I.1 The Argument

To be human is to want to be better – if not a better person, then at least better at something. Our lives are haunted by the gap between ideals and reality. We are not only capable of forming ideals – we are also capable of recognizing that we fall short. That shortfall is why most lives take the form of a quest toward an ideal. We tell a story to ourselves and to others about how we strive to close the gap between who we are and who we would like to be.

What makes this quest so quixotic is that the goalposts keep shifting. As I approach my earlier ideal of a good citizen or a good husband or a good scholar, I come to realize that I could be an even better citizen, husband, or scholar. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Similarly, the more you strive to be virtuous, the more aware you are of your vices. The more we consult our conscience, the more it demands of us. That is why saints think of themselves as sinners, while sinners think of themselves as saints.

The first premise of this book is that we cannot seek to be better unless we are guided by a notion of the best. How could one identify “better” except in relation to what is best? The very notion of progress rests on the notion of a goal. As Aristotle says, the perfect is logically prior to the imperfect, just as actuality is prior to potency. Apart from our conception of the perfect, how would we know that we have room for improvement?

All of this might seem unexceptionable, but the quest for perfection has many enemies. Worldly wise people remind us that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Are not we often told, “one day at a time” or “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey”? Perhaps we should focus simply on getting better rather than on being the best. Who wants their life tyrannized by the pursuit of an impossible dream? There is something obsessive about the pursuit of perfection.

In the life of nations, the dangers of perfection are even more evident. The politics of utopia has been widely discredited by the experience of communism and fascism. Today, politically savvy people talk about incremental reform, piecemeal social engineering, and the science of muddling through. Serious-minded reformers usually despise utopians as mere daydreamers. But those reformers are wrong: there is no reform without utopia. And there is no becoming better without aiming for the best.

These attacks on the pursuit of perfection are better understood as attacks on perfectionism – that is, on misguided ways of seeking the perfect. Perfectionism, as an obsessive or fanatical idealism, is indeed the enemy of the good. The perfect itself cannot be the enemy of the good, because in practical reasoning the concepts of good, better, and best all imply each other and are inseparable. There are many ways to go wrong: one can pursue a good ideal in a bad way or simply pursue a bad ideal. An obsessive pursuit of an ideal often reflects an imperfect ideal, not the imperfection of idealism. Captain Ahab and Ebenezer Scrooge are to be faulted not for pursuing an ideal but for pursuing the wrong ideal. What about settling for the imperfect? Even that goal rests on knowing what is perfect.

A fundamental axiom of liberal political theory holds that a society can become better even when its citizens disagree about what is best. We can agree on the means even when we disagree about the ends. Augustine, for example, argued that both pagans and Christians can agree about the need for civil peace as a means to very different ends. More individual liberty and more economic security are popular ideas today because they are compatible with many different conceptions of the best human life. What makes liberal politics viable is that those with different conceptions of what is best can often agree about how to make society better. Better still implies best, but the same means of betterment can serve more than one end. Nonetheless, whether more individual liberty or more economic security is better depends on one’s conception of what is best.

The second premise of this book is that the idea of a god or of the divine functions in practical reasoning as the limit case of what is best. Without a conception of godlike perfection, we could not choose what is better.Footnote ¹ That is what the word “god” effectively means in our lives: whatever we take to be the best. It is important to note, however, that one can pursue a godlike ideal without pursuing a god. Augustine argued that because we desire God, that desire must be implanted by God. But the human pursuit of the perfect does not imply the existence of a perfect being. Practical reason posits perfection as an ideal to regulate our efforts to become better.

The medieval theologian Anselm famously defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”Footnote ² It is a conceptual truth about God, says Anselm, that he must be perfect; the very notion of affirming or imitating an imperfect God is incoherent.Footnote ³ Even though the biblical God admits to making mistakes, the Bible often describes God as perfectly holy and righteous. The gods of Greek myths possess some obvious perfections: they never die or grow old, they are beautiful and strong, and they lead lives of leisure. Of course, these gods are far from morally perfect, which is why Plato will insist that the poets lie about the gods. As we shall see, nothing is more revealing of the differences between Plato and Aristotle than their differing views of divine (and, hence, human) perfection.

To judge a god to be imperfect would be to erect a standard above that god by which to measure it. That standard of perfection, then, functions in practical reasoning as the true god.Footnote ⁴ This line of reasoning led Plato and Aristotle to argue that the divinities of the Greek poets were not the true gods. Plato, for example, repeatedly says that “god is the measure of all things.” To be the measure of all things means precisely “nothing greater can be conceived.” As we shall see, both Greek philosophers and the Bible will treat divinity as the ultimate standard for practical reasoning.Footnote ⁵ Even to describe a god as the highest or supreme being is to presume to take his measure.Footnote ⁶ Divine perfection is a presupposition of religious thought, not a proposition subject to verification.

But why cannot our standard of what is best be a human standard? If I want to be a better philosopher, why shouldn’t I adopt a human role model, such as Plato or Aristotle? If I want to be a better citizen, why shouldn’t I look to Pericles or George Washington? Again, logically, I could not know that Plato and Aristotle were better philosophers or that Pericles and Washington were better citizens without an ideal of the absolute best, most godlike philosopher or citizen. These paragons are better only by reference to the best. I might prefer human exemplars because they are better known to me, but I am still relying implicitly on an ideal that transcends human exemplars. There is an irony in measuring oneself in relation to Plato or Aristotle, given that they measured themselves in relation to a god.

We should never assume that any actual human being is the best possible exemplar. If Roger Bannister had modeled himself on the best actual human runner, he never would have broken the four-minute mile. There is no known upper limit on human achievement, which is why the idea of divine perfection is inescapable. To be the best we might be in any field of human endeavor is to reach for god. To do anything else is to sell ourselves short. Nothing seems so foolish and presumptive as to adopt a divine role model; yet rationality requires nothing less. We will never know what is humanly possible unless we aim for the divine. Our choice is not whether to seek the divine but rather to decide what kind of divinity to aim for.

We seek the divine because we want a more meaningful life, one that transcends the limits of our current existence. Meaning is a relation between a part and a larger whole. A word gets its meaning from the sentence of which it is a part. Similarly, the deeds of my own life get their meaning from the larger contexts in which I place them. If I am working to abolish slavery, I might first see my mission in terms of the history of abolitionism in my own nation; then I might see it in the context of the human history of abolitionism; third, I might see abolitionism in relation to God’s liberation of Israel from slavery in the Bible; and finally, I might see my life’s work in relation to God’s liberation of humanity from sin itself. Similarly, I might welcome a needy stranger into my home as an act of compassion or hospitality; I might also welcome him in relation to the duties of good citizenship; finally, I might welcome a stranger as if he were Elijah or Christ himself. Meaning is additive: each of these stages of ascent creates more levels of meaning in my life. By interpreting my life in relation to the divine, I achieve the widest possible context of meaning. In a purely mathematical sense, a life lived in relation to a divine ideal possesses more meaning than one lacking such a frame.Footnote ⁷

The third premise of this book is that language about the divine – whether in myth, theology, or philosophy – is an invaluable window on human nature. Whatever religious language might tell us about the gods, it certainly reveals a lot about us. In this book, I make no attempt to argue for the existence of any gods. I set aside the whole question of divine reality. I aim to show instead how the idea of god functions in human practical reasoning, especially in classical Greek philosophy and in the Bible. We ascribe perfection to the gods because we need a measure for our aspirations, not because we can claim knowledge of the divine nature.

In every human culture, there are stories celebrating human beings who seek to become gods – and stories about the hazards of doing so. Mythology everywhere, but especially Greek mythology, is concerned with the boundaries between humans and gods – and with the violations of those boundaries. We are deeply ambivalent about the human ambition to become like a god – an ambition that seems both heroic and hubristic. At the same time, the gods are notorious for their unwelcome intrusions into human life, which range from impregnating women to killing those with hubris. In Homer, the gods are passionate spectators of the human drama, while the humans regard the gods with wariness. Both gods and men police the boundaries between divine and human very carefully.

Some anthropologists claim that all religions originated in practices of honoring, remembering, and worshipping the dead, who were felt – or feared – to be a living presence. Religion thus rests on the idea of the survival of human beings after death – that is, on the partial or complete divinization of human beings. Indeed, human beings do survive death – if only in the memory of the living. By remembering and worshipping the dead, we either honor their survival or ensure it. Stories of human efforts to become divine are thought experiments in human self-understanding: Are we more like other animals or more like the gods?

The quest to become like god is as central to ancient philosophy as it is to ancient religion; philosophy arose as a kind of purification of religion. The first people ever to call themselves “philosophers” – Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Parmenides – also claimed to have themselves become gods. And they were all worshipped by their disciples and others as divinities in human form. If to be divine meant to possess superhuman knowledge, then philosophy offered the chance for humans to become gods. This philosophical aspiration to become divine was taken up by the Socratic philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.Footnote ⁸ As we shall see, Plato and Aristotle repeatedly insist that the aim of human life is to become as much like god as is humanly possible. Plato and Aristotle coined the words theology and theological, speculated about the nature of god, and offered guidance for how philosophers can ascend to the divine.

Ever since Plato and Aristotle entered the medieval universities, their overarching visions of human life were obscured when their writings were divided into separate bodies of knowledge, such as logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and theology. Twentieth-century analytic philosophers have remade Plato and Aristotle in their own image and likeness by dissolving their thought into a miscellaneous array of conceptual puzzles. When it comes to the philosophy of the Socratics, truly we murder to dissertate. For, as we shall see, in the thought of these philosophers, what we call metaphysics, ethics, politics, and theology are all merely aspects or phrases of one aim: to become like a god.Footnote ⁹

In this book, I devote a chapter to each Socratic thinker, showing how his thought is organized around the goal of becoming like god. As they journey toward god, our Socratic philosophers discuss a wide range of philosophical topics – from biology, physics, and cosmology to epistemology, ontology, and logic, not to mention ethics, politics, and rhetoric. Naturally, Socratic discussions of these matters – which are independently riveting – have attracted most of the attention among modern scholars. But all these topics, no matter how intrinsically important, are best understood as milestones or landmarks on a larger philosophical quest. Or, to alter the metaphor, philosophy serves as a ladder for a theological ascent.

The Socratics were less interested in developing a science of god and more interested in the question of how to become like god. Theory, for them, is subordinate to practice: we want to know who god is so that we can better imitate god. About the practical task of how to become like god, the Socratics are impressively systematic – about precise doctrines of the divine nature, much less so. As we shall see, Socratic philosophy is not about how the heavens go but about how to go to heaven.

What makes philosophy Socratic is its relentless teleology: every action, these philosophers argue, is explained by the goal it seeks, not by the instruments it uses.Footnote ¹⁰ Socratic philosophy can be accurately captured in a simple motto: mind over matter.Footnote ¹¹ Aristotle says, for example, that human beings have hands because we are so intelligent; we are not intelligent because we have hands.Footnote ¹² Mind explains matter – not matter, mind. When discussing teleological thinkers, we must not lose sight of the goal. I will argue that in the quest to become like god, we find the interpretive key to unlock the whole of their philosophical thought. Each Socratic thinker developed a strikingly original conception of philosophy as a path to salvation.

If all this sounds vaguely religious, it should. Socratic philosophy is more like religion than it is like modern philosophy.Footnote ¹³ My chapters on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are sandwiched between a chapter on ancient Greek religion and a chapter on the Bible. Socratic philosophy can be understood only in the matrix of Greek religion; the Socratic philosophers did not abandon Greek religion but attempted to reform it. If Socratic philosophy aims at becoming as much like god as is humanly possible, then so does biblical religion. I will conclude this book by comparing the quest to become divine in Socratic philosophy and in the Bible because such a focused comparison will illuminate Athens and Jerusalem.

I.2 The Approach

One measure of the pervasiveness of the human aspiration to become divine is the range of words in English to describe it: from Greek, “apotheosis” and “theosis”; from Latin, “divinization” and “deification.” Although some scholars see differences among these terms, I shall use them interchangeably.Footnote ¹⁴ Anyone who wants to learn about deification should begin with the pioneering books of M. David Litwa, who has traced ideas of deification throughout Western culture, from ancient religion to modern transhumanism.Footnote ¹⁵ Litwa writes as a biblical scholar and classicist, whereas I write as a philosopher. Many scholars who write about deification, including Litwa, explore its manifold expressions in religious thought, but they rarely explore the religious critique of deification. I aim to explore the full ambivalence about deification expressed in Greek religion, Socratic philosophy, and the Bible.

I am an avid reader and sometimes even a writer of technical studies in Socratic philosophy.Footnote ¹⁶ I am immensely grateful for the achievements of modern philological and philosophical scholarship – a debt I acknowledge in my notes. But what often gets lost in the mountains of scholarship is the reason why we devote our lives to these thinkers. If Socratic philosophy survives as a part of the common intellectual culture, it will be because of the sweeping vision of human life found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not because of their particular arguments. In this book, I present the full grandeur of the philosophical visions of the Socratic philosophers – an imaginative grandeur subsequently approached, in my view, only by Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel. I make no apology for focusing on the big picture, since this perspective is often obscured by the technical refinements of modern scholarship. I have drawn widely from the specialized philological and philosophical scholarship to ensure the accuracy of my portraits. Still, a focus on the big picture logically entails less fine-grain resolution on the details. I devote the main text of this book to describing the sweeping visions of the Socratic philosophers; I use extensive notes to ground this description in the relevant primary texts and interpretive debates.

My chapter on Greek religion could be subtitled: “What every student of Greek philosophy should know about Greek religion.” The philosophical quest to become like god grew out of heroic divinization in Greek poetry and cult. Greek religion is a vast subject, of course, which is why I focus only on its most basic concern: the question of whether humans can or ought to become gods. I limit my analysis of Greek religion to the epoch between Homer and Aristotle, that is, the Archaic and Classical periods.

My approach to Greek religion is unusual because of my extensive use of Poseidonius’s tripartite division: theology of the philosophers, theology of the poets, and theology of the civic cult. This triad gives us three places to look for Greek religion. For the theology of the philosophers, I draw on the writings of Plato and Aristotle; for the theology of the poets, I draw freely from the works of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, because they are the poets who most influenced the Socratic philosophers; for the theology of the civic cult, I rely on historians of ancient Greek ritual. Whatever the utility of Poseidonius’s tripartite theology to the study of Greek religion in general, it is indispensable for understanding the relation of Greek religion to Greek philosophy.

The supreme philosopher of the human ascent to the divine is Plato, who is the source of almost all subsequent philosophical, religious, and mystical thought about the human aspiration to become divine. That is why my chapter on Plato is the centerpiece of this book. But Plato cannot be understood except in relation to his teacher, Socrates. The Platonic quest to become like god was inspired less by the teachings than by the exemplary life of Socrates.

The quest for the historical Socrates has been largely quixotic. We have two striking – though sharply contrasting – portraits of him in dialogues by his students, Plato and Xenophon. Unfortunately, we lack sufficient external evidence to determine the historical accuracy of either. What we can say is that the Socrates who matters to Western philosophy is the Socrates of Plato.Footnote ¹⁷ But Plato never tells us whether his Socrates is the Socrates of history or a spokesman for Plato’s own ideas. To distinguish the historical Socrates from the Platonizing Socrates within Plato, scholars have relied principally upon Xenophon and Aristotle.Footnote ¹⁸ There will never be agreement about precisely where the historical Socrates ends and where the Platonizing Socrates begins – especially if one assumes, as I do, that there is a basic continuity from Socratic to Platonic philosophy. Plato’s own thought develops the thought of his beloved teacher by seeking solutions to the puzzles Plato finds in the discourse and in the deeds of Socrates.Footnote ¹⁹

What is the relation of the historical Socrates to the character “Socrates” in Plato’s dialogues? I have taken a conservative or minimalist position by limiting my “Socrates” to Plato’s Apology and Alcibiades’s memoir of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Here, I join a long line of readers of Plato since Friedrich Schleiermacher who believe that, in these speeches, Plato’s Socrates most closely approaches the historical Socrates.Footnote ²⁰ I will assume that the Apology reveals how Socrates saw himself, while Alcibiades’s speech in the Symposium reveals how Socrates was seen by some of his students. By adopting such a minimalist view, I hope to give my portrait of Socrates the most secure footing possible within the dialogues of Plato. If the historical Socrates does not appear in these speeches, then he does not appear anywhere in Plato.

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, with someone as great as Plato, we shall never get him right; and, if we can never get Plato right, then we should at least change our ways from time to time of getting him wrong. The scholarly literature about how to interpret Plato is almost as vast as the literature actually interpreting Plato.Footnote ²¹ First, I again adopt a conservative strategy by delimiting my Plato to the twenty-six dialogues judged most likely to be authentic.Footnote ²² Second, because Plato never speaks in his own name in the dialogues,Footnote ²³ we must ask “who speaks for Plato?”Footnote ²⁴ Following Aristotle, I will assume that the views defended by the leading speakers of Plato’s dialogues – usually, but not always, Socrates – are Plato’s views.Footnote ²⁵ A cynic has observed that in every conversation there is a perpetrator and a victim. Whether or not this is true generally, it is certainly true of Platonic dialogues. There is always a principal speaker – sometimes doubling as the narrator – who directs and controls the conversation. There is no way to demonstrate that the views of these leading speakers represent the sincere views of the historical Plato; but it also does not matter. These speakers present many novel philosophical ideas that must be credited to someone – why not the author of the dialogues? That Plato speaks primarily through these principal characters in no way implies that he does not also speak through other characters in the dialogues. After all, the minor characters in many of the dialogues ask the questions and frame the debates that shape the speeches of the principal speaker.

Third, although I agree that each dialogue creates its own philosophical agenda so that the views expressed in it are best understood by the dialogue’s immediate rhetorical context, I will abstract Plato’s views from across all of his genuine dialogues. Each Platonic dialogue creates its own world – but at the same time, the ideas and the action of each dialogue connects it with many other dialogues.Footnote ²⁶ A full explication of any one dialogue requires the explication of many if not all the other dialogues. The Platonic corpus is a whole made up of wholes. In this book, I have attempted a composite portrait of Plato that I hope will illuminate readings of each individual dialogue. Fourth, my approach to Plato’s dialogues is strongly unitarian. None of my claims rest on an external ordinal – let alone cardinal – sequence of the dialogues.Footnote ²⁷ I treat the many differences among the ideas presented in the various dialogues not as different stages in the development of Plato’s thought but rather as different facets of his thought.Footnote ²⁸

Plato’s thought is unified by its practical aim of convincing his readers to ascend to the divine along the path of philosophy, not by the logical consistency of a system of doctrines. The structure of his dialogues reveals his practical ambition. Were Plato’s intention to develop doctrine, his dialogues would feature debates among mature philosophers. Imagine the possibilities for dialectically testing ideas in a dialogue featuring the mature Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras!Footnote ²⁹ Yet not one of the Platonic dialogues features a debate between even two mature philosophers.Footnote ³⁰ Instead, Plato’s dialogues feature Socrates (or another lead speaker) defending philosophy to an assortment of nonphilosophers, ranging from naïve youths to hardened sophists. The dramatic structure of the dialogues revolves around the attempt of Socrates to convert his interlocutor to the life of philosophy – or at least to a life shaped by philosophical ideals.Footnote ³¹ As vehicles for the development of doctrine, the dialogues are hopeless; as vehicles for the saving of souls, the dialogues are ideal.

Platonists have long argued about whether Plato was a dogmatist or a skeptic. Plato is famous for defining human life as “serious play”:Footnote ³² what makes life serious and what makes it play? I will argue that Plato is deadly serious about the need to rescue human souls from the evils of ignorance, greed, and hubris by learning how to imitate, to the extent humanly possible, divine wisdom and goodness. Philosophy for Plato is a path leading the soul to god: psychogogy as theotropy. Every Platonic dialogue features an ascent to the divine: from particular things to general ideas, from bodies to souls, from becoming to being, from mere conventions to true nature, from false piety to genuine worship, from earth to heaven.Footnote ³³ The variety of dialogues reflects, in part, the variety of aspects to this human ascent: metaphysical, cosmological, and religious. The drama of each dialogue stems from the implicit question: Will Socrates’s interlocutors follow him on his journeys to the divine? Or will they evade, resist, or reject Socrates’s invitation? In fact, all of Socrates’s interlocutors ultimately stand in for Plato’s readers: they give voice to our rejection or acceptance of Socrates’s invitation. The dialogues vary greatly in the amount of dramatic conflict between Socrates and his interlocutors; but Plato is counting on dramatic conflict with his readers. Socrates demands not mere intellectual assent – he is asking for your whole life.

What matters is the upward direction of our lives, not whether we affirm that souls have parts or that god is a form or a soul. Plato presents a small set of ideas but with many variations – not because he is a radical skeptic but because his arguments are all directed to particular people, and different kinds of people will be persuaded by different kinds of ideas. For example, Plato never developed a technical vocabulary, which is why I do not capitalize terms like “forms” or “divine maker.” When speaking of the ascent from becoming to being or from the many to the one, Plato uses a variety of different expressions for “the thing itself,” that which “is,” the unseen but intelligible form.

Socrates must meet his interlocutors where they are – and this rhetorical imperative shapes how he presents his ideas. All Platonic argumentation is ad hominem.Footnote ³⁴ If Plato’s dialogues were intended to develop doctrines, then Socrates would permit his interlocutors to defend hypothetical views; but Socrates frequently insists that they defend only their own personal convictions.Footnote ³⁵ The point of Socratic conversation is to examine lives, not doctrines. The variety of dialogues reflects, in part, the variety of kinds of people invited to ascend to the divine. Plato is a doctrinal and rhetorical pluralist: his Socrates will deploy a wide range of ideas, myths, and even fallacies to bring specific people closer to god. Ladders can take many different guises.

I see continuity among the Socratic philosophers. The so-called Socratic dialogues are Platonic and the Platonic dialogues are Socratic.Footnote ³⁶ Although Aristotle’s extant treatises are not formal dialogues, he develops his ideas through internalized debates with putative opponents. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish Aristotle’s own views from the many others he interrogates; his own view often arrives like a caboose at the end of a long train of considerations. Aristotle’s monologues are often more dialectical than Plato’s dialogues. I also adopt a unitarian reading of Aristotle, and I reject any theory of his development. I restrict my portrait of Aristotle to those treatises that are most likely to be authentic.Footnote ³⁷

Aristotle follows Plato by inviting his readers to become as much like god as is humanly possible. When it comes to ideas about the divine, Plato says too much, and Aristotle says too little. Like Plato, Aristotle offers no consistent doctrine of god or of the human soul, but Aristotle does say a lot about how to become divine. What unifies Aristotle’s logical, metaphysical, biological, and ethical treatises is the idea of development, the actualization of potential. The whole idea of development makes no sense apart from its goal, and the goal of all development for Aristotle is to become divine.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, although Aristotle does not provide us with a science of god, his science of development is the path to god.

Aristotle’s Greek is so compressed that it might be called telegraphic: it transmits the maximum number of conceptual distinctions with the minimum number of words. The challenge for interpreters of Aristotle is to develop his highly elliptical comments into a full view. Aristotle’s extant writings are so sketchy and underdetermined on questions of “first philosophy” that any interpretation of Aristotle must also be a reconstruction: we must connect the dots and fill in the bare outline. Aristotle defends his habit of providing merely a sketch by inviting his readers to fill in the details. Aristotle does not merely invite us to think with him – he requires us to do so.Footnote ³⁹

I conclude my portrait of Aristotle by developing his suggestions about what ethics and politics would look like in the light of his notion of god. I have taken some liberties in reconstructing Aristotle’s views of the divine to bring out what I see as distinctive about his god as a moral and intellectual exemplar.Footnote ⁴⁰ Aristotle’s god governs the cosmos not by creating or managing it but by drawing it toward him with the sheer power of his example. I have attempted to explain how Aristotle’s god governs the cosmos and how Aristotle’s philosopher governs his polis. I realize that I have gone beyond what Aristotle explicitly says into the territory of what I believe he should have said, consistent with his own principles. I know of no other way to make sense of his claim that a human being should attempt to become as much like a god as is possible.

The idea that becoming like god (homoiōsis theōi) is the goal of the philosophical life for Plato and Aristotle was a commonplace among the Platonists of antiquity but much less often asserted by modern scholars.Footnote ⁴¹ Because of the recent revival of interest in ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle, several scholars have noted the striking neglect of this theme, especially in English-language scholarship.Footnote ⁴² So unfamiliar today is this idea of becoming like god that some scholars even deny that it is Platonic.Footnote ⁴³ This neglect has seriously distorted our modern understanding of the Socratic Greek philosophers. That the Socratic philosophers see happiness as a goal is well known; what is not well known is that happiness was understood by them as becoming godlike.Footnote ⁴⁴ As we shall see, god is the measure of human happiness among the Socratic philosophers.

Because variants of the idea of becoming like god are found in many Greek philosophers, scholarship has usually taken the form of a “conceptual history” (Begriffsgeschichte). First, the concept is analytically detached from its context and identified as what Arthur Lovejoy called a “unit-idea.” Second, this unit-idea is then compared to the same unit-idea found in other authors or variants of the unit-idea are compared across contexts within one author. Sometimes the focus of these studies is on the semantic field of the particular words used to define the unit-idea, that is, the verbal formula; sometimes the focus is on the conceptual relations between the unit-idea and other ideas within a particular philosopher.Footnote ⁴⁵ Often, a historical story will be told about the development of the unit-idea over time.

I will make use of lexical and semantic analysis, but my approach is fundamentally different. One danger of focusing too much on the verbal formula “homoiōsis theōi” is that Plato and Aristotle use other expressions to convey the same idea, such as “immortalization” (athanatizein). As we shall see, when Plato and Aristotle talk about becoming immortal, they mean becoming divine, not living forever.

My focus is not the idea of becoming like god but rather the unity of the philosophical vision of each Socratic philosopher. I treat the formula “becoming like god” not as an object of analysis but as a password to open Socratic philosophy. My claim is that what gives the thought of Plato and Aristotle its unity and majestic sweep is the vision of an ascent to the divine. If one pulls hard on the thread of “becoming like god” the whole tapestry of Socratic thought unravels because this thread holds it together. Although I make use of philological and conceptual analysis, my approach is basically synthetic. I aim to see Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible whole. Such an aim, in view of the sheer mass of relevant scholarship, may be unrealistic. I am fully aware that my reach exceeds my grasp.

If the Bible is to survive as part of our common intellectual culture, then it will do so only because of its sweeping vision of human and divine life. The many books of the Christian Bible are carefully arranged to tell a unified history of the cosmos, from creation in Genesis to destruction and re-creation in Revelation. The sweeping narrative arc of the Bible is often obscured by modern scholarship, which has analyzed the Bible into scores of distinct authorial traditions. We now have many Moseses, many Isaiahs, many Psalmists, and many Pauls. I do not deny that the Bible is the product of many distinct authorial traditions, but I also affirm that the Bible can be usefully read as if it were the product of one author. Yes, the Bible is a library of many different kinds of books, but that library has been carefully curated. The Bible gets its unity not from its many authors but from its editors (“redactors”), including the Christian councils that selected the canonical books and placed them in order. The Bible is a literary masterpiece of editorial committee work.Footnote ⁴⁶

For all of its internal diversity of authors and genres, the question of whether the Bible has a consistent message depends on the prior question: Compared to what? If the Hebrew Bible is compared to the New Testament, then there are certainly important differences, at least in emphasis. But if the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are each compared to Plato’s philosophy or to the Vedic scriptures, then those biblical differences shrink to insignificance. Because I am comparing biblical ambivalence about deification to the philosophical theology of Plato and Aristotle, I treat the Bible as a consistent whole, with some qualifications. On the question of deification, the Bible and classical Greek philosophy have enough in common to make their important differences highly illuminating. I attempt to steer a middle path between those who see classical Greek philosophy and biblical religion as incommensurable and those who see classical Greek philosophy as anticipating biblical teaching.Footnote ⁴⁷ Plato is not Moses speaking Attic Greek, but neither is Plato incomprehensible to Paul.

Old Testament scholars seek parallels between biblical myths and the religious myths of neighboring cultures in Aram, Canaan, Babylonia, Assyria, and Egypt; New Testament scholars also compare anthropological, theological, and cosmological concepts in the Bible with ideas found in Hellenistic religions and philosophical traditions. All of this scholarship tends to make the Bible seem merely reflective or even derivative of its cultural context. I make no attempt to compare the Hebrew Bible to its contemporary religious matrix; nor do I attempt to compare the New Testament to the vast array of thought known as Hellenistic philosophy and religion. I write about the Bible not as a biblical scholar but as a philosopher. I attempt to reconcile the apparent inconsistencies in the biblical text just as I do for the works of Plato and Aristotle. Nonetheless, my comparisons of the Bible to classical Greek philosophy will be relevant to the encounter of biblical authors with Hellenistic philosophy since much of that philosophy finds its origins in the Socratic philosophers.Footnote ⁴⁸ I read the New Testament in the context of the Old Testament rather than in the context of Hellenism. I see Paul as a Jewish prophet more than a Greek philosopher.Footnote ⁴⁹ Finally, in my opinion, biblical interpretation is never innocent of theological assumptions, whether tacit or explicit. That is why I make explicit my guiding theological principles in the notes.

Although I emphasize the unity of the Bible, I do concede that ideas of becoming like God are found more often in the New Testament than in the Hebrew Scriptures.Footnote ⁵⁰ This difference no doubt reflects the more far-reaching encounter of New Testament authors with Greek thought.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet neither the Old nor the New Testament uses technical terms for deification; instead, theories of deification make explicit what is largely implicit in the Bible. The whole idea of deification has served to divide Christians from Jews: Jesus was himself accused of blasphemy on the grounds of “making yourself God” (John 10:33). Ever since, the theme of deification has been largely absent from Jewish theology. Within the New Testament, there are subtle differences as well: the Johannine tradition emphasizes deification more than do the Synoptic traditions and Paul perhaps even more than John.

Christian deification is a central theme in Greek patristic theology and in modern Orthodoxy but is less prominent in Roman Catholic theology.Footnote ⁵² Many Protestant theologians, such as Karl Barth, see the whole idea as a Hellenic distortion of biblical faith. It is certainly true, as we shall see, that Greek philosophical and biblical deification are very different. But, like Socratic philosophy, the Bible offers us a path to becoming godlike. The Bible contains no doctrine of deification, but such a doctrine can find its basis in biblical ideas about human intimacy with God.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, although the Bible contains no doctrine of the Holy Trinity, it does describe a triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁵⁴ As we shall see, biblical deification means participating in the community of the triune God. If God is love (1 John 4:16), then God must be a community of lover, beloved, and active love, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Christian theologians who develop doctrines of deification do tend to focus on some parts of the Bible and ignore others. They cherry-pick their favorite verses. What makes my approach to the Bible unique is that I explore the full biblical ambivalence about deification. No book could be said to reject the human aspiration to divinity more than the Bible. And yet, if deification means a turn away from sin and a surrender to divine love, then no book offers more hope for deification than the Bible. I make the full biblical case against deification before showing the biblical support for it.Footnote ⁵⁵

For the Greek texts and translation of the early Greek philosophers, I use The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, edited by G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For the Greek texts of Plato, I use John Burnet’s editions in the Oxford Classical Texts; for the Greek texts of Aristotle, I use David Ross’s and others’ editions of the Oxford Classical Texts. For all other classical authors, I use the Greek and Latin texts and translations of the online Loeb Classical Library, unless otherwise noted. For Plato and Aristotle, I rely on (but sometimes modify) the translations in John M. Cooper’s Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997) and in Jonathan Barnes’s Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Since I do not read Hebrew, I consult Strong’s Concordance for the text of the Hebrew Bible. For the Greek New Testament, I use the Nestle-Aland edition, Novum Testamentum Graece (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1979). For the Bible in English, I use the translations of the HarperCollins Study Bible (NRSV, revised edition, 2006) because they attempt to combine the beauty of the King James Bible with the accuracy of modern scholarship.