Perspectief 2016-34

Perspectief 28 Dr. Petre Maican as a personal relation with God. The more we get to know someone, the more we feel closely connected with them, without losing our own identity. The same applies to deification which is the advancement of the human beings in their friendship with God. Third, for the Orthodox faithful, union with God does not mean that humans get a share in God’s essence (becoming “Gods” with capital letters); it rather means that humans can “partake” in God’s uncreated energies as they are manifested in creation. To bring all these strands together, a solar analogy might help. God’s rays of light (uncreated energies) shine forth into the world and through the world, just like the rays of the sun. The role of these rays is to reveal God’s existence and to sustain creation. Deification describes the process of transforming oneself into a perfectly transparent medium for God’s energies in the world. Just as these rays of God do not annihilate the diversity of the world but support and increase it, so also the human being who seeks union with God becomes ever more unique. For Stăniloae, the path towards achieving this transparency with God’s uncreated energies is dialogical. From the very moment of her creation, when God breathes life into her, the human being is called to speak in response to God’s words of love. 7 In fact, as Stăniloae explains, the entire world in all of its physical and spatial-temporal dimensions, has been intended by God as the scene of this dialogue. 8 Time, he says, is nothing more than the interval between God’s call for love and the human answer to this call. 9 The necessity for this divine–human dialogue to take place on a material scene stems from the ontological difference between humanity and God. No human being can remain alive if she hears or sees God. Hence, God uses the materiality of the world in order to make Godself heard. In this respect, Stăniloae explains, every tree, every stone, every historical moment, and every encounter we have with other people are in some way a representation of God’s plasticised words, which invite us to begin (or to perfect) our dialogical relationship with God. 10 7 Dumitru Stăniloae, Teologia Dogmatică Ortodoxă , vol. I (Bucureşti: Institutul Biblic şi de Misiune Ortodoxă, 2010), 409. 8 Idem, I, 348. 9 Idem, I, 188. 10 Idem, I, 143–148.