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.