Maximus the Confessor and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: A Womanist Theology of Divinization and the Kenosis of Unworthiness

Abstract

This essay examines how traditional Christian accounts of divinization can be refined to address those whose sacrality has been systematically stripped away through racialized and gendered violence, specifically Black women in the U.S. context. The analysis draws on Maximus the Confessor’s relational ontology of divine love and Aristotle Papanikolaou’s “askesis of learning how to love” for survivors of violence, and Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple as a womanist theological text, to construct a womanist theology of divinization that underscores the concept of the “kenosis of unworthiness.” Where traditional understandings of theosis presume a subject with an inflated will that requires a journey into humiliation, this essay argues that many desacralized persons begin divinization from a position of imposed self-negation that requires instead the relinquishment of internalized unworthiness before participation in divine life becomes possible. The essay traces Celie’s transformation through a disrupted god-image, encounter and embrace of divine omnipresence and her recovery of self-determination to demonstrate that divinization for the desacralized first materializes as healing. The essay concludes that a responsible theology of divinization must account for modernity and the impact of imperial lust for dominative power. In doing so, the doctrine can affirm that self-movement and self-determination both constitutive of the divine image and can be restored through the Spirit’s relational and regenerative work even amid historical, cultural, and structural violence.

1. Introduction

In the Christian tradition, divinization is the experience of divine–human communion in which humanity is transformed by the embodiment of virtue into the likeness of God and conformed to the image of Christ. Maximus the Confessor’s doctrine of divinization is distinct in the patristic tradition due to its three indelible markers: cosmology, Chalcedonian Christology, and the placement of divine love or agape at the center of its hermeneutic. These markers form Maximus’ interpretive lens for theosis as a matter of divine intention and telos. Throughout his writings, Maximus qualifies divinization in continuity with his predecessors within the Greek patristic tradition as the tri-part experience of praktikē, physike, and theologia (Maximus the Confessor 1857).1 However, these three stages are regarded in the Confessor’s thought as non-linear progressions not confined to the familiar stair step model, but purification, illumination, and union are mutually dependent and co-constitutive in a way that aligns the experience of divinization with the dynamism of human life. Maximus’ dynamic non-linear account of divinization accounts for adaptability, spiritual progression as well as the hard realities of regression amid dereliction and social suffering. It permits space to discuss particularity and subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the universality that the doctrine presupposes. In a postmodern world, it raises important questions such as: How does one experience divinization in the face of historical and cultural violence? What does it mean to strive beyond being toward well-being when one is under the threat of non-being? What does divinization mean for the desacralized, or for those for whom their sacrality has been stripped away through the misogynistic racialization of Christian soteriological discourse?

Through the lens of the Black experience in the Americas, desacralization can be understood as a tri-dimensional existential reality. It can be defined as context, process, and embodied consciousness (Gordon 1997).2 As a context, desacralization is an imposed external state of problematized human existence. Secondly, desacralization is a systematic process of divestment—it involves a series of intentional actions and steps taken to socially construct particular bodies in the secular and sacred imagination as contemptuous symbols of desecrated existence. Desacralization is embodied consciousness because it is out of the context and bodily experience of being de-sanctified that influences these abjected persons in their own attempt to draw meaning from their own existence.

Three theological concepts guide this critical meditation on divinization under the threat of non-being or desacralization. First is Maximus the Confessor’s treatment and further development of philautia as disoriented self-love that guides one towards divinization and participation in divine nature. This essay explores a modern interpretation of philautia and our contemporary reality of white racial narcissism. Second, the concept of agency is critical to this work. Since the early modern period, the term has been gendered, classed, racialized, and reserved for white industrious “self-reliant” heterosexual performing cisgender males. As a corrective, this essay deploys womanist theo-ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon’s notion of “restricted agency,” which is two-fold (Cannon 2021). While this essay seeks to describe and document desacralization as a primary existential and theological restriction, the word “own” is appended throughout to underscore the power of the moral and radical subjectivity of the desacralized despite the social restrictions levied upon them. The third concept is freedom of the will which is the presumption that human beings partake in the divine nature through the exercise of choice and creativity as opposed to compulsory engagement. In Maximus’ further development, philautia/self-directed love relies on the presumptions of agency and freedom of the will and described in his thought as and autokineton/self-movement and autoexousion/self-determination.3 These concepts are essential to my process of inquiry into how the desacralized experience of divinization contends against the restrictions imposed through desacralization, and my interpretation of kenosis as the self-emptying of unworthiness.

2. Methodology

The method used in this essay departs from most work in Christian theology and ethics. To draw from the patristic tradition as well as womanist secular and theological ethics for contemporary thought is to employ an interdisciplinary method of mutually critical correlation of sources and norms. Building on the framework proposed by David Tracy, this method specifically correlates patristic discourse within the Christian tradition and contemporary human experience of African American women and their communities as sources of theological reflection. Priority is given to the theological norm of patristic theology, which is the regula fidei, which establishes divine revelation, apostolic doctrine, the apostolic canon of scripture, and…apostolic authority, afforded by the organization of the Church as a combined standard for theological reflection (Mutie 2022). Daniel Patte describes the aim of regula fidei as a standard to be the search “for the vision which brings human beings to love God and to love others [and that allows] believers to see their lives/experiences with the eyes of faith, discerning in the midst of evil “what is good and acceptable and perfect”(Patte and Eugene 2002). In a similar vein yet informed by historical and contemporary experience of African American women and their communities, the womanist soteriological norm is the healing and righting of relations amid suffering and evil that actualizes the ministerial vision of Jesus Christ operationalized by the Spirit. The interdisciplinary method of mutual critical correlations among patristic and womanist discourses offers to an increasingly diverse and postmodern body of Christian believers and spiritual eclectics the patristic and African American women’s literary canons as a repository for theological reflection.

By correlating these sources and norms of the patristic and womanist traditions, a polydox theology of divinization is formulated through sustained attention and appreciation for the “grace-filled transformative moments” of divine–human encounter and embodiment of love that enacts real flesh and blood human experiences of healing and wholeness effectual against the privation of good. The experiences of privation and healing that are attended to in this work are those of those who are desacralized by dominative systems and the measurable recovery enacted through practices of kenosis of unworthiness. The theoretical framework constructed to interrogate divinization on these terms is drawn from St. Maximus The Confessor’s discourse on divinization and Alice Walker’s theological imagination illustrated in her novel, The Color Purple.

3. Thesis and Method

The thesis of this essay is that divinization for the desacralized materializes as a particular experience of healing that involves being reconciled to one’s innate divinity by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God through the kenosis of unworthiness and theotic regeneration of the Spirit revealed in self-determination. Where classical accounts of theosis emphasize the purification from pride and the cultivation of humility through ascetical practice, a womanist theology of divinization recognizes that many persons, particularly Black women who have endured systematic violence and dehumanization, begin their spiritual journey from a position of internalized unworthiness rather than excessive self-regard. For such persons, the movement toward divine–human communion requires the emptying out of lies about their worth and the false self constructed through internalized oppression, and the recognition of the sacred self that has been created in God’s image. This kenosis of unworthiness creates space for the Spirit’s regenerative work which is the exercise of self-determination as participation in divine life through freely enacted self-movement.

For this work, the thought of Maximus the Confessor proves instructive as he understood divinization as voluntary union of love grounded in the human capacity for αὐτοκίνητον, or self-movement, and αὐτεξούσιον, or self-determination, provides crucial resources for womanist theology. Maximus’s insistence that “there is no rational soul, which is by essence more valuable than another rational soul” and his emphasis on holistic participation in which “the whole human being…remains wholly human in both soul and body by nature, yet becomes wholly God in soul and body by grace” offer theological warrants for affirming the innate divinity of those whom society has marked as contemptuous. However, contemporary theologians like Bryce E. Rich have demonstrated that the patristic tradition inherits from Platonic philosophy a gendered anthropology that associates women with materiality, passion, and spiritual deficiency.

I engage Maximus critically to make use of his insights on the equality of souls and holistic participation while remaining critical of the unnamed gender hierarchies that shape his theology. Maximus affirms equality of souls at the level of essence, while his symbolic asceticism can be read in a way that reinscribes hierarchies in which the feminine is positioned in proximity to passion and materiality. By employing a womanist methodology, this work queries whether the affirmation of equality of souls can stand when embodiment is socially ordered through racial and gendered valuations that have marked Black women’s bodies as sites of excess and deficient in sacred worth and moral agency.

Additionally, I draw on Aristotle Papanikolaou’s work on violence and virtue which demonstrates through neuroscience that violence can diminish one’s capacity to love and therefore to experience theosis. Papanikolaou directs scholars to consider the hope for healing to be found in neuroplasticity and what he calls “the askesis of learning how to love.” St. Maximus the Confessor provides an account of self-movement and self-determination within a relational ontology of love. Aristotle Papanikolaou clarifies how violence impairs the capacity to participate in that love and thus requires healing, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple renders this theological struggle visible in Celie’s movement from internalized unworthiness toward divine–human communion through the recognition of divine presence.

4. Desacralization and the Black Body

In The Making of New World Slavery From Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, Robin Blackburn notes that the earliest debates among Catholic and Protestant churches were regarding whether Christian salvation was available to enslaved Africans in the Americas. He mentions specifically the Synod of Dordt in 1618 in which Reformed churches came together in part to decide the protocol on administering the sacrament of baptism to enslaved Africans who had been born in the homes of Reformed slaveholders (Blackburn 1997). Blackburn reports that attendants of the Synod were unable to reach consensus and decided to leave it up to individual households rather than take an oppositional stance against the Atlantic slave trade (Ibid). However, not only did the Reformed Church refuse to critique the institution of slavery, but by not doing so, they also affirmed the white racial narcissism that characterized slavery in the Americas, which endorsed the inhumanity of Africans and the eternal condemnation of their Blackness. This conviction that Africans did not have souls to save is consistent with the journal account of Jarena Lee in which she recalls the deist who came to hear her preach out of curiosity because he did not believe that Africans had souls (Andrews 1986). For a group’s embodiment to be the signification of sin, then social death as experienced by people of African descent is also to experience sacral death. The nature of sin-talk by and on behalf of the desacralized is a discourse that deals with this great ontological dilemma between redeemable spirit and irredeemable flesh.

It is important at this point to examine the ways in which Black embodiment has been constructed as not simply the signification of sin, but more specifically, the enfleshment of sin. The humanity of Black flesh is problematized through objectification, and subsequently, the salvageability of Black flesh is also therefore jeopardized in the soteriological imagination of the dominant community. American Christianity corrupts the biblical narratives to make sense of racial difference and to declare the subjugation of Black bodies as moral practice. Through this immoral seizure of theology and bodies, American Christianity reintroduced a strand of Christian Gnosticism that provided theory and practice for Christians to again become estranged to human flesh. Black theological discourse as a diversified project that places the desacralized bodies of Black people at the core of its hermeneutical lens has largely been devoted toward destabilizing this modern form of Christian Gnosticism by the reassertion of the divinity in flesh, or by re-sacralizing Black flesh. Within this theological economy, divinization cannot be presumed as a universal range of human experience but must be properly identified as a form of divine–human communion wherein the healing of personhood is paramount and essential to faithful resistance to forces that threaten the flourishing of humanity.

5. Desacralization and the Promise and Growing Edges of Classical Accounts of Divinization

As historically articulated and contemporarily appropriated, can classical doctrines of divinization account for desacralized bodies, personhood, and restricted agency? Maximus the Confessor offers a compelling account of divinization that is conditioned by love as the determinative theological virtue; however, more than the centralization of love is necessary to disrupt the gendered hierarchy that shapes how to imagine and engage participatorily in that love. While, for Maximus, love is the condition of our creation, our relation, and our deification, the dissonance between the philosophical theology and practice warrants the question of whether a relational ontology of agape remains viable if particular bodies are structurally excluded from its embodiment and mediation? The vitality of love as a governing modus operandi is where two seemingly disparate discourses such as patristic theologies of divinization and womanist theology come to resonate with each other. Within Alice Walker’s four-part definition of womanist is a ninefold repetition of the word “love” and loves as an indication of its significance to Africana women’s experience of healing and wholeness. It was the perversion of this theological virtue with regard to the self and in-group in the distortion of its orientation, constitution, and proportion that desacralization of Africana women and their communities became a normative existential context. With the lives and experiences of Africana women and their communities at the center of her theological reflection, womanist theologian Delores S. Williams engages psychoanalytic theory to help to make comprehensible what I argue here to be a perversion of love in her use and building on the term “white racial narcissism.” She describes it as “a negative, oppressive and pathological force that persists in American national consciousness” that “degrades black and elevates white” and is characterized by “an exaggerated concern with [white] power and control, the result of which is interpersonal exploitation [of black people]” and deficient social consciousness with regard to darker races” (Williams 1993).

Though Maximus could not have imagined the racialized sexist cooption of theological discourse that would emerge out of modernity, his discussion on love and the impediments to its actualization with regard to divinization is instructive for understanding pathological narcissism. In his Four Hundred Chapters on Love, Maximus states: “Μὴ φίλαυτος ἴσθι, καὶ ἀγαπήσεις τὸν Θεόν μὴ φιλόσαρκος; καὶ οὐ μισήσεις τὸν πλησίον” (Maximus the Confessor 1865).4 Here Maximus places an adjectival predicate under imperative force which consequently treats self-directed mode of attachment (phila) as a habitual mode of being rather than a single act. Philautia/self-directed mode of attachment is to be a moral and spiritual misalignment of the soul as an ontological requisite to partake in the divine form of love (agape).

Maximus is indebted to Evagrius here, who precedes him in the interpretation of φίλαυτος as the “mother of all passions” as well as its characterization as a regressive orientation with regard to divinization (Casiday 2006).5 However, Maximus conceptualizes φίλαυτος as more than that which disorients the soul from contemplation but also as a disruption of one’s relational ontology. In his translation and annotation of the text, Joseph Pegon clarifies that philautia functions within Maximus’ thought as “that fundamental lack of balance which makes the center of gravity of the human composite fall from the mind to the lower, sense faculties. The first impulse of nature was turned to God and, therefore, ecstatic; it has been folded back on itself. The “body” is the ego as bound to matter” (Pegon 1945). Per Pegon’s account, we can understand that φίλαυτος is a form of regression that involves a turning away from divine love which is the immanent yet transcendent definitive nature of human existence. If our existence is thus navigated by our self-direction of the will, φίλαυτος is akin to the Augustinian notion of homo incurvatus se in which human beings choose to love only themselves and in doing so have chosen to no longer look to God.

It is significant to note at this point that Maximus makes a distinction between philautia/self-directed love and agape/God-directed love. To describe God-directed love, he uses the indicative form of agape, or ἀγαπήσεις τὸν Θεόν over against φίλαυτος.6 What is instructive here is that Maximus’ use of the indicative form of agape accomplishes two things at the same time. First, it carries forth the presumption that the love of God is a factual structure of reality. Second, the future indicative presents love of God as consequence rather than compulsory. Whereas love according to God emerges as the truthful movement of human nature toward divine-human communion, Maximus distinguishes philautia/self-directed attachment to show that distorted love turns the will inward under illusion. Philautia/self-directed love is a product of distortion in one’s perception of both the self, others in relation to the self, and a movement of the will toward power in pursuit of self-preservation apart from God. Maximus relates philautia/self-directed love with impurity first in false knowledge in his use of the term ψευδῆ γνῶσιν/psevdí gnósin which conceptually connotes misrecognition (Ibid. 3.12 (PG 90:1020C)).7 The soul misrecognizes both its origin and its end under an illusion of self-sufficiency (Maximus the Confessor 1981). For Maximus, this misrecognition of self-sufficiency is representative of a perversion of self-love whereby the gnomic will falsely attributes to itself a fullness, or excess, and distorts the proper orientation of love toward God.

While the category of distortion through excess does not exhaust the ways in which love may become disordered, Aristotle Papanikolaou addresses the lack of proper self-love due to moral injury and violence such as self-loathing. In his essay, “Trinity, Virtue, and Violence,” Papanikolaou examines self-loathing and works within Maximus’ understanding of love as participation in the life of God. He relies on a theological anthropology that presupposes that human beings are created for divine–human communion as agape. Using theosis as an abductive lens, Papanikolaou creates an interpretive correlation between this human vocation and the existential damage that violence inflicts upon it. He connects self-loathing to the passions of fear and anger which Maximus identifies as obstacles to participation in agape and argues that fear and anger “impair the ability to be in the kind of relationship that would not simply allow for love but also for learning to occur” and therefore, “if one is impaired in the ability to love, one is impaired in one’s ability to be gifted theosis” (Papanikolaou 2018).

Papanikolaou integrates neurobiology and trauma theory to further argue that living under constant threat or from guilt associated with violence damages the human capacity to love and learn. He considers cases of moral injury in war veterans, the trauma of community violence, and domestic violence to demonstrate how violence can inhibit the development of non-cognitive skills of trust, empathy, self-control, etc. He names neuroplasticity as a hopeful feature in the reorientation to the vocational path of theosis, or what he describes as “the askesis of learning how to love.” With neuroplasticity, the human brain is subject to restructuring. Relying on the research of trauma clinicians such as Bessel van der Kolk, Papanikolaou observes the resonances between the practices identified as most helpful in the treatment of trauma survivors and ascetic practices such as recitation of the Jesus prayer, breathe control, and the discipline of yoga. He notes: “There is clearly potential in these spiritual practices to wire the body toward openness to loving and being loved” (Ibid, p. 128). Building on Maximus’ relational ontology, Papanikolaou clarifies that the askesis of learning how to love involves spiritual practices and the embodiment of virtue, and restores one’s capacity to love but to also build restorative relationships (Ibid, p. 122).

Maximus’ relational ontology and Papanikolaou’s emphasis on the healing potentiality therein correct the perspectives on theosis that lend themselves to a more individualistic reading, particularly when interpreted apart from the ecclesial and cosmic scope such as in the case of Pseudo-Dionysius and Evagrius of Pontus. Unlike Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s apophaticism or Evagrius Ponticus’ eremitic asceticism, Maximus places the theological virtue of love at the center of his doctrine of divinization whereby communion is enacted through acquired and applied knowledge of love as it is taught through the extension of the self in relation to God and neighbor. The foundation of Maximus’ placement of love as the condition of our creation, our relation, and participation in God is the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity whereby the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit model what it means for agape to be an operative precondition of mutuality, reciprocity, and unity within diversity. Maximus notes that it is out of this principle of relationality that God creates human beings when he states:

“Not as though in need of something did God, who is plenitude beyond measure, bring into being His creatures, but that they might proportionately share in Him with delight and that He Himself might enjoy His works, seeing them rejoice and ever insatiably sated on Himself the inexhaustible”.

(Maximus the Confessor 1857)

Observe that within Maximus’ doctrine of God and creation is a theological anthropology that understands human beings to be created for participation in the divine life whereby relational love is the telos of our existence. In this reference from Maximus, he uses a specific Greek phrase ἵνα μετέχωσι that is translated as “to share in” or “participate” to describe the movement of the creature toward the Creator. Maximus’ theological anthropology is particularly salient in that within it is the presumption and exposition of the nature of human freedom that is a condition of what it means to be created in the image of God.

In On the Cosmic Mystery, Maximus clarifies:

“He therefore becomes a child of God and divine by grace through the Spirit. For a created being could not be revealed as a child of God through deification by grace unless he were firstborn of the Spirit in the exercise of free choice on account of the power of self-movement (αὐτοκίνητον) and self-determination (αὐτεξούσιον) that is inherent in human nature.”

(Maximus the Confessor 2003)

Maximus’ idea of self-movement refers to that which can move itself and it is the essence of the soul’s endowment with freedom of the will, and thus, its capaciousness to the degree in which every human being can be the primary cause of their own moral and spiritual direction. Maximus introduces αὐτεξούσιον as an accompaniment of self-movement, but separate, to clarify just how human beings may direct their lives toward participation in agape or turn away and move toward the regressive self-orientation that he describes as philautia. Therefore, human beings have this capacity for movement toward love according to God as well as the authority to determine the direction of that movement through the exercise of freedom. However, the vicissitudes of life constrained by finitude, historical contingencies, and imposed suffering are co-determinative factors that place certain limitations on our ability to exercise this freedom. For example, Papanikolaou’s proposal presumes that the ascetical subject has bodily autonomy necessary to enter a disciplined interior practice.

With consideration of embodiment and personhood that are subject to chronic fear, state surveillance, and societal exposure that invites violation rather than restoration, I argue that divinization cannot presume bodily autonomy as an inherent condition of participation. It must be understood in ways that distinguish between ontological freedom and social freedom given that the divine image persists even where bodily autonomy has been historically and structurally denied. A consummate example of the co-determinacy of historical contingency in this regard can be found in Maximus’ own experience of persecution under the authoritarian system of the Byzantine court of Emperor Constans II during the Monothelitism Controversy. In fact, the appositive title of “Confessor” that was firmly established posthumously by the Third Council of Constantinople for Maximus was applied based on this imperial persecution that culminated in his exile, trial, and mutilation. His adamant defense of the Chalcedonian creed’s definition of Jesus Christ became a direct threat to the imperial aim to unify the Byzantine empire against Arab invasions, theological orthodoxy aside. To ensure his silence, Emperor Constans II enacted imperial violence and ordered Maximus and his disciples to have their tongues cut out and their right hands to be severed (Allen and Bronwen 1999).

What was at stake was the integrity of the Christological confession that the Logos possessed a fully human will that freely cooperates with the divine will. For Maximus, the denial of the human will of Christ would compromise the confidence in his assumption of the fullness of human nature. How could the will and soul of which the will derives be a part of the divine image in true consubstantiality, and thus, be healed or sanctified? Consequently, divinization is no longer understood as divine–human communion made possible by the inherent freedom affirmed in agape but risks being distorted as a compulsory union enacted through dominative power exercised over humanity in contradiction of the divine image in which it has been created. Moreover, what Maximus’ passion provides is a historical and theological witness to the reality of violence imposed through degradation, humiliation, and defilement of the body; the human person experiences the diminishment of the very freedom that makes participation in divine life a possibility.

Pertinent to our task is to note the continuity between the violence of the imperial state and that of intimate and cultural forms of violence on an individual as well as communal level. The continuity is the exercise of what Maximus describes as the deliberative will, or gnome to a destructive end. As the expression of the natural will encumbered by the inclination to consider between various ways or modes of being to achieve a perceived good, Maximus clarifies this form of consideration that is formed within the context of “ignorance, doubt and opposition, since one only deliberates about something which is doubtful, not concerning what is free of doubt.” (Farrell 1990). Here is a fundamental characteristic within the Eastern Christian tradition that can be attributed to the Cappadocians in their distinction between the “image” and “likeness” of God, deliberation that results in the choice to turn away from agape being oppositional to nature. The capacity to choose is evidence of humanity’s sharing in the image of God and thus divine freedom, whereas the turning away is reflective of the corruption of inclination to bear the “likeness” of God.

Unlike traditions represented by St. Augustine who believed humanity to be existentially broken and without capacity to ascribe to virtue apart from divine grace, Maximus believed that humanity was naturally willed to virtue yet existentially encumbered in their mode of choice. I agree with Nancy J. Hudson who further explains in her book Becoming God that the Greek tradition in particular holds divine grace to be a continuous force within nature; however, when one turns away from the natural inclination to move toward God as the source of all things, it is this natural orientation that is rejected. She concludes, “it is not human nature that is fallen, but human existence that is polluted. This pollution or impurity is not an inherited condition, but it is a sickness that occurs when the movement toward deification is halted” (Hudson 2007).

The promise presented is a model of an optimistic theological anthropology that focuses on the original virtue of creation and the seemingly oppositional stance to devaluation in the assertion of its relational ontology that centers the theological virtue of agape. However, the experiential context of ascetic practice becomes a growing edge and deeply problematic frame out of which subordinationism of the body to the soul becomes a normative presumption in Maximus’ discourse. What I wish to refer to is Maximus’ deployment of relational hierarchies, dualisms, and binaries in his metaphoric associations that reinscribe themes of dominative power masked as generative governance.

This opens the question of how divine–human communion is experienced when human existence is “polluted” and restrained by dominative power. African American women’s literary tradition, more particularly the literary and theological imagination of Alice Walker unveiled in her novel The Color Purple, invites us to consider what it might mean to experience divinization when autoexousion is an ontological reality yet subject to desacralization as an existential context.

6. The Color Purple as a Womanist Theology of Divinization

As a guiding methodology for my engagement of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple as a theological text often reduced as a mere cultural resource, I employ the apologia of Womanist Catholic theologian, M. Shawn Copeland. Informed by literary and critical theorists, Copeland encourages theologians to approach literature as an end in itself whereby each literary text should be valued for its own sake rather than to instrumentalize it for a separate purpose outside of its constitution. Copeland cautions the theologian to avoid excavation of the literary text “in search of the supernatural” and the tendency “to shove the novel into doctrinal suppositions” (Copeland 2020). Another principle within Copeland’s apologia is humility in which she exhorts the theologian to proceed with “respect for the act of creation, the need to proceed in a manner that is courteous and sensitive to the writer’s specific language, and patience and sympathy in the act of reading” (Ibid). In this regard, the theologian assumes a posture in which they can experience the pedagogical capacity of the text to illuminate on the “mysteries of the human mind and human heart” and appreciate “the protean spiritual potential of aesthetic creation” (Ibid).

In accordance with Copeland’s apologia, a theological interpretation of The Color Purple must honor the writer and her subjectivity, self-identifications, structure, style, and priorities. Alice Walker identifies herself as womanist, which is a derivative of the term “womanish” that finds its origins in African American women’s folk culture of the American South. Walker defines womanist as “a feminist or feminist of color. Being grown-up. In charge. Serious: A woman who loves other women, sexually or non-sexually; an appreciation of women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility; women’s strength. Sometimes loves individual men; loves music, dance, the moon, Spirit, food, roundness, struggle, the folk, and herself, regardless.” Walker identifies the telos of womanism in her qualification that it is “committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people” (Walker 1983).

It is important to note that Walker locates herself within multiple heritages inclusive of African American, Native American, and Scotch–Irish cultural traditions. “I’m probably tri-spiritual,” Walker stated in an interview with Scott Winn and added “I was raised as a Christian. Now I love Buddhism and I love earth religion” (Walker 2000). African American women in theology and religion found inspiration in Walker’s womanist spirituality which has been described by womanist theologian, Karen Baker-Fletcher as a form of “relational integrative metaphysics” and something between pantheism and panentheism as she emphasizes divine omnipresence through the Spirit in creation, nature, and human communities (Baker-Fletcher 2006, pp. 64–66). Accordingly, The Color Purple can be read as Walker’s literary account of how the those desacralized by the lived intelligibilities of white racial narcissism, sexual violence, and heteropatriarchy can experience spiritual and material transformation upon their realization and embrace of this theological tenet of divine omnipresence. It is against these lived intelligibilities that are each distinctive byproducts of philautia that Walker narrates the joys and concerns of Black women and their individual and communal lives situated in the rural Georgia during the Jim Crow era.

The novel’s protagonist, Celie, is a poor fourteen-year-old African American girl who has lost her mother to sickness and who is referred to by the man whom she believes to be her father as “evil,” “ugly,” “ain’t smart,” and one who “tells lies” (Walker 1982, pp. 3, 8). The reader first meets her through Walker’s epistolary form in a series of letters that Celie writes to God and later to her beloved sister Nettie. In these letters, Celie shares her deepest and unbridled confessions and confidences through which the readers come to understand that she has borne two children, both the issue of repeated sexual assault and incest at the hands of this man whom she believes to be her father. In Celie’s narrative, her father takes her children upon each of their births in attempts to remove any evidence of his violation of her and convinces her that they are both dead when in actuality he has sold the children as orphans to a local preacher and his wife who are unable to have biological children on their own. Celie is soon married off to a much older African American widower and batterer, Albert Johnson, who has four small children from his previous marriage. Throughout the novel, Celie refers to Albert only as “Mr. ______.” Though there is a shift in patriarchal context from the household of her stepfather to her husband, Celie’s experience of physical, sexual, and psycho-emotional abuse persists. The social world of racialized poverty, colorism, physical and sexual violence, and surrogacy that structures Celie’s life must be understood as a historical extension of the multi-dimensional experience of desacralization as context, process, and embodied consciousness.

With the historical backdrop of the Jim Crow South, the novel spans from 1911 to 1945, and throughout Walker gives the reader a fictive yet accurate portrayal of the afterlife of slavery particularized by the racialized sexist norms and the emasculating impact of what bell hooks terms “plantation patriarchy.” Distinct from other patriarchal systems of gender roles and hierarchies exist in political leadership, social privilege, and the distribution of labor, craft, and family structure of which men of various African tribes were familiar, “plantation patriarchy” introduced a white patriarchal masculinity that was established and enforced through brute violence and a sadistic gender politics that was customized for an efficient plantation economy (Hooks 2004; Equiano 1789; Douglas 2016).

In her work, Jezebel Unhinged, Tamura Lomax provides an illustration of this plantation gender politics that was established by white enslavers who endeavored to de-gender and re-gender African men and women. She details:

It matters that North American slavery made black men and women sexual assault victims and survivors, that people were “put together” and treated as “common animals” for breeding and other deplorable purposes, that men and women were prostituted and forced to have multiple sexual partners they did not want, that their romantic bonds and bodily autonomy were ignored, that women and girls were forced to birth and nurture the offspring of their rapists, that they and their children were born into such a broken and demonic sociopolitical structure. It matters because many enslaved men and women carried the shame and markings of their abusers, and because such markings also estranged black love and ways of “seeing”—the self, each other, sex, family, accountability, responsibility, and boundaries. Relocating sex pathology in black women and girls is crucial to delineating between black women and men intraracially. Black men are not referred to as jezebels nor are their sexual histories with black women as problematized intracommunally. Equally essential to this project is distinguishing between black women—between jezebelian black women and “true” black women (black ladies)—and climacteric to that are cultural interpretations of the black “nuclear” family, which includes black patriarchy. In fact, discerning between good and bad black women became a linchpin for demonstrating and substantiating black morality after slavery.

(Lomax 2018)

Between the plantation patriarchy of the antebellum period and the Jim Crow era of the American South is a transgenerational thread of existential, relational, psycho-emotional brokenness rooted in race and gender-based philautia of modernity that is of great spiritual consequence. Celie, like many other female descendants of enslaved Africans in the Americas shaped by and within this context, is structurally disciplined to internalize her own desacralization and spiritually attend to themselves through a distorted perception of God, self, and others.

This distorted perception of God, self, and others is reified in her arranged marriage brokered by her alleged father to Albert Johnson, a man to whom Celie refers as Mister. This language communicates the degree of relational estrangement sustained through language. The formal title widens the disparity within the power dynamics between Celie, and the reader becomes more informed of Celie’s view of her “husband” as an authoritarian to be feared as opposed to loved. Papanikolaou’s insights on how the effects of violence on the human person can be aptly applied and observed in Celie’s case. In his reading of Maximus identification of fear and anger as obstacles to divine–human communion actualized in the learning and practice of love, Papanikolaou argues that when these emotions dominate the interiority of the human person, obstacles can surface in one’s ability to extend oneself in relationship with others that permit the actualization of love as well as the learning of how to love materializes. Celie’s repeated experience of sexual violation and surrogacy within both her childhood as well as marital homes is a combination of trauma to her body, personhood, and spirit. Both contexts and uninterrupted experiences of incest and intimate partner violence shape an interiority that had learned shame and silence to be affective norms of her existence. In such conditions and contexts, the capacity to discern love and imagine herself as worthy of love is the kind of spiritual injury that is sustained.

With Papanikolaou’s help, we can consider that divinization involves the principal factor of healing. If divinization occurs through love and violence hinders this realization, then the embodiment of the theological virtue of agape must account for spiritual injury whereby the internalization of the unworthiness projected is a perpetual woundedness compounded by the scar tissue of the but so immanent past. To find power to manage the oppressions of her physical world, Celie relies on sentiments of faith and addresses her letter to God as a form of prayer to draw strength during pain. In her addresses to God, Celie does not only escape from personal grief buts also shares her confidences concerning experiences of other community members.

However, this faith is skewed to the extent that it is weighed down by the burden and condition of mutability. It is faith shaped in and out of a distortion of what Rudolf Otto describes as mysterium tremendum, which he claimed to be an “ambiguously negative oppressive and overwhelming sense of the divine that evokes our feelings of creatureliness, of the diminution of our plans and hopes; it is this feeling that leads to a sense of unworthiness—a sense of the overpowering reality of that which stands over against us, and the fundamental distinction between the human and the divine” (Long 1986). While, on the level of description, Otto’s notion of the mysterium tremendum is consistent with the observations of scholars across religious traditions, the same narratives that testify to the sense of creaturely diminishment in what can be termed as genuine encounters with divine otherness, the narratives of formerly enslaved Africans in the diaspora, have also witnessed to the reality that the mysterium tremendum as named by Otto to be an abstraction that is detached from how the naming and understanding of these genuine divine–human encounters can be distorted when we fail to consider how this sense of unworthiness is structured through racial narcissism, exploitative capitalism, and misogyny.

And thus, the Celies of the world may draw from their faith to gather this strength and substance for survival; this unworthiness can not only be distorted through an existential context of desacralization but can consequently limit our ability to imagine flourishing. Readers experience the expansion and healing of Celie’s theological imagination in a series of interchanges with, ironically, Shug Avery, who is her husband’s mistress; more importantly, these interchanges disrupt the respectability politics that keep the community bound to white heteronormative circumscriptions as well as aspirational black patriarchy.

While many African American Christian cisgender wives who subscribe to “traditional family values” systems might have experienced humiliation and dismay at the thought of forming a relationship with their husband’s mistress, Celie finds solace in her shadow. When Shug is present, she is not subject to her estranged husband’s physical, sexual, or psychological abuses. Most profoundly, it is in what could be described as her sacred conversations with Shug on the nature of God and creation that turn out to be at the center of Celie’s transformation.

More specifically, it is Shug who disrupts this sense of unworthiness in Celie’s imagination of the nature of God in relation to creation. Celie details:

I is a sinner, say Shug. Cause I was born. I don’t deny it. But once you find out what’s out there waiting for us, what else can you be? Sinners have more good times, I say. You know why? She ast. Cause you ain’t all the time worrying bout God, I say. Naw, that ain’t it, she say. Us worry bout God a lot. But once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like.

You telling me God love you, and you ain’t never done nothing for him? I mean, not go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that? But if God love me, Celie, I don’t have to do all that. Unless I want to. There’s a lot of other things I can do I speck God likes…I can lay back and just admire stuff.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church t share God, not find God.

Shug is the first to probe her imaginings of the divine when she states: “Tell me what your God look like, Celie.” To Shug, Celie confesses: “ The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown.” Celie goes on to state: “He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted” with “bluish-gray” eyes and “white lashes.”

This identification of the continuity between the divine image that has been at the center of her theological imagination and the men in her life who have devalued and defiled her is one of the earliest signs of a shift in Celie’s interiority. Subsequently, Celie presents herself as open to receive Shug’s testimony of the transformation of her own god-image. Upon hearing Celie’s image of the divine, Shug laughs and shares in retort:

When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest…The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. God ain’t a he or she, but a It…not something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything…Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed (Walker 1982, pp. 162–63).

The conversation had between Shug and Celie here is a pivotal moment in the novel, and for our purposes as we observe the latter wrestling with the legacy of desacralization that has been inscribed upon her being and the soteriological anxiety derivative of the creation of white maleness as a soteriological category.8

This shift in Celie’s interiority and theological imagination resonates with the dynamism of Maximus doctrine of divinization involving the mutually dependent and co-constitutive experience of praktikē, physike, and theologia. Readers become aware of the reorientation of the self in Celie in the transformation of her desire and relational disposition. By embracing an understanding of divine love that is both present in all of creation, but even more profound, a grasp of a theological paradigm of an omnipresent divinity undefined by race nor gender, Celie can imagine divine love as noncontingent on human action and undisturbed by the pervasiveness of sin. There is a reorientation to the nature of an omnipresent divine love that comes into being by way of desire. Eros emerges as the reawakening of relational capacity in affirmation of Papanikolaou’s notion of the askesis of learning to love involves this restoration of one’s capacity to extend oneself in and toward healing relationality. The intimacy that develops between Celie and Shug is a demonstration of desire and ecstatic movement that is re-membered to its relational telos. It is an ecstatic movement toward divine love, and one that detaches it from philautia, that they might seek and be receptive to divine revelation and truth.

The appearance of Shug in the life of Celie sheds light on the experiences and results in shocking discoveries about the divine and her most formative relationships. Celie later announces these discoveries to the reader when she states: “My daddy lynch. My mama crazy. All my little half brothers and sisters no kin to me. My children not my sister and brother. Pa not my Pa” (Walker 1982, p. 151). The newly acquired realization of numerous lies in the past liberates Celie from all ties of kinship, which evokes her decision to start a new life with another God to protect her. God “must be sleep… I don’t write to God no more, I write to you” (Walker 1982, pp. 151, 164), in her letter to her sister Nettie.

With the help of Shug, Celie achieves selfhood and celebrates her healing from the dependence on men and their white-haired God. It is important to note here that this white-haired God is an idol carved out the false equation of the essence of God with a mutable and fraudulent good. Within the co-option of the essence of God as white, classed, gendered as male, and heterosexualized, divine–human communion involves spiritual transformation that strikes down the idolization of the essence of God while at the same time affirming one’s belonging in the divine economy. Celie engages in this iconoclasm, and it results in her new vision of God, an omnipresent God seen in every act of creation. “Dear God. Dear Stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything, Dear God” (Walker 1982, p. 242). The life story of Celie represents the infinite traffic of life, death, and reincarnation inherent to the concept of Chi of indigenous African culture and religion (Juneja 2008).

Celie engages in what womanist pastoral theologian Stephanie M. Crumpton describes as the “de-idealization” of theology that perpetuates negative cultural images of God and the self that perpetuate and legitimate violence (Crumpton 2014, p. 165). Celie replaced the negative cultural images of God and self with the redemptive cultural self-object typified in the persona of Shug Avery. Consistent with Crumpton’s interviews with Black female survivors of intimate and cultural violence, where she highlights the significant role of the Black female pastors in the transformative process of restructuring their spirituality, Shug can be interpreted to a great degree as a pastoral figure for Celie who became a redemptive idealizing cultural self-object for her that affirmed Black women’s humanity and God’s desire “to show Herself from within distinctly female bodies” (Ibid, pp. 96–97). Celie’s experience is a literary heuristic device through which Crumpton’s argument that through the interrogation of oppressive God images (such as a white God that desacralizes Blackness and femininity) coupled with the affirming experience of mirroring through redemptive cultural self-objects, survivors of intimate and cultural violence are able to develop a more life-giving theology for their lives.

Those theologians who have begun to identify themselves as Christian womanist have found inspiration in Walker’s literary presentation of a reimagining of the divine by and for the healing of black women’s interiority as the affirmation of divine omnipresence, particularly underscored by an emphasis on divine–human consubstantiality. The doctrine holds that the Incarnate God (Jesus) is of the same essence (homoousios) as God the Father in divinity and of the same essence as humans in humanity. Whereas the modern Christian tradition places emphasis on the consubstantial Christ, the Cappadocians remind us of the vitality and significance of the Spirit in Christ, creation, and healing. In his treatise, On the Holy Spirit, St. Basil of Caesarea states:

If you consider creation, remember that the heavenly powers were established by the Spirit…Christ comes, and the Spirit prepares His way. He comes in the flesh, but the Spirit is never separated from Him. Working miracles and gifts of healing come from the Holy Spirit…Through the Spirit we become intimate with God…Resurrection from the dead is accomplished by the operation of the Spirit…If “creation” means bringing the dead back to life, how great the work of the Spirit is! The Spirit gives us risen life, refashioning our souls in the spiritual life. On the other hand, if “creation” means the conversion of sinners to a better way of life, and the renewal of this earthly life, and changing our earthy, passionate life into heavenly citizenship, then we should know that our souls attain such a high degree of exaltation through the Spirit. Understanding all this, how can we be afraid of giving the Spirit too much honor?

(St. Basil of Caesarea 1980)

Here we can note some connections between Cappadocian thought and a womanist doctrine of God and creation whereby divine omnipresence of the Spirit is a core tenet. However, Basil helps us consider the specific activity of the divine from both a natural as well as historical perspective. Most particularly, the Spirit is the operative necessity that enables divine–human relation and, furthermore, the transfiguration of the human condition. As we consider Maximus’ conversation on self-movement toward self-determination in the Spirit, we find a conversation partner for understanding Celie’s internalization of unworthiness and transformation that occurs in her interpenetrative experience of praktikē/purification, physike/natural contemplation, and theologia/contemplation of God in the self-emptying of unworthiness as she embraces the concept of divine omnipresence in herself and all creation.

In Maximus, to be “firstborn of the Spirit” is evident “in the exercise of free choice”, self-movement and self-determination” to not only partake in the image but also in the “likeness” of God in our movement toward love as participation in divine life. Yet this movement presumes a subject who recognizes herself as capable of such participation. But what about a subject whose movement has been redirected through violence toward negation? While the ascetical tradition might presume an inflated self or a will that must be humbled before God as a part of the purification stage of divinization, Celie presents a case of a deflated self or will confirmed to hold its personhood in suspension. To throw this embodiment out of suspension, what is required may be named a kenosis of unworthiness, which is a relinquishment of the false self produced through racialized and gendered domination.

Here the parabolic relation between kenosis and theosis takes on a different valence. The downward movement does not represent voluntary humility in the classical senses but an imposed descent into conditions of devaluation. Maximus’ concept of self-movement clarifies that the authority to direct one’s movement remains inherent to humanity’s creation in the image of God. Celie’s transformation requires the refusal of a false kenosis that denies her participation in divine life. Her movement toward self-determination becomes the condition for authentic kenosis that affirms the truth of our creation rather than domination. If God is present within all creation, then the vertex of the parabola shifts and emerges in the recognition of divine presence within the self.

Through this recognition, the kenosis of unworthiness occurs as Celie relinquishes the false narratives that have governed her self-understanding. Within Maximus’ framework, her self-movement is redirected toward love according to God. Her self-determination becomes visible in acts of speech, labor, and relational repair. These acts signal participation in divine life as divine–human communion. The Spirit’s presence enables the praktite/purification through the embodiment of a major principle of ascetic practice of renunciation through the conformity of the will, redirection of movement, and self-emptying becomes the shedding of imposed unworthiness rather than the affirmation of it.

Critical to Celie’s self-emptying of imposed humiliation is a return to divine love through the material reconciliation with her own body, recognition of divinity within herself, and vital aspects of the material world in nature, the fields, trees, and the sky. There is profound resonance between Celie’s kenotic experience and Maximus’ non-linear approach toward divinization that holds praktite/purification to be inextricably connected to physike and theologia. However, the obstacle to be surmounted is not the desire for pleasure but the denial of herself as a person worthy of experiencing pleasure. Celie allows herself to experience intimacy outside of the marital heterosexist paradigm as her renunciation of self-negation.

Kimi Bryson-Reilly conducts a careful analysis of the role sex and sexuality both play in Celie’s transformation and notes: “Shug’s womanist God” not only has an unconditional love for creation but “loves pleasure, celebrates sex, irrespective of the gender identities of the partners [and] resists evangelicalism’s divinized patriarchy” (Bryson-Reilly 2025). This is a salient observation of historical context wherein which American evangelicalism in its racialized sexist repressive sexual politics has discouraged Black women from growing in their knowledge of God as well as themselves. She reads Celie’s move to embrace pleasure and relationality, particularly with Shug, as a pivotal point in the elevation of her spiritual consciousness and liberation, enabling Celie to extend herself by gifting to another the beauty of the experience of her essence and potential.

Celie conceives future possibilities for herself in relationships, community, writing, and the transformation of her home life. She experiences the spiritual reality of healing, the revelation of truth, revitalization of her spiritual commitment to life, and the grasp of an ethos of justice that brings her actions and decisions to a hypostatic union. Celie’s “Dear Everything” is a production and indication of the harmonious movement of the soul through physike whereby her contemplation of God in and through all of creation involves her embrace of a relational ontology of divine love. In her experience of physike, Celie spiritually discerns the logoi of creation as well as experiences the “ecstasy of love” and “spiritual calm” that Maximus describes as markers of theologia, or purification in love (St. Maximus the Confessor 1865; Vishnevskaya 2006).

Celie’s experience teaches us that the embodiment of agape increases the human capacity to affirm one’s divine freedom. The affirmation of freedom as constitutive reality of the divine image is evidenced in the novel’s turning point in which Celie comes into self-awareness of her agency and progressively asserts this agency in the renunciation of desacralization as an embodied consciousness. As Eboni Marshall Turman argues in her proposition of a womanist ethic of incarnation rooted in the doctrine of divine-human consubstantiality, “black women embody the radical mediation that is the imago of the God they serve.” (Turman 2013). In recapitulation of the Incarnation, Turman argues, is a mediation between the en sarki and the kata sarka that retains historical memory of the violences endured yet the en sarki is the most foundational a priori of Black women’s personhood. As Celie embraces the truths denied her, of her children and beloved sister who are yet alive, she wrestles with malicious thoughts to enact retaliatory violence against Albert. In choosing not to do so with the help of Shug, Celie renounces violence as requisite for her spiritual and physical liberation (Walker 1982, p. 120). Her anger transmutes into a moment of self-determination to agape and to bring into subjugation the passion to hate, eventually without regard for Albert’s worthiness or refusal to reciprocate.

In Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective, Baker-Fletcher argues that it is the Spirit that enables humanity to live or dance with God amid the tensions associated with the goodness of God and the reality of suffering and evil. She finds wisdom in the process metaphysic that helps her to tease out her Christology that holds Jesus to be fully dust and fully spirit and flesh out the Eastern notion of perichoresis. “Even in the depths of hell…God is there. If the power of life is omnipresent and if it can inspire love of the hater regardless of the temptation to hate the hater, then it is all-inclusive love.” Engaging St. Augustine’s commentary on 1 John, she further clarifies: “…the power of God in Christ…is present in God’s compassionate, comforting, and resurrecting love, which is the power of the Holy Spirit. All three relational actions of the divine community create and love. This power of Love, found in the Holy Spirit, Augustine wrote, united Lover and Beloved. All three persons participate in divine love” (Baker-Fletcher 2006, pp. 147, 161, 207).

Participation and acceptance of divine love is what allows Celie to eventually confront Albert. When Celie tells him of her plans to leave him, he spews insults against her to diminish her hope. Celie interrupts with “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook… But I’m here” (Ibid, p. 207). A womanist approach to theologizing divination then might find this moment to be a declaration of divine–human consubstantiality in and over against the lived intelligibilities of race, gender, radical patriarchy and heterosexism that have historically governed her existence. As Maximus affirms in reflection on the Incarnate God in Christ:

With his foreknowledge He links both spiritual and material things to each other and to Himself; as their cause, beginning, and end. He keeps all things in his close control, though they are widely different in nature. Just by the force of their relationship to Him as their beginning, He disposes them to each other; by this force all things are led into a harmony of motion and existence.

(St. Maximus 1982)

What then does divinization as healing look like when considering bodies held in suspension of being but the restoration of self-movement in harmonious movement, or kinesis, with truth and the reclamation of self-determination as a participation in divine love omnipresent in a reality in which our existence is held in relation to God and creation. It is from this redirection and healing of the gnomic will that some of the broader theological implications of Celie’s divinization come into view.

7. Conclusions

A responsible theology of divinization must offer a relational ontology that can be meaningful in a modern U.S. context in which the misogynistic racialization of Christian soteriological discourse has been death-dealing to black women and their communities. The desacralized are the many Celies of the world who experience divinization as the restoration of the capacity to love and receive love. While Maximus The Confessor could not have imagined the modern racialized sexist cooption of theological discourse, his distinction between philautia and agape as well as his account of the impediments to love remain instructive for our interpretation of racial narcissism and misogynoir as perversions of desire.

Inspired by the theological vision of Alice Walker, a womanist theology of divinization argues that the perversions of love that fashion racialized sexist violence along with the internalization of unworthiness require a revisitation of the kenosis–theosis correlation. Divinization needs to include the relinquishment of the absurdities that negate divine–human personhood. Maximus’ account of self-movement and self-determination affirms the capacity to participate in divine life despite contexts and histories of violence and desacralization. Self-determination can be recovered and can take place through the reorientation of the disposition of the soul and body toward divine love as the work of the Spirit within humanity and all of creation. And the embrace of literary imaginaries also affirms Papanikolaou’s observation that “If the Christian calling is to learn how to love, then an ascetics of divine-human communion cannot be confined either to the monastery or to the church—the whole world is the field in which these ascetics must be played out” (Papanikolaou 2012).