divinization

Updated: May 2, 2025

We feel, in effect, a satisfaction in doing good when good superabounds within us, when we are swollen with pity; and we are swollen with pity when God, filling our soul, gives us the suffering sensation of universal life, of the universal longing for eternal divinization.

Miguel de Unamuno - Tragic Sense Of Life

The data do not explain the reasons for this change of custom; a natural suggestion is that there came a time when the conception of the deity forbade an ascription of divinity to human beings. However this may be, the nominal divinization of kings seems not to have had any effect on the cultus. As far as the known evidence goes, the king seems never to have been approached with divine worship.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

And does not this apocatastasis, this humanization or divinization of all things, do away with matter? But if matter, which is the principle of individuation, the scholastic principium individuationis, is once done away with, does not everything return to pure consciousness, which, in its pure purity, neither knows itself nor is it anything that can be conceived or felt?

Miguel de Unamuno - Tragic Sense Of Life

This sort of divinization is particularly prominent in Melanesia and parts of Polynesia; it exists also in Japan and in West Africa.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

It is now practically given up by the educated classes, and will probably soon vanish completely. +347+. Among the Greeks and the Romans the belief in the divinity of living men and women was of a vague character. At a later time such divinization was sometimes treated jestingly.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

+355+. The divinization of the Calif Ali by some Shiah sects was the product of religious fanaticism under the guidance of Aryan conceptions of the incarnation of the divine. +356+. Mythical ancestors. Mythical ancestors are usually eponymous; the tendency in all ancient peoples was to refer their names and origins to single persons.

Crawford Howell Toy - Introduction to the History of Religions: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV

And if demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated.

Miguel de Unamuno - Tragic Sense Of Life