Apotheosis

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Apotheosis is the word for lifting a subject up to the level of a god. High in the dome of the United States Capitol Building hangs The Apotheosis of Washington, painted in 1865, showing a mortal risen into divine company.

  The same word covers far more than one painting. It names any process of divinization or deification, treating a person, a living thing, or even an abstraction as if it were a deity. In religion the process is called divinization or deification. In art it becomes a whole visual genre built around gods, angels, and rising figures.

  Which rulers claimed divine honors while they were still alive? Why did Christian theologians spend centuries arguing over whether a human could become godlike without ceasing to be human? And why did composers and poets keep reaching for this one word, again and again, across centuries and continents?

• 2. Gods Among Mortals

  ›

  Centuries before the Hellenistic age, Mesopotamian rulers from Naram-Sin to Hammurabi already presided over imperial cults. Egypt's pharaohs did the same. Every pharaoh who died in Egypt's New Kingdom became the god Osiris, having already been treated as Horus while still ruling. The architect Imhotep received the same honor after his death, though the shift into godhood took well over a thousand years. By the time it was complete, he had become linked mainly to medicine. About a dozen non-royal Egyptians eventually reached this same status.

  In Greek religion, Hercules stood among the humans who crossed into godhood, usually raised up by one of the Twelve Olympians. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, Zeus handed the mortal Psyche the gods' own ambrosia and turned her into a goddess. Queen Berenice II of Egypt was deified like other Ptolemaic rulers. Her court claimed that her sacrificed hair rose into the sky and became the star cluster Coma Berenices.

  From the Geometric period of the ninth century BC, long-dead local heroes received chthonic rites at shrines called heroon. Philip II of Macedon became the first Greek leader to claim divine honors for himself. At his wedding to his sixth wife, his own enthroned image was carried through the procession. That practice at Aigai, his capital, later spread to the Macedonian kings, then to Julius Caesar, and eventually to Rome's own emperors.

  Some leaders reached god status before death, among them Alexander the Great. Others, including members of the Ptolemaic dynasty, waited until after they died. A hero's cult status, similar to apotheosis, was even granted to a few long-admired artists, including Homer.

  By the sixth century BC, Greek hero cults had turned civic rather than familial. Even so, some families kept hereditary claims alive, among them the Eumolpides, descended from Eumolpus, who held priestly rights tied to the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  Unlike Rome's deified emperors, Greek heroes never rose to Olympus. Ancient belief kept them beneath the earth, with only local power. That is why their rites echoed those for Hecate and Persephone rather than Zeus and Apollo. Heracles and Asclepius broke that pattern, honored sometimes as gods and sometimes as heroes, with night rites followed by sacrifice the next day. Prometheus, remembered as a hero to humanity, was said to have stolen fire from Mount Olympus and given it to mortals.

  Rome would take this same idea further, turning it into a formal vote in the Senate.

• 3. Rome's Divine Emperors

  ›

  Before the Republic ended, only one figure, the god Quirinus, had achieved apotheosis in Roman religion, through his identification with Romulus. Everything changed in 42 BC, when the triumvir Octavian secured the posthumous deification of his adopted father, the dictator Julius Caesar. A vote in the Roman Senate became the standard path to divinity, sometimes just confirming an emperor's own decree. Deific language often circulated quietly beforehand, within the palace itself. Reigning rulers often deified a popular predecessor for a practical reason: doing so lent them legitimacy and won public favor.

  The public ceremony marking this transition was called a consecratio. It centered on releasing an eagle, meant to carry the dead ruler's soul up to heaven. Coins and other artwork often echoed that ascent, sometimes showing the soul rising in a chariot. The clearest surviving image is a relief on the base of the Column of Antoninus Pius, who died in 161. It shows him and his wife Faustina the Elder, who died around 140, lifted by a giant winged figure representing Eternity. Personifications of Roma and the Campus Martius sit below the scene, eagles fly above, and the imperial couple appear dressed as Jupiter and Juno.

  The historian Dio Cassius says he witnessed it firsthand. He described the lavish public consecratio for Pertinax, an emperor who ruled for only three months in 193. Septimius Severus ordered that deification. Deified Romans received the title Divus, or Diva for women, added after their names. Sometimes an emperor's dead loved ones qualified too, including Hadrian's companion Antinous. Roman religion drew a rough line between a deus, a natural-born god, and a divus, a mortal elevated to divinity, though the distinction was not always kept consistent. Temples and columns went up specifically to give these new gods a place for worship.

  The imperial cult found its strongest following in the provinces, especially in the Eastern Empire, where deified rulers were nothing new. Rome's own traditionalists and intellectuals stayed cooler on the idea. Some mocked the practice privately, including in The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius, a satire usually credited to Seneca. It ridiculed a weak emperor's rise to godhood.

  That same skepticism about deified rulers would echo far beyond Rome, in traditions across Asia that granted or denied godhood to their own kings.

• 4. Faith Across Asia

  ›

  Chinese folk religion absorbed a striking number of once-living figures into its Taoist pantheon, among them Guan Yu, Iron-crutch Li, and Fan Kuai. The Song dynasty general Yue Fei was deified during the later Ming dynasty. Some practitioners regard him as one of three highest-ranking heavenly generals. The Ming dynasty epic Investiture of the Gods built its entire plot around legends of this kind of deification.

  Buddhism treats Buddhahood, achieved even by Gautama Buddha himself, as a goal open to the faithful. Many of its major deities are described as having once been ordinary humans. Most of these figures are understood as avatars or rebirths of earlier ones.

  Hinduism grants comparable status to Rama, worshiped as an avatar of the god Vishnu despite having lived as a human. Swaminarayan is a documented historical figure who lived from 1781 to 1830. Some Hindus regard him as an avatar of Krishna, himself an avatar of Vishnu, or as an even higher deity in his own right. Bharat Mata, or Mother India, started out in the late nineteenth century as a national personification invented by a circle of Bengali intellectuals. She now receives actual worship.

  Across a stretch from India to Indonesia, various Hindu and Buddhist rulers were portrayed as deities, usually only after they died. Jayavarman VII, the Khmer Empire's first Buddhist king, ruled from 1181 to 1218. He used his own face as the model for the many statues of Buddha and Avalokitesvara he commissioned. Some observers have called the personality cult built around Kim Il-Sung, founder of North Korea, a form of deification, despite the state's official atheism.

  Christian theology, by contrast, would spend centuries arguing over whether becoming godlike required a human to stop being human at all.

• 5. Becoming Godlike In Christianity

  ›

  Christian theology avoids the word apotheosis entirely, preferring deification, divinization, or the Greek term theosis. Mainstream teaching in both East and West holds that Jesus Christ was God who took on mortal life. It rejects the opposite view, called adoptionism, that a mortal earned divinity. Second Peter 1:4 states that Christ became human so that humans might become, in its words, partakers of the divine nature. In John 10:34, Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6 back at his questioners: Is it not written in your Law, I have said you are gods? Heretical groups such as the Waldensians faced accusations of self-deification.

  The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, written by Anglican priest Alan Richardson, calls deification the goal of every Christian in Orthodoxy. It notes that humanity is made in the image and likeness of God. Saint Irenaeus put it directly: if the Word has been made man, it is so that men may be made gods. That line became standard across Greek theology. In the fourth century, Saint Athanasius repeated Irenaeus almost word for word. In the fifth century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria wrote that believers become sons by participation, in Greek methexis. For Saint Maximus the Confessor, deification was, in his words, the encompassing and fulfillment of all times and ages, tied directly to the Incarnation. Writing at the end of the tenth century, Saint Symeon the New Theologian described God conversing with those he has made gods by grace. He compared it to a friend conversing with his friends, face to face.

  Eastern Orthodox theology names this transformation theosis, a union with God. It is reached through catharsis, a purification of body and mind, and theoria, an illuminating vision of God. According to Hierotheos (Vlachos), the process rests on direct spiritual insight, called gnosis, rather than the rational or academic emphasis common in Western Christianity.

  The Roman Catholic Church never uses the word apotheosis. It relies instead on the Latin-derived divinization and deification, giving the idea less emphasis than the Eastern Catholic Churches do. It still surfaces in the Mass, as the priest prays while pouring wine and water into the chalice: by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity. Catholic teaching separates natural life from supernatural life, the latter described as what God freely gives to lift humans above their natural state. It is received through prayer and the sacraments.

  Deification begins in the soul through baptism's sanctifying grace, and reaches spiritual completion in Paradise. Full deification, including the body, arrives only at the resurrection on Judgment Day. Only saints receive this full deification, while the damned are merely made immortal. The whole Universe is unconditionally predestined for deification, though humans and angels must earn theirs through moral behavior.

  Several Mormon denominations teach their own version of apotheosis under the name exaltation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that sufficiently obedient members reach the celestial kingdom's highest level. There they live eternally with God, keep their families, and become gods who create worlds and spirit children. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has taught that religious polygamy is necessary for exaltation. The LDS Church itself no longer enforces that requirement. Wesleyan Protestantism links theosis to entire sanctification, the belief that a Christian can, in principle, live entirely free of voluntary sin. Wesleyan theologians trace this idea to the Eastern Fathers, who saw salvation restoring a deification originally built into human nature before the fall.

  The Druze faith broke away from Isma'ilism and then from Islam altogether. It teaches that the Imam Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was God in the flesh. Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad, founder of the faith and chief author of its manuscripts, declared that God had taken on human nature as al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Historian David R. W. Bryer classifies the Druze as ghulat, or extremists, within Isma'ilism. He describes their faith as diverging from Islam as sharply as Islam diverges from Christianity, and Christianity from Judaism. Druze believers attribute to al-Hakim the same divine qualities that Christians attribute to Jesus.

  Painters and sculptors would spend centuries finding ways to put these competing claims about godhood onto canvas and into stone.

• 6. Art and Ceiling Scenes

  ›

  The Apotheosis of Voltaire borrows classical Greco-Roman pagan imagery and features the god Apollo, though its actual subject is a modern writer. Scenes like it typically lift the subject into the heavens, or show them rising toward it, ringed by angels, putti, and personified virtues. From the Baroque period onward, artists used this same imagery purely as an honorific device for rulers, generals, and fellow artists. Painters also gave the same treatment to personified places and abstractions. The format suited ceilings and domes so well that it became the standard choice for both.

  The Catholic Church avoids the word apotheosis in doctrine, yet its art keeps circling back to the same composition. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Ascension of Jesus share much of that visual language with pagan apotheosis scenes. So do many paintings of saints being lifted to heaven, some even titled apotheosis in modern times. Early examples typically honored the founders of religious orders after their canonization. Among them was Saint Ignatius Loyola, painted by Andrea Pozzo between 1691 and 1694. His fresco sits beside the nave cupola of the Church of the Gesù in Rome. Saint Dominic received similar treatment in Santi Domenico e Sisto, painted between 1674 and 1675. Pietro da Cortona's Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power, painted in the 1630s, celebrated Pope Urban VIII and his family. It combined the papacy's crossed keys with the giant bees of the Barberini coat of arms.

  Composers would soon find their own way to stage the same rise to glory, using sound instead of paint.

• 7. Music and Poetry

  ›

  French Baroque composers used apotheosis as an alternate title for the tombeau, a memorial piece written for chamber ensembles to honor friends or patrons. François Couperin wrote two such tributes. One honored Arcangelo Corelli, called Le Parnasse, ou L'Apothéose de Corelli. The other honored Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose movements include Enlévement de Lully au Parnasse, depicting Lully being raised to Parnassus. Romantic composers reused the term for finales built around a theme returning in grand, exalted form. Franz Liszt became especially associated with the device. He stretched his hero themes far beyond their original shape, slowing them down until they split into smaller fragments. Some twentieth-century critics dismissed the technique as vacuous bombast. Richard Wagner borrowed the word metaphorically, calling Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the apotheosis of the dance.

  Hector Berlioz titled the final movement of his Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale simply Apotheose. He composed the work in 1846 for a monument to France's war dead. Two of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballets, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, close with apotheosis finales, as does Ludwig Minkus's La Bayadère. Igor Stravinsky gave the same title, Apotheose, to closing episodes in both his ballets Apollo and Orpheus. Maurice Ravel closed his Ma mère l'Oye with a tableau also titled Apotheose. Concerned in 1970 about arms proliferation and environmental damage, Czech composer Karel Husa named his response Apotheosis for This Earth. Aram Khachaturian labeled a segment of his ballet Spartacus Sunrise and Apotheosis.

  In poetry, Samuel Menashe, who lived from 1925 to 2011, wrote a poem simply titled Apotheosis, as did Barbara Kingsolver. Emily Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886, wrote Love, Poem 18: Apotheosis. Dejan Stojanović's Dancing of Sounds includes the line Art is apotheosis. Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote a poem called Love's Apotheosis. Samuel Taylor Coleridge titled a 1787 poem The Apotheosis, or the Snow-Drop. Alexander Pope parodied the whole tradition in The Rape of the Lock. There, the stolen lock of hair at the center of the poem's mock feud rises into the heavens instead of a king or a saint.

  That same lock of hair, raised skyward as a joke, sits close to a far more literal claim to godhood. Elsewhere, a living human expected the real thing.

• 8. Anthropolatry

  ›

  Ancient Japan practiced anthropolatry, the deification and worship of actual living humans, toward its own emperors. Followers of Socinianism later faced accusations of practicing anthropolatry themselves. The anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach went further, professing an entire religion built around worshiping all human beings without exception. Auguste Comte took a narrower view. He venerated only those individuals who had made positive contributions to humanity, and excluded everyone else.

  Comte's list of the deserving, unlike Feuerbach's embrace of everyone, quietly picks winners among mortals. It is the same choice that every court, cult, and creed in this history had already made, long before Comte wrote it down.