Category: Walking Truth

Weekly theological insight to a broad audience on living out Christianity, published every Thursday.

A Thousand Small Inanities or Radical Love: Adam Gopnik Versus Flannery O’Connor

My daughters often buy me books for Christmas and usually are quite successful in their selection, but this year I received a book by Adam Gopnik which, while written with the panache of a New Yorker staff writer, continually reaches points of incredible banality. Typical is the stirring conclusion: “The most you can say is that experience suggests that treating both the proposition that love is good and the proposition that the facts can be found as true tends to make more people happy.”[1] Or there is this riveting inanity defining liberalism: “A belief that life should be fair – or fairer, or as fair as seems fair.”[2] Gopnik’s daughter tries to gently point out the shallowness, as she and her father are cycling on their island retreat. They come upon a sign at a yoga studio: “In this house we believe that: Black lives matter – Women’s rights are human rights – No human is illegal – Science is real – Love is love – Kindness is everything.” His daughter says, “Dad, there’s your entire book!” Gopnik does not miss that she has reduced his entire effort to “one-sentence attitudes that comic book liberals like me are supposed to share.” However, he doubles down, and acknowledges the sloganeering captures the “liberal imagination.”[3]  I cannot disagree with the slogans, but it was hard to believe his conclusions (which literally appear on the wall of a yoga studio) serve as his deepest life principles. I kept reading the book thinking, there had to be more depth to come. I was wrong.

At the same time, I was reading Flannery O’Connor’s, The Violent Bear It Away,[4] and I realized Gopnik was the perfect stand-in for the protagonist in O’Connor’s novel. The teacher or Rayber, believes in science, reason, fellowship, and experience, but these are exposed as banalities by his nephew, Tarwater. Tarwater, due to his isolated upbringing under his great-uncle suffers sociopathic compulsions, and eventually murders his cousin (Rayber’s son). Rayber, who would save Tarwater from his great-uncle, imagines taking Tarwater to the Natural History Museum, exposing him to science and the ways of reason, will cure him of his evil tendencies: “He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.”[5]

Gopnik suggests exposure to Darwin, Mill, and Adams, and other exemplars of liberal principles, found in science, capitalism, and the bent toward a practical materialism, are sufficient for a rule of life. Both Gopnik and the teacher are committed to the lesson of experience and the notion that the individual creates values, based on their experience. On the basis of experience, Gopnik says, “people make up their values . . . they aren’t handed down from the past on high.”[6] Likewise the teacher imagines, “By virtue of kinship and similarity and experience, [he] was the person to save him (Tarwater) . . .”[7] Meeks, a travelling salesman, imparts the same wisdom, “He said he himself had graduated from the School of Experience with an H.L.L. degree. He asked the boy if he knew what was an H.L.L. degree. Tarwater shook his head. Meeks said the H.L.L. degree was the Hard Lesson from Life degree. He said it was the quickest got and that it stayed learnt the longest.”[8] Rayber attempts to extract the boy from the grip of his uncle’s fanaticism by similar appeal: “’There are certain laws that determine every man’s conduct,’ the schoolteacher said. ‘You are no exception. Experience is a terrible teacher.’”[9]

The boy and his great-uncle mock the ineffectual Rayber, though he is a regular topic of conversation. The problem is, they cannot remember him, or put flesh on their memories of him. “He had made a habit of catching his great-uncle in contradictions about the schoolteacher’s appearance. ‘I forget what color eyes he’s got,’ the old man would say, irked. ‘What difference does the color make when I know the look? I know what’s behind it.’ ‘What’s behind it?’ ‘Nothing. He’s full of nothing.’”[10] The man is so vague and empty, he cannot hold down an enfleshed image.

Imagine trying to build a life around Gopnik/Rayber philosophy. Certainly, as the boy says about the teacher, “He knows a heap. I don’t reckon it’s anything he don’t know.” As the old uncle explains, the problem is not in the knowing. “’He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,’ the old man said. ‘That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same.’” Rayber is incapable of recognizing his own self-deceived understanding, as knowledge is the cure to everything. Likewise, Gopnik does not admit the possibility of an evil, the very nature of which is self-deception. The old man describes this as the danger of being dispossessed of the self.[11]

To inculcate liberalism, or a “hatred for cruelty,” an admission we are not perfect, a “belief that sympathy can save us from clannishness,” a belief in “permanent reform based on reason and an appeal to argument,” and to be “open to the lessons of experience,” is Gopnik’s plan of salvation.[12] Certainly, no one can disagree that being nice, having public parks, trying not to be violent (though Gopnik hedges on this one), not judging people by race, parentage, or income, are worthy ideas, but being kind does not constitute a worldview. It is insufficient in the encounter with evil and radical goodness. Gopnik explains, “These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity – a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination.”[13] He does not consider the possibility that individual imagination may be inadequate, deceived, or captive to a particular time and place. He does not consider, as the old man explains, that he might be dispossessed of himself.

Gopnik may be among the best representatives of the modern perspective, which is not a political point of view (Republican or Democrat) but the liberalism which is the prevailing creed of our time. Most agree, cruelty is bad, conversation is good, egalitarianism and tolerance are to be valued, but to imagine this constitutes a world or takes account of reality, is to mistake the problem (human imagination) for the solution.  

 In the novel, Rayber is bowled over by the impudent boy. “The boy had overtaken him, given him a thunderous blow on the head, and then disappeared. And with his disappearance there had come such an overwhelming feeling of release that Rayber had waked up with a pleasant anticipation that his guest would be gone.”[14] Best to ignore and get rid of the evil, rather than to acknowledge the challenge the boy poses to his world. It is not only his nephew though, but his son, Bishop, who challenges his world. He had tried to drown the boy, due to his disability, but had failed. Meanwhile, “he sent him to a school for exceptional children and he had made great strides. He could wash himself, dress himself, feed himself, go to the toilet by himself and make peanut butter sandwiches though sometimes he put the bread inside.”[15] The boy was independent enough that Rayber could mostly ignore him, but then he would once again be confronted with reality: “the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity.”[16] He is unnerved by his son’s complete innocence (in his value system he should be drowned), so that he is afraid of his love for a boy who is worthless in regard to reason, science, and knowledge. “His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate.”[17] If there were an “image of God” he understood, his son fit that likeness, but this reality represented by his son was one that his world could not afford:

The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.[18]

How can this irrational, “idiot” love have a place in a world where, in Gopnik’s terms, “reasoned conversation” is supreme?[19] The extremes of goodness and evil, love and hatred, cannot be accounted for. Rayber’s hatred for his nephew, and his unwillingness to include his son in the realm of his values, consist of the same stunted imagination. Both challenge a world of liberal values: material concern, reason, science, and the power of imagination. His nephew is positively evil and his son worthless in regard to the potential of imagination. They do not really qualify as human, in the Gopnik/Rayber world.

Rayber’s uncle recognizes that his nephew’s worldview is such that he cannot love what does not fit his standards: “And once, only once, the old man had leaned forward and said to Tarwater, in a voice that could no longer contain the pleasure of its secret, ‘He loved me like a daddy and he was ashamed of it![20]” The old man and the disabled boy are both beyond the pale of Rayber’s values. As O’Connor explains, “Bishop looked like the old man grown backwards to the lowest form of innocence.”[21] In this narrow world of modern liberal values, the grotesque, the disabled, the fanatics, the zealots, have no place. They should not be, and only when we progress beyond such malformations can liberal values and imagination take hold.

In a weak attempt to ameliorate the boy, Rayber says they are a alike, but the boy accuses his uncle of being deluded: “’I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.’ He was looking at his uncle now with a completely fresh contempt. ‘It’s nothing about me like you,’ he said.”  Rayber would receive and leave the world as he found it, but the boy – as strange and crazy as he is – has no such intent: “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all.”[22] The boy’s world was wrecked from the beginning, as he was literally born in the midst of the car wreck which killed his mother, but out of this experience, “He had always felt that it set his existence apart from the ordinary one and he had understood from it that the plans of God for him were special, even though nothing of consequence had happened to him so far.”[23]

It is this wrecked sort of outsider and his strange world that Rayber/Gopnik cannot abide. Such weird grotesqueries must be submitted to the normal, reasonable, stable world of the enlightened. This world has no room for enchantment, depth of spirit, or for acknowledgement of radical evil or radical love. Gopnik/Rayber certainly acknowledge love – with Rayber praising its practical value in the life of his sister, and Gopnik meaninglessly acknowledging “love is love,” but there is a different order of love that is dangerous: “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”[24] The love for a child that is “worthless” or an old man that is insane or love for a world which ultimately cannot contain such love. “It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated. He always felt with it a rush of longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured—turned on him once again. The longing was like an undertow in his blood dragging him backwards to what he knew to be madness.”[25] He could not afford the price of radical love as it reeked of inexplicable spiritual madness.

The choice is between the stable orbit around a human imagination grounded, as Gopnik describes, in “reason, good conversation and debate,” and committed to “egalitarian social reform” and “ever greater tolerance” (though obviously “not absolute”)[26] or the enchanted possibilities of a world lit with an inexplicable grandeur, open to radical love and enabled to grapple with radical evil. One is an engagement with flesh and blood reality, and the other cannot bear the weight of reality. Flannery O’Connor is posing both possibilities, without making her case, beyond the fact of an inexplicable love and evil. Much like Rayber, it seems Gopnik cannot afford a world beyond “a thousand small sanities.”  Insanity may be lurking in anything more. O’Connor describes this absolute faith in sanity as constricting: “He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”[27] Only a flat world, devoid of extremes of love and evil, allows balance, choice, and human imagination to reign supreme.

O’Connor expresses the other choice in the voice of a small child, an “evangelist” in a Pentecostal meeting who confronts Rayber:

“Do you know who Jesus is?” she cried. “Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love. The Word of God is love and do you know what love is, you people? If you don’t know what love is you won’t know Jesus when He comes. You won’t be ready. I want to tell you people the story of the world, how it never known when love come, so when love comes again, you’ll be ready.[28]

Extreme love is unacceptable to Rayber, its insanity and crudity threatening and beneath his consideration, so he runs into the night.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1]Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2019) 216-217.

[2] Ibid, 80.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle Edition, 2007).

[5] Ibid, 39.

[6] Gopnik, 81.

[7] O’Connor, 33.

[8] Ibid, 17.

[9] Ibid, 53.

[10] Ibid, 16.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Gopnik, 80.

[13] Ibid, 81.

[14] O’Connor, 39.

[15] Ibid, 32.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Gopnik, 24.

[20] O’Connor, 20.

[21] Ibid, 32.

[22] Ibid, 53. Unfortunately he probably means he intends to kill Bishop, as his act of “uprooting” though even this evil works a kind of grace.

[23] Ibid, 12.

[24] Ibid, 32.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Gopnik, 23-24.

[27] O’Connor, 33

[28] Ibid, 36-37.

Jesus as the Answer to Nothing or the Alpha and Omega: The Jesus Logic of Robert Jenson

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that he became “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name seems to me here not to ring true.”[1] He describes something like a feeling of disgust at religious jargon (he says “I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable”).[2] When I see billboards or bumper stickers advertising “Jesus is the Answer” or “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” I get a similar feeling. I am suspicious of the question Jesus might be thought to answer, or the “reason” behind such sloganeering. The language is largely unintelligible. As Robert Jenson has noted, this is true not simply of slogans but “That Christianity’s language about God has become unintelligible to its hearers is finally apparent also to us who speak it – in that we find it increasingly unintelligible to ourselves.”[3] The sloganeering like much of popular religion, seems to be on the order of “Coke is It” – spoken with enough force by enough smiling people the product is consumed for an unspecified “it” factor. To ask after the meaning is already to have missed the point. The implication is Coke/Jesus will bring on a certain toothy happiness, devoid of specifics and requiring a hollow intensity of “faith.” This Jesus answers nothing and does nothing, and yet rather than assume this name is a cipher, preachers and believers blindly committed to the faith, increase the intensity of the sloganeering. It cannot be admitted the meaning is uncertain, as this implies it may have no meaning.

The problem is not that too much is made of Christ. As Jenson has noted, much of Christian thought is falsely construed as part of a “possessed rationality” in which an idea, an image, or a mental picture serves in place of the person of the Logos and this results in human striving toward God, rather than a reception of the Word. From his Lutheran context, this is “works righteousness” – with focus on ascent to God, rather than on a relinquishing of human logic. The Logos is not received on the basis of an already possessed logic, as if the Word is one word among many. This Word which establishes all of creation and which is its fulfillment, is an order of reality which exceeds human speaking and thinking, as it is the summation and creation of reality. As Michael Brain has written of Jenson, “All of the disparate words of creation coalesce into one: the Word of God, whom Jenson identifies exactly with the person of Jesus Christ.”[4] This is not a Word subject to verification by other means, or testable according to scientific positivism, but is a Word that surpasses this sort of reason.

On the other hand, this Word is not an abstraction, an analogy or an image, but a person. Brain maintains, “Jenson emphatically taught the unqualified and exhaustive identity of the Word with this person, for the Word that establishes creation in the beginning is the exact history of Jesus in our midst and the Kingdom he enacts. Creation has its being from the historical life of Jesus Christ, from 1 to 30 A.D., so that statements of reality are true insofar as they narrate the story of Jesus as both the story of God and the story of creation.”[5] Of course, this makes no sense according to a reason built on the logic of cause and effect, in which the life of Christ is subsequent to the eternal life of God, but neither does a suffering God, a God that is human and is born, a God that experiences time and history, or a God who in Christ grows in wisdom and stature.

In Jenson’s reading and expansion upon Maximus, he maintains the Logos is “a triune identity” (tropos hyparxeos): “he is a subsisting relation to the Father, the subsisting relation of being begotten.”[6] Jenson recognizes that to follow Maximus, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[7] If God the Son suffered, then one of the Trinity suffered, and if one of the Trinity suffered, then God suffered. “We may still apprehend paradox in his position, but the paradox is now not that the presumed impassible Logos suffers, but that the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[8] As Maximus states it, he is “Suffering God.”[9]

Jenson, following Maximus and Origen and deploying a metaphor of Augustine, asserts a peculiar first century understanding, that the Trinitarian God is accomplishing his identity in Christ. Deploying Augustine’s psychological analogy, God the Father is like “consciousness” or the locus of awareness, while God the Son is as God’s “ego,” the “diachronically identifiable individual” while the Holy Spirit is God’s freedom. God in Christ is not a disembodied logos asarkos, but the historical person Jesus.[10] “The second identity of God is directly the human person of the gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[11] Jesus find his “I” “in the same way that other human beings do – or, rather, that other humans find their ‘I’ and are free” as he is and does.[12] “This human personality is then an identity of God in that before the Father in the Spirit he lives the mutual life that God is. . .”[13]

According to David Bruner, “A Father without a Son – that is, without an incarnate son of the kind Jenson specifies – would be the same as an apparatus of mental perception without any lived history.”[14] God would have no lived content or actuality and Trinity and theology are rendered abstract and unintelligible. For Jenson, apart from the historical Jesus, God would not be who he is, Trinity would not be a fact about God, and the love of God or the very definition of God would not be the case. This is a paradoxical logic which accounts for the synthesis found in Christ between God and human, between Creator and creation, which is definitive of the personhood and love of God. This paradoxical, cosmic, synthesizing, love of God found in Christ, is directly accessible and intelligible.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th.  Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42. The title of this blog was inspired by Jordan Wood’s lecture 8 on Maximus at PBI, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-and-the-love-of-god-in-synthesis-personhood-and-humility/

[2] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[3] Robert Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 3.

[4] Michael Raymond Brain, The Metaphysics of the Gospel: Christ, Reality, and Ecumenism in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Toronto: Wycliffe College Dissertation, 2023) 70.

[5] Brain, 70.

[6] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 136

[7] Ibid, 137.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Maximus, Ambigua, 91:1037B, quoted in Jenson, Ibid.

[10] David Bruner, “Jenson, Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 21 Number 3 July 2019) 317.

[11] Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 137, Cited in Bruner, Ibid.

[12] Jenson, Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bruner, Ibid, 317.

“That Christ Would Be Formed in You”: From False Imaging to the Image of Christ in Maximus

Out of the long disputes in church history about the nature of the person of Christ, there develops a complicated and nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person. This is developed by Maximus the Confessor, who describes the “depth of the soul,” the “hidden part of the heart,” the two natures and wills, the role of reason, intellect and sense experience, all of which is integrated into a singular personhood.[1] Maximus is “Confessor,” having his hand cut off and his tongue torn out, because of his defense of the union of the divine and human natures and wills in the singular person of Christ. Maximus sees Christ as uniting the human and divine, but the very definition of person takes on this mediating role between the heavenly and earthly, the sensible and intelligible, the natural and the spiritual. On the basis of sense experience there is the development of discernment, intellect, and the fulfilling of the personal. In one of Maximus’ favorite triads, he speaks of the development of the human as passing from being, to wellbeing, to eternal being. Being does not explain wellbeing, and wellbeing does not explain eternal being, but as in Einsteinian field theory, the explanation works from the top down, with the person of Christ demonstrating the integration of being (being human, having passions and sense experience etc.) with wellbeing, all of which is understood in the light of the divine-human being. By concentrating vision on eternal being, and understanding God gives being to all that exists, there is the grace of well-being. [2]

In Maximus, as opposed to Freud, this depth psychology is not simply bent on describing the source of human passion and aggression (though Maximus also does this), but also describes how to direct the passions. As Kallistos Ware has put it, Freudian psychoanalysis goes down to a “dank and snake-infested cellar” but there is also a depth psychology serving as a ladder that leads to the Kingdom of God.[3] There is a ladder of ascent through being, the natural, the sensible and the knowable but the ladder of ascent, as with Moses going up Sinai, is a movement from knowing to unknowing, beyond the conceptual into the unknowing of the mystical, and this pertains to the personal. The personal is not reducible to the conceptual or the sensual, or simply to being, but being and all that it entails is mediated through the personal and the personal is ultimately synonymous with the divine Person: “On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who ‘becomes all things to all’” (I Cor. 9:22).[4]

Synonymous with the concept of the personal are both the divine Person and the cosmos he has created. It is not that either God or cosmos, Creator and creation, can be conceived separately, but it is their integration in Personhood which give them coherence. As with David, he “heard the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaim the work of His hands, and this is wondrous indeed, since the creator did not endow these things with a soul. Yet with the ears of his intellect, he heard inanimate beings proclaim the principles of theology . . .”[5] David said, “My father and my mother abandoned me, but the Lord took me to himself.” Maximus takes him to be describing the passage from “the natural law of the flesh, which governs the process of birth and corruption” and the passage through “sensation, which feeds us like a mother,” or the passage from desiring the visible to desiring the invisible. “In this way, the visible world is abandoned by us and abandons us, but the Lord takes us to Himself and according to the spiritual law adopts those who are worthy, becoming their adopted father through virtue and knowledge, and in His goodness He gives the whole of Himself to the whole of them, according to the likeness.”[6] God is not perceived apart from the cosmos, rather: “If the soul uses the senses properly, discerning by means of its own faculties the manifold inner principles of created beings, and if it succeeds in wisely transmitting to itself the whole visible universe in which God is hidden and proclaimed in silence, then by use of its own free choice it creates a world of spiritual beauty within the understanding.”[7] As Maximus explains in the Mystagogy, God made all things and defines their limits, though apart from Him these things seem to diverge but “he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of relationship with him as their beginning.”[8]

Throughout, Maximus has in mind the mediating role of the incarnation, which is not simply a model, but the mode of personhood enacted in the body of Christ, which is the explanation of the cosmos: “The universe possesses a sanctuary, which is the realm above and is assigned to the powers above, and it also possesses a nave, which is the realm below and is traversed by those whose lot it is to live through sense perception.”[9] He describes the process of the soul passing through its three stages, as one entering the Church: “By means of the nave, representing the body, it proposes ethical philosophy, while by means of the sanctuary, representing the soul, it spiritually interprets natural contemplation, and by means of the intellect of the divine altar it manifests mystical theology.”[10] Life is a process of putting on Christ, and passing, by means of the earthly nave, into the heavenly sanctuary.

Maximus describes the same process, in detail, in an allegorical reading of the Exodus, in which Moses represents the intellect. Deprived of Moses, as at Sinai, Israel reverts to the mental images of Egypt and return to their delusional wanderings in the wilderness. In Moses absence, they melt down their practice of the virtues in the fire of their passion, and they produce an irrational image, the Golden Calf. When Moses returns, or when divine reason arrives, it grinds this irrational state into powder and scatters it under the water.”[11] The calf is the “mixing and confusion” of the passions, and it is molten as it is the reification of “the form of the evil imaginings stored up in the mind.”[12] The calf is an interpretation, a projection of the imagination, or a false rationalization.

As Jordan Wood explains, Maximus does not think we can avoid making images, or what he calls phantasms, as this is what is entailed in being a rational being.[13] These phantasms, are simply interpretations or intelligible pictures, and in the absence of Moses/reason, a calf “emerges from the fire” of the passions. Humans are continually personifying, even the inanimate, but this false incarnation and false imaging intimates the reality. Every time we stub our toe and get angry at an inanimate object, creation as incarnation is at work. There is an external manifestation, a taking on of flesh, a concretization, which points to the working of grace, even here. The grace of false incarnation is that it can lead to true incarnation as it objectifies, and opens to examination, even stupid delusions. When you examine this object that has now become this event that has now become clear to you (e.g., you yelled at that door or that table), that means you are starting to self-scrutinize what you have brought out of yourself and made into an image, a phantasm, a molten calf.  Certainly, you are confused, you have mixed things up, and assigned agency where it is lacking. As Maximus states it, “The intellect takes all of these things, according to the meaning given to each, and throws them into the fire of the passions, where it forges the irrational and mindless state of ignorance, which is the mother of all evils.”[14] Recognizing this evil for what it is, in Maximus extension of the allegory, is to grind the idol into dust and cast it onto the water:

This state, however, can be broken down whenever the intellect—observing in thought the density of the passion as it is manifested externally to the senses—breaks apart the combination of elements producing the passion and brings each one back to its proper principle of origin. This is how it “scatters them under the water,” which is to say “under the knowledge of truth,” clearly distinguishing and decoupling them from their mutually evil coalescence and combination.[15]

Every passion takes a natural power such as desire or anger, and turns it from its created nature, but the intellect enables a deconstruction of this idol, and a return of the natural powers to their proper place. The intellect can grind the molten calf, and its various elements, into powder, and the image of God be restored.

In Jordan’s explanation, Maximus takes from our reifying and idol producing tendencies, the hopeful point, that it densifies, thickens, and becomes almost a false incarnation, and that it thus becomes an object open to examination and deconstruction. Even though it is constructed out of delusion (which is to say, nothing at all), the very fact that that the dynamic product is an incarnation, is also the very occasion for being able to destroy it and therefore be saved. Recognizing false incarnation, in light of its true realization, allows release and the opportunity to pull the powers and passions back from this object and to redirect them. The point is not to give up on images, and to see God as some transcendent immutable other, but the point is to enact discernment. To grind the molten calf into powder, requires discernment and judgment, as the soul comes to possess the divine image of God alone. We do not simply become idol smashers, nor is it simply the right kind of imaging, but it’s a matter of the right image, and the true incarnation.[16]

Personhood, image making, and interpreting, which are at the root of false incarnation, are also the reality and truth of deification. Paul describes this as the goal of his ministry and the point of the spiritual life. Prayer, meditation, spiritual discipline, Bible study, and church involve us in image making as “Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19).

[1] See the development of this in Michael Bakker, “Maximus and Modern Psychology” in The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, eds, Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 534.

[2] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 10:119.

[3] Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996) 56, Quoted in Bakker, Ibid.

[4] Saint Maximus The Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. By Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 50.

[5] Ambigua, 10:20, 179-181.

[6] Ambigua, 10:21, 181.

[7] Ambigua 10: 21, PG 91. 1248C; trans. In  A. G. Cooper. The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 59,  cited in Bakker, 538.

[8] Mystagoy, 51.

[9] Mystagogia, 56.

[10] Mystagogia, 4, cited in Bakker, 540.

[11] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.:  The Catholic University of America Press) 16:2, 131.

[12] Thalassios, 132.

[13] Jordan Wood, Lecture at Ploughshares Bible Institute http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/discerning-and-becoming-the-image-of-christ-with-jordan-wood/

[14] Thalassios, 16:5, 132,

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jordan Wood, Ibid.

Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer: The Specific Instance of the Word Actualized Always and In All Things

Prayer, the most instinctive and common of religious practices, is also the most paradoxical. How can God be both personal and interactive and yet be eternal? Does the unchangeable God hear and respond to our requests? Does he change his mind, at our prodding?[1] In a classical theistic understanding, God is prior to all things. He is impassable, unchangeable, immovable, and all knowing. If he already knows, then doesn’t his foreknowledge require that all things are already determined? In some Calvinist interpretations, for example, all events are direct determinations of his will. The only explanation for prayer, for a classical theist, a Calvinist, or for any who hold that eternity is prior to creation, is that prayer is about aligning human will with the eternal (the unchanging purposes of God). Even in my anti-Calvinist fundamentalist Bible college this was the explanation that was given. While aligning our will with God’s must play a role in prayer, this also seems to fall short of the basic human need in the midst of pain, sickness, suffering and evil. It also does away with authentic personal interaction with God. Is prayer just a matter of learning to accept bad things, and relinquishing any hope of a different outcome? This is not very satisfying and does not accord with the Bible’s picture of God “repenting” or changing his mind, as he did in response to both Abraham and Moses, the most prominent examples of many, in which God interactively changes course. Open Theology, in attempting to answer this problem, concluded God is subject to time and does not know all future events, and so, as in Process Theology, God is discovering the future along with the rest of us. This may be more emotionally satisfying, but it also seems to diminish God and his power in the face of evil and suffering (the very things that evoke much prayer).

Maximus the Confessor provides an alternative cosmological setting and understanding of prayer, in which eternity and God do not simply precede creation, but the identity of God is in incarnation and creation. Time is not subsequent, or outside of God’s eternal purposes, but as is clear in the incarnation, creation is part of and participates in who God is. In his explanation of The Lord’s Prayer, Maximus concludes that this model prayer, which touches upon the needs and requests of every prayer, is answered by Christ in the incarnation. “For the words of the prayer make request for whatever the Word of God himself wrought through the flesh in his self-abasement.”[2] Creation’s purpose and completion, realized in incarnation, sets prayer and the Lord’s prayer, directly within God’s eternal purpose. It is not that God’s eternal purposes precede or are outside of time, or that human free will conflicts or obstructs eternity, but God, in his eternity, responds to human freedom. Afterall, God “became man without any change” in who he is as God.[3] Thus the model prayer “teaches us to strive for those goods of which only God the Father through the natural mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit is in all truth the bestower, since according to the divine Apostle the Lord Jesus is ‘mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5; cf. Heb 8:6). Jesus teaches us to petition God for that which he would accomplish, but even here the petition is part of the fulfillment. 

God’s purpose, that his Word would be “actualized always and in all things,”[4] or the purpose of creation as participation in God (deification), means that divine and human purpose (the mutual purpose of incarnation) is to be in full communion/communication. Prayer is central to this purpose: “If then the realization of the divine counsel is the deification of our nature, and if the aim of divine thoughts is the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life, then it is profitable to recognize the full import of the Lord’s prayer, to put it into practice and to write about it properly.”[5] Maximus equates “divine thoughts” with “the accomplishment of what we ask for in our life.” That is, human need, human action, human desire, in this reversal of the way we may often think, shape divine thoughts. Time shapes eternity, as creation and incarnation are eternal facts about God. We know this, as God’s eternal purposes are realized in the incarnation.

Seen in this light, Maximus concludes the prayer contains the meaning of 7 key things: “theology, adoption in grace, equality of honor with the angels, participation in eternal life, the restoration of nature inclining toward a tranquil state, the abolition of the law of sin, and the overthrowing of the tyranny of evil which has dominated us by trickery.”[6] In summary, Christ teaches us the true name and nature of God, and adoption is enacted through the Son, rendering men equal to the angels in heaven by bringing together heaven and earth, and providing a new birth fully integrating human free will in the promotion of “Thy Will”, and by providing a new heavenly food (the bread of immortal life). God in Christ restores nature from the bondage to decay by defeating death and purifying nature of the violence of hostility, and by providing a spiritual birth not subject to the law of sin and death, thus effecting the destruction of the tyranny of evil.[7] In each phase of his argument, Maximus demonstrates how the salvation wrought in Christ answers the prayer.

In regard to theology, the prayer speaks of the Father’s name, but the one name given by God is that of Jesus Christ: “for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). According to Maximus, “Father” is not an added designation nor is the kingdom an added dignity: ”The Father indeed has no acquired name and we should not think of the kingdom as a dignity considered after him. For he did not begin to be, as if he had a beginning as Father and King, but he always is, and is always both Father and King, not having in any way begun to exist or to be Father or King.”[8] God did not take on a different identity, but the identity revealed through Christ and because of Christ is who he is from eternity. In the incarnation, the Word “teaches us the mystical knowledge of God, because he shows us in himself the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the full Father and the full Holy Spirit are essentially and completely in the full Son, even the incarnate Son, without being themselves incarnate.”[9] The prayer, in the name of the Father, for the kingdom to come, is inclusive of all of who God is: “For the name of God the Father who subsists essentially is the only-begotten Son, and the kingdom of God the Father who subsists essentially is the Holy Spirit.”[10]

By praying “Our Father,” and bidding others to so pray, Jesus sets forth and shares the grace of his relation to the Father. The adoption by the Father is enacted by the Son: “He gives adoption by giving through the Spirit a supernatural birth from on high in grace, of which divine birth the guardian and preserver is the free will of those who are thus born.”[11] No one asks to be born the first time, but in the true birth and beginning, human will and freedom are preserved by God. “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother who . . . does not bear the marks of nature subject to corruption and generation in the relationship of male and female.”[12] The first birth is something of a false beginning, displaced by the second, in which each, like the Virgin Mary, consents to bearing the incarnate one. “For in Christ there is neither male nor female, thus clearly indicating the characteristics and the passions of a nature subject to corruption and generation. Instead, there is only a deiform principle created by divine knowledge and one single movement of free will which chooses only virtue.”[13] The defeat of evil, the overcoming of temptation, the arrival at virtue, are implicit in the very possibility of the prayer enacted in Christ. The prayer, like the one who modeled it, is a new order of relation with the Father, in the Kingdom through the Spirit.

Throughout, Maximus is picturing the prayer as a process of deification, and so the daily bread is best described as “Our bread” as that “which you prepared in the beginning for the immortality of nature, ‘give us this day,’ to us who belong to the mortal condition of the present life, so that nourishment by the bread of life and knowledge triumph over the death of sin.”[14] Adam missed partaking of the bread of life due to transgression, but Christ restores this possibility. “For the Bread of Life, out of his love for men, gives himself to all who ask him . . . according to the spiritual dignity enabling him to receive it.”[15] Elsewhere Jesus warns not to worry about life, about food or drink, or what you will wear, but seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:25). Maximus suspects some may not agree with his interpretation, but even in the literal understanding (which disagrees with Jesus command) the prayer is for one day’s supply, thus even taken literally the prayer is a preparation for death. “On the contrary, let us without anxiety ask in prayer for one day’s bread and let us show that in the Christian way of life we make life a preparation for death, by letting our free will overtake nature, and before death comes, by cutting the soul off from the concerns for bodily things. In this way it will not be nailed down to corruptible things, nor pass on to matter the use of the natural desire, nor learn the greediness which deprives one of the abundance of divine gifts.”[16] It is due to possessively seeking after earthly life after all, that death reigns, and this prayer for God’s provision is aimed at the institution of a heavenly economy.

The prayer asks those in heaven and on earth to be of a single will, and Maximus also turns this imitation into a two-way interpersonal realization, as the prayer calls upon God to imitate man in offering forgiveness. “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is a “summons to God to be to him as he is to his neighbors.”[17] As the one praying takes on God’s likeness, he takes on the divine detachment from remembering offenses, and like God, he freely forgives, enacting reconciliation between God and nature: “For since free will has been thus united to the principle of nature, the reconciliation of God with nature comes about naturally, for otherwise it is not possible for nature in rebellion against itself by free will to receive the inexpressible divine condescension.”[18] It is not simply that earth is drawn heavenward, but the heavenly kingdom is brought to earth, in and through the prayer. Not only God, but his children become dispensers of grace in forgiveness.

Maximus ties together the logic of the prayer for bread and the forgiving of debtors, as both are a surpassing of nature. Asking for spiritual bread can be likened to forgiving debtors as the one praying knows he is mortal by nature, and any day natural life may end, but this is the point of the spiritual life, of “outstripping nature” and dying to the world. “For your sake we are put to death the whole day, we are considered as sheep of the slaughterhouse” (Ps. 44:23 and Rom. 8:36). Like Christ, the one praying pours out life as a libation, which is already a deliverance from temptation and evil. This is already deliverance from the law of sin, and from the evil one. “In this way not only shall we acquire forgiveness for our sins but we shall also be victors over the law of sin without being left behind to undergo the experience of it. We shall trample underfoot the evil serpent which gave rise to the law.”[19]

The prayer calls for a radical cosmological shift, in which time participates in and completes eternity, and eternity and the heavenly are enacted in time. The prayer, Maximus insists throughout, calls not only for the completion of creation in incarnation but directs “us to the mystery of deification” as God condescends “through the flesh of the Only Son” to enact His Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.[20]

[1] Jordan Wood raises and answers these issues in a PBI lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-on-the-explanation-of-prayer-by-jordan-wood/

[2] Maximus the Confessor, “Commentary of the Our Father: A Brief Explanation of the Prayer Our Father To a Certain Friend of Christ By Saint Maximus, Monk and Confessor,” in Maximus Confessor:  Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 102.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7:22.

[5] Commentary on the Our Father, Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 102-103.

[7] Ibid, 103-104. Maximus cycles through these results several times.

[8] Ibid, 106.

[9] Ibid, 103.

[10] Ibid, 106

[11] Ibid,103.

[12] Ibid,109.

[13] Ibid, 110.

[14] Ibid, 113.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 114.

[17] Ibid, 115.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 118.

[20] Ibid, 118.

The Mystical Union: Maximus and the Christologic Beyond What Can be Conceived

If problem and solution are stated in the broadest terms, whether scientific, social, psychological, or spiritual, this is captured in the terms dualism and synthesis. An unresolvable difference, or a disunion, in which two systems, two facts, two grounds of meaning, or simply two people, stand opposed, is this sense of a duality. In turn, synthesis is union without dissolution, accounting for difference but integrating this difference into a larger, harmonious field. Union without dissolution describes the goal of field theory in science, but it also potentially describes every solution or resolution. All peace and harmony, all problem solving, depend upon a synthesizing harmony. The problem is, that unresolvable difference (dualism) characterizes human thought, whether that of wave and particle, Jew and Gentile, or male and female. Maximus the Confessor, in describing the work of God in Christ, demonstrates how it is that Christ overcomes otherwise irresolvable difference. He shows that the way God is at work surpasses any philosophical, religious, or logical system, whether that of Plato and Aristotle, the apophatic and cataphatic, or simply systems grounded in being and nonbeing. Cause and effect, existence and nonexistence, sensible and rational, silence and speech, being and nonbeing, or knowing and beyond knowing, describe the working parameters of human conceptuality. The history of thought, religion and theology, are summed up in these parameters of possibility, and yet Maximus maintains God in Christ surpasses these categories.

He begins On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy by laying out an alternative parameter:

Let God be the guide of the things that are perceived and spoken, for he is the only mind of those who perceive and of that which is perceived, and he is the only word of those who speak and of that which is spoken. He is the life of the living and of the things that have been endowed with life. On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who “becomes all things to all” (I Cor. 9:22).[1]

Maximus explains that, “on account of himself, he neither in any way whatsoever belongs to nor comes to belong to the things that are or that are becoming, whose essence he constitutes.”[2]  Being and becoming are inadequate ways of conceiving of God as “He is by nature in the same class as absolutely nothing of the things that are, and for this reason, he allows us to say rather that he is not, because it is more properly said of him that he transcends being.”[3] But this Platonic notion of the God beyond being, taken up by Neo-Platonists and many modern day Platonic theologians, is also inadequate in Maximus’ estimate. He acknowledges that we might contemplate the “difference between God and creatures,” and he recognizes that negation and affirmation are both limited possibilities which might be a reverential part of acknowledging God, “yet,” he says, “neither is possible in a proper sense – I am speaking of the existence and non-existence of God.”[4] Maximus acknowledges both of these approaches (and allows for the theological traditions which depend upon either the negative or the positive), while at the same time suggesting neither is “possible” or adequate.

So, this abstract approach to God, focusing on God as cause, might conclude positively that all things speak of God as they can be traced back to their origin, while at the same time maintaining that nothing can be said of God on the basis of cause, as God precedes all effects. It may be correct in a limited sense to speak of God as cause of all things, but as Jordan Wood notes, something is smuggled into God as cause, that is inadequate, as cause speaks of sequence or has reference to an unfolding in time which would never arrive at God.[5]

Maximus argues that neither existence nor non-existence “is possible in a proper sense, because neither establishes the very essence and nature of what existence is concerning the one whom we seek. For nothing at all – whether it exists or does not exist – is united with him by nature because he is their cause; neither anything of the things that are and are spoken nor anything of the things that are not and are not spoken in any way comes near to him.”[6] God is “beyond every kataphatic and apophatic statement”[7] – He is beyond either negation or affirmation or silence and speaking – all are inadequate. In other words, God is beyond any possibility that has been conceived or could have been conceived, and even to conclude to a negative not knowing is a claim about what can and cannot be known.  

While the tradition from Dionysius, which Maximus is referencing, would privilege the apophatic – and which Maximus allows has partial validity, even in itself it would negate the supposed understanding that imagines negation and silence alone are adequate. To claim to know what must be negated (the apophatic), or to know what cannot be spoken or made incarnate, is to claim to know what cannot be known (a self-defeating position). In both Protestant and Catholic understanding, this form of theology has laid the ground for delimiting what God can and cannot do, even in the incarnation. An apophatic theology which goes beyond itself, to that which is otherwise unthinkable, must be open to the possibility of God revealing himself in a manner that is not conceivable.

Yet, in the Christian theological tradition, this neo-platonic apophaticism predominates in Catholicism (East and West) and Protestantism. For example, the hard demarcation often made between faith and reason, presumes to tap into a reason that imagines it has the power to mark the limits of affirmation and negation, faith and reason. It makes a judgment and marks a delimitation taken up in nominalism and forms of Thomism. It limits the possibility of revelation and sets the limits of what God can do in incarnation, yet as Maximus argues, the accessible or inaccessible, the describable or indescribable, the knowable or unknowable do not in any way come near to him. Abstractions devolve into irresolvable differences, differences upon which they either implicitly or explicitly depend, but which are self-defeating.

Maximus moves directly into demonstrating how the incarnation and the church as a continuation of incarnation, goes beyond abstraction to a fulness of synthesis. The church, like Christ, “bears the representation and image of God because she possesses the same activity as his according to imitation and representation.”[8] God binds together those categories, such as the intelligible and sensible: “he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of relationship with him as their beginning.”[9]

Nothing has an origin or nature which establishes some absolute difference; rather all things have a common origin and cause which synthesizes or overcomes difference. “This relationship nullifies and covers over all individual relationships that are contemplated according to the nature of each of the things that are, not because it corrupts and destroys them and causes them not to be, but because it surpasses and outshines them. . .”[10] There is a unified relationship, or a final unified field theory, if you will, in which the unification of all things is posited. “And it is by this relationship that the totality itself and the parts of the totality shine and by nature are, because the parts possess the whole cause, which shines more brilliantly than themselves. And just as the sun is more brilliant than the stars in nature and power, so also its appearance covers over them as a cause does its effects.”[11]

All things relate to God, but humans have the capacity to obscure and fracture this relationship, which infects human recognition of how it is that all things  achieve unity with one another. As Maximus’ translator explains, “nothing in its original, created form is oriented to the division and discord that comes as a result of the fracturing of relationship with God.”[12] As Maximus explained earlier, this restoring of relationship is the work of the church instituted by Christ: “This contract for spiritual work in the spiritual vineyard restores the spiritual denarius of the divine and most royal image that was stolen by the evil one in the beginning through deceit according to the transgression of the commandment.”[13] The church “works the same things and in the same way as God does” – “as an image relates to its archetype.”[14]

For example, though there are a nearly boundless number of people from many different races, tribes, tongues, customs, manners and pursuits, through the body of Christ they are regenerated and recreated: “to all he gives equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ.”[15] Maximus quotes Galatians 3:28 to make the point: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Church, as the image of God, works the same divine synthesis and oneness around the faithful. “God himself works this oneness by nature without confusion around the substances of the things that are, alleviating and making identical that which is different around them by the reference to and oneness with himself as their cause and beginning and end” and what God is doing in the universe he is doing through the faithful in the church.[16]

Maximus uses the architecture and various offices of the church to illustrate the point that the body of Christ is unified. There are priests and ministers working in the sanctuary, and there is the nave which is accessible to all the faithful, but the church is one. “In the same way, the entire universe of everything that is which was brought forth from God at the creation and is divided into the intelligible realm, which is comprised of intellectual and bodiless substance, and the realm that is sensible and bodily and which has been ingeniously interwoven from many forms and natures” is unified in the Creator.[17] Maximus describes this unity, synthesizing difference (in the body of Christ and the cosmos) as constituting two churches. “The universe possesses a sanctuary, which is the realm above and is assigned to the powers above, and it also possesses a nave, which is the realm below and is traversed by those whose lot it is to live through sense perception.”[18] The universe, like the church, “is not divided by its parts” as the divisions are limited. All differences resolve to an undivided unity as “these realms are alternately identical with the universe and are without confusion with one another.”[19] Just as Christ unifies the church, so too all the facets of the sensible and intelligible are unified in God. If the things that do not appear are clearly perceived on the basis of the seen (Rom. 1:20) then how much more is this the case for those who devote themselves to this spiritual knowledge.

The church is God’s unifying activity in which participation in Christ (deification), is made explicit and visual, in the unifying work of communion, baptism, and priestly mediation. God makes himself known and seen bodily, becoming His own sign. The eucharistic moment, in which Christ gives himself to all who would receive him, constitutes a Christo-logic, exceeding (and unifying) all difference in a unifying synthesis. God is his own symbol in Christ, unifying beginning and end, the lowest and the highest, time and eternity, the cosmic and the heavenly, the sensible and the rational. This action of God in Christ is beyond what could otherwise be conceived, but this logic beyond all other logic, points to a fullness in which God is all in all. “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” no earthly or heavenly, no sensible or rational, no apophatic or cataphatic, no mere abstraction, “but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11). In this realization there is the transfiguration of the human and a new order of understanding – Christologic.

[1] Saint Maximus The Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. By Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019) 50.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 50-51.

[5]In a lecture at PBI http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-christologic/

[6] Mystagoy, Ibid, 51.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 52

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, footnote 23.

[13] Ibid, 49.

[14] Ibid, 53.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 55.

[17] Ibid, 56.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?

As we enter this confusing period in our nation, the response and responsibility of Christians to government is being brought front and center. Rethinking the Christian role in Empire may prove to be the silver lining to the cloud of the present chaos. It was under the darkest of circumstances, after all, that Paul outlined the responsibility of Christians to the state. During the period in which Nero ruled Rome, Christians, by their very existence, were thought to be a danger to the Empire. Paul provides instruction as to how to proceed in light of the fact that Jesus has been slain and Paul himself will shortly be murdered. Continue reading “What Is The Proper Christian Response To Evil Government?”

The Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus’ Bible Reading

As long as a merely historicizing exposition of the Scriptures predominates, the reign of the mind absorbed in transitory and temporal things has not been toppled, and the children of the dead Saul continue to live, along with his offspring, which are seven in number, that is, the corporeal and transitory observance of the law. Maximus the Confessor [1]

Maximus the Confessor demonstrates that his understanding of Christ as the Word who would be incarnate in and through all things, is always the Word made flesh or the exegetical reality of God (John 1:18) and this is his biblical hermeneutic. For example, the story of David handing over the children of Saul to be executed by the Gibeonites, is a story about a literal, historical reading versus a Christ centered-theological-spiritual reading. In an explanation of 2 Kings 21, Maximus describes those who might stick to a literal understanding or cling to the law as controlled by the flesh. In the story “Saul signifies the written law, which rules over carnal Jews according to the power of the carnal commandment. In other words, he signifies the corporeal way of life or thinking that rules over those who are guided solely by the letter of the law.”[2] In a riff on the meaning of Rizpah (Saul’s concubine), he explains that her name means “course of the mouth.” “The course of the mouth is the learning of the law that is limited solely to the pronouncing of words. The person who occupies himself solely with the corporeal observance of the law unlawfully cohabits with such learning, and from their union is born nothing that is pious or loves God.”[3] Such a one gives birth to miserable offspring – “anathema and shame.”

One attached to the flesh, the letter, or the law, is attached to pleasure, having a “passionate attachment to the world.” Maximus equates “love of the world” and “love of the body” with love of “physical configuration of the letter of the law.”[4] Such a one has made the letter his concubine, and Maximus emphasizes the “corporeal” nature of this desire of the law, is aimed at “the enjoyment and satisfaction of the body,” such that to pursue the letter of the law is the same as one “absolutely subject to the activity of the passions and to the shame of the defilement of the vile thoughts they produce. He will be subject to this corrupted world and preoccupied in his thoughts with love for the body and the matter and forms of the passions.”[5] To love the law or to be attached to the letter, is as one who “’reckons his stomach to be God, and who boasts in his shame as if it were his glory,” such a one “knows only how to embrace eagerly the dishonorable passions as if they were divine, and thus attends only to what is transitory, that is, to matter and form, and to the misuse of the activity of his five senses. . .”[6] Maximus describes an incapacity of thought, or an inability to escape the symbols and to arrive at “a natural principle or thought.”[7] Saul, or one attached “to the letter of Scripture,” is consumed with “enjoyment of the flesh, which he thinks is prescribed by the law” and devoid of “divine knowledge” but experiencing a “famine of spiritual nourishment.”[8]

One can rise above corporeal desire, and attachment to the world, only through interpretive lens of Christ. Maximus explains that “Jesus, the Word of God,” does not do away with the medium of thought or what he calls the bearers of wood and water” but he ignites in these materials “the light of divine knowledge” which “washes away the stain of the passions.”[9] Maximus’ point seems to fit naturally with the experience of the two unnamed disciples going to Emmaus.

Though we might imagine an encounter with the historical Jesus would be proof enough, knowledge enough, or experience enough to confirm the reality of faith, the two on the Road to Emmaus, walk and talk with the historical Jesus without recognizing him. Given the best tools of historical criticism, the finest textual criticism, the most elaborate working of all linguistic and textual critical tools, none of these will bring us as close, and certainly no closer to the reality of the historical Jesus, than that experienced by two on the Road to Emmaus, yet this historical, physical, embodied encounter with Jesus did not produce recognition, understanding or faith. It is only the eucharistic moment of breaking of bread that produces understanding and faith, and it is at this moment that Jesus fades from sight. As the two explained later, “He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread,” when he disappeared (Lk. 24:35). A reading of the Bible that sticks, to the history, to the text, to the letter, or to the flesh, will never arrive at Christ.

While the incarnation is necessary and central to the person and work of Christ, Christ is not recognized on the basis of history, or on the basis of the flesh. Divinity is not the flesh itself, but made manifest in the flesh. Looking upon the flesh of Jesus, Jesus in the body, even the raised body, does not guarantee or equate with comprehension; rather an impassioned attachment to the flesh, to embodiment, can be equated with sin, even when it is the flesh of the historical Jesus. So too an impassioned attachment to the letter of Scripture, to the historical aspect of Scripture, or to Scripture per se, is on the order of attachment to the flesh. Both can be equated with clinging to the finite, to the medium, to the sign, rather than to the Spirit and to Christ.

In this sense, only Christ exegetes God (Jn. 1:18). Scripture, the law, history, the book, the flesh, do not exegete or explain. Certainly, each of these is taken up as a medium of explanation, but the explanatory point is the exegetical reality of Christ. This is the distinction that the early church made between law and Gospel. The law, as an end in itself was presumed to be on the order of taking the flesh as an end in itself. Thus Origen argued that there need be no distinction between the Old and New Testament, as the law or the Old Testament becomes such only where it is not read in conjunction with the Gospel. The law, “becomes an ‘Old Testament’ only for those who want to understand it in a fleshly way; and for them it has necessarily become old and aged, because it cannot maintain its strength, but, “for us, who understand and explain it spiritually and in an evangelical sense, it is always new.”[10] Both Testaments are new in that it is in the newness of understanding brought by Christ that they are to be understood. 

This exegetical or hermeneutic problem as with all human fallenness, is a matter of desire, but it is not desire per se but a stunted desire set on making the finite, the letter, or the flesh an end in itself. Maximus compares it to Potiphar’s wife attempting to seduce Joseph, and left only with his clothing, “completely failing to attain intercourse with the object of her desire.” So is one who only reads Scripture historically or literally. “The garments of the Word are a symbol of the words of Holy Scripture . . . but we must necessarily take thought for the ‘body’ of Holy Scripture, by which I mean its inner meanings, which are far superior to its ‘garments,’ for is not ‘the body more than clothing’? [Mt 6.25].”[11]

In Maximus’ description, with the pursuit of the body of Scripture there arises a desire that is “stretching out alongside God’s infinity.”[12] As Paul Blowers points out, desire in Maximus (who is following Gregory of Nyssa), is not “an unfortunate superaddition to reason or the human intellectual constitution” but “lies at the very core of human nature.” Desire is a necessary component of what it means to be human. As Blowers argues, “Called to the highest knowledge of, and participation in, the Trinity the intellect is helpless without the inclination and passionate pursuit afforded by desire.”[13]

Desire per se is not the problem with humanity, but a deviant desire that can cause the mind to “slip downward from above” but, according to Maximus “God redirects irrational lust for the things of this life to a natural object of desire.”[14] It is “by means of its desire and the whole power of its total love,” as they “cling closely to God through knowledge, and, growing in likeness to God,” that one is “divinized.”[15] Deification, Maximus writes,

is precisely . . . the return of believers to their proper beginning according to their proper end, which is the fulfillment of their desire. The fulfillment of their desire, in turn, is the ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire. The ever-moving repose of desirers around the object of their desire is, in turn, their uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of the object of desire. And the uninterrupted and continuous enjoyment of their object of desire is, in turn, their participation in supernatural divine realities.”[16]

Reading Scripture with Christ as center and interpretive key, redirects desire toward its proper end (and beginning), not through satiation of desire but through its increase. “For it is simply not possible that those who once come to be in God should reach satiety and be drawn away by wanton desire.”[17] Wanton desire proves empty and trivial, it is easily quenched or it is “repulsed and nauseated by things that were base and repugnant.” However, desire of God opens one up to an infinite desire. God “who by nature is infinite and infinitely attractive. . . increases the appetites of those who enjoy Him owing to their participation in that which has no limit.”[18]

Divinization is a stretching out and proper ordering of desire, which Maximus pictures as inherent to human immortality. Desire is part of the means of breaking out of the finite, the fleshly, the historical, and breaking through to the indwelling presence of the Creator, “making God Himself—who bound together the body and the soul—the body’s own unbreakable bond of immortality.”[19] Desire points to its proper end and beginning in desiring and infinitely attaining God.

[1] St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (hereafter, Q Thal, Translated by FR. Maximos Constas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press), 65.14, 528.

[2] Q Thal, 65.3, p. 521.

[3] Q Thal, 65.5, p. 521.

[4] Q Thal, 65.6, p. 522.

[5] Q Thal, 65.8, p. 523.

[6] Q Thal, 65.11, p. 525-526.

[7] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 524.

[8] Q Thal, 65.12, p. 526.

[9] Q Thal, 65.9, p. 525. Jordan Wood illustrates this point, made below, with the two on the Road to Emmaus in this lecture http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-maximus-view-of-the-word-as-continuing-incarnation/

[10] Origen, Hom Num 9.4.2/GCS 7, 59.10-15. Cited in Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 203.

[11] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 10.29, 33. Cited in Q Thal footnote, p. 527.

[12] Opusc. theol. et polem. 1 (PG 91:9A). Cited in Paul Blowers, ”The Dialectics and Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus the Confessor,” (Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011) 425-451) p. 432.

[13] Blowers, 432.

[14] Ambigua 8.2, p. 145.

[15] Ambigua 7.31, p. 119.

[16] Ad Thal. 59 (CCSG 22:65), Cited in Blowers, p. 433.

[17] Ambigua 7.28, p. 115.

[18] Ambigua 7.28, p. 117.

[19] Ambigua 7.31, p. 121.

Finding the Center in the Midst of Despair

In this strange time in our nation’s history, with the general bewilderment as to what has gripped our neighbors, our churches, or perhaps our family, no explanation seems adequate. The culture wars, the extremes of political correctness, the deconstruction of gender, the concern for the life of the unborn, are not to be dismissed, but neither is the seeming failure to recognize evil, or the willingness to deploy evil for the supposed greater good. Clearly a form of despair and desperation is at work. The center is not holding, especially where that center is presumed to be biblical. To the degree that the Christian faith has played a key role (e.g., Christian nationalism, religious fanaticism), the disagreement among Christians is fundamental. Clearly, there is a sharp divide over the meaning of the Gospel, the meaning of the Bible, and the identity of God. That is, the political and social crisis is a reflection of an even more deep-seated theological despair and crisis. The most fundamental question concerns the very identity and meaning of Jesus.

While it may seem that evangelicals, or those who hold to biblical inerrancy and the “authority of the Bible” are taking the high road in regard to faith, could it be there needs to be a literal and metaphorical “coming to Jesus”? That is, the evangelical notion that the Bible and correct Bible reading provide the cure to every disagreement and heresy, is not only missing the primacy of faith (or in terms of the early church, the primacy of the Gospel), but the nature of faith and the primacy of Christ. A faith given over to cultural and political pragmatism – the deployment of evil for the greater good – may have missed the central idea/ideal of the Christian faith, attaining to the perfection of Christ. So, in this moment of political turmoil reflecting a deep theological crisis, I propose a foundational and simple shift, a literal coming to Jesus as the basis of the harmonizing center of the Bible and the Christian faith.

The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no canon of Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture).[1] This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily  historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. Rather than recognize the images of God in the Old Testament as requiring Christ, requiring the Gospel, requiring that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ, the Gospel and Jesus are made subsequent to and conditioned by the Old Testament and by universal violence (only dispelled by the peace of the Gospel). The necessity of violence, the necessity of scapegoating, the necessity of a Janus-faced God, means that Jesus is used to support the worst sorts of fascism, Zionism, and nationalism.

In other words, the tradition of the Church for its first fifteen hundred years has been abandoned.[2]  As Origen, the first to write a handbook on interpretation put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.”[3] It is the meaning of this “through the Gospel” that has been lost. What Origen meant was that the Gospel makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other things). As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As Robert Wilken describes, contained within the early church’s exegetical method there was “a complete and completely unified dogmatic and spiritual theology.”[4] Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives.

To reduce it to an allegorical reading may be to miss the presumed spiritual reality and difference Christ makes. According to Paul, Christ is the true Subject of the Old Testament: “For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Co 10:1–4). Paul goes on to make his readers the primary recipients and beneficiaries of this spiritual reading: “Now these things happened as examples for us” (10:6). It is not that those who experienced these events are left out of the picture: “Now these things happened to them as an example,” but the writing is “for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (10:11).

Origen, follows Paul and the early church, in seeing all things in light of Christ, giving rise to a spiritual reading of the Old Testament, but more accurately, giving rise to a spiritually centered reading of all reality. In Origen’s view, like the Apostle(s), there is no Old and New Testament, but there is one revelation who is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, and this all-encompassing revelation brings about the unity of all of Scripture. Origen illustrates this through the Mount of Transfiguration: it is always the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah (on the Mt.) who bear witness to Jesus. It is the glory of Gospel reflected onto the Old Testament, but when the spectators lift their eyes, they see only Jesus. As Herve du Bourg-Dieu deploys Origen’s imagery:

The cloud has been lifted, and as Moses and Elijah disappear, Christ is the only one that can be perceived. Because the shadow of the law and the prophets has departed, the true light shines forth in the blazing beauty of the Gospel. For when the shadow of the law and prophecy, which covered the minds of men with its veil, recedes, both can be found in the Gospel. For although there were three of them, they have become one.[5]

If one is only looking at history, the letter, the Scriptures, rather than Christ, then law, prophecy, Moses and Elijah and the Old Testament appear as a multiplicity, but in Christ (and understood spiritually) they are none other than the teaching of the Gospel. In Origen’s imagery, all things, including the unity of revelation in the cosmos are exegeted through Him, but this interpretive strategy is not for the simple or undisciplined.

As Peter Martens describes, in Origen’s conception “ideal scriptural interpreters embarked upon a way of life.”[6] All of Origen’s training and energy was geared toward his way of life as an interpreter. In Eusebius biography of Origen, scriptural study occupied him for all of his life, from his conversion. This constitutes a life, as the interpreter’s response (his living it out) is also part of the interpretive process. Martens’ project is to demonstrate how it is that Origen’s interpretive method can only be understood as part of his biography (he is an exegete). As De Lubac argues, Origen’s exegesis could not be disentangled from “a whole manner of thinking, a whole world view … [a] whole interpretation of Christianity.”[7] But this would seem to be the proper goal of every Christian exegete.

Perhaps even this needs to be taken one step further, in that the original exegete, Jesus Christ, is the mind toward which the biblical exegete is striving. The exegetical task, is a life task in which salvation is being realized, as one puts on the mind of Christ. According to Martens, the exegetical life “when seen as a whole, made this life both expressive of, and in continual search for, salvation.”[8] Scripture is for the cure of the soul, the fulfilling of the pursuit of salvation in attaining the divine likeness as one arrives at the unifying image of Christ.

In a long section in his commentary on John, Origen makes the case that the Word of God is singular: “The complete Word of God which was in the beginning with God is not a multitude of Words, for it is not words. It is a single Word consisting of several ideas, each of which is a part of the whole Word.”[9] As long as one is hung up on the multiplicity of words and images in Scripture, she has not attained the singular Word. Those who do not attain to the singular image, even if they are declaring words about truth, according to Origen, are stuck in letters and words and miss the unity and harmony of the singular Word:

. . . but because of disagreement and fighting, they have lost their unity and have become numbers, perhaps even endless numbers. Consequently, according to this understanding, we would say that he who utters anything hostile to religion is loquacious, but he who speaks the things of truth, even if he says everything so as to leave out nothing, always speaks the one Word.[10]

As Origen goes on to argue, Christ is mentioned throughout Scripture, in the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Psalms, and “in all the Scriptures,” as Christ testifies sending us back to the Scriptures, “Search the Scriptures for you think you have eternal life in them. And it is they that testify of me” (Jn 5:39).[11] Origen finds this singularity testified throughout Scripture. In his commentary of John (Jn. 12:12-19) for example, “Jesus, therefore, is the Word of God who enters the soul, which is called Jerusalem, riding on an ass which has been loosed from its bonds by the disciples.”[12] The ass, in Origen’s explanation is the Old Testament, set loose by the teaching of the disciples (the Gospel), so that these things might be received into the soul.

For Origen, the Bible constitutes a singular book, with a singular message in spite of the variety and types of writings, because it is written for salvation:

For the whole book contains the ‘woe’ of those perishing, and the ‘song’ concerning those being saved, and the ‘lamentation’ concerning those in between. But John, too, who eats one roll on which there is writing ‘on the back and the front,’ has considered the whole Scripture as one book, which is thought to be sweet at the beginning, when one chews it, but which is found to be bitter in the perception of himself which comes to each of those who have known it.[13]

Fitting with his notion that the Bible is a singular book, Origen believed it ultimately had a single author. Origen, like modern interpreters, held that the intent of the original author is important, but unlike modern interpreters, he assigns authorship directly to God (while taking into account the fleshly and soulish parts of Scripture). The goal, even in the details of the law, is to achieve the mind of God revealed in Christ.  With Paul he argues “All Scripture is inspired of God and profitable.’”[14]

Scripture is profitable in Origen’s imagery as food for the soul and as medicine to cure the root human sickness: “each individual, insofar as he perceives himself healthy and strong, takes in all these things, which are the words of God, and in which there is different food according to the capacity of the souls.”[15] Readers are like sheep that feed and water on such “profitable” pastures that have “saving power.”[16] He also compares Scripture to almonds which consist of three parts: the bitter and hard outward shell, followed by a second protective layer, but only in its third layer does it feed and nourish the one who eats it. So too Scripture has a bitter shell (like the flesh), a second layer (on the order of the soul), and only at its center is it spiritually nutritious. Only “in the third place you will find hidden and concealed in the [law and the prophets] the meaning of the mysteries’ of the wisdom and knowledge of God’ [Col 2:3] by which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed, not only in the present life but also in the future.”[17]

Likewise, he compares Scripture to a medicinal herb. In his Homily on Psalm 37 he says God “prepared remedies for the soul in the words He has sown and scattered throughout the divine scriptures, so that those who are brought low by some illness, as soon as they sense the first inkling of sickness or perceive the prick and pain of a wound … they might seek out an appropriate and fitting spiritual discipline for themselves, drawn from God’s precepts, which might bring them healing.”[18]

Scripture, exegeted in Christ is nothing less than the means to advance human salvation.[19] Church and society are plagued by a soul sickness aggravated by a contentious and violent religion. A return to the unifying person of Christ as exegete is the singular cure for this crisis of despair.

[1] This is the argument of Origen in First Principles, 4.1.6.

[2] Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis; The Four Senses vol 1, translated by Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998) see the Forward by Robert Louis Wilken, ix.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, xi.

[5] Quoted in De Lubac, 235.

[6] Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours of the Exegetical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi.

[7] H. de Lubac, Histoire et Esprit: L’Intelligence de I’Ecriture d’apres Origene (Paris:

Aubier, 1950), transl. A. E. Nash and J. Merriell, History and Spirit: The Understanding of

Scripture according to Origen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 295, 194. Cited in Martens, 7.

[8] Martens, 11.

[9] Origen, Commentary on John books 1-10, translated by Ronald Heine (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 5.5, p. 163.

[10] Commentary on John, 5.5 p. 163.

[11] Commentary on John, 5.6 p. 164..

[12] Commentary on John 10,174, p. 295.

[13] Commentary on John, 5.7,  p. 165

[14] Commentary on John, 1.16, p. 35.

[15] Hom Num 27.1.1-2 and 27.1.5/GCS 7, 255.22-256.1 and 257.10-12. Cited in Martens, 199.

[16] Phil 11.1/SC 302, 380.4-13. Martens, 199.

[17] Hom Num 9.7.3/GCS 7, 64.7-10. Cited in Martens, 199.

[18] Hom 1.1 Ps 37lPrinzivalli, 256.11-248.21. Cited in Martens, 200.

[19] Martens, 200.

Finding Christ in the Collapse of Civilization

 So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14

Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.

JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.

However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]

As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.

Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.

Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.

God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).  

[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here

[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401

[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/

[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2

[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ 

[7] Ibid.

Reciprocity in Paul, Bulgakov, and Maximus as the Resolution to Futility

The day’s din of temporality alternates with night’s whisper of eternity, and under the swelter of life, the icy breath of death occasionally blows by, and when this breath enters а soul, even just once, that soul can thereafter hear this silence even in the middle of the din of the market, can feel this cold even under the scorching sun. And he who in his own experience has recognized the real power of evil as the foundation of worldly tragedy loses his erstwhile credulity towards history and life. In the soul, sadness settles deep within, and in the heart there appears an ever-widening crack. Thanks to the reality of evil, life becomes an auto-intoxication, and not only the body but also the soul accepts many poisons, in whose face even Metchnikoff with his antitoxins is powerless. A historical sense of self is colored by a feeling of the tragic in life, in history, in the world, it is freed from its eudaimonistic coloring, it is made deeper, more serious—and darker. Sergius Bulgakov [1]

We are thrown into the world (as Heidegger describes) and this thrownness, in which we do not comprehend either our beginning or end, our relation to others and the world (our place), and in which the inevitability of death is the one incontrovertible fact, this reality can be tyrannical, transforming every seeming significance into futility. The existential angst and frustration precede the various abstractions articulating the paradox of human existence: the relation of the one and the many, the universal and the particular, heaven and earth, or in the most intimate sense, the relation of male to female, one’s self-relation, or the relation to death. New Testament Christianity poses an answer to this otherwise irresolvable frustration, but it does so through a peculiar logic, recognizing two orders of creation (one true and one false) and two beginnings for humanity (one true and one false), and each of these orders and beginnings contains its own necessary logic and experience.

In one world order there is beginning and end, the historical, consecutive and sequential, birth and death, and even where a religious element is added, time is separate from eternity, and heaven from earth, and futility reigns. In the other, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, the historical is not bound by the consecutive and sequential, and death precedes birth, and time partakes of eternity and eternity partakes of time, and heaven and earth are intersecting realities. Or to put it most succinctly, in one world there is only fragmentation and difference, and in the other there is an overriding synthesis and reciprocal unity. The logic of the incarnation (the Logos), resolves what is otherwise irresolvable, not simply philosophically (though the philosophical is an articulation of the same problem) but in an existential and personal sense of the tragic reality of evil.

The logic of this second order is expressed in many passages in the New Testament describing the incarnate Christ in the middle of history as the beginning of all things (e.g., John 1:1; Col. 1:18) and the summing up of all things or the alpha and omega (e.g., Eph. 1:8-10; Rev. 22:13). As Paul writes, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:15–16). What is accomplished through him and for him is not a failed or temporary arrangement. Incarnation completes, heals, and fulfills creation. The early church took these verses at face value, taking the the cross to be the beginning point of creation. According to The Martyrology of Jerome, “On March 25, our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, conceived, and the world was made.”[2] According to Hippolytus, “It is in the preaching of Jesus Christ, the proclamation of the one who died on the cross, interpreted and understood in the matrix, the womb, of Scripture, that the Word receives flesh from the Virgin.”[3] According to Maximus, creation is incarnation and incarnation is creation.[4] This then is accompanied by a series of paradoxes in which God dies on a cross, in which creation proceeds through incarnation, in which the creator is created, and in which a virgin is mother of God. In each of these paradoxical understandings, cause and effect, time and eternity, God and humanity, are put in a reciprocal relation, in which the reality of the one cannot be understood or posited apart from the reality of the other.

The modern tendency is to flatten this biblical logic, such that the Logos/creator is disincarnate, and Christ as beginning refers only to the pre or post incarnate Christ, making his incarnation a necessity posed by creation, and making Jesus’ birth and death a necessity preceded by another order of human birth and death, all of which pictures the incarnation as a reaction to creation. The reality and logic which this modern reason refuses, is the reciprocal relation between Father and Son, Creator and creation, or between time and eternity. The problem with this flattened version is that it pictures the work of Christ as secondary (a reaction), a step removed from the reality of God, and ultimately the saving power of Christ becomes inexplicable, in this false logical frame. Instead of Christ joining God and humanity, Creator and creation, heaven and earth, his incarnation and all of creation are assigned a secondary reality. This too shall pass, as if it were a temporary situation. Perhaps the two alternatives are best illustrated in Christ’s work in regard to death, which is either the entry point for understanding the gospel, or the point at which gospel logic is confounded.

In Paul’s illustration in Romans 5, death plays three different paradoxical roles (an understanding first refused by Augustine whose misreading is now standard, see here). First death is a result of sin (5:19), an understandable reference to Adam, but then death is pictured as the condition of sin. It is the reign of death which accounts for the spread of sin and interwoven throughout the passage is the universally observable truth that death reigns (“death spread to all men” v. 12; “death reigned” v. 14; “the many died” v. 15; “death reigned through the one” v. 17; “as sin reigned in death” v. 21). Though Adam is at the head of the race of sinners, the sin of Adam is marked by the same all-inclusive orientation characterizing all enslaved to sin and death. As Paul describes in Romans 8, orientation to the flesh and death constitutes a slavery to fear: “for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die” (8:13) and this orientation results in “a spirit of slavery leading to fear” (8:15). So, “sin reigned in death” (5:21) and it is this explanation of sin, and salvation as an overcoming of this orientation, Paul explains from chapter 4-8.

In chapter 4 Abraham is depicted as relinquishing sin’s struggle through resurrection faith. Though he is as good as dead due to his and Sarah’s age and childlessness (4:19) – nonetheless they believed God could give them life, summed up as resurrection faith (4:24). In Romans 5, Christ, through death, defeats sin and death: “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (5:18-19). In chapter 6, Paul explains that in baptism we are joined to Christ’s death, making his death the means of defeating sin and death: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?” (6:3). By taking on the “likeness of His death” Christians take on the likeness of his life (v. 5), crucifying one orientation to achieve the other (v. 6). As Paul explains in chapter 8, “if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (8:13). It is not clear how death and resurrection would have anything to do with sin were it not for the fact that sin is the orientation to death reversed in Christ. This then resolves to the paradoxical solution that death is result, cause, and resolution for sin.

The theologian who has devoted the greatest effort to explaining this paradox (sin as the condition and wage of sin, as well as its cure) posed in Romans, is Maximus.[5] In Maximus’ explanation, the turn to sensory objects, which comes with its own pleasure, is a deceived desire.[6] The attachment to the sensory or the finite and passable, results in a masochistic play between pleasure and pain. “Wanting to escape the oppressive sensation of pain, we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment.”[7] The greater the pain, the more desperate the pursuit of pleasure, such that there is a reciprocal role for death, creating both the peculiar pleasure of sin and its painful end.

Maximus maintains this is part of God’s providential plan so as to limit the pursuit of this futility: “God, however, in His providential concern for our salvation, attached pain to this pleasure, as a kind of power of chastisement, whereby the law of death was wisely planted in the nature of our bodies in order to limit the madness of the intellect in its desire to incline unnaturally toward sensory objects.”[8] Maximus, following Paul, describes death as both giving rise to this condition and resulting from it. “Therefore, death, which came about because of the transgression, was ruling powerfully over all of human nature, having as the basis of its rule the pleasure that set in motion the whole process of natural generation, which was the reason why death was imposed on our nature.”[9] Death rules over human nature through illegitimate pleasure, but this same death is imposed to delimit the deception. This explains the beginning to be found in Adam, which is neither a legitimate nor real beginning.

The true beginning is found in Christ: “His death was something opposed to and which surpassed that principle, so that through death He might obliterate the just end of nature, which did not have illegitimate desire as the cause of its existence, and which was justly punished by death.”[10] Through his death, Christ “made that very passibility a weapon for the destruction of sin and death, which is the consequence of sin, that is, for the destruction of pleasure and the pain which is its consequence.”[11] Christ ushers in a new birth, a new beginning, which is no longer caught in the closed loop of pain and pleasure: “But the Lord manifested the might of His transcendent power by establishing within human nature a birth—which He himself experienced—unchanged by the contrary realities of pleasure and pain.”[12] In the midst of suffering and death, he negates the deadly orientation of sin and imparts the power of eternal life: ”For by giving our nature impassibility through His Passion, relief through His sufferings, and eternal life through His death, He restored our nature, renewing its capacities by means of what was negated in His own flesh, and through His own Incarnation granting it that grace which transcends nature, by which I mean divinization.”[13] Christ delivers from the futility of death, though death remains, but no longer as cause and condition of sin, but as part of salvation. Maximus describes this death as “a natural condition that counteracts sin.”[14]

“For when death does not have pleasure as a mother bringing it to birth—a pleasure which death by its very nature punishes—it obviously becomes the father of eternal life. Just as Adam’s life of pleasure is the mother of death and corruption, so too the death of the Lord, which came about for the sake of Adam, and which was free of the pleasure associated with Adam, is the progenitor of eternal life.”[15]

All of this is part of Maximus’ explanation of how it is that “The time has come for judgment to begin from the house of God.”[16] As long as the tyranny of sin ruled human nature, judgment could not begin, but now in Christ sin is judged and condemned. Christ became a perfect human, bearing the condition and punishment of Adam’s nature, and thus he “condemned sin in the flesh” and he converted death into the condemnation of sin (judgment).[17] Life is no longer controlled by the futility of death, but in Christ and those joined to his life and death, death is the judgment of sin. There is a true beginning, a true birth, a true creation, which does not destroy human nature but delivers it to its proper end.

Jordan Wood in a Ploughshare’s seminary class describes how Maximus here (in Q Thal. 61) demonstrates the reciprocal logic, which orders his entire corpus: the particular death of Christ is universal, as is his resurrection as his life is the beginning and end of all things; the cosmos which seems to arise in fragments and difference, complexifies and unifies in his broken body; he lives and dies to join himself to our false beginning and end, hypostasizing his nature into our beginning and end, making of them a different, unified, reality; Jesus died because of you, but you died because of Jesus (you have been crucified in Christ, in Christ all have died, the whole world has died to me) and thus with the death of the Son of God a true death entered the world; death is no longer your own, but yours is the death of Christ – Christ dying in you; he hypostasized an unchanging reality into finitude.[18]

Likewise, Bulgakov counters his view of evil (cited in the epigraph), with a view of the reciprocal relation of life in Christ, which changes the futility of death into the Sophiology of death, recognizing life is from God:

For non-religious consciousness, life simply happened, it is an accident; for religious consciousness, life is given and, as given from above, it is holy, full of mystery, of depth and enduring significance. And life is given to our consciousness not in the form of an isolated, individual existence, but rather of the lineal, the historical, the universal, the global; it arises in the infinite flow of life proceeding from the Fountain of life, the God of the living [Mark 12:17] who does not know dependence and who created not death but life [Wis 1:13]. In the face of this universal and cosmic life, and, therefore, in the face of history, responsibilities are placed on us, along with the “talents” entrusted to our use [Matt 25:14–30] from the very moment of our birth. For religious consciousness, history is a holy sacrament, and one that furthermore possesses meaning, value, and significance in all of its parts, as was deeply felt in German classical idealism, especially in Hegel.[19]

[1] Bulgakov, Sergius. The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (pp. 3-4). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] John Behr, cited in Wood, Jordan Daniel. The Whole Mystery of Christ (p. ix). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition, introduction.

[3] This is the explanation of John Behr in, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 18.

[4] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.:  The Catholic University of America Press) 60.3.

[5] His translator suggests that a portion of his work On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios is an exposition of Romans 5:12-21. QThal, 441.

[6] QThal, 61.5. p. 436.

[7] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[8] QThal, 61.2, p. 434.

[9] QThal, 61.10, p. 440.

[10] QThal, 61.5, p. 436.

[11] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[12] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[13] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[14] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[15] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[16] QThal, 61.1, p. 434.

[17] QThal, 61.8, p. 439.

[18] Jordan soars in this lecture, and is the inspiration behind this blog. http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/jordan-wood-on-reciprocal-causality-in-maximus/

[19] Bulgakov, p. 2.