How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology: The Contribution of Ivan Popov

In contemporary scholarship, deification is so universally assumed to have been an abiding feature of the Eastern Orthodox tradition that it strains historical imagination to conceive of a time when the idea of deification would have been largely forgotten. This article demonstrates that the rediscovery of deification as a structurally indispensable concept of patristic thought was made by the Russian patristic scholar Ivan Popov in a trilogy of essays published in 1903-1909. The article considers different cultural registers within which the deification motif surfaced in the nineteenth century: the Greek Philokalia and its Slavonic and Russian editions, Dostoevsky’s prophecy about the self-divinization of humanity in revolutionary socialism, the Spiritual Diary of St. John of Krondstadt, and Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of Godmanhood. While these sources held a great potential for the theoretical development of deification, the importance of deification for Orthodox theology was not appreciated in nineteenth-century Orthodox academic theology. The situation changed dramatically after Popov (who briefly studied with Harnack in Germany) published his essays arguing for the centrality of deification in patristic thought, providing a detailed analysis of the concept in the fourth-century patristic authors (dwelling at length on Athanasius and the Macarian Homilies), and offering a taxonomy of the two main types of deification: realistic and idealistic. This article discusses Popov’s influence on Pavel Florensky, Sergei Epifanovich, Lev Karsavin, Georges Florovsky, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, and Vladimir Lossky.