Maximus the Confessor and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: A Womanist Theology of Divinization and the Kenosis of Unworthiness

Abstract

This essay examines how traditional Christian accounts of divinization can be refined to address those whose sacrality has been systematically stripped away through racialized and gendered violence, specifically Black women in the U.S. context. The analysis draws on Maximus the Confessor’s relational ontology of divine love and Aristotle Papanikolaou’s “askesis of learning how to love” for survivors of violence, and Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple as a womanist theological text, to construct a womanist theology of divinization that underscores the concept of the “kenosis of unworthiness.” Where traditional understandings of theosis presume a subject with an inflated will that requires a journey into humiliation, this essay argues that many desacralized persons begin divinization from a position of imposed self-negation that requires instead the relinquishment of internalized unworthiness before participation in divine life becomes possible. The essay traces Celie’s transformation through a disrupted god-image, encounter and embrace of divine omnipresence and her recovery of self-determination to demonstrate that divinization for the desacralized first materializes as healing. The essay concludes that a responsible theology of divinization must account for modernity and the impact of imperial lust for dominative power. In doing so, the doctrine can affirm that self-movement and self-determination both constitutive of the divine image and can be restored through the Spirit’s relational and regenerative work even amid historical, cultural, and structural violence.

Repository attribution: Michele E. Watkins. Maximus the Confessor and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: A Womanist Theology of Divinization and the Kenosis of Unworthiness. Religions, 17(7), issue year 2026; article page publication date 2026-06-23. Original: source article. DOI: 10.3390/rel17070749. Original PDF reproduced without changes under CC BY 4.0. No endorsement is implied. Copyright 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/