Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person is a demanding but deeply clarifying work, almost Oxford University Press–level in its density of references and rigor, yet without the usual reading difficulty. Panayiotis Nellas places theosis at the very center of Christian anthropology, not as a mystical add‑on or future reward, but as the key to understanding creation, salvation, and the human vocation itself.
Drawing deeply from the Fathers, especially John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus, Nellas presents death not as a crude punishment, but as something God permits so that, as the patristic tradition memorably insists, “evil might not become immortal.” Adam is not a finished being who simply failed, but an unfinished one, called to grow into communion. Sin is therefore a cosmic rupture in humanity’s movement toward its proper end, and salvation is not juridical repair but the restoration and fulfillment of what humanity was always created to become.
The section on the “garments of skin,” the primary reason I sought out this book, is especially illuminating. It closely echoes and complements the Syriac vision found in Ephrem’s Hymns of Paradise and Sebastian Brock’s The Luminous Eye. The loss of the Robe of Glory in Genesis is not the end of humanity’s story, but the context in which God mercifully provides for continued movement toward unity and likeness.
It is precisely at this point that, drawing especially on Maximus the Confessor, Nellas situates this anthropology within a broader cosmological vision through a Christian transformation of the Porphyrian Tree (71, 211). In its pagan form, the tree is static and classificatory: beings are fixed within hierarchical categories, and movement across ontological levels is impossible. Maximus radically alters this logic. Humanity is no longer confined to a single branch, but is uniquely capable of movement, ascending and descending, across the divisions that structure creation. Male and female, paradise and the inhabited world, heaven and earth, sensible and intelligible, created and uncreated are not closed boundaries but sites of mediation. Through theosis, the human person is called to traverse and unite these divisions, not by nature alone, but by participation in Christ.
Within this framework, marriage is understood as a postlapsarian mode of being, yet one treated with no contempt. It remains a “great mystery,” blessed by God and revealed in the union of Christ and His Church. Marriage functions as part of the garments of skin, not a fall from grace, but a merciful provision ordered toward unity for those not called to remain chaste. What emerges here is not an isolated ethical teaching, but a vision of humanity’s vocation that necessarily opens onto a wider cosmological horizon.
This vision stands in deliberate contrast to Kabbalistic and neo‑gnostic “tree” schemas, often repackaged in contemporary popular culture, which imagine salvation as ascent through impersonal emanations or secret knowledge and ultimately collapse into Neoplatonic abstraction. For Maximus, there is no ladder to climb apart from Christ, and no escape from creation, only its personal and eucharistic transfiguration. Creation itself is anticipatory rather than deterministic: obedience is hoped for, not coerced. In this way, Deification in Christ pairs naturally with Hymns of Paradise, presenting the same truth in a distinct but harmonious key: that Christian doctrine is not merely believed, but lived as a freely chosen movement toward restored glory in Christ.
