For Mahoney, "Comte takes the place of Christ, just as the love of Humanity,' the jealous Grand-Etre, takes the place of 'love of God.' In this sense, Comte has
divinized his own existence, making himself the herald of a new Humanity worshipping itself." Man's "self-deification" by man is the antithesis of man's divinization through the power and gift of God.
The hero is thus effectively
divinized, and not as a deus absconditis; rather, the divine economy is fundamentally changed, ushering in a new era.
The short answer is, as I just noted, that they have been
divinized, "made God." (49) This does not mean, obviously enough, that they are now identical with the divine substance, nor certainly that they have become the second person of the Trinity.
In our post-lapsarian reality, even if Christ's death and resurrection open the gates of hell and he sends his Holy Spirit that we may become
divinized, our reason and will remain prone to becoming darkened, just as our efforts at participating in God's creation, remain tentative, fragile, and often broken.
Gods and
divinized heroes were associated with particular regions, names, myths, and rites, as opposed to "Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever" (Heb.
At his inauguration in Hobart Simonds showed he was ahead of the pack in seeing the totalitarian ideologies of Fascism and Communism not as left and right opposites, but as similar, in that they
divinized the state as all powerful.
Orishas are
divinized ancestors worshiped in Candomble.
To put it differently, the economy of salvation is the history of these infringements beginning with the incarnation of God the Son in the flesh and up until the whole of humanity is
divinized at the end-point history of this world.
In both modernity and postmodernity, there is no place for divine action on humanity's behalf, since, for the former, law itself is
divinized ("legal positivism," 195-96), while in the latter, law is replaced by a "philosophy of alterity," a purely horizontal concern for the "other" (197).
In place of Christianity, it offered a new religion of the
divinized state and the nation as an organic community."
The theme of God becoming man so that man may become
divinized is consistent throughout the work --the anthropos, the divine man.