Bishop Bulus al-Bushi: A theologian from the 'golden age' of the Coptic Orthodox Church - On 'theosis' (union with God)

Anba (Bishop) Bulus al-Bushi (ca. 1170-1250) was one of a select group of Arabic speaking Egyptian theologians that helped shape the Coptic “golden age” set in the Ayyubid rule of Egypt. His name reflects the fact that he was from “Bush,” a town located in Middle Egypt (just north of Beni Suef). Much of the early part of his career, was spent as a monk, probably at the Monastery of Anba Samuel Qalamun in the Fayum, a large agricultural oasis located adjacent to the Nile Valley, southwest of Cairo. During the last decade of his life, he served as bishop of Old Cairo, the most prestigious of the local Egyptian bishoprics at the time.

Below is an excerpt taken from Bishop Bulus' exegesis of John 6 found in his treatise 'On the Incarnation,' emphasizing the role of the eucharist in theosis. (John 6 is a well known scriptural passage which is incorporated in the liturgies of both the Eastern and Western churches)



The church of the Virgin Mary (Hanging Church) in Old Cairo, dating to the 3rd C.
Bishop Bulus likely prayed many divine liturgies and delivered countless sermons in this ancient church.

Bulus al-Bushi - 'On the Incarnation'

Chapter Eight: God Granted Us Participation in the Body of Christ

"Then in his favour he added a confirmation. He willed to grant us participation in that holy body and a connection with it by a most excellent spiritual kinship that transcends the bodily kinship, to the extent that the eternal life which that body acquired becomes in us completely and rightly natural.

 
God gave to us first the Holy Spirit through baptism, the Spirit that he had extracted from Adam the day that he ate from the branch of disobedience. Through the Spirit he provided us with the second birth for our inheritance of the kingdom, just as he said, ‘Unless one has been born of the water and the spirit, he will not see the kingdom of God.’

 Then, afterwards, he gave us an additional (sign of his) favour, over and above the state Adam was in before his error: he gave us his life-giving body. As he said, ‘I am the life-giving bread, which came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever!’ Then he told us what the bread is when he said, ‘The bread that I give is my body, which I offer up for the life of the world.’ Indeed, he even added to that another announcement, when he said, ‘If you have not eaten the body of the Son of Man, nor drunk his blood, there is no eternal life in you.’ His statement, ‘in you’, means that it (eternal life) comes to existence in your essential nature. It is not external to you, nor is it alien to you. He settled that matter and said, ‘Because my body is true food, and my blood is true drink, whoever has eaten my body and has drunk my blood remains in me, and I in him.’ As for his statement, ‘true food’, he said that because his divinity is united with his body. He has been united with the holy bread and has transformed it into his body in truth and not merely in likeness. Then he said the greatest thing, when he made the statement, ‘Just as the living Father sent me, and I have life on account of the

Father, so too whoever eats me lives on account of me.’ He did not need to say in this instance, ‘whoever eats my body’, because he already had established that in the preceding statement. He said first, ‘the living bread’, and informed us that that bread was truly his body. Then he said third, ‘whoever eats me’. He means by this that he is God incarnate, and his divinity is not differentiated from his humanity. Whoever partakes (of the Eucharist) in a worthy manner and with faith, God will reside in him and give him the life that he gave to the body united to him. The apostle said, ‘He is ready to change the body of our weakness and transform it into something resembling the body of his glory, as the work of his powerful hand to which everything is devoted in service. As for his statement, ‘the Father lives, and I live on account of the Father’, (its meaning is), just as was introduced earlier in the first part of this book, that he is perfection from perfection, and ‘light from light, life from life, true God from true God, begotten not made, equal to the Father in essence’.

Whoever does not have his share of faith in him, nor has received baptism, nor has participation in his living thrones, also does not truly have a share in the inheritance of eternal life, but rather is completely alien to it altogether, because ‘flesh and blood’ (as the Apostle Paul said) ‘does not inherit the kingdom of God, and the changeable does not inherit what does not change’. Indeed, there does not reside in a human being anything that is more exalted than him—that which is more exalted is the Holy Spirit and the living thrones that belong to God the Word who is their master and creator. Therefore, such a one has no share or inheritance in that eternal kingdom! Now as for the ones who died first, he came and saved their souls through his own sacrifice on their behalf, since they relied on the hope of the promise. As for the believers, he gave them his thrones on account of their (way of) life, as he testified, saying, ‘Whoever believes in me, if he dies, he will live. And whoever lives and believes in me, will never suffer death.’ In this statement, he gathered together the first and the last."

 

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Source:

Bulus al-Bushı, On the Incarnation, ed. Samir Khalil Samir,

Traite´de Paul de Bus sur l’unite et la trinite l’incarnation,

et la verite du christianisme (Maqaah fı al-tathlıth wa

al-tajassud wasihh at al-masıhıyah), Patrimoine Arabe

Chretien 4 (Zouk Mikhail: al-Turath al-‘Arabı al-

Masıh, 1983), 187–227. Trans. S. Davis.