Divine Influx

the purpose of our life is blessedness or, what is the same thing, the kingdom of heaven or of God... not only to behold the Trinity, supreme in Kingship, but also to receive an influx of the divine and, as it were, to suffer deification; for by this influx what is lacking and imperfect in us is supplied and perfected. And the provision by such divine influx of what is needed is the food of spiritual beings.

This passage delivers the most technically precise definition in the corpus: divine influx is the mechanism of deification itself, supplying what is imperfect in the creature and constituting the very nourishment of spiritual existence.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis

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The All-creating Wisdom fashioned these souls, these receptacles with free wills, as vessels as it were, for this very purpose, that there should be some capacities able to receive His blessings and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream.

Gregory of Nyssa grounds divine influx ontologically: souls are created as self-enlarging vessels precisely so that the unceasing inpouring of divine blessings may find adequate reception and perpetually expand the receptacle.

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 2016thesis

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the mystical states themselves are characteristically experienced in a state of passive receptivity, with a surrender of the personal will in favor of a radically receptive embrace of the divine influx: 'The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.'

Tarnas, synthesizing James, identifies surrender of the personal will as the structural precondition for divine influx, framing receptivity as the defining experiential signature of genuine mystical states within the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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there are five of these Presences, namely, the five Descents (tanazzulat); these are determinations or conditions of the divine Ipseity in the forms of His Names; they act on the receptacles which undergo their influx and manifest them.

Corbin articulates Ibn 'Arabi's hierarchical metaphysics in which divine influx takes the form of graduated descents of the divine Names, each acting upon its prepared receptacle and thereby manifesting a level of being.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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Adam, before the fall, also participated in this divine illumination and resplendence, and because he was truly clothed in a garment of glory he was not naked, nor was he unseemly by reason of his nakedness.

Palamas situates divine influx within a prelapsarian anthropology: the original human condition was one of active participation in divine illumination, the loss of which defines the Fall and the recovery of which defines theosis.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as air inclines to a vacuum.

James documents the mind-cure tradition's pragmatic restatement of divine influx: the prepared soul operating in expectancy and receptivity becomes a vacuum into which spiritual energy flows by natural law.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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when the luminosity of love is added, then it is evident that the image has been fully transformed into the beauty of the likeness.

Diadochos of Photiki describes divine influx as the completing act of the soul's transformation: grace adds the luminosity of love to the soul's outline, completing its repainting into the divine likeness.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting

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through the subconscious part of it we are already one with the Divine without any miracle of grace, or abrupt creation of a new inner man.

James presents the mind-cure movement's immanentist revision of divine influx: because the subconscious self is already continuous with the Divine, influx requires no supernatural interruption but only the removal of blockage.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902aside

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