DIVINE CONSORTIUM. — This is a theological expression, derived from Holy Scripture (2 Pt 1:4), which signifies that mysterious participation in the divine life to which man is elevated through sanctifying grace (cf.).
In the cited verse of 2 Peter it reads: “By these he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). The term κοινωνία (koinōnía) used by St. Peter also in his first letter (1 Pt 5:1), is found likewise in St. John (Jn 1:3) and in St. Paul (1 Cor 1:9; Phil 3:10), with the meaning of communion, divine participation, which is connected with the idea of adoptive filiation (cf. ADOPTION, SUPERNATURAL) by virtue of a regeneration whereby man is reborn of God; an idea not unknown to St. Peter (1 Pt 1:3, 23), frequent in the other two Apostles (Jn 1:12-13; 1 Jn 3:1; Rom 8:14-15; Gal 4:4 ff.; Eph 1:5 ff.). The term κοινωνία and its meaning are thus proper to the evangelical climate. St. Peter emphasizes the object of participation, which is the divine nature (οὐσίας θείας, used by Plato and other classical authors as equivalent to “true Divinity”). The Vulgate translates κοινωνία as consortes, whence the term “consortium.”
Ancient and modern exegesis of St. Peter’s difficult passage leads to this interpretation: the Christian, enlightened by faith, receives from God precious gifts (grace and infused virtues), through which he enters into participation in the very life of God, initially on earth, fully in heaven.
This text serves as the basis for the development of the theology of grace among the Fathers and the Scholastics. It is especially the Eastern Fathers who, meditating on the words of St. Peter in the light of the thought of St. John and St. Paul, arrive at the concept of θέωσις or deification of man, which sums up the entire economy of Redemption and grace. Theological development matures in two phases, one Trinitarian and the other Christological. In the first, deification is linked to the action of the Son and the Holy Spirit, who, being of the same divine nature as the Father, make the Christian an adopted son of God and thus a partaker of His nature (Athanasius and Basil). In the Christological phase, deification is presented as a reproduction of the hypostatic union of the Word, in which the ineffable union of the divine and human is realized (Cyril of Alexandria). St. Augustine echoes the text of St. Peter in Sermon 13, but the Pelagian controversy compels him to develop rather the dynamic concept of grace in the sense of a supernatural activity under the influence of God. The Scholastics, especially St. Thomas, return instead to the fruitful conception of the Greek Fathers and, with the aid of Aristotle’s theory of habits, reconnect deification with sanctifying grace as an entitative habit infused by God, which confers upon the soul a mode of being that is God-like. St. Thomas explains the so-called “regeneratio secundum rationem sive recreationem,” which is effected by the infusion of grace into the essence of the soul (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 110, a. 4), whereby man becomes like God.
The magisterium of the Church has confirmed this traditional doctrine. Among the propositions of Baius condemned by Pius V is the 42nd, which denies sanctifying grace “by which man is adopted as a son of God and, according to his inner man, is renewed and made a partaker of the divine nature” (Denz.-U., 1042). Leo XIII in the encyclical Divinum illud (AAS, 29 [1897], p. 644) recalls the concept of man “regenerated and made a new creature and a partaker of the divine nature and a son of God made divine.” Finally, Pius XII in the encyclical Mystici Corporis (AAS, 35 [1943], p. 214) teaches that the Word became incarnate to make men “partakers... of the divine nature” in this life through grace, and in the next life through the beatific vision.
Modern theologians investigate deeply the nature of this so-called divine consortium, seeking to avoid on the one hand the concept of a formal participation in the divine nature in a pantheistic sense (as claimed by pseudo-mystics like Molinos and the Quietists), and on the other hand the concept of a participation reduced to mere moral imitation (as desired by semi-rationalists).
Taking a middle path, one may say that grace imprints upon the soul a supernatural image of God, whereby man acquires a mode of being similar to the divine and a tendency to act, that is, to think and will in a divine manner. An image, then, that is dynamic, or, as another acute theologian (De la Taille) suggests, an actuation of the soul by the divine nature similar to that which occurs in the human nature of Christ by virtue of the hypostatic union and in the souls of the blessed, who, through the light of glory, are elevated to the direct intuition of the divine essence (cf. GRACE, SANCTIFYING; INHABITATION OF GOD IN MAN).