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Deification   /dˌiəfəkˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Deification

noun
1.
The condition of being treated like a god.
2.
An embodiment of the qualities of a god.
3.
The elevation of a person (as to the status of a god).  Synonyms: apotheosis, exaltation.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Deification" Quotes from Famous Books



... dissatisfaction at the existing condition of metaphysics and theology. Schleiermacher could not look upon the dearth around him without the deepest emotion. He asked himself if there was no remedy for the wide-spread evil. The seat of the disease appeared to him to be the false deification of reason in particular; and the general mistake of making religion dependent upon external bases instead of upon the heart and consciousness of man. His conclusion was that both the friends and enemies of Rationalism ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... to be carried on the people's shoulders as in triumph, and have a brazen statue in the marketplace? Add to this the adoption of names and surnames, those divine honors given to a man of no reputation, and the deification of the most wicked tyrants with public ceremonies; most foolish things, and such as one Democritus is too little to laugh at. Who denies it? And yet from this root sprang all the great acts of the heroes which the pens of so many eloquent men have extolled to the skies. In ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus

... interpretation of historical Christianity, we find that in his view the life and works of Jesus fell entirely within the field of human experience. He sees in the deification of Jesus an evidence of lack of faith in the infinitude of the individual human soul. He sees in every gleam of human virtue not only the presence of God, but some atom of His nature. As a preacher he had no tone of authority. A true non-conformist himself, he had no desire to impose his views ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot

... The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... young Reynolds. We can hardly blame Hudson for sending him away—no master wants a pupil around who sees all over, above and beyond him, and who can do better work than he. It's confusing, and tends to rob the master of the deification that is his due. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... religion, a bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as active and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from plane to plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss and divine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate of the sense of hearing, to lead ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity with God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as a deification ... they dwell on the idea that we become partakers of the Divine nature."[3] The emphasis here is not so much upon sin to be atoned for or punishment to be avoided, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... Amendment extending Right of Suffrage to Women — Able speech of Henry W. Blair; Government founded on equality of rights, no connection between the vote and ability to fight, property qualification an invasion of natural right, man's deification of woman a shallow pretense, no such thing as household suffrage here, maternity qualifies woman to vote, fear of family dissension not a valid excuse — Joseph E. Brown replies; Creator intended spheres of men and women to be different, man ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... much of mystery surrounding the peasant mind, that its workings must often be accepted rather than understood. But those who wish to understand somewhat the psychological process which led in antiquity to the deification of kings during their life-time could not do better than study the cult of Constantine ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best phasis a "pantheizing deification of nature." Strange enough as it may seem, the true philosophy is to be found any where rather than among philosophers. Each philosopher builds up a reasoned system of a part of existence; but life ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... they had been, it is said for centuries, in close contact with the Egyptians; and that, in the theology of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians, there is abundant evidence, notwithstanding their advanced social organisation, of the belief in spirits, with sorcery, ancestor-worship, the deification of animals, and the converse animalisation of gods—it obviously needs very strong evidence to justify the belief that the rude tribes of Israel did not share the notions from which their far more civilised neighbours ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... once more handed round; both were excellent, and during a brief interval mighty issues were set aside and conversation became more general and more free. The pageant of games and combats which was to last for over thirty days in honour of the deification of Caligula and his safe return from Germany became the subject of eager talk. There had been rumours of a remarkable load of African lions arrived in the Tiber a day or two ago, which were to make a gorgeous spectacle in the arena pitted against some ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... the enjoyment of sun or shade, cool winds or sweet scents; fearfully, in a mere vulgar dread of rocks and desolate places, as compared with the comfort of cities; or, finally, superstitiously, in the personification or deification of natural powers, generally with much degradation of their impressiveness, as in the paltry fables of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from AEolus, and of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... were made," he cried, "we were made for each other. It is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street. That is the real thing. It is the deification of the ludicrous." ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. No book written with a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantly written; and the work done in the past to the glorification of mere passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme claim of the lowest ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... hills, rivers, wells, fords, and the open air. Third, a system of Teutonic hero or ancestor-worship, typified by Woden, Baeldaeg, and the other great names of the genealogies, and having its origin in the belief in ghosts. Fourth, a deification of certain abstract ideas, such as War, Fate, Victory, and Death. But the average heathen Anglo-Saxon religion was merely a vast mass of superstition, a dark and gloomy terrorism, begotten of the vague dread of misfortune which barbarians naturally feel in a half-peopled land, where ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... question turns on your Protestant deification of the intellect. . . . If you really believed, as you all say you do, that the nature of man, and therefore his intellect among the rest, was utterly corrupt, you would not be so superstitiously careful to tell the truth . . . as you call it; because ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... if the power of Prussianism, run mad and murderous, held the world by the throat, if the primacy of the earth belonged to a government steeped in the doctrines of a barbarous past and supported by a ruling caste which preaches the deification of sheer might, which despises liberty, hates democracy and would destroy both ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn

... in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear, and who believed ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... with the worship of Indra and Agni is that of the 'moon-plant,' soma, the intoxicating personified drink to whose deification must be assigned a date earlier than that of the Vedas themselves. For the soma of the Hindus is etymologically identified with the haoma of the Persians (the [Greek: omomi] of Plutarch[12]), and the cultus at least was begun before the separation of the two nations, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... towards the altar of idols, calling upon his gods to proclaim his deification, and at the moment when he moved, Goisvintha sprang forward. Antonina was kneeling with her face turned from the door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove the knife into her neck. The moaning ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... individual has been annihilated by the logical process constructed to maintain it. We have come to a political deification of Mammon. Laissez-faire is not utterly blameworthy. It begat modern democracy, and made the modern republic possible. There can be no doubt of that. But there it reached its limit of political benefaction, and began to incline toward the point where extremes meet. . . . To every ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... fitting end for the mighty religious system that through countless generations has overshadowed India? Yes, it is well: it is a fitting end for that man-destroying system, more cruel than the bloody religions of Mexico, which, for the deification of the individual, made hopeless Helots of the multitude. Henceforward CASTE must virtually be at an end. Upon caste has our Bengal army founded a final treason bloodier and larger than any known to human annals. Now, therefore, mere instincts of self-preservation—mere ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... Rome to sue for peace. A truce for one hundred years was granted them after they were fined a part of their land. These are the principal transactions which occurred during the reign of Romulus, in peace and war, none of which seem inconsistent with the belief of his divine original, or of the deification attributed to him after death, neither his spirit in recovering his grandfather's kingdom, nor his project of building a city, nor that of strengthening it by the arts of war and peace. For by the strength ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... these immanent ideas! Yet there is organic continuity throughout. So large is the place filled by the phenomena of the winds, that human imagination has not always stopped short at their mere personification or deification. In many American languages, we are told, the same word is used for storm and for god; so, too, with certain tribes in Central Africa. That is to say, the name for the storm-wind has become the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hilarity were not sufficient. The conqueror and tamer of the Netherlands felt that a more personal and palpable deification was necessary for his pride. When Germanicus had achieved his last triumph over the ancient freedom of those generous races whose descendants, but lately in possession of a better organized liberty, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... me thus. But, without my consent, that word spread like wildfire. I still must think the name is not applicable to me. I stand in relation to this century as a Christian discoverer, founder, and leader. I regard self-deification as blasphemous; I may be more loved, but I am less lauded, pampered, provided for, and cheered than others before me—and wherefore? Because Christian Science is not yet popular, and I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... safely continue in the old faith. After all, it explains more difficulties than it raises. No doubt if we cannot free ourselves from modern conceptions we shall be somewhat startled not only by the almost deification of Beatrice, but also by the frank revelation of Dante's passion, with which neither the fact of her having become another man's wife nor his own marriage seems in any way to interfere. It needs, however, ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... of what is meet and just in the Divine intelligence, though the Divine will, being a perfect will, is not liable to act against them, yet are those ideas improperly called a law to the Divine will, because intellect and will are identified in one God. Kant's doctrine makes us all gods. It is a deification of the human intellect, and identification of that intellect with the supreme and universal Reason; and at the same time a release of the human will from all authority extraneous to the individual. This amounts to a putting off of all authority ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... by the oppression of the true Romans, succeeded in attaining great influence over the wretches who governed. The most disgusting ignominies of the empire, such as the apotheosis of the emperors and their deification during life, came from the East, and particularly from Egypt, which was at that period one of the most corrupt countries on ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various



Words linked to "Deification" :   deify, avatar, status, condition, embodiment, worship, incarnation, exaltation, apotheosis



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