Spanning historical and theoretical divides, this panel explores the shaping effect of Orthodox theological ideas on human bodies, concepts of the soul, and being. Papers will cover Gregory Palamas’ understandings of the world soul versus the human soul, a contemplation of Gregory of Nyssa’s theosis in critical relationship to Methodist theologian John Wesley’s sanctification, and John Zizioulas’ eschatological reverie on being and human existence.
This paper argues that John Wesley stands within the patristic tradition of deification exemplified by Gregory of Nyssa. In both late antiquity and early industrial England, bodies were rendered vulnerable within hierarchical and economic regimes that disciplined and exhausted embodied life. I contend that Nyssen’s theosis and Wesley’s sanctification share a participatory grammar in which salvation is understood as transformative participation in divine life that reconfigures mortal embodiment. Under industrial modernity, Wesley reformulates this patristic vision as an embodied holiness capable of resisting the reduction of the body to labor utility. By centering embodiment, this study reframes deification as a counter-formation of embodied existence rather than a purely metaphysical doctrine. It further suggests that this participatory logic bears implications for contemporary regimes of racialized vulnerability, where socially imperiled bodies remain sites of theological and political struggle.
The great Byzantine saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) explicitly rejected the Platonic idea of the World Soul. I argue, however, that certain structural features of the World Soul remain in the superstructure of Palamas's accounts of the creation and deification of the sensible world through the human soul. I thus argue that through its rational movements in cooperation with the activities of the divine Nous, Logos, and Eros the human soul becomes a functional World Soul in Palamas's thought.
Zizioulas’ landmark work Remembering the Future articulates a powerful vision of eschatology as a central ontological category for Christian theology. Zizioulas' interest in eschatological ontology, however, begins earlier in his career. Already in Being as Communion, he interprets Maximus' triad of genesis–movement–rest as comprehensible only "from the end" rather than organically unfolding "towards the end" (96). In this position we find the seeds of Zizioulas' later more sustained treatment of the question of eschatological ontology in Remembering the Future. In this paper, one element of this discussion will be examined, namely Zizioulas' hard separation of the notion of teleology (captured by the phrase "towards the end") from that of eschatology ("from the end"). This division between teleology understood in a negative light and eschatology understood in a positive light, is discussed at some length in Remembering the Future, 101–109, and will form the basis for this paper's exploration.