Dionysius – Forging Ploughshares

Understanding William Desmond Through John Scotus Eriugena

As I noted in my previous blog (here) in his intellectual autobiography, Wayward and Homebound,[1] William Desmond accounts for his thought of betweenness (metaxology) as arising from his Irish roots, but beyond the various circumstantial conditions of language, geography, and politics, the central figure in what it means to be philosophically and theologically Irish, not just for Desmond but for Irish intellectuals such as Richard Kearney and Thomas Duddy, is the Irish philosopher and theologian John Scottus Eriugena (c. 815-877). The thought of John the Irish-Irish (as both Scottus and Eriugena might be translated), is the opposite of and should not be confused with the later John Duns Scotus. His thought can be traced though Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius, and Maximus, and thus it is no surprise that it was the early Hegelians who were among those who rediscovered Eriugena. Here is the Irish version of the Eastern understanding of theosis, panentheism, and idealism. And perhaps for the same reasons (and accusations of heresy), Eriugena was excluded from the main western philosophical and theological tradition, helping produce a distinctive Celtic religious sensibility of betweenness. “He navigated between here and elsewhere, peregrine not only between Ireland and Europe, but between Greek and Latin, between Athens and Jerusalem. . . He is peregrine religiously and philosophically: between the Jewish exodus and the promised homeland of the Father; between the Neoplatonic going out and coming home, exitus and reditus, pro[h]odos and epistrophē.”[2]

It is not simply epistemology but ontology which is on the move for Eriugena: “Eriugena traces the etymology of theos to both ‘I see, θεωρῶ’ and ‘I run, θέω’ (Periphyseon, 452B15–452D32).”[3] “He makes all things run from a state of non-existence into one of existence” – suggesting divine energy is a dynamic field of theophany.[4] For Eriugena, the transcendent God or the unknown God is primary, and Desmond affirms God’s absolute transcendence as the “unknown” God, not only beyond being but beyond nonbeing. However, the Word/world is God’s self-articulation, the procession of God which can be termed a “self-creation”, or a procession from out of darkness and non-being into the light. Speaking the Word, who is at once eternal and filling all of time, there is an immanent universal available to every subject. “The whole of reality or nature, is involved in a dynamic process of outgoing (exitus) from and return (reditus) to the One. God is the One or the Good or the highest principle, which transcends all, and which therefore may be said to be ‘the non-being that transcends being’.”[5] This creation ex-nihilo is unfolding in the incarnation, and according to Dermot Moran, “Creation ex nihilo means God’s own self-creation, His self-manifestation in theophanies, His movement from darkness to light.”[6]

Following Maximus, the incarnation is the exitus that can be equated with creation: creation is incarnation (and vice versa, incarnation is creation). “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). Eriugena develops this understanding “to construct a deep correspondence between epistemology and ontology. Thus, Maximus’ cosmic Christology based on the Logos-logoi ontology, offers Eriugena a framework which allows him to expand the use of dialectic from mere method to a cosmic framework which underlies both epistemology and ontology.”[7] According to Moran, for Eriugena, “The process of creation is, at the same time, the process of the begetting of the Word, or the simple exclamation of the word in divine speech (clamor Dei). . . God is really ‘not other’ than the world, and creation is ‘not other’ than God.”[8] In turn, Desmond’s metaxology is both epistemology and ontology, which like Eriugena’s philosophy is a dialectic, bringing together what dualistic thinking separates into opposites. For John, “There is a companionable betweening of philosophy and theology” as “God is above all encapsulation, and hence transcendent, other than the finite world, and yet there is an immanence between God and creation. All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[9]

Eriugena, though, like Origen and Maximus, is in danger of being misunderstood, of working in the same manner (real or imagined) as Hegel, in that he speaks of God creating himself through the world. “It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature.”[10] As with I Corinthians 15.28 God will be all in all or John 1.3-4, all things are in God as life, are phrases that appear frequently in Eriugena, following Dionysius, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. Or as Echart and Nicholas of Cusa assert, God is in all things and all things are God. This is more than as assertion of God’s omnipresence but neither is it pantheism. If one recognizes with Origen and Maximus (and not Hegel, in Desmond’s reading) that transcendence is preserved along with immanence, then one can rightly speak of the “between” of creation as divine.

God is manifest in the Word, in creation, but this manifestation is not determinate or final. In the between there is the too-muchness or “the overdetermination appearing and receding in the determinate and the self-determining: because appearing communicated, because receding elusive, and yet always suggestive of more than every determination and our self-determination.”[11] Eriugena was wrongly accused of teaching the identity of God and the created world, which though mistaken, gets at the radical turn of his thought. As Moran points out, “This, of course, is only one side of Eriugena’s doctrine; his Dionysian negative theology also asserted the absolute transcendence of God.”[12] As he concludes, “Eriugena is not a pantheist, and his strong monistic statements concerning the identity of divinity and creation are always counterbalanced by assertions of the absolute difference between God and creation.”[13]

The theophanous manifestation of God occurs within a negative dialectic in which non-being, ex-nihilo transcends being. “We might speak of the nothing through excellence (nihil per excellentiam, nihil per infinitatem) and the nothing through privation (nihil per privationem), and still further a phrase that keeps recurring in his work is: plus quam, ‘more than.’”[14] This is not an absolute knowing but a humility always open to more, arising from nothing. God is beyond denial and affirmation, “an above God Godhead.” As Desmond notes, for Eriugena, “In some degree all being is theophanous”[15] but this theophany points beyond what is manifest, as “the world is God’s own self-othering, an intermediate moment in the circular process by which God is brought back into unity with self.”[16]

For Maximus, there is an ongoing synthesis in the body of Christ, which not only accounts for the deification of the Christian but is the means for cosmic deification: “The ‘body of Christ is either the soul, or its powers, or senses, or the body of each human being, or the members of the body, or the commandments, or the virtues, or the inner principles of created beings, or, to put it simply and more truthfully, each and all of these things, both individually and collectively, are the body of Christ” (Amb. 54.2). The body of Christ is the body of “each human being” it is the “virtues” or “the inner principles of created beings.” Eriugena’s anthropology follows Maximus’ insight that the human being, like Christ, synthesizes all aspects of creation as the “workshop of creation.”

He speaks of knowledge and training of the mind as a spiritual exercise, an understanding which might be said to characterize Desmond’s entire corpus.[17] The Periphyseon is a sort of spiritual exercise: “the goal of exercitatio is to contemplate nature in the right way in order to repair the fragmentation of creation by achieving a unified vision and thus realize the return of all things to their divine source.”[18] There is a synthesis in nature, for Desmond and Eriugena, as it intersects with the divine and is divinized, and though Eriugena, like Origen and Maximus, employs Neoplatonism, this is clearly an overcoming of the Neoplatonic distrust of fleshly reality. The human being mediates between the divine causes and the created effects, and Christ, the fully human one, assumes the full cosmic scope of mediation and unification: “through the incarnation of Christ the Logos, the universal human nature and through it the rest of creation is unified, redeemed and ultimately divinized.”[19] Though this is a historical and even a natural realization, (“All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[20]) it is at the same time transcendent.

The distinction from Hegel, which Desmond brings out, is that in Eriugena God exceeds comprehension and does not even comprehend Himself, as to comprehend is “to render determinate, and God exceeds all delimitation, including all comprehensive determination.”[21] God is at once “no-thing” or nothing and more than all things. There is no final synthesis. This “more than,” for Desmond, “is indicative of a difference with Hegelian immanence, beyond which there is nothing more.”[22] John proleptically includes the Hegelian dialectic, but is not simply a philosopher of immanence, but the passage to transcendence from out of immanence is marked, like the thought of Desmond, as being between: between being and nothing, the apophatic and kataphatic, the transcendent and immanent. This betweenness is the movement of God, from out of Himself and returning to Himself, and it is not Hegel’s settled Wholeness or univocity, realized without transcendence. “In Eriugena there is exceeding transcendence as there is exceeding immanence.”[23]

Desmond notes that there may be the temptation with Eriugena’s dialectic, as with Hegel, to close the metaxu: “if the whole is only the betweening of God with Godself, we are tempted with a desire to close the circle of divine self-relating, such that the thought of absolute unity can overtake all other thoughts, even the thought of the between.”[24] Though there is exit from and return to the One “there is the always-ever-superlatively-surplus-more of the One”[25] and human participation in this One reflects this continual excess. “The idea of the human (homo) transcends any simple univocity of determinate essence. He exhibits the overdeterminate unity of contradictory determinations; as an image of God as beyond comprehension, man infinitely surpasses man (to echo Pascal).”[26] Humans created in the image of God found in Christ are realizing this image, and this process, is without end. “Wayward and homebound, metaxologically back and forth, going forth and coming back, within the whole, but yet opened beyond the immanent whole: can one think here of a relation to the Apocalyptic betweening of the ‘already and not yet’?”[27]

This betweening however is not to be resolved in a final realization (or synthesis), and this seems to mark Desmond’s departure from Eriugena. Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ. Eriugena envisions a final return which will abolish all difference but Desmond suggests the need to think metaxu differently: “does the between keep open the space of difference, and this now as the distance (di-stans: standing by two, bij twee, betweonum) wherein we can come to love all, even God, and be loved, even by God?”[28] He appeals to William Butler Yeats’ “Crazy Jane” to make the point: “Going outside or returning inside, passing along the way or passing away, being exiled or repatriated, there is a constancy in passage, a constancy in distance, and all things remain in God, not as in a circle closed into itself but as a porous intermedium of coming and going. I do not come across self-circling with Crazy Jane.”[29]

Desmond also sees it illustrated in Celtic crosses: “We are drawn to the circular patterns there, but the effect is more one of crisscrossing. There is a liminal in-betweenness of interwoven patterning in which beginning and end are hard to separate.”[30] As with Maximus, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. “Crossing oneself, one comes across oneself, and more than oneself.”[31] The movement of God and the movement of the self are eternal in their coming and going and being stretched out. Desmond also likens it to a labyrinth, “There is something infinite, beyond every whole, in the traversing. While amazing, the between as labyrinthine has no simple center and no circular closure. It has to be crossed, crisscrossed, again and again.”[32] There is no exiting desire and satisfaction in God, but only a continual growth in agape love or theosis.

The work of William Desmond, understood against the background of Eriugena, locates his work as part of a distinct tradition, largely absent in the western context. Eriugena, like Maximus, is working out the details of Athanasius’ formula, “God became man that man might become god.” Apocatastasis or theosis seems to likewise characterize Desmond’s metaxology, the working principle of the cosmos and God in which transcendence and immanence are an unfolding realization, in which God would be all in all (creation is incarnation). Desmond may not venture as far as Richard Kearney, but they are on a similar path in their reading of Eriugena, in which humanity acts as God’s co-creator. As Kearney puts it, “The basic thinking was this: divinity possibilises, humanity realises. God is not but may be—on condition that we show up and respond to the unconditional call for love and justice on this earth.”[33] Desmond’s between, as I am understanding him, is this same disruption of binary thought, which with Eriugena and Kearney (to say nothing of John, Paul, Origen, Dionysius and Maximus) would remake our conceptions of God and reality.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: Suny Press, 2025).

[2] Ibid, 95.

[3] Ibid, 96.

[4] Ibid.

[5] John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Thu Aug 28, 2003; substantive revision Wed Oct 30, 2019).

[6] Dermot Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 236

[7] John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[8] Dermot Moran, “Nature, Man and God in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena,” in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, Editor Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985) 236.

[9] Wayward, 30-31.

[10] John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, vol. 3, 678c, cited in Moran, The Irish Mind, 91.

[11] Wayward, 138.

[12] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 88.

[13] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 89.

[14] Wayward, 31.

[15] Wayward, 30.

[16] Wayward, 31.

[17] This is the way Ryan Duns characterizes Desmond’s work. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018).

[18] Stanford Encyclopedia.

[19] Wayward, 31.

[20] Ibid, 30

[21] Ibid,31.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 32.

[28] Ibid, 32-33.

[29] Ibid, 33.

[30] Ibid, 32

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Richard Kearney, “My Way to Theopoetics Through Eriugena,”in Literature & Theology (Vol. 33. No. 3, September 2019, pp. 233–240 doi:10.1093/litthe/frz019) 233.

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.

Joy

In Scripture the path to joy is to be found in and through the presence of God (Psalms 16:11, Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 9:2), through being present with/to others (Romans 15:32, Romans 12:15) and this joy is integral to salvation (1 Peter 1:8-9). Joy is linked to ecstasy (Acts 15:32), or going outside of the self, which accords with being present with and loving others. There is a mutual indwelling, a giving, a going outside of the self, which is definitive of love, joy, and peace. The reason the presence of God is linked with joy is that God is, by definition, continually pouring himself out in Kenotic self-giving love (Philippians 2:7). As Dionysius describes, “He who is the cause of all, in His beautiful and benevolent longing (eros) for all, is carried outside Himself in His providential wills for all creatures through the superabundance of His loving goodness, being, as it were, beguiled by goodness, love, and intense longing.”[1] God is by definition, ek-static, or always going outside of himself (in the self-giving of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit). Though some may think of God as above all and removed from all, He comes to all in Christ. This ecstatic power of love is inseparable from who He is. God is defined as love (I Jn. 4:7), and this intense love is a longing for the beloved, and thus we are drawn to Him as His great love attracts us to Him. As David describes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1). We were made for God and for love, and this love is as necessary to our spiritual well-being as water is to our bodies. God moves us as he moves toward us, or as Maximus puts it, “He thirsts to be thirsted for, and longs intensely to be longed for, and loves to be loved.”[2] As John says, He ignites in humanity a desire for Him: He “will draw all men unto Me” (Jn. 12:32).

But there is a reciprocity in this drawing, in that those drawn to and by the love of the cross, must take up their crosses and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). There is a giving and receiving, in which the receiving calls for a giving, and this reciprocal identity (in and through the other) nurtures an outward bound, and continually expanding love. Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father and Spirit, we are conjoined in a body whose identity is ever-enlarging. Just as we are drawn into the love of God, so too others are drawn into the love we carry (John 13:35). As we open our life to the life of others, we expose the lie of self-contained self-sufficiency (the world’s definition of happiness). Whether we know it or not, everyone seeks mutuality, reciprocity, the sustenance of life with the other.[3] True eros or desire recognizes the infinite opening of love, true desire, true love. As Rowan Williams states it, “this means that finite being tends towards being spoken, being apprehended, represented, regenerated in human response and engagement.”[4] We are made for communion and interpersonal love, which means that like God, we are to be continually moving out of ourselves, beyond our person, beyond our nature. In the explanation of Maximus, “man is not his person, nor his nature, nor even a sort of an addition of them, but his wholeness. . . (is) something beyond them, and around them, giving them coherence, but itself not bound with them.”[5] To be fully human (like Christ) is to be in continual synthesis, moving toward the other, toward mutual indwelling, toward participation.

The Bible gives us a variety of metaphors or pictures of this synthesis. Baptism is to be joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4); communion is a partaking of Christ (Mark 14:22–24); the Holy Spirit is for indwelling (I Corinthians 3:16); to be joined to Christ (as pictured by Paul) is on the order of being joined in marriage (Eph. 5:31-32). Christ as Logos is God’s way to ecstatically offer himself. He offers himself in the incarnation as Logos (Jn. 1:1) but this Word is interwoven in Creation: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). The Logos, the person, “upholds all things by his powerful Word” (Heb. 1:3); “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is the ordering person or arche behind all things. He is the world’s reason, at multiple levels, to be experienced intellectually, erotically, or emotionally. He is for apprehending, speaking, and consumption.

As I have written previously (here), Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, describes the research scientist as being drawn in by the world, in a kind of longing for satisfaction, in which a presence in the world seems to look back at the scientist looking into the world. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[6] Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[7] There is a presence, a deep joy, a profound satisfaction, in discovery, understanding, and meaning, all of which can be attributed to synthesis with the Logos, which is all-inclusive.

As Paul says, there is “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). There is only one person, one energy, one principle operating in and through all things. God interpenetrates the universe and he also interpenetrates persons, and the realization of this synthesis is holistic – knowing God, knowing others, knowing the world. Caught up in this exchange, we lose our enclosed egos and are made alive in Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). I or ego is crucified, opening the self to life in Christ (inter-Trinitarian love), and escaping the bonds of self-enclosure.

If participation in God is joy, then non-participation is hell. Hell seems to be a world of our making, inspired by the devil (Matt. 25:41) as the one who would be God, envies God, who refuses to participate in God, and who declares that freedom is self exploration.[8] The danger is in being seduced by something less than the divine, perhaps our own image, our own ego, and instead of being drawn to life, love and ecstasy, we are drawn into a suffocating finitude. In our sin, we would obtain being, obtain life, obtain self. In Christ’s warning in each of the Gospels, those who would save themselves lose themselves (e.g., Matt. 16:25). The rivalries, the imitated desire, the jealousy, the earthly, all describe a failure to escape the self. Paul describes this stifling world as compulsive, neurotic, law bound, Godless, spiritless, and ultimately as the body of death (Rom. 7:24). This self-enclosed ego is split between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and no Other appears on the horizon for this sick soul (of Romans 7). The lost treasure of self requires a constant turn inward. All one can do is enjoy their symptom, and compulsively repeat, in the deadly drive toward possessing the self. Instead of ecstasis, there is stasis in the refusal to enter into dialogue with God, the world, and nature. Here there is no history, no movement, no growth, no reciprocity, no meaning, and certainly no joy.

This dark picture (summed up in Romans 7), stands in contrast to the joy of chapter 8. This joy, which resonates throughout the chapter, is built upon being joined to the love of God in Christ (8:38-39). In Paul’s description, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Throughout, he is describing a metamorphosis as we are “set free” (v. 1), through mind transformation (v. 7) and through the gift of the Spirit (v. 9) “made alive” (vv. 10-11) and adopted as God’s children and enabled to call God Abba (vv. 15-16) as we are transformed into the image of the Son (v. 29) through love. Being joined to God, participating in the body of Christ, finding love, means transformation through this inter-hypostatic, synergistic, reciprocal, joyfulness.[9]

[1] On the Divine Names, IV.13, PG 3: 712AB. Cited in Nicholas Loudovikos, “Analogical Ecstasis: Maximus the Confessor, Plotinus, Heidegger and Lacan” (https://www.academia.edu/20373350/_Analogical_Ecstasis_Maximus_the_Confessor_Plotinus_Heidegger_and_Lacan), 1-2.

[2] Ambigua, PG 91: 1206C. Cited in Loudovikos, 2.

[3] See Rowan Williams, “Nature, Passion and Desire, Maximus’s Ontology of Excess” In Studia Patristica, LXVIII, 267-272.

[4] Ibid, 271.

[5] In the summation of Nicholas Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” in Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (https://tftorrance.org/journal/v4/participatio-2013-v4-14-Loudovikos-258-286.pdf) 285.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 19.

[7] Ibid, 21.

[8] Nicholas Loudovikos, “Ecstatic or reciprocal Meaningfulness?: Orthodox Eschatology between Theology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis” (www.academia.edu) 6.

[9] Ibid, 11.

Paul Blowers: From Creation Ex Nihilo to Creation Ex Deo or From Being to Well-Being in Maximus the Confessor

In Genesis the formless void, or the chaos of creation, in the view of Tertullian[1] and Gregory Nazianzen,[2] did not mean that matter was intrinsically formless, but apart from the light of Christ, which illumines and tames it, matter carries the possibility of lapsing into chaos and the nothingness from which it arose. This means Christ creates and sustains in the same self-giving love by which he saves, with death and nothingness as the other possibility. To state it clearly, creation and saving are part of the same kenotic self-giving of God in Christ. In the words of Paul Blowers, a leading specialist on Maximus the Confessor (who is the premiere innovator on the Chalcedonian Formula), there is a passage from being to well-being, inclusive of eternal well-being, as part of the same gift of grace flowing from God.[3] God calls from out of death and nothing in creation and salvation, and this is the all-inclusive work of Christ.

There is a progression of creation through salvation which unfolds not only in the Bible’s first chapters but its final chapters in which the purposes of creation are met in salvation. That is the eternal – joined to, shaping, holding together, from out of the ex nihilo is realized through Jesus Christ. The summing up (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of Ephesians 1:10, ties the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, directly to the incarnation. The death and nothingness which Christ overcame in his life, death and resurrection, is that which is continually overcome, through him, in creation. Or to say the same thing differently (if a bit redundantly), God’s grace in Christ is one, in salvation and creation. The sin which gives way to death, opens creation to the nothingness from which it arose and which Christ in his saving work turns back. This turning back is the completion of creation’s purpose. This is the mystery, hidden since the foundation of the world, revealed in Christ: “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him” (Eph. 1:9). The purposes of creation are found in incarnation.

This is the clear teaching of the New Testament, which has profound ramifications. Obviously, there is no nature grace duality or an ungraced nature, but it also implies a radically different understanding of the relationship between God and creation and time and eternity.

Creation Ex Deo

Creation ex nihilo is primarily a negative statement and is not meant to describe the how of creation, nor does it convey the positive interpenetrating relationship of God with his creation. The ex nihilo, even in the work of Aquinas, plays the primary role of combating both the doctrine of the eternality of the creation, or the notion that creation was made from out of some pre-existent matter. The doctrine does not refer to creation being called from out of nonbeing, but refers to the Creator as the cause, the source, or the power behind all being.[4] Nothing exists apart from Him, but He exists and the universe is a result, in one way or another, of His existence. This is not an explanation of how God did it but is simply a pointer to the fact that creation is His doing. According to A. Maryniarczyk, “the Creator is the cause of everything that is – form, matter, properties, and substance – and that nothing exists apart from Him that did not come from Him. The universe was and is a work of creation (creatio continua).”[5]

The danger with creation ex nihilo is that the nihilo will be conceived as an actually existing void or nothingness, or that creation will be pictured as something separate from God. The point of the doctrine is, that apart from God, nothing exists. All things are created and sustained through his active presence. According to Irenaeus, “God drew matter, and the very substance and form of things, ‘from himself’ (a semetipso) by willing the creation into being.”[6] Gregory of Nyssa argues that apart from God’s active willing matter has no existence. He assigns it to an “ineffable intellection” but does not speculate as to how this might be, but clearly there is the sense of ex Deo, or creation coming from out of God.[7] Dionysius the Areopagite directly explains the ex nihilo through the ex Deo. He asserts that God has brought the universe into being out of his goodness, and that “the Divine who transcends being is the being of all that is.”[8] As Blowers points out, “Dionysius adds the crucial caveat that God is creatures’ being only in the sense of their relative participation in him, and that the God who “is all things in all (1 Cor 15:28) is no-thing among any existent.”[9]

The passage from nonbeing to being is a possibility only through the direct act and continuing activity of God. As Blowers puts it, “In creating, God not only produces and shapes matter and bodies, he already saves them from nonbeing, from unfulfilled potential.”[10] The nothing or what is not, is filled in by what is and what is becoming in the creating/saving work of Christ. According to Gregory of Nyssa, the power of the Creator-Logos is “creative of what is, inventive of what is not, sustaining of what has come into being, and foreseeing of what is yet to be.”[11] There is a teleological purpose in which what we will be has not yet appeared (I John 3:2). This unrealized potential is not yet, but in Christ will be. It is only in contrast to what is and what is becoming, through Christ, that nothing or what is not can be posited. So creation ex nihilo is another way of saying that all that is has its being through Christ.

This then raises a series of problems (recognized by Dionysius), in that creation might be thought to be an emanation from God in a Greek sense, and that ultimately all things reduce to God (pantheism). God might be pictured as a multiplicity of beings, though everything is just his one Being (producing a plurality) with a loss of distinction between Creator and creation. The resolution to this potential (and real) misconstrual is a proper understanding of the role of Christ.

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

Maximus the Confessor goes further than his predecessors in distinguishing creation from a Greek emanation, but also in explaining how it is that Christ completes creation (through incarnation) while maintaining a creation/Creator distinction. He notes that beings become, through his being “all in all” (1 Cor 9:22), but that God never becomes. He cannot be said to be a being: “In this way he can in no way be associated by nature with any being and thus because of his superbeing is fittingly referred to as nonbeing. For since it is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then the affirmation of superbeing must be the negation of beings, and the affirmation of beings must be the negation of superbeing.”[12] Both being and beyond being (or nonbeing) must be ascribed to God. “In one sense they are both proper to him, one affirming the being of God as cause of being, the other completely denying in him the being which all being have, based on his preeminence as cause.”[13] Maximus creates a sharp divide between Creator and creation, or between the divine and the human, but this divide is bridged by the one who is both Creator and created, both human and divine. These categories are absolutely separate, but this separation is overcome by the one bearing both realities in his singular personhood.

Salvation as the Means of Creation

For Maximus, not only are salvation and creation the work of Christ, they are of the saving work. Maximus posits the saving work of Christ as having precedence over his creating work: “insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.”[14] He describes the incarnation of Christ as a “’a super-infinite plan infinitely preexisting the ages,’ with a view to which God created the very essences of all creatures.”[15] In other words, Christ as savior is the Creator. As Peter puts it and as Maximus notes, “But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (I Peter 1:19-20). The slain lamb manifest at the end of time is the foundation of creation. His sacrifice in the middle of history serves as the arche at the beginning and the goal realized at the end of history.

As Maximus writes, “The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all the hidden logoi and figures of Scripture as well as the knowledge of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose (logos) for which God originally made all things.”[16] He goes on to note, one cannot abstract from the slain lamb to the arche of all things through either the intellect or the senses. That is, it is this particular person, and not an intellectual (in the Greek sense) or sensible abstraction, that accomplishes creation in incarnation:

All visible things require a cross, meaning the capacity of preempting the attraction to them of those who engage them by sense experience. And all intelligible things need a burial, meaning the complete immobilization of those who engage them by intellect. For when all activity and stimulus toward all (sensible and intelligible) things is suspended together with all inclination to them, the Logos, who alone exists in and of himself, appears anew as if rising from the dead, since he encompasses all those (created) things that come from him, though none of them has any intrinsic connection to him at all by natural relation. For he is the salvation of the saved by grace and not by nature.[17]

The logoi or undergirding arche by which Christ creates and sustains are not extrapolations, abstractions, intellections, senses, apart from who he is. Thus, though Maximus may occasionally sound Greek, he is not appealing to a Greek sort of Forms, but is appealing directly to Jesus Christ as forming the logic, the purpose, the arche or the logoi of creation. Christ’s embodiment in incarnation is the same presence found throughout creation. As Blowers sums up,

Through the logoi, the Logos has pre-evangelized all things and prepared them for the Christophany in which all things are ‘recapitulated’ according to their proportionate participation in the work of Christ. Maximus frequently speaks of this ongoing work of recapitulation as the ‘mystery of Christ,’ within which the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is perpetually culminating in the deification of humanity and the transformation of all creatures.[18]

The participation in Christ of the Christian is the creation power which gave the first birth but which leads to the second birth. According to Maximus, “Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings created by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those – like us human beings – who have received their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.”[19] God’s creative purposes encoded in the logoi are part and parcel with his salvation purposes worked out in the incarnate Logos. In the pithy phraseology of Blowers, “When Christ spoke of ‘working still’ along with the Father, he was speaking in his own role as Creator, effecting a new integrity of creation, a new unity of its universals and its particulars, and a new condition in which creatures that are by nature moved by the Creator move on their own toward well-being.”[20]

[1] Tertullian, Contra Hermogenem 29.1–6; 33.1 (SC 439:140–50). Cited in Paul Blowers, “From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being: Creation ex nihilo in the Cosmology and Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor,” in Light on creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, eds. Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017], 173.

[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 4 (De mundo) (Moreschini, 16). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[3] Blowers, 176.

[4] See Daniel Soars, “Creation in Aquinas: ex nihilo or ex deo?” (New Blackfriars, DOI:10.1111/nbfr.12603)

[5] Andrzej Maryniarczyk, ‘Philosophical Creationism: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Creatio Ex Nihilo’, Studia Gilsoniana 5 (2016, 217–68), 240. Cited in Soars, 4.

[6] Adv. haer. 2.30.9 (SC 294:318); 4.20.1 (SC 100:626). The Citation and full quote are from Blowers, 175.

[7] De hominis opiicio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C). Blowers, Ibid.

[8] De caelesti hierarchia 4.1 (PTS 36:20); cf. Ep. 8.1 (PTS 36:173–4). Blowers, Ibid.

[9] Blowers, 175, referencing Dionysius De divinis nominibus 7.3 (PTS 33:198).

[10] Blowers, 174.

[11] Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:16, ll. 20–2). Cited in Blowers, Ibid.

[12] Mystagogia, prooemium (CCSG 69:9, ll. 106–19), trans. George Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 185 (altered). Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C). Cited in Blowers, 175.

[13] Ibid.

[14]Adversus haereses 3.22.3 (SC 211:438). Cited in Blowers, 179-180.

[15] Blowers, 180 referencing Quaestiones ad Thalassium 60 (CCSG 7:75–7).

[16] Capita theologica et oeconomica, 1.66–67 (PG 90:1108A–B). Cited in Blowers, 180.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

[19] Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:143), trans. Paul Blowers, in Paul Blowers – Robert Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 118. Cited by Blowers, 181.

[20] Blowers, 182.