An excerpt from the book "THE PERSON IN THE ORTHODOX TRADITION" by Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos
What has been said is needed in order for us to
understand the limits of human freedom and also to understand how
freedom, independence functions in the saints. As we shall see in what
follows, the saint's independent will, precisely because he is favoured
with divine grace, always moves naturally towards the good. When I speak
of a saint I mean the deified person who partakes of God's deifying
energy.
The Apostle Paul offers this witness: "It is no
longer I who live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2,11). He has the
certainty that Christ lives in him, and so elsewhere too he says:
"Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ" (1 Cor. 11,1). St. Gregory
Palamas, bearer of the same Revelation, interpreting this teaching of
the Apostle, says: "Do you see clearly that grace is uncreated? Not only
is such grace uncreated, but also the result of this sort of energy of
God is uncreated; and the great Paul, no longer living the temporal life
but the divine and eternal life of the indwelling word, came to be
without beginning and without end by grace". And a little further on:
"Paul was a created being until he lived the life which had come about
by God's command; then he no longer lived this life but a life which had
become indwelt by God, become uncreated by grace: and wholly possessing
only the living and acting word of God".
In the Apostle's words and in the interpretation by
St. Gregory Palamas, champion of the theologians, it is clear that a man
who has been united with Christ, who has attained illumination and
deification, by grace becomes uncreated and without beginning, because
he has the living Christ within him.
