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.