Man is divinised through grace

The soul isdivinised. Its life is a complete contrast with what it was before, and with what it so often encounters around it! Our faith tells us that a soul in the state of grace is truly a divinised soul: God has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). This theological concept of man is almost as far above the purely natural and human concept as God himself is above humanity. We are human beings of flesh and blood, not angels. But through the influence of the soul in grace, this divinisation overflows into the body, as a kind of anticipation of its glorious resurrection.

“Shall I, then, dare to say, ‘Because I am holy’ (Ps 85:2)? If I say ‘holy’ as one who sanctifies himself and needs no one to sanctify me, I would be proud and false. But if I say ‘holy’ as one ‘made holy’, as it is written, ‘Be holy, for I am holy’ (Lev 19:2), then the body of Christ may venture, and this one man crying out from the ends of the earth, may venture – with his Head, and under his Head – to say, ‘For I am holy’.”²