Tag: deification

Metaxology as an Extension of Sophiology

Metaxology and Sophiology are all-encompassing descriptions of reality, of God’s relationship to creation, and are theological and philosophical descriptions of the realization of this relationship. So the most important element of this blog is in the title. Placing William Desmond’s work on a continuum with that of Sergei Bulgakov’s, helps explain the tenor and emphasis of his project, and for example, helps answer the question as to why the turn to aesthetics. I do not question the possibility of a difference, which there is, but work from the premise, that showing the conjunction will reveal the significance of this ground-breaking mode of thought.

Bulgakov’s Sophiology and Desmond’s Metaxology are both focused on the metaxu, or the between, or living this out (betweening), as living out the between of immanence and transcendence contains the fulness of human potential. Both describe a transformational synthesizing process, recognizing the antinomy of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. In Bulgakov’s description of Sophia, “in setting alongside itself the extra-Divine world, the Divinity thereby places between itself and the world a certain border and this border, which according to the concept itself is found between God and the world, the creator and the creature, is itself neither the one nor the other but something completely particular, simultaneously uniting and separating the one and the other.”[1] As Josephien Kessel explains, Bulgakov was “interested in the nature of the connection and border between immanence and Transcendence, which is Sophia as metaxu, or ‘between’,” which also explains the parameters of Desmond’s Metaxology.[2] The principle of the metaxu or Sophia is “the ultimate middle term, the intermediary between God and the world . . . which makes the God-world relationship possible.”[3] As John Milbank explains, “one could say that Sophia names a metaxu which does not lie between two poles but rather remains simultaneously at both poles at once.”[4] Bulgakov and Desmond are continuing the particular synthesizing work of Maximus, Eriugena, and Hegel.  The mode of thought, the turn to a reworked dialectic, and the attempt to describe the potential encounter with God in philosophy and aesthetics, characterizes each. In Bulgakov’s terms, there is a “symphonic connection” or a synthesizing unity or togetherness. Both recognize Hegel aimed at describing this synthesizing process, the dialectic of unity in difference in which opposites are paired and synthesizing (syzygy). For them though, it is a dynamic unfolding reality. Both can be characterized as building on the project of Hegel and German idealism, and of course Desmond is conscious of his work’s continuity with Sophiology. It seems he takes up where the Russian sophiological tradition left off, refusing the sense of a gulf between Creator and creation, and presuming supernatural grace pervades creation. This is an attempt to demonstrate, in a very small and inadequate manner, the convergence of this thought.

The Synthesizing Possibility Between Infinite Life and Death

In Desmond’s description, there is a glimpse of the infinite that may “put us out to sea,” arousing something on the order of the sublime, which he relates directly to the darkness and light of the Eucharist. Likewise, Bulgakov, in his Sophiology of Death, expounds upon the awakening to eternity through a dark realization. “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.”[5] Recognition of good and evil seem to arrive entwined. “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.”[6] Desmond concurs: “Yes, the passion of being is not univocal and its saturated equivocity can border an extremity of affirmation, as well tempt desire with a descending movement into darkness, touching on death, if not going into hell.”[7] He appeals to Freud and Schopenhauer to make the point: “Begetting on the beautiful participates in the agon of eros and thanatos. Doomed love: intenser life. Death itself raises the ultimate question of the giftedness of beauty.”[8]

 Desmond relates the mixture of this infinite darkness and light in the story of Moby Dick: “the blank Leviathan, whether innocent or malicious, who knows, mysterious beyond our moral measure of good and evil. The saturated equivocity of beauty still tasks us metaxologically.”[9] Ishmael, when he finds himself dampened in spirit, a “November of the soul,” is lured to the sea to purge his burdened soul, to hunt the monster of the deep. Can we equate, Desmond wonders, “Ecce homo: the sacrificial lamb on display. And the sea monster?”[10] The infinite sea, personified, is at once monstrous and sacred: “’Monstrare’ means ‘to show’: the monster is a show of the sacred, but there is a sacred show in the monstrance: golden carrier of the consecrated bread that is the body of Christ, once to be beheld, even on the streets of the city of man on the feast of Corpus Christi.”[11] Christ is present in the midst of darkness and death, in the very midst of the city of man, the infinite shines forth. According to Bulgakov, the creature exists between being and nonbeing, and creaturely Sophia acts as a counter to death and nonbeing, and the Holy Spirit as Sophia, “actualises,” “concretises,” and insinuates “beauty,” “sensation” and “life.”[12] Both thinkers converge upon the exposure of infinite goodness in the midst of a potentially overwhelming darkness.

Inspiration and Deification in the Between

Both Desmond and Bulgakov depict a simultaneous revealing of infinite light and darkness in Christ. There is an erotic yearning for “sophianic Illumination” and this unfading light challenges the darkness. “The love of the Father through the Spirit in the life of the Son is unbroken and there can be no room for any sort of mutual abandonment. But ‘economically,’ in the relationship of God to the world, as Creator to creation, there occurs, as it were, a division of the hypostases because the very hypostasis of union, the Holy Spirit, in ‘abandoning’ the Son, ceases, as it were, to unite the Son with the Father and instead remains with the Father.”[13] The Spirit, which “blows where it wills” (John 3:2), momentarily and manifestly (economically) “stops blowing on the Son.” This presence and absence, darkness and light, experienced by humanity, however, is encompassed within the reality of the Trinity.[14] The outcome of deification, in the midst of death and darkness, being predetermined.

Bulgakov links the working of Sophia explicitly to Christ: “The humanity of Christ is created Sophia, permeated by Divine Sophia and in this union with it already pre-deified.” [15] Desmond likewise, describes a pre-deified creation. God breathes into the mud, energizing, enlivening, making human (the breath of Spirit and Sophia). “God’s kiss is not just a blown kiss that dissolves in the air. It touches the humus and what it touches comes alive and breathes—breathes for itself, breathes as itself.”[16] Creation and divinization are deepened and widened. “Created Sophia, as the human nature of Christ, admitted of further sophianization or divinization, which is exactly what was accomplished through the resurrection of Christ and in his glorification.”[17]

The struggle between life and death, being and nonbeing, indicates the possibility of divine being or nonbeing enacted in every human life; a struggle predetermined in Christ and carried out in the Spirit. “The Divine ousia is thoroughly transparent for the Spirit and in this sense is Sophia, entirely hypostatized and not leaving a place in itself for anything that is not hypostatically clarified (for any Urgrund or bottomless abyss).”[18] Communication of the Spirit is the ongoing work of the Trinity in creation and the repetition of God in the human image calls for continued life and repetition with a difference.

Desmond describes this as the possibility of “inspiration and creation” as the world is not determinately bounded, but open. It is open to a “participation in the porosity,” expressed in “energetic endeavor in relation to what is beyond itself,” a “beyond as already seeded or sleeping in itself.”[19] The metaxological supposition “draws on the aesthetic overdetermancy of being,” and “draws us to it as alluring” and so to we draw on this supposition in creating “works that shine with its surplus.”[20] Desire is not simply a lack but the opening to an enabling grace. “The poros as opening a way, as enabling a porosity, is not always recognized when we treat of desire as if it were only a lack. There is the memory of divine festivity in the birth of eros, and with this the endeavor towards beauty is already in receipt of the promise of more than lack, of a more fulfilled festivity.”[21] Desire points to “the promise of the agapeic”: “the promise of a surplus generosity that comes to us in the delight of beauty. This festivity participates in an affirming ‘yes’ to being. The gift of beauty offers this incarnate ‘yes’ in a celebratory delight.”[22] The infinite shows itself in this unexpected, and even potentially monstrous (sacred) beauty; an agapeic overflowing which might be likened to Sophia.

The Iconic Aesthetics of Sophia and the Potency of the Middle

Sophia or betweenness is a possible realization of the divine in the immanent, a recognition and pursuit of unity in difference and betweenness. Bulgakov illustrates the natural intersection of Sophiology and art through icons, which are images made to reflect the Godhead, but these images are possible because the Name of God is the original and real icon of the Godhead. [23] Art, like the icon, is made possible by the iconic nature of reality, the presence of God in creation. Just as the human is an iconic and real representation of the divine, so too the possibility of art or language. God is present in his Name, just as he is present in the sacramental bread and wine, indicating the sacramental nature of all creation. “More than an icon, it becomes the temple, the altar, the shrine, the Holy of Holies, the place for the presence of God and of encounter with God.”[24] Creation is temple, a fit dwelling for God and human encounter with the divine.

For Desmond, the pursuit of love, goodness and beauty, are at once erotic and spiritual (on the order of the icon?) and give rise to focus on the aesthetic and ethical as realms of “potencies.” Being permeable, porous, and relational, is definitive of personhood and its powers. The ethical, for example, is not delimiting or disempowering, but a potency.  “We are endowed in receiving and being invested with these potencies. And we are plurally endowed in that these different potencies bring to explication the ethical promise of our ethical being.”[25] There is promise in the good and ethical, open to realization. “All of the potencies of the ethical come forth out of an initial immersion in the ethos of being where we are offered an opaque intimation of the surplus of the good.”[26] The good (like the sophianic), is a gift of the between opening the human to the divine. “There is an elemental intimacy with the worth of being: before all determinate values, there is a pre-determinate sense of the good of the ‘to be’ at all, which we participate in, and witness to in the fact that our being is itself a kind of affirmation of being.”[27]

There is a potential sabbatical peace, beyond war and peace or beyond death, but also an encounter with something other. “Beauty witnesses an elemental rapport between ourselves and what is other. There is nothing of a vis dormativa in this rapport. We are surprised by beauty and taken outside of ourselves.”[28] It as if the other has “taken the initiative in communicating to us.” We are given the (divine) perspective of “beholding from the beautiful.”[29] We receive from the other, and only then are we “perceivers and conceivers.” There is an erotic, energized, endowment given in beauty. It is “not that our passio essendi makes us merely passive. To the contrary, we are energized to creative work in receiving originating power. But there is an endowed character to our participation in creative power.”[30] We can be perceivers, conceivers and creators because grace saturates creation, and this is the foundation of all human endeavor.

Conclusion: The recognition that Desmond’s metaxu accords with and can be read as a development of Sophiology, is a simple but enlightening realization, providing a long historical context for Desmond’s work, which like that of Bulgakov, calls upon the (mostly Eastern) tradition, in his expansive theology and philosophy. The excitement and beauty of his writing hit me, when I recognized he is providing a first-order description of divine encounter, on the order of Bulgakov’s Sophiology. The promise of the Gospel is premised on a universal accessibleness to God and the Spirit, and it is this premise which Desmond and Bulgakov are spelling out in Sophiology and Metaxology.

[1] Sergei Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 217. Cited in Richard Paul René, Absolute Vulnerability: A Contemporary Orthodox Anthropology in Dialogue with Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, John Zizioulas, and Sergius Bulgakov (Toronto: University of Toronto and St. Michael’s College, PhD, 2024), 83.

[2]Josephien H. J. van Kessel, Sophiology and Modern Society: Sergei Bulgakov’s Conceptualization of an Alternative Modern Society (Nijmegen: Ipscamp Printing, 2020) 148

[3] René, 27.

[4] John Milbank, Sophiology and Theurgy: the New Theological Horizon (Unpublish paper available online at https://rprt.northwestern.edu/documents/research-scholar-articles/milbank-article-2.pdf, 9

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

[6] Sophiology of Death, 4.

[7] William Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, (Eugene, Oregon, Cascade Books, 2018), 60.

[8] The Gift of Beauty, 60.

[9] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[10] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[11] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[12] Milbank, 17.

[13] The Sophiology of Death, 128.

[14] The Sophiology of Death, 129.

[15] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[16] The Gift of Beauty, 33.

[17] Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (p. 123). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[18] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter (pp. 62-63). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.

[19] The Gift of Beauty, 50.

[20] The Gift of Beauty, 26,

[21] The Gift of Beauty, 26-27.

[22] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[23] Sergii Bulgakov, Philosophy of the Name (NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies) (pp. 295-296). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

[24] Philosophy of the Name, 314,

[25] William Desmond, “The Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good” in An Ethics of/for the Future? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 65

[26] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[27] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[28] The Gift of Beauty, 21

[29] The Gift of Beauty, 21.

[30] The Gift of Beauty, 24.

Maximus the Confessor: Knowing Christ as Breaking the Bonds of Human Knowledge

The parameters of human thought are captured in the statement, “Identity through difference reduces to sameness.” It is a plural parameter in that the first half of the statement captures the form of thought that is focused on difference. Greek dualism,[1] the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena, or the biblical portrayal of human knowledge as falling into the dialectical pairs of good and evil, illustrate some of the possible infinite pairs expressing a necessary difference. Language is structured on binaries and human entry into language depends upon the child entering into the capacity for differentiation, which is to say that identity through difference may describe philosophical or sociological possibilities all of which depend upon a more basic psychology.

Paul gives us the psychological form of the dialectic in Romans 7, in which the I is pitted against itself (I do what I do not want to do). He provides the religious form of the dialectic in his depiction of the Jewish reification of law and Jewishness (opposed to Gentiles). He depicts a sexual/psychological form of the dualism in the male/female duality, and he pictures a sociological dualism in the slave/free duality.

The second form of the parameter, the reduction to sameness, is often equated with eastern forms of monism or pantheism, which may also be a psychology, religion, and sociology. But to characterize the two forms of thought as eastern and western may be to miss that that identity through difference implies sameness. Hegel’s dialectic between death and life (or something and nothing), taken up by Heidegger, is indistinguishable from the Zen Buddhist thought of Nishida Kitaro (something Heidegger and Nishida recognized in one another). Just as with a “good” dependent on its opposite “evil” (as in the knowledge of good and evil), so too life dependent on death, or “something” dependent upon “nothing,” implicitly privileges evil, death and nothingness. Hegel, more than Heidegger, seems to recognize the inherent violence and evil (the necessity of the “slaughter bench of history”) grounding his dialectic, which the fascists (Heidegger and Nishida) served blindly. Though Sigmund Freud privileges the western notion of the ego and denigrates the drive to sameness, equating it with eastern religion (dubbing it the Nirvana Principle), in his later thought (emphasized by Jacques Lacan) he recognizes both phases of identity as part of the universal human sickness. The reality is that, though some may emphasize difference or sameness, the two are interdependent and always found together.

René Girard depicts sameness in terms of the undifferentiated violence which gripped the generation of Noah, constituting the flood. Universal destruction is a violent melding into the One. The resistance to sameness in the differentiation of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the Jewish Law, and the continual slide into idolatry, intermarriage, sexual and religious indifference, is the predominant story of the Bible. Differentiation turned into “absolute difference” (reification of the Law and Judaism) is the failure of thought attached perhaps to second Temple Judaism, pharisaic religion, or the religion practiced by Paul (the Pharisee) and his contemporaries. The absolute distinctions of Judaism in its depiction of God as holy and unapproachable, is the final preparation for the recognition of the revelation of the Messiah.

The New Testament depiction of the God/man ushers in a new order of knowing, psychology, sociology, and ultimately peace, founded upon knowing Christ rather than identity according to difference and sameness. It may be that Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) works out most completely how it is that Christ surpasses difference and sameness. Maximus comes at the end of a centuries long debate in which the heretical tendency was to either overemphasize the deity or the humanity  of Christ. The Council of Chalcedon makes a bald statement about the “hypostatic” union of deity and humanity in Christ:

of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood . . . recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.

The effort is to maintain the difference of two natures combined in one person, avoiding both difference of persons (there is a single unified person) yet maintaining difference of natures (yet “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation). What Maximus recognizes is this formula cannot be maintained on any other basis than that of Christ Jesus himself. Knowing Christ entails a new metaphysical understanding and an alternative epistemological order (knowing Christ is its own order of logic and its own order of being). To fit Christ to a Greek or any human frame of understanding will be to inevitably fall into identity through difference (an unapproachable transcendence) or sameness (immanence without transcendence). This is not simply a theoretical or philosophical danger, as Maximus recognizes that knowing Christ is a transformative knowing (involving deification or becoming united with Christ). How we know is determined, in this case, by who we know. Failing to know rightly, Maximus the Monk and ascetic recognizes, is to fail to know the love of God rightly. To enter into Trinitarian love is not a possibility available through human knowing, and human misunderstanding is not simply a failure to know rightly but this form of knowing is an obstacle to love.[2]

As Maximus explains in Ambigua (hereafter Amb.) 10 (explaining a statement of Gregory the Theologian that seems solely concentrated on reason and contemplation), true philosophy is always combined with true practice. He says “practice is absolutely conjoined with reason” as “right thinking” alone restrains “irrational impulses.” He describes the mode of human reason as clouded or veiled as it is misdirected from its telos of knowing God and is confined to “surface appearances” and is caught up “solely into what can be perceived by the senses, and so discovers angry passions, desires, and unseemly pleasures” (Amb. 10.7). He makes a distinction between knowing “polemically and agonistically” as opposed to a true rationality (Amb. 10.5). One can know through identity and difference (agonistically, polemically, dialectically), or one can know according to Christ.

True rationality will no longer play the contradictory game of imagining absolute difference as conceivable (the very ground of conception), and thus reducing it to sameness. Christ unifies what is absolutely transcendent and immanent, not in a new combination of these categories, but as their very definition.  As Jordan Wood puts it in regard to Maximus, “Divine and human natures are not only incommensurably different while perichoretically unified, but ineffably identical in Christ. . .. God is not merely transcendent, nor merely immanent, but is mysteriously the identity of both, and this renders him all the more transcendent.”[3]

Apart from Christ, transcendence is really a non-category, the equivalent of death or nothingness. That is, transcendence rendered as a mere negation, is no transcendence at all. God as an apophatic mystery is the equivalent of Heideggerian nothingness or Hegelian death. In both instances, the negation is the true power behind any positive being. By the same token, an apophatic God may serve as a reified nothingness – an absolute difference providing the background of all that is something. Though Maximus refers to the categories of transcendent and immanent or apophatic and cataphatic, these are not the basis of knowing nor do they constitute a metaphysical reality, as in Christ these categories are brought together such that Christ surpasses transcendence and immanence and apophatic and cataphatic. As Maximus writes,

As much as He became comprehensible through the fact of His birth, by so much more do we now know Him to be incomprehensible precisely because of that birth. “For He remains hidden even after His manifestation,” says the teacher, “or, to speak more divinely, He remains hidden in His manifestation. For the mystery remains concealed by Jesus, and can be drawn out by no word or mind, for even when spoken of, it remains ineffable, and when conceived, unknown. (Amb. 5.5)

Christ as the ground of true knowledge and true reason is not a ground that can be reduced or known on some other basis. This knowledge is ineffable, not in the sense that nothing or absence serves as the ground of knowing, but all knowing and all positive being gives itself in Christ as its own ground and is not apprehended on some other foundation. This is a positive transcendence – a new order of transcendence.

Beyond this, what could be a more compelling demonstration of the Divinity’s transcendence of being? For it discloses its concealment by means of a manifestation, its ineffability through speech, and its transcendent unknowability through the mind, and, to say what is greatest of all, it shows itself to be beyond being by entering essentially into being. (Amb. 5.5)

An immanent demonstration of transcendence or a manifestation of concealment or an articulation and knowability which reveals an inarticulate unknowability, is the only basis upon which transcendence is made known. It is only as Christ is beyond being that he can enter into being. What we learn in Christ is that a full transcendence is the basis for immanence. As Wood puts it, “He is not merely beyond knowability and unknowability (speech and silence, affirmation and negation, etc.). This very transcendence is what allows him to be both at once, and his being both at once is therefore the premiere index of this newly appreciable transcendence.”[4]

This seeming paradox is of the same order as the paradox that knowing does not serve as its own ground or that language arises from a deep grammar that is not itself subject to explanation. Christ is the foundation, the bedrock at which the spade is turned. Christ preserves absolute difference within the singular person he is (this is Maximus’ is), as the immanent manifestation of this absolute. This is a new order of transcendence and a new order of reason, bringing together what otherwise is radically separate, and bringing it together “without difference, without separation, and without distinction.”

As Maximus describes it in regard to Mary and Jesus’ virgin birth, the seemingly impossible is made possible and the paradoxical is rendered as part of a new order of understanding:

Thus, “though He was beyond being, He came into being,” fashioning within nature a new origin of creation and a different mode of birth, for He was conceived having become the seed of His own flesh, and He was born having become the seal of the virginity of the one who bore Him, showing that in her case mutually contradictory things can truly come together. For she herself is both virgin and mother, innovating nature by a coincidence of opposites, since virginity and childbearing are opposites, and no one would have been able to imagine their natural combination. Therefore the Virgin is truly “Theotokos,” for in a manner beyond nature, as if by seed, she conceived and gave birth to “the Word who is beyond being,” since the mother of one who was sown and conceived is properly she who gave Him birth. (Amb. 5.13)

Only one beyond being could so fashion being, providing the seed for his own flesh, preserving the virginity of His own Mother, and making her who is subject to His being, give birth to the one beyond being. “For ‘in a manner beyond’ us, the ‘Word beyond being truly assumed our being,’ and joined together the transcendent negation with the affirmation of our nature” thus His is a power “that is beyond infinity, recognized through the generation of opposites” (Amb. 5.14).

As Maximus notes, it is not as if human identity has its existence apart from the possibility of this reality found in Christ, as human “essence itself, which plainly is not a self-subsisting hypostasis, for it has no existence in and of itself, but instead receives its being in the person of God the Word, who truly assumed it” (Amb. 5.11). The identity of Christ as the God/man is not subsequent to human identity but is the very ground and source of human identity. It is only “in a manner beyond man,” that “He truly became man” and it is only due to His transcendence over nature that he came to be “according to nature, united and unimpaired” but this fact about who he is, the logic of the incarnation, is the logic of creation and of human identity. As Maximus succinctly puts it, “As God, He was the motivating principle of His own humanity, and as man He was the revelatory principle of His own divinity” (Amb. 5.18). Just as he is the ground of his humanity, he is the ground of all humanity, and this is made known in who he is. In all “that He did He confirmed the presence of the one through the other, since He is truly both” (God and man) (Amb. 5.17) and this difference is the ground of all human identity and the ground of true knowledge. “The conjunction of these was beyond what is possible, but He for whom nothing is impossible became their true union, and was the hypostasis in neither of them exclusively, in no way acting through one of the natures in separation from the other, but in all that He did He confirmed the presence of the one through the other, since He is truly both” (Amb. 5.17). Christ is the possibility and potentiality of what it means to be human. This possibility cannot be otherwise known or approached. The incarnate Christ is the very ground of human possibility, the purpose and ground of creation, and the understanding of this reality, like the reality itself, is only known though him.

Maximus is well aware that the temptation is to relinquish the absoluteness of divine transcendence or to make this absolute negation itself part of the typical dialectic constituting human knowledge: “it is not, as some would have it, “by the negation of two extremes that we arrive at an affirmation” of something in the middle, for there is no kind of intermediate nature in Christ that could be the positive remainder after the negation of two extremes” (Amb. 5.20). There is no dialectic between transcendence and immanence on the order of the Hegelian dialectic or the dialectic of the knowledge of good and evil. What is absolute remains absolute in the revelation and reality of Jesus Christ.

[1] Dualism is, of course, the wrong word, but it is a perceived dualism that functions through the contradictory notion of absolute difference (an inherent contradiction). There are no conceivable absolute differences as, if they are conceivable, they are not absolute. Absolute differences can in no way be brought together in human thought. It is also an obvious overgeneralization to simply portray Greek thought as working on this false dualism, as it too contains both forms of thought (e.g., Plato’s deployment of the chora).

[2] See Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, (London: Routledge, 1996) 25-26.

[3] Jordan Daniel Wood, “Both Mere Man and Naked God: The Incarnational Logic of Apophasis in St. Maximus the Confessor”; in Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017) 111.

[4] Wood, 117.