Failure to Reach Theosis — Causes, Consequences, and the Church's Answer

Source: Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life — Archimandrite George, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of St. Gregorios on Mount Athos (Part 5 of series — see theosis_experiences)

Overview

The final chapters of Archimandrite George's text shift to a pastoral and diagnostic register. Having established what Theosis is, how it is made possible, what it requires, and what it feels like (Parts 1–4), he now addresses the question the attentive reader has been silently holding: Why do so few actually reach it? Three causes of failure are named — distraction by legitimate goods, moralism, and anthropocentric humanism. From there the analysis pivots to consequences: both the consequences of guidance oriented toward Theosis (theanthropocentric formation that transfigures relationships, parenting, and ecclesial life) and the consequences of guidance that is not (the spiritual disorientation of modern youth, visible in addiction, extremism, and despair). The Church's answer — articulated most fully in the Athonite tradition — is not a critique from the outside but an invitation to what man was always made for.

I — Failure of Many People to Reach Theosis

Biblical Foundation

Supporting texts:

• Matt 22:37 — Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; the complete orientation that attachment to secondary purposes frustrates
• Phil 3:13–14 — "Forgetting what lies behind… I press on toward the goal"; the singular focus that the accumulation of good-but-not-ultimate things dissolves

Theological Analysis

Three Causes of Failure

1. Attachment to the Basic Cares of Life
The world and its goods are not evil; used eucharistically — as gifts from God — they become paths toward union with Him. The failure is not in possessing goods but in misplacing priority: placing Theosis second, third, or indefinitely deferred. Archimandrite George identifies a predictable pattern: the person says he will pray, confess, and receive Communion — but today there is studying, tomorrow meetings, the day after weddings and family obligations. The accumulation of legitimate demands fills the space that was never formally surrendered to God. Luke's repeated excuse — "I ask you to have me excused" — becomes the posture of a life. The individual things are not sinful; the pattern is fatal.

The Lord's directive is precise: seek first the Kingdom. Archimandrite George identifies the Kingdom of God with Theosis — when divine Grace reigns within a man, he becomes a channel through which Grace reaches other men and society. The deified man is not withdrawn from the world; he is its greatest gift to it.

2. Moralism
Western theological influence has, to a significant degree, reduced the Christian life to moral improvement — a pursuit of virtue and the avoidance of vice, with the goal being a more orderly and upright human self. This guidance is anthropocentric: its centre is man's moral condition, and human effort is the primary variable. It offers no genuine experience of God; the psyche's thirst for the divine remains unquenched. The result, historically, is atheism: a generation told that Christianity means moral betterment finds that secular humanist programmes offer moral betterment without the inconveniences of institutional religion.

Moralism is not entirely wrong — virtue matters, commandments matter — but severed from the goal of Theosis, it becomes a closed system that circles back to the self. The soul was not made for a better version of itself; it was made for God.

3. Anthropocentric Humanism
The third cause is the philosophical air of modernity: a socio-cultural system premised on human autonomy, self-determination, and the sufficiency of man as the measure of all things. This is Adam's original sin raised to a civilisational principle. Humanism claims to liberate and develop the human person; in practice, it reduces him — because it severs him from the divine prototype after which he was fashioned. A man developed to his maximum autonomous potential, but not deified, is less than he was made to be. The Church's humanism is incomparably more radical: it proposes to make a man a god.

II — Consequences of Theocentric Guidance

Biblical Foundation

Supporting texts:

• 1 John 4:20 — "He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen"; love of neighbour as the social form of Theosis
• Col 3:10 — Being renewed in knowledge after the image of the Creator; the transformation of perception that guidance oriented toward Theosis produces

Theological Analysis

The Positive Case: What Theocentric Guidance Produces

When the guidance given by the Church — rooted in the Holy Services, Pastoral Theology, and the Holy Mysteries — is genuinely theanthropocentric (centred on the God-Man Christ and ordered toward Theosis), it transforms the entire fabric of a person's life and relationships.

Relationships transfigured. The person who orients himself toward Theosis begins to see other human beings differently — not as competitors, instruments of pleasure, or obstacles, but as prospective gods: icons of the Creator who share the same divine destiny. This shifts the ground of social ethics from obligation to vision. One does not treat another with dignity because decency demands it; one treats another with reverence because one sees in him what he is destined to become.

Parenting reoriented. The consequence for the guidance given to children is equally radical. Parents who know what Theosis is will give their children a formation aimed at Theosis. They will feel the holy weight of the charge entrusted to them: they are raising future gods, not merely competent or happy adults. This is, Archimandrite George argues, the most revolutionary form of education imaginable — and it is the Church's ordinary inheritance.

The Divine Liturgy as formation. The ethos of the Divine Liturgy is precisely the movement from ego toward God and neighbour. In the Liturgy, the faithful learn to overcome self-enclosure, to open themselves to the divine and to one another. Communion in Christ is not merely received; it is practised, progressively deepened with each liturgical gathering. Theosis is not only a vertical transaction between the soul and God; it is simultaneously a horizontal expansion of the person toward the whole community of the Body of Christ.

The revolutionary claim. Against every contemporary ideology that promises human liberation and dignity, Archimandrite George issues a direct challenge: What other form of humanism is able to make man a god? The Church's humanism reaches higher than any secular programme can conceive. Its urgency is correspondingly greater in a moment when false humanisms are aggressively promoted and the young are their primary targets.

The Negative Case: Guidance That Does Not Lead to Theosis

When guidance toward Theosis is absent — when the young are handed a materialistic, rationalistic, or moralistic formation that does not name their deepest hunger or point to its true satisfaction — they do not stop seeking. They seek elsewhere.

Archimandrite George traces the descent with pastoral gravity: first, young people turn to Oriental mysticism, yoga, the occult, and Gnosticism; then, when those prove insufficient, to outright occultism and Satanism. In the moral sphere, severed from the goal that gave morality its meaning (union with God), ethical constraints lose their rationale entirely. Anarchy and extremism fill the vacuum. Addiction, described here as "a new plague of our age," represents a compulsive search for the interior intensity that only Grace can legitimately provide. At the terminus of the descent: despair and, for some, suicide.

The diagnosis is not condemnatory but deeply compassionate. These are our children — icons of God, called to be gods — who were not given the gift we possessed. They are seeking, legitimately, the experience of true life, of something beyond the logic of the materialistic world. The Church has the very thing they are searching for. The failure is not in them but in the formation — or absence of formation — they were given.

The answer offered is not a programme but a Person and a community: Mount Athos is named explicitly as the place where the blessing of Theosis, the vivid experience of Grace and Light, has continued to flow and draw the young back to their purpose.

Key Quotes

"Our holy God moulded us for Theosis, so if we are not deified, our whole life is a failure."

"To set our sights on Theosis sweetens the pain in every trial and all the various difficulties."

"They give themselves completely to secondary purposes and forget 'the one thing necessary.'"

"What other form of humanism, however progressive and liberal it may appear, is as revolutionary as that of the Church which is able to make man a god?"

"We did not give it to them, and so they do not know it; they do not know the great purpose of man's life, Theosis."

"The Lord wants us to strive to be deified; after all, for this purpose He became man and died upon the Cross so that He shines as the Sun amidst men, and God amidst gods."

Practical Application

Personal
The three causes of failure are an examination of conscience. Is Theosis actually the first priority, or is it deferred behind a succession of legitimate goods? Has moralism reduced the Christian life to ethical self-improvement rather than divine union? Has the ambient anthropocentrism of modern culture quietly displaced the God-Man from the centre of life?

The consolation in this chapter is the directness of the remedy: name the first thing first. The rest — the legitimate goods, the moral effort, the civic participation — does not disappear but falls into its proper place.

Apologetic / Pastoral
The analysis of young people's spiritual seeking is one of the most pastorally useful sections in the entire text. It provides a non-judgmental diagnosis: those who pursue yoga, occultism, or extreme experiences are not nihilists but seekers who were not given the true object of their search. The appropriate response is not condemnation but an invitation — the Church has what they are actually looking for, and it exceeds everything they have tried.

Summary

Key Takeaway: Three causes prevent most people from reaching Theosis: attachment to secondary goods that crowd out the one thing necessary, the reduction of Christianity to moral improvement (moralism), and the anthropocentric spirit of modernity. When guidance is genuinely theanthropocentric — centred on the God-Man Christ and ordered toward Theosis — it transforms relationships, parenting, and communal life; it is the most radical humanism possible. When it is absent, the hunger for transcendence drives the young toward false substitutes, with increasingly destructive consequences. The Church's answer is not critique but invitation: the very experience the human heart is searching for has been preserved and offered, most visibly in the Athonite tradition.

Related Topics

Theology Wiki

• Theosis (wiki)
• Anthropocentrism (wiki)
• Hesychasm (wiki)

Series — Theosis (Archimandrite George)

• concept_theosis — Series Index & Study Guide (Wiki)
• theosis_purpose_human_life — Part 1: The True Purpose of Human Life
• theosis_uncreated_energies — Part 2: Theosis Through the Uncreated Energies of God
• theosis_qualifications — Part 3: Qualifications for Theosis — Humility, Asceticism, and the Holy Mysteries
• theosis_experiences — Part 4: Experiences of Theosis — Theoria, the Uncreated Light, and the Communion of Saints
• Part 5 (this note)

Sources

• Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life — Archimandrite George, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of St. Gregorios on Mount Athos