Jordan Wood – Forging Ploughshares

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Ambigua, 10:21, 181.

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

[8] Mystagoy, 51.

[9] Mystagogia, 56.

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

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

[12] Thalassios, 132.

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

[14] Thalassios, 16:5, 132,

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jordan Wood, Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[6] QThal, 61.5. p. 436.

[7] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[8] QThal, 61.2, p. 434.

[9] QThal, 61.10, p. 440.

[10] QThal, 61.5, p. 436.

[11] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[12] QThal, 61.6, p, 437

[13] QThal, 61.6, p. 437.

[14] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[15] QThal, 61.7, p. 438.

[16] QThal, 61.1, p. 434.

[17] QThal, 61.8, p. 439.

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

[19] Bulgakov, p. 2.