. And that that life
1:34.5	conducts you all the way to heaven in which it becomes a kind of stable and permanent realization.
1:40.6	So, yeah, I know, I mean, to some people who aren't familiar with the claim or who are hearing the claim for the first or the second or the third time, it sounds a bit astonishing.
1:49.0	Because at least at first blush, it sounds ever so slightly polytheistic in the sense that if we are gods and God is God, there are multiple gods, and then here we are in polytheism.
1:59.0	And it sounds almost like Roman paganism in a sense
2:02.8	that the pagans were very inclusive, and they didn't make judgments as to the truth or falsity
	...

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