Becoming Like God

The Quote

"We should try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can, and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise."

— Plato, Theaetetus, 176a

Original language: Greek

Historical Context

The Theaetetus, composed in Plato's late middle period (around 369 BCE), is a dialogue devoted to the question "What is knowledge?" Its dramatic setting is carefully constructed: the frame narrative reports that the philosopher Theaetetus, mortally wounded in battle, is being carried back to Athens, and that a copy of Socrates's conversation with the young Theaetetus has just been discovered. The main dialogue is set years earlier, when Theaetetus was a promising young mathematician and Socrates, employing his characteristic midwifery, examines three successive definitions of knowledge — knowledge as perception, as true belief, and as true belief with an account — finding each wanting.

The passage at 176a comes at the dialogue's close, in a passage often called the "flight to God" or the "becoming like God" excursus. Having refuted the final definition of knowledge, Socrates turns from epistemology to ethics, contrasting two opposing "patterns" (paradeigmata): the divine pattern, which is supremely good, and its contrary, which is supremely evil. The point of philosophy, Socrates says, is to flee from the latter and become like the former. This shift from the analysis of knowledge to the exhortation to virtue is characteristic of Plato: the inquiry into the nature of knowing ultimately reveals that genuine knowledge is inseparable from the moral condition of the soul, and that the failure to know is itself a kind of moral failure — the mark of a soul disordered by the love of falsehood.

The exhortation to "become like God" (homoiosis theoi) is one of the most influential sentences in the Platonic corpus. It compresses into a single formula the ethical, metaphysical, and religious dimensions of Plato's conception of philosophy. Set against the backdrop of the Theaetetus's sustained refutation of relativism and Protagorean subjectivism, the passage asserts that the good life is not a matter of opinion or convention but of conforming the soul to an objective, divine order of truth and virtue.

Meaning

Socrates frames the philosophical life as a "flight" (phauge) from earth to "the dwelling of the gods" (pros ton theon). The language of escape and ascent is metaphysical: the soul seeks to leave behind the mutable, disorderly realm of becoming and approach the stable, intelligible realm of the divine. But Socrates immediately gives this flight an ethical interpretation: "to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible" (kata to dunaton). The qualification "so far as this is possible" is important, for it acknowledges that a human being, embodied and mortal, cannot become literally divine; the assimilation is partial and aspirational.

The final clause specifies the content of this assimilation: "to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise" (dikaios kai hosios meta phroneseos). The Greek terms denote the cardinal virtues in their religious and intellectual dimensions. Dikaiosyne (righteousness or justice) is the virtue of giving each thing its due; hosiotes (holiness or piety) is the virtue of right relation to the divine; phronesis (wisdom or practical understanding) is the intellectual virtue that grasps the good. To become like God, then, is not to acquire supernatural power but to approximate the divine moral and intellectual perfection through the practice of virtue.

The structure of the statement is significant: it identifies becoming like God with the acquisition of virtue rather than with mystical union or ecstatic transcendence. The "escape" is achieved not by fleeing the world in a literal or ritual sense but by living a life of justice, piety, and wisdom. This makes the philosophical ideal at once transcendent in its orientation and practical in its means: the soul ascends to the divine by becoming, within the human sphere, as righteous and wise as it can.

Philosophical Interpretation

The doctrine of homoiosis theoi — assimilation to God — is one of the most discussed passages in Plato, and it became a defining formula for the entire Platonic tradition. The interpretation hinges on the sense of "likeness" (homoiosis). On the dominant reading, descended from the ancient commentators and revived in modern scholarship, likeness is qualitative rather than substantial: the soul becomes like God not by sharing the divine nature but by imitating the divine attributes of justice, holiness, and wisdom. God, in Plato's theology, is wholly good, rational, and unchanging; the human soul approximates this perfection by ordering itself in accordance with reason and virtue. This reading is supported by the immediate context, in which Socrates contrasts the "divine" pattern (the good) with the "ungodly" pattern (evil) and identifies likeness to the former with moral and intellectual virtue.

The passage occupies a pivotal place in Plato's ethics because it articulates the telos — the end or goal — of the philosophical life in terms that unite virtue and knowledge. Throughout the dialogues, Socrates argues that virtue is knowledge and that the good life is the life of wisdom. The Theaetetus's formula makes the implications explicit: the wise and virtuous soul is the one that has drawn closest to the divine, because wisdom and virtue are precisely the attributes that characterize the divine. This connects the homoiosis doctrine to the metaphysics of the Republic, where the Form of the Good is the highest object of knowledge and the model for the just soul's order. Becoming like God, in the Republic's terms, is becoming like the Good: ordering one's soul in accordance with the rational apprehension of what is best.

The formula also bears on Plato's theology and his account of evil. In the Theaetetus, Socrates insists that evil can never be "eradicated" (176a), for it must always stand in opposition to the good; the philosopher's task is therefore not to perfect the world but to flee from evil toward the divine. This sober acknowledgement of the ineradicability of evil distinguishes Plato's view from later utopian or messianic traditions and underwrites his insistence that the philosophical life is one of ongoing purification rather than final redemption. The soul's assimilation to God is a process, not an event — a lifelong "flight" that is never completed within the bounds of mortal life.

The influence of homoiosis theoi on subsequent thought can hardly be overstated. In Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, the formula became the summation of philosophy's aim: for Plotinus, the soul's return to the One through virtue and contemplation is the very meaning of assimilation to the divine. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria and the Christian Alexandrians, Clement and Origen, adopted the formula directly, identifying "God" with the God of scripture and interpreting virtue and wisdom as the soul's conformity to the divine Logos. The maxim "become like God" entered the Greek Christian ascetic tradition — where it was glossed as becoming like God through mercy and humility — and remained a touchstone of Byzantine and medieval theology. In the Latin West, the formula influenced the monastic ideal of contemplation and, through Augustine, the doctrine that the blessed life consists in the soul's restless ascent toward the immutable God. Even in secular modern philosophy, the idea that moral and intellectual excellence constitutes a kind of transcendence — a raising of the self toward an ideal that exceeds the merely human — echoes the Theaetetus's ancient exhortation. The passage at 176a remains the classical locus for the conviction that the good life is, at its deepest, a movement of likeness toward the divine.

Related Concepts

• wisdom-wisdom: The quote identifies wisdom (phronesis) as one of the essential marks of the soul's assimilation to God, holding that to become like the divine is, in part, to become wise.
• wisdom-virtue: Plato equates becoming like God with the practice of virtue — righteousness, holiness, and wisdom — making moral excellence the path by which the human soul approximates the divine.

Related Learning

• The Greek Philosophy page situates this concept within the tradition's core ideas.

Sources

1. Plato. Theaetetus. Translated by M. J. Levett. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. 176a.
2. "Plato." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/