Maximus the Confessor – Forging Ploughshares

Sabbath Healing: The Sharing of Divine Presence

Salvation in the Bible hinges upon the presence of God, linked to his relationship to creation in his Sabbath rest (or Sabbath peace), the sacred time into which he invites those (being) created in his image. God’s rest contains and extends the divine reflection, “It is good, it is very good.” This reflective time is returned to creation as revelation: “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen 2:3). This permanent day, without morning or evening, is God’s significance, his sanctifying presence, given to and revealed in this day. The six days of creation, of activity, of motion, of control of chaos, etc., are for and lead to the seventh, containing the divine reflexive goodness. It might be said nothing happens on this day, but this day is the happening, the significance, the meaning arising out of and enfolding the other days. It is the final marker, contained within the sequence of events, each with its own sort of goodness, but culminating in the eternal goodness. According to Sigve Tonstad, “By the act of hallowing the seventh day God drives the stake of the divine presence into the soil of human time.”[1]

This day, in the description of Maximus, has no “created origin, since it is the manifestation of realities beyond limit and measure.”[2] It is subsequent to the created realities of the previous six days, with their measured beginning and end, morning and evening. It is unlimited and uncircumscribed, as he is in this eternal day. This “perpetual day, is the unalloyed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest.”[3] Maximus links the day with eternality in three modes or through three ways: being, well-being, and eternal-being. It is not that God’s Being is contained on a continuum with being, but it is out of the “essence” of God” that creation’s being occurs. This is a potential, actualized through human well-being and free choice. Given the reality of creation and nature, there is the potential to enact (or not), well-being. Eternal-being, contains and fills out the potential and activity of the others, and it is not a “natural potential within beings.”[4]

Maximus sidesteps an ontotheology which would put God on a continuum with being, through the division of the six days from the Sabbath. We do not get to God through creation directly, due to its own nature or its own essence, but we come to God in creation as on the order of a temple or a resting place for God, in which the meaning is in the added divine declaration. The motion and free choice of that which has a beginning and whose activity and motion has an end, cannot come to eternality through itself. There is an eternality to which creation gives access, through Sabbath, but the motion of the other days must cease. All activity, evolution, creation, even of an infinite or ongoing kind does not come to eternality, in fact it ensures, in its continual beginning and ending, that eternity will be obscured. All process (as in materialistic evolution or continual creation) does not allow for encounter with the agent behind the process, and this is the meaning given in the seventh day, otherwise lacking. It links creation with the Creator, not only by implication, but through presence, enunciation, and participation.

Nature and creation are not everything, though the world religions build upon this presumption in worshipping nature, and human philosophy often concludes the world is all that is the case (materialism, atheism, animism etc.). Sabbath puts a limit on creation from within, which opens onto or is eternity. Nature and free choice have a potential but there is a limit to their powers and activity, but that limit is the eternal. Their limit accords with the eternal principle for which they were created. We might say time is circumscribed by eternity, but this seventh day is an interpenetrating time. It is encountered among the other days and time as goal, as eternal possibility. God speaks on the other days (manifest in what is made), but God’s Word on this day is a direct manifestation and reflection of himself. The other days can be seen in what they produce, but this day is devoted to God’s word, to his delight and declaration, and to hearing. This difference marks the limits of what is made (manifest, seen, objective) from what is unmade (God himself).

There is activity, creating, working, tending, and eventually sweating and toil (which must end but is not its own end), then there is God’s sharing of himself. Nature and free choice have a potential which grace fulfills, and this is the significance (the symbol and the reality) of Sabbath. It is not that the eternal is outside of creation, but in Sabbath the eternal is conjoined and resting in creation. The eternal is not limited by the finite, but the finite is precisely for and intersected by the eternal. Eternality, God, Goodness, True Essence, are not limited, as if eternity were limited by time, or God excluded or limited by creation, but the opposite is the case; the created and finite are limited by the Eternal. This day without beginning or end, without created origin, is not succeeded by another, but is the terminus of all days and ages. This terminus though, is met among the others, as its own day and an alternative way.

The problem is that Sabbath presence is obscured for humans, and the story of the Bible might be read as Sabbath (re)gained. The faith founded on divine presence begins with a Judaism dealing primarily in absence. God speaks to Abraham, but shows up intermittently, though “Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (Gen 26:5), which points to Sabbath remembrance. The first lesson of Israel in the wilderness concerns remembering Sabbath rest, which had already been given (Ex 16:1-31). They were to trust in God to provide double manna on the sixth day and to preserve it on the seventh, though they feared starvation. God shows himself in Sinai and the Tabernacle, but the Jews approached the sacred space only in trepidation and through representatives (Moses, Aaron, the high priest). He was hidden in the holy of holies, but then his glory absconded from the Temple entirely. The sacred space is lost in the exile, and sacred time is all that remains, but the prevailing sense is: “Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!” (Is 45:15). The Sabbath no longer claimed location, and its time was limited. The Sabbath was a remembrance of creation and God’s resting, holding out a promise of freedom, but in slavery, exile, and subjugation, the Jews seem unprepared for divine presence.

Jesus’ Sabbath controversies, his deliberate healing on the Sabbath, and his direct identity with God, fill out the revelation and meaning of Sabbath. Jesus explains, the Sabbath is not a day of doing nothing, but it is the day in which God is working in healing, redeeming, delivering, and saving: “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (Jn 5:17). Throughout, Jesus challenges the received Jewish understanding of Sabbath (as inactivity), to emphasize divine activity. In turn, the paralytic must carry his mat (Jn 5), the blind man must mix mud (Jn 9), both involving activity the Jews prohibited on the Sabbath. It is this Sabbath work of redemption, performed by God but including a joyous response (mud mixing, bed carrying, running and leaping). A burden is involved, but it is a joyous burden inclusive of healing.

Believers take up the burden of cross, the work of redemption of Christ, learning the rest of God is a cessation of one kind of work, synonymous with the work of redemption. Jesus’ direct identity with God (“I am” the life raising the dead, the light giving sight to the blind, the true water curing thirst) arises in healing, the lifting of crushing burden, exchanged for an easy life-giving yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). The healing is a proof of who Jesus is, but also of who God is. The absence and seeming indifference of God to human suffering is remedied in the curing of blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and death itself. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28).

This violation and correction of Jewish Sabbath expectations involves reidentifying God in Christ, re-understanding the Sabbath, and accepting that God is present and revealed. There is a burden to bear, but it is not the weight and toil of the world, but the taking up of the cross, the burden of redemption. The Creator is the Redeemer, as Jesus is true light, true life, true glory, revealed in his seventh-day work. He is the Sabbath, the life-giving rest, giving God and rest in himself, to creation.

[1] Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (p. 37). Andrews University Press. Kindle Edition. Thank you Jonathan for the gift of this book, and putting me onto Tonstad.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol II, trans. Nicholas Constas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 279.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 277

Leaning into Christ’s Death as the Hope of Resurrection

My wife, Faith, asked me in a point-blank way what I thought about my resurrection. Maybe it was the wording or the way she asked, but in the moment, I felt only disbelief. I mumbled that I was unsure, and kept to myself that annihilation sometimes seemed plausible. I assume I am a peculiarly poor example of Christian belief, and I know that for many the reality of resurrection and heaven are live options. We went on to talk of her mother, who had an immediate and lively hope of heaven. But as I thought about it, I realized I have no trouble believing in the resurrection of Christ, and I recognized in the New Testament his resurrection is the fulcrum opening the possibility.[1]

Resurrection faith, as it develops in the New Testament, is not focused so much on the future as it is on reconceptualizing immediate, concrete, experience. Baptism, for example, is a voluntary embrace of death so as to be reborn with a new sensibility and experience. Paul makes this argument in telling the Romans they must abandon sin and live virtuous lives (Ro 6:3). Resurrection faith is a training in dying, or in reconceptualizing life. Certainly, this entails future possibility, but it is primarily a more immediate engagement, which points to the significance of the bodily resurrection.

This is not a belief in the Platonic forms, or in some vague afterlife, but it intersects with or is on a continuum with embodied human experience. The death and birth imagery in baptism plays out the immediate embodied point, of resurrection faith. Yes, perhaps it is those of us who are weaker or more immature Christians who get drug down by earthly attachments, but it is also true that it is precisely in this earth-bound embodiment which Christ addresses us. I can take up (or at least grasp) the incremental orientation of living out virtue, dying to the self, and living for others. The immediate thing that impinges is also that which can be immediately resisted, to grasp hold of life as if to preserve it, but this immediate struggle seems obvious. The danger in leaping over these realities, to a future disembodied bliss, is to imagine we get there without passing through embodiment, mortality, and death. That is, we may leap over this reality and misconstrue the eternal significance of the present condition. Rather than severing these bonds, which would amount to giving death final say, Christ lifts us up together with all of creation beyond death, and we are to realize this now. The point is to inhabit the body – bodying forth a virtuous, resurrection faith. Christ has bound us fully and completely to embodiment, and on this basis we live resurrection faith.

We live within or between two experiences, or two overlapping ages, so that the possibility of resurrection, or the end of all things (“The end of the ages has come upon us” 1 Co 10:11) is negotiated now. Paul describes being simultaneously dead to transgression and alive in Christ. He goes on to describe, in the present tense, that he “made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:17). He does tie this to the ages to come, but he poses this future possibility on the basis of the present reality, fusing past, present, and future together in a singular movement.

The working of time, in putting off sin and dying with Christ (Ro 6), is an immediately enacted realization. Believers “have been baptized into His death” (Ro 6:3); “our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with” (Ro 6:6); we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Ro 6:5). The resurrection is not first, but a faith arrived at given the reality of dying with him. We live into this understanding, not as a mere metaphor or mere likeness, but a present participation. As Ann Jervis notes, it is not that “believers travel to Christ’s past but because Christ’s past is present and can be known in human present tenses.”[2] So too we do not travel to Christ’s empty grave but live his resurrection and ascension in the present.

The movement described by Athanasius, “He became man that we could become God,” ties the purposes of creation and redemption in a singular time continuum. Stage one, making humans in His image and likeness, is not instantaneous but a project only completed in the one who is fully human (his inhumanization), and then stage two is a development out of stage one, human divinization. Christ unites himself absolutely and forever (hypostasis), with human nature so as to enact entry of humanity into divinity. God becoming man and man becoming God are distinct but intertwined and overlapping.

Dying to transgression, being brought to life, and being seated at the right hand of the Father, occur for Christ, but are repeated or realized in those found in Christ. There is a realized and being realized eschatology. It is an apocalyptic explosion in slow motion, in which we can see one order coming to an end and the other commencing. For Paul, the end of the ages have come upon us, as God in Christ has become human, but he is becoming human as we too incarnate who he is. In the process we are seated with him in a full divinization, both accomplished and unfolding. As Maximus writes, “To state the matter briefly, of these ages, the former belong to God’s descent to man, while the latter belong to man’s ascent to God.”[3] But Maximus goes on to explain, that inasmuch as this has happened to Christ already, and Christ is the beginning, middle and end, in this sense all of this “has already come upon us.”[4] All at once in Christ, in whom the ages are enfolded, we are caught up in this cosmic creation purpose.

Maximus describes this as consisting of an active and passive principle, with past ages or the ages of the flesh involving “human toil,” having “the characteristic property of activity, but the future ages of the Spirit, which will come about after this present life, are characterized by the transformation of man through passivity.”[5] The Psalm Maximus references, indicates man’s life is full of wearisome toil: “seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps 90:10). The imagery of Sabbath rest (described in my previous two blogs) intercedes into this wearisomeness, as we participate in God, in passive reception. As with Mary and Martha, the activity of Martha accompanies and provides for the reception of Mary at Jesus’ feet. With Mary and Martha (in varying proportions), so too we are caught up in two ages and modes, involving both action and receptivity. These two ages, of activity and passivity, are interfused as we must actively make our way to receiving. Having put on Christ is not an end of reason, of thinking, of putting on virtue, but involves a new nexus of reception and action.

Past, present, and future, run together, so that all things are occurring or unfolding in Christ, in and through whom we are active and passive. We accept Christ, we work, we think, we choose (e.g., to be baptized to partake of the Eucharist), we receive. This working of Christ within us is not finished, as the dying we do in taking up the cross and following him is still occurring, and the rising we do is not fully enacted, but the dying we begin, we believe will be made complete at the Parousia or at our death. “Existing here and now, we will reach the ends of the ages in a state of activity, at which point our power and ability to act will reach its limit.”[6] That is, our death is not our end, but is the full realization of the birth which we are undergoing, but it is also where God takes over. “In the ages that will follow, we shall passively experience by grace the transformation of divinization, no longer being active but passive, and for this reason we will not cease being divinized. For then passivity will transcend nature, having no principle limiting the infinite divinization of those who passively experience it.”[7] There is a limit to what we can do, what we can believe and understand, but this limit is where we entrust ourselves to God. The new creation has commenced, but there is still a groaning, a decay, a dying, which will be completed.

God will complete the good work, creation ex -nihilo begun in you: “And we are passive when, having completely traversed the inner principles of the beings created out of nothing, we will have come, in a manner beyond knowledge, to the Cause of beings, and, since all things will have reached their natural limits, our potentials for activity appropriate to them will come to rest.”[8] Our faith is not that we can take it all in, as we pass beyond knowledge and beyond our natural limits, but we can rest in God’s possibilities for us. Paul says, we shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor 15:52). The transformation begun in you will no longer revolve around your ability to receive, but we must put this understanding to work now. “Blessed, then, is the one who, after making God human in himself through wisdom and fulfilling the genesis of such a mystery, passively becomes, by grace, God, for the fact of eternally becoming this shall have no end.”[9] Our active inhumanizing God within us, our training in righteousness, will become the age in which we are directly taken into the arms of God (our training in passive receptivity concluded).

The understanding that we are in the stages of a birth “converts” the meaning of death: no longer a condemnation of nature but clearly of sin.[10] Death reigns in one age, but those who are conformed to the death of Christ, are brought to life: “through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men (Ro 5:18–19). As Jervis notes, this one act of righteousness extends to people in every historical period. “In regard to Christ’s temporality . . . this suggests that Paul thought that an act in Christ’s human past affected all of humanity, even those who lived before the incarnation. In effect, Christ’s past spans all of human time.”[11] Though our time and place bound natural capacities limit our perspective, recognition of this time of Christ pertains directly to participation in him: “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Ro 6:9).

Paul, and Maximus after him, compare this state to being in the womb: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who are the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Ro 8:22–23). We may see as in a glass darkly, or as if we are peering through a womb, prior to which has been the activity of our conception (creation) and the other side of which is our entry into the fulness and purpose of creation (divinization). As Maximus writes: “For it is true—though it may be a jarring and unusual thing to say—that both we and the Word of God, the Creator and Master of the universe, exist in a kind of womb, owing to the present conditions of our life.”[12] The Word may appear obscurely in this material, sense-perceptible, enclosure, but the delimitations of the womb, set in the context of the birth it indicates, provides a continuity with resurrection which we can live and die into.

The work begun in us, the reality in which we are engaged, the effort of our life, Paul says, will be brought to completion (Phil. 1:6). This makes of death the final descent through birth. I may not immediately leap to faith in my resurrection, but I can fully embrace the faith of Christ, who is “the author and perfecter of faith,” and so I fix my eyes on Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection and his ascension (Heb 12:2). This Christocentric approach is not a faith in my faith, it does not depend on my power of belief but it is a participation in his faith, in his dying, and rising.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] I found the lecture by John Bare on Maximus, and I turned to Maximus’ approach to the subject, parting some from Bare’s and Maximus’ analysis.

[2] Ann L. Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Translated by Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 22.5.

[4] Ibid, 22.6.

[5] Ibid, 22.7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 22.8.

[10] Ibid, 61.10,

[11] Jervis, 82-83.

[12] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 6.3.

The Living Letter/Logoi of Creation: The Science of David Bohm as Illustration of the Theology of Maximus

In drawing out the connection between Paul’s positive use of “letter” and Maximus’ development of the term logoi (see here), the material world is inseparably bound-up with meaning. Significance in the Logos is incarnate or embodied and in turn what is embodied has significance. Maximus works out this participatory ontology through his identification of the Logos directly with creation (in the logoi). His is not the Neoplatonic notion of emanation, with its distinction between the One (in whom there is no distinction) and divine Intellect (with its logos and distinction) but in the explanation of Mika Törönen, “This is another kind of simultaneous union and distinction where wholes and parts through God’s providence and judgement make up a harmonious manifold.”[1] The structure of reality, according to Maximus, is in its wholeness through which things are united, but this takes place at both the level of the particular (logoi) and the universal (Logos). In Paul’s terms Christians are the particular instantiation of the letter of Christ, and for Maximus, Christ’s stamp is put upon all creation in the logoi: “‘Who … would not recognize that the one Logos is many logoi distinguished in the undivided difference of created things through their unconfused individuality in relation to each other and themselves?”[2] This accounts for the union between the created and the uncreated but also, according to Maximus, the “union of the mind with the senses, and the union of heaven with earth, and the union of sensible things with the intelligible, and the union of nature with the logos.”[3] The one being made “all in all” or incarnate in all things “lends” the meaning of personhood to all of creation and it is through this incarnate reality that meaning is available (the Logos/logoi relation). This is the primary principle, I would argue, behind Maximus’ theory of logoi and it is the driving presumption (“discovery”) reflected in the theoretical physics of David Bohm.

Theologically the choice is between a theology which divides the Logos and incarnation, so that a preexistent Logos is separated from the incarnate Christ (a logos asarkos or disembodied Christ), or incarnation is understood to be an eternal fact about God in Christ being worked out in and through all of creation. In physics the choice is between a matter and mind duality or, as in quantum theory, the recognition that matter is interdependent with mind and meaning. According to quantum theory, elementary particles account for and respond to the observer, so that mind appears on both sides of observation. In the words of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, commenting on Bohm, “mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by an electron.”[4]

In most contemporary science reality is presumed to be material or physical, and this is foundational. Matter serves as the final reference, so that the brain may produce consciousness, but this is a by-product of the brain’s activity. A purposeless evolution has produced a material based human activity grounded in the set structures of the physical world. As Sheldrake sums up, in contemporary science everything, including people and animals are reduced to the mechanical and matter is unmixed with consciousness; nature is fixed and unchanging as the total amount of matter is the same and the laws of nature are fixed; all life is based on biological structures carried in genetic material such as DNA; minds are inside heads and are the product of brains; memories are material traces in brains; there is no direct activity between mind and matter (such as found in telepathy); and mechanical or material medication alone is authentic.[5]

Even where this neo-evolutionary doctrine may be denied, the Cartesian split between mind and matter, body and soul, thought and physical reality often prevail, and matter is defined as something that exists independently of mind. A privileging of material reality prevails, even where materialism may not be consciously embraced and even where the existence of mind is acknowledged, it is usually given no place in physical reality. This physicalism reigns, though the emergence of life is mostly unaccounted for (statistically it is improbable if not impossible) and even though science now recognizes that 96% of reality in “dark matter” or “dark energy” is still obscure. Better to believe in infinite parallel universes, all with different laws, then allow for the possibility of a creator God. The prevailing doctrine not only excludes the divine mind, but mind itself – consciousness should not really exist as matter is prime reality. Thus, the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett can write a book, Consciousness Explained, in which he dismisses consciousness as illusory.

Bad theology guided by materialist assumptions, is actually the historical cause preceding materialism. That is, it was dualistic Christians who first separated mind from matter. As Sheldrake explains, “They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds making them completely different from unconscious matter.”[6] They assumed they were strengthening arguments for the soul (mind), empowering it over the body (as in Descartes), and they sought to show the superiority of humans over animals. Humans, they would argue, are immortal, completely separate from animals (in their possession of mind and soul), and in the process, they created an unbridgeable gulf between body and soul and between humans and “nature.” Most people, Christian or not, presume this dualism, in spite of its deeply unchristian bias and regardless of the fact that modern physics indicates the fallacy of the materialist worldview.

Bohm (1917-1992), a theoretical physicist who studied under Robert Oppenheimer, has boldly set-forth for an alternative understanding. He argues that quantum physics, due to its interactions with the mind of the observer, spelled the end of both materialism and Cartesian dualism. Mind is not localized in the head of the observer but extends into the world, so that thought shows itself in and through material reality. Human minds can reach to the stars because the world resonates with and can be read and touched by thought and at the same time, the world seems to look back.

Bohm’s interpretation overlaps with Maximus’ understanding of logoi, in that the world is penetrated by mind. The materialistic tendency is to separate the physical and mental, or soul (mind, meaning) and body so that the “psychosomatic” is thought to refer to two distinct entities, with “psyche” or mind arising as a result of the material body (soma). Bohm maintains there is a unity between soma (the physical) and significance (the mental) as they are part of “one overall indivisible reality.” [7] The observer is part of the observation, and in turn the observed accounts for and responds to the observation. Like Logos and logoi or creation and incarnation, each “reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it) . . . they are both revealing the one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from two sides.”[8]

The letter written in stone or ink does not have its meaning in the medium, and so too in the physical world, DNA or electrical and chemical activity, are not reducible to their medium. A television signal is produced by images from a camera transformed into subtle electrical signals, carried on even more subtle radio waves, but the content is not found in electricity or radio waves per se, but in the images and sound in the television set received by the mind of the viewer. According to Bohm, “Meanings are thus seen to be capable of being organized into ever more subtle and comprehensive overall structures that imply, contain, and enfold each other, in ways that are capable of indefinite extension.”[9] The depth of subtlety and the extent of their manifestation is infinite.

Meaning is not fixed, and as a result there is an openness toward infinite clarification, deeper understanding, ongoing discrepancies, which all point to a depth of structure or an ever-changing understanding and more comprehensive meaning.[10] For example, Newton’s laws indicated Einstein’s insights of a conjoined space/time, which indicate a quantum reality. Bohm explains this involves a paradoxical unfolding: “while the quantum theory contradicts the previously existent classical theory, it does not explain basic concepts of this theory as an approximation or as a simplification of itself. Rather, it has to presuppose the classical concepts at the same time that it has to contradict them.”[11] It is not that quantum theory introduces new basic concepts, but it introduces ambiguity into concepts such as position and momentum, which were previously unambiguous. The ambiguity is not simply in the mind of the observer, but there is an ambiguity (openness) built into basic reality.

Matter is open to mindful interaction, which means the world can act back upon us, positively or negatively. In cancerous cells there is replication and duplication, or in neurosis the compulsion to repeat, a sort of miscommunication which damages the body or mind, creating a closed feed-back loop. Misinformation or disinformation is a disease or neurosis that directly impacts the host. “It is evident that this typical form of a runaway feedback loop between the soma- significant and the signa- somatic is deeply involved in a wide range of neurotic disorders.”[12]

The letter kills, or meaning takes on a deadly form precisely because it is stunted and turns in on itself. A deadly relationship to the law (occurring between meaning and embodiment) may infect one individual, interpersonal relations, or relationships with nature, as all involve soma-significance. There may be either a circular feedback which gets stuck in a deadly loop or soma-significance extended and opened to ever-renewed growth. Relationships with Nature or with the Cosmos are affected, on both sides of the relationship, by a meaning that may be rightly or wrongly construed. That is, just as in human relationships there are two sides interacting and affecting the relationship, so too the world in general reflects this interactive relation. “Indeed, insofar as we know it, are aware of it, and can act in it, the whole of Nature, including our civilization which has evolved from Nature and is still a part of Nature, is one movement that is both soma- significant and signa- somatic.”[13]

There is no flat material world, or in Paul’s language, the letter that kills is deceptive and deadly, not because it is a reality, but because it is presumed to be an end in itself. The law, Scripture, or the letter, which is presumed to be a foundation is on the order of a materialism that assigns the fulness of reality to the material order. It is deadly in its finitude, deceptively hiding the eternal. On the other hand, the living letter has the breath and breadth of personhood and access to participation in or even identification with Christ. The letter is part of a word which is part of a structure of meaning but this meaning always exceeds itself in the manner of personhood, not simply referring back to the material or to other letters but resonating with the eternal – an excess of meaning without a definitive closure. As in Maximus, the many logoi have their union in the Logos, containing both a distinct and unconfused particularity with an integrity in the unifying Logos.

There is the continual encounter with Christ in creation, or the filling out of the Logos in the logoi, which may simply specify the mind in Bohm’s description. The name of the universal in the particular, or the union of body and meaning, is specified in the logoi of the Logos. The extension of the incarnation into all creation, is a reality about creation reflected in quantum physics, which is simultaneously sensible and intelligible. There is a singular unbroken reality, which apart from the specificity of the Logos tends to be divided and delimited (the letter that kills). The isolated letter, law, or material nature cut-off from its extended meaning is reductive but the letter or quantum reality as a living process refers to the personal, mindful, eternal, interpenetrating all things.

[1] Mika Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 8.

[2] Ambig. 7 (PG 91), 1077C. Cited in Törönen, 30.

[3] Qu. Thal. 48: 188–9 (CCSG 7), 341. Cited in Törönen, 30.

[4] Rupert Sheldrake, “Setting Science Free from Materialism,” (Explore 2013; 9:211-218 & 2013 Elsevier Inc) 217.

[5] Sheldrake, 211.

[6] Sheldrake, 213.

[7] David Bohm, “Soma- Significance: A New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental” (https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/bohm.html, 2016) 1.

[8] Soma-Significance, 1.

[9] Soma-significance, 2.

[10] Soma-significance, 3.

[11] Soma-significance, 8.

[12] Soma-significance, 3.

[13] Soma-significance, 4.

Recovering the Neo-Chalcedonian Resolution

The divide between the Eastern and Western church rests upon two very different conceptions of Christology, cosmology, God, predestination, and salvation. Where the West would divide the Logos from the person of Jesus, the East has a long tradition of identifying Jesus directly with the Logos. Where the East has (mostly) consistently identified Christ’s suffering and death as divine suffering and death, the West has tended to mitigate through two natures the suffering and death so that it is only the human Jesus and not the divine Logos or divine Son of God who suffers. This has resulted in two very different pictures of God’s relation to creation and the nature of salvation (with the West focused on legal theory and the East focused on deliverance and healing). While in the name of ecumenism, it might do well to downplay this difference, the history of the difference is one of being glossed over until discussion has broken down and two very different Christianities have resulted.

The Lutheran theologian who devoted most of his life to recovering the unique sensibility of the East may be best qualified to tell this story. In Robert Jenson’s telling, the early creeds and councils did not so much resolve controversy as temporarily contain it through compromises which would ultimately end in schism. Even the power of the emperor, backing the impetus of the councils to reach a unified understanding (and the force of excommunication), did not contain the controversy and contradiction. It was not just Arianism, but even within the parameters of the creeds two irreconcilable positions, surrounding the issue giving rise to Arianism, survived. In the broadest terms, in one understanding the gospel tells of work done by a God antecedently and otherwise determined and in the other the gospel itself determines who and what God is.[1] The starkness of these two alternatives was mediated through a series of secondary issues such as the role of Mary (Theotokos?), the nature of the Logos, the nature of Christ as Son, distinctions within the Trinity, but what was at stake was the degree to which the story of Jesus of Nazareth could be identified with the story of God.

The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with God, certainly did not fit the philosophical understanding of God’s impassibility. Subordinationism was the initial response for those committed to a Greek understanding but Nicaea accentuates the dissonance in identifying “one who underwent gestation, birth, growth, a human career, rejection, torture and execution as ‘true God.’”[2] Subordinationism had said Jesus was less than God and had thus relieved the strain, as these things were assigned to one less than God. Nicaea forced a new expression of the same problem.

The Alexandrian school of Christology acknowledged the dissonance in a position Jenson summarizes as: “We have no idea how the Son, who is true— and therefore of course impassible—God, can have suffered, but somehow it happened.”[3] The Antiochene school refused the dissonance and attempted something like the Arian compromise by distinguishing between Jesus the Son who suffered and God the Son, who alone is “true God.” God the Son is divine, and therefore does not suffer but within this same person is another “nature” which suffers with humanity. The Antiochene escape is the Arian escape “moved a notch.” [4] Now instead of subordinating the one who suffers to less than God, no longer allowed by Nicaea, the Antiochenes make a distinction within Christ, assigning part of him to deity (the impassible) and part of him to humanity (the suffering). The philosophical ontology could be spared by prying open a different place within Jesus. The split within Christ would be negotiated in a variety of terms but the Antiochenes prevailed inasmuch as the unified image of Christ was displaced by distinctions identified with deity (e.g., Logos, Word, Son of God) which were something other than the human Jesus. “Thus theology was set a new problem: of construing a unity between two distinct and metaphysically polar entities.”[5]

The unified understanding of Jesus as “Christ,” “Logos,” “Son of Mary,” “Son of God,” the second member of the Trinity was once assumed, but a gap was opened, in which Jesus is “one with the Son” or “one with the Word” as a relation rather than as direct identity. As Theodore of Mopsuestia describes, in his development of physeis (natures): “He |Jesus| is God because of his close conjunction with that divine nature who really is God.”[6] In his commentary on John he sorts out each clause of the narrative so as to assign it to either the Logos (with its deified conjunction) or the man.[7] Jesus of Nazareth is not himself directly the Logos or one of the Trinity, but inasmuch as he is Son, Logos, or Word, he exists in relation to the second identity of the Trinity. There is a clear distinction between his two “natures,” conjoined as they might be. Even the saving assigned to Jesus is more a result of this conjunction of two natures. “Jesus saves,” or his flesh is “life-giving” only in being conjoined to God. While Jesus shares in the Logos, and is thus deserving of worship, this conjunction is not direct identity. The Logos precedes the man, and by the same token the Logos does not suffer nor is he son of Mary. Theodore’s distinction of Logos from the man Jesus, would become standard in Antiochene thought and among those subject to its influence.

According to Nestorius, even the popular liturgical expression acclaiming Mary “Mother of God” (Theotokos) is mistaken. Mary did not bear deity but a man and “the incarnate God did not die, but raised him in whom he was incarnate. . . .”!”[8] This was a step too far for the Alexandrians, and they find a champion in Cyril of Alexandria, who takes up the Alexandrian cause in opposing Nestorius. According to Jenson, “His great concern was for continuity of divine agency throughout the gospel narrative, for theological warrant to read the Gospels whole as God’s own story. It is throughout the story God the Son who becomes human and who by what he does as human unites us to himself and his Father.”[9] According to Cyril: “We confess that the very one. . . who is only-begotten God—and who is indeed according to his own nature impassible—suffered in the flesh for us. . . .” Confession must include “the death according to the flesh of the only-begotten Son of God.”[10] Cyril insists, everything one might denote by Christ, God the Son, Jesus, or any of the other biblical names or titles ascribed to him, all are predicated of the one subject, the incarnate God. As Cyril puts it, “The sacred writings proclaim him sometimes as a whole and single human who is, in the Incarnation, the understood subject of his deity, and sometimes, vice versa, as God who is the understood subject of his humanity.”[11] His point is a direct refutation of the Antiochene doctrine, aimed at dividing Christ.

In Theodore’s examples, “God the Son has a mother” and “Jesus is lifegiving,” demand two different natures (as God has no mother and God alone, and not Jesus, gives life), but Cyril identifies what is two, in Theodore, with one subject. “Therefore we say the body of Christ is divine since it is the body of God. It shines with unutterable glory and is incorruptible and holy and life-giving.” Likewise in the other direction: “When we read he “grew in wisdom and knowledge and grace’ this must be predicated of (the incarnate Son)… and so also hunger and thirst. And indeed, even when we read that he petitions the Father to escape suffering, we attribute also this to the same one.”[12] According to Cyril, we confess “one nature, of God the Logos, that has been enfleshed.”[13] Cyril is directly deploying Theodore’s term, not to refer to two natures but to show that there is a singular Subject (the Logos is human). Cyril acknowledges that it may be legitimate to speak of two natures, if by this we mean Jesus is everything required to be God the Son and this particular human being. He instantiates each in who he is. There is an abstract understanding allowing for two natures, but not a concrete distinction.

Unfortunately, the Council of Ephesus (449) and then the council of Chalcedon (451), though setting forth a statement in light of Cyril’s strong claims, once again aimed at appeasing the Antiochenes. Pope Leo sent representatives to the councils, along with his Tome or letter, which would be appended to the councils’ statements, including the following crude formulation: “For each nature is agent of what is proper to it, working in fellowship with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word and the flesh what belongs to the flesh. The one shines forth in the miracles, the other submits to the injuries.”[14] In other words, each nature does its own thing and goes its own way depending on the circumstance. Leo’s representatives insured that his views were reflected in the final statement by picturing the natures as existing “in” Christ rather than allowing that Christ is abstractly “from” these two natures hypostatically united in him. For the Western church, Chalcedon was identified with Leo’s position, while the Egyptian and Syrian churches remained suspicious of Chalcedon, eventually becoming separate churches.

Those of Cyril’s followers who remained in the imperial church would interpret Chalcedon and hypostasis with a Cyrillian slant. They made hypostasis mean what they thought it should, making it the “’synthetic’ agent of the whole gospel narrative, both of what is divine in it and of what is human in it and they identified the eternal Logos as himself this hypostasis.”[15] According to John of Damascus, “Since Christ is one and his hypostasis is one, it is one and the same who wills and works divinely and humanly. . .. And since Christ is one and the same who wills according to each nature, the concrete will is one and the same… .” Thus, “He did not do human things in the human way, for he is not only man but also God. Whence it is that his sufferings are life-giving and salvific. Nor does he do divine things in the divine way. . .. Whence it is that he performed divine signs by touch and speech. .. .”[16] Also John is clear, Jesus is the Logos: “God the Logos was not united to flesh antecedently hypostasized in itself, but… came in his own hypostasis to dwell in the womb of the holy virgin, and hypostasized .. . , from the holy blood of the virgin, flesh animated by a rational soul. . . .”[17] This understanding, which identified hypostasis with Logos as the one agent of salvation, marks Neo-Chalcedonianism. The Cyrillians insure that at the Second Council of Constantinople (made up mostly of Eastern bishops in 553) this Neo-Chalcedonian understanding was made dogma, though it had little effect outside the communion surrounding Constantinople (the Western church mostly ignored Constantinople of 553).[18]

Maximus the Confessor (579-662) inherits and builds upon the Neo-Chalcedonian identity. Neo-Chalcedonians included both Cyril’s “from which he is” and the Chalcedonian “in which he is” and Maximus adds “he (simply) is”: “Christ, being according to nature from both deity and humanity, and in deity and humanity, is by nature God and man. And another factor there is not at all.”[19] The hypostasis is not a synthesis in addition to the natures, but the hypostasis is both of the natures. He is not alternatively one and then alternatively another but he is directly “from” both. Not “from” as a sequential relation (e.g., in time or before time) but simply as an abstract description made concrete in Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[20]

What God is doing in Christ is not secondary to who he is, but Jesus in his healing, peaceable, kenotic love, is God. Thus, Maximus claims that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. This is not a suffering exterior to God but God suffering in the Son – “suffering God” in Maximus phrase.[21] The early church, from Melito of Sardis (100-180) affirmed straightforwardly and paradoxically, “The Impassible suffered… .” “God was killed. . . .”![22] The Neo-Chalcedonian developments of Maximus do not ease the paradox so much as accentuate it in that “the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[23]

The near loss of this Neo-Chalcedonian insight in the West has stunted Western theology in nearly all of its phases, but most particularly it has helped foster a violent image of God and a violent atonement. While both East and West have embraced various levels of violence, it is ultimately the Neo-Chalcedonian understanding, in its identity of God with Christ, that most fully opens up the possibility of the peaceable nature of God and his Kingdom as the saving purpose of Christianity.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 22nd https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 165.

[2] Jenson, 125.

[3] Jenson, 125.

[4] Jenson, 126.

[5] Jenson, 126.

[6] Catechetical Homilies, 57, cited in Jenson, 127.

[7] Commentary on the Gospel of John, ed. & tr. into Latin, J.-M. Vospe, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Paris: Louvain, 1940), vols. 62-63. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[8] “First Sermon against “Theotokos,”” Friedrich Loofs, ed., Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle: 1905), 251-252. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[9] Jenson, 128-129.

[10] Second Letter to Nestorius, ed. Schwartz, i.i.1.25-28.6. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[11] To Theodosius, on True Faith, ed. Schwarz, i.i.1.25-28.29. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[12] First Letter to Successus, ed. Schwartz, i.i.vi.151—157.10. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[13] To the Noble Ladies, on True Faith, ed. Schwartz, i,v,62—118.10. Jenson, 129.

[14] Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum ep. Constantinopolitanum de Eutyche, cited here from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:79.3-7. Cited in Jenson, 131.

[15] Jenson, 133.

[16] John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, 59.193-196. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[17] John of Damascus, 46.24-30. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[18] Jenson, 133.

[19] Ambigua 91:121B. Cited in Jenson, 136.

[20] Jenson, 137.

[21] Ambigua, 91:1037B: “theos pathetos.” Cited in Jenson, 137.

[22] Antonius Caesar, 13.16. Cited in Jenson, 125.

[23] Jenson, 137.

Universal Salvation as Fullness of Embodiment: From Paul, Irenaeus, Origen, Maximus to Lonergan

The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning, and that His embodiment is the fullness of meaning extended universally.[1] “Universal” has a double meaning, in that it is all-inclusive not simply of all people but of everything about them, most particularly their embodied condition. In an ordinary sense, the incarnation locates meaning, not in disembodied thoughts or souls but in the flesh, which is the human connection with the world. Given the truth and implications of the incarnation, there is no disincarnate language or disembodied word as the Word, the ground of language, is enfleshed. In the incarnation Christ stands in the place of this interconnectivity completing it and infinitely extending it. Incarnation or embodiment is the shared condition, which God took up in Christ to impart final and full meaning.

Incarnation Extends Meaning Through All Creation

Being found “in Christ” (ἐν Χριστῷ) as part of his body (the church), a partaker of his body in communion, baptized into his body, and imitating and following Christ, is the means of being incorporated into the meaning he imparts. Christ’s embodiment is extended universally (to all people and all things), throughout every phase of his life, death and resurrection. The Word made flesh is meaning incarnate to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and is incarnate in the manner of his life. His teaching is manifest in the materiality of his words and his life enfleshed makes his life and teaching imitable. He embodies a new sort of human, a new human community, shared in its material and sensuous form. The incarnation is meaning shared (Logos given) as incarnation fills creation with divine life and meaning.

Resurrection Eternally Extends Incarnation

This meaning takes on its full universal scope in the resurrection, which is the inauguration of Christ’s embodiment extended to all people. The resurrection does not bring incarnation to a close but is the ongoing extension of the incarnation. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies” (Jn 11:25). Eternal life is through bodily resurrection enacted now. God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet 1:3). Christian salvation, now and future, is being joined to the death and resurrection of Christ: “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Ro 6:4). This hope of being found in Christ, through baptism, the church, the body of Christ, the eucharist, is the extension of Christ’s embodiment to all people for eternity.

The salvation of Christ begins then in the incarnation, continues through the resurrection, through which Christ’s embodiment of meaning fills creation (which is to say corporately or corporeally). There will be a final restoration [apocatastasis] of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21) . This restoration is cosmic as God’s purpose is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:9–10). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). The hypostatic union of deity and humanity in the incarnation, bodies forth or makes Christ’s incarnate body the carrier of ultimate meaning, eternally extended (in heaven and earth), which constitutes salvation.

Alienation From Embodiment is the Human Problem

If resurrection or being re-embodied, restored, recreated, describes salvation, then salvation’s opposite is to be disembodied, dead, or alienated from life in the body. To wish for disembodied bliss in the Platonic Forms, or in Hindu melding with the One, or in Buddhist denial of the body, is the opposite of Christian salvation, but so too any form of refusal of the body, any form of death wish or orientation to death. In neurosis and psychosis, the mortal body is refused, such that one pictures the body as secondary. It is not that “I am my body,” but “I have a body,” and contained within my body is the special treasure of my soul or my essential self. (My body may have a toothache, in Wittgenstein’s mockery of disembodied notions of language.) There is an alienated distance from the reality of the body, as if salvation would be deliverance from the body, rather than eternalization of the body in Christ. The opposite of baptism or being joined to the body, is alienation, schizophrenia, or sacrifice of the body as (if it is) an obstacle. Masochism and sadism are an attack on embodiment. The biological, the fleshly, the mortal, is often viewed with disgust and is refused.

As Paul describes (in Slavoj Žižek’s extended interpretation describing the lie of sin), it is as if there are two bodies at work. Rather than acceptance of the body in baptism, in communion, in the church, in which the mortal is integrated and accounted for, there is alienation and antagonism (as depicted in Romans 7). The body or flesh is not an obstacle per se, but due to sin and the refusal of the created and embodied condition, the body (which is the self) becomes an obstacle. Salvation is not the overcoming of the obstacle of the flesh or body but the overcoming of this deception.

Being Embodied in Christ is the Resolution

Christian salvation is a defeat of the refusal of the body, a refusal of being incarnate, a refusal of God’s good creation. It is necessarily universal, in that embodiment is by definition, connectedness, communal, linguistic, and a shared condition. Recreation or restoration occurs through participation in a breadth and depth of embodiment. Thus, apocatastasis is universal in multiple senses. In Romans 5 all that are in Adam and all that are connected to him share in the world of which he is a part: the Garden which he tills, the children he bears, the wife that completes him, the earth which feeds him, and the cosmic order which provides him dimension and context. In Paul’s description all are found in Adam, and this all extends to the cosmos, which is in travail. Adam is not simply one separate body, but a body of connections, the head of a race, and the keeper of God’s good earth, co-creator with God in naming its creatures, and organizing their place. Adamah is not just from the earth, but constitutive of its purpose and goal.

To save Adam is to save all that he includes. Thus, the second Adam is by definition necessarily universal in his assumption of all that Adam is, which includes his body, his race, and the human world he constitutes. Death spread to all through Adam, and this is reversed in Christ. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). Salvation is corporate, corporeal, and cosmic in scope, exposing the lie behind alienation, isolation, absolute individualism, and disembodiment. Our tendency in sin may be toward the disincarnate, but in Christ we become fully incarnate in embrace of embodied reality.

Embodiment in Christ as Salvation is the Church’s Teaching

When Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom” (I Cor. 15:50), he does not mean that flesh and blood will be gotten rid of in the Kingdom, but will be transformed by the Spirit. As Irenaeus puts it: “Unless the flesh were to be saved, the Word would not have taken upon Him flesh of the same substance as ours: from this it would follow that neither should we have been reconciled by Him.”[2] Christ has reconciled us in the flesh by his flesh, not by getting rid of the flesh but adding to it the life of the Spirit, by means of which the flesh bears spiritual meaning. The hypostatic union is a fusion of God with humanity, and all this entails.

Origen describes an integrating of soul and body in Christ in a spiritual union with God, which does not separate but which eternally binds the human body, soul and divine Spirit: “For the Word of God is thought to be more in one flesh with the soul than a man with his wife. And, moreover, to whom is it more fitting to be one spirit with God than to this soul, which has so joined itself to God through love that it may deservedly be said to be one spirit with him.”[3]

The culmination of this understanding is found in Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 13 August 662), who maintains God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself through incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[4] The extension of ultimate meaning to the world through Christ is in and through shared embodiment, aimed to envelope all creation. In Bernard Lonergan’s rediscovery of this understanding, “the embodiment of Christ in the hypostatic union, with all that this embodiment entails in terms of Christ’s life and ministry and sufferings, makes Christ’s body a symbolic and incarnate carrier of meaning” extended to all creation.[5]

[1] See Bernard Lonergan, The World Mediated by Meaning, unpublished talk given at MIT, 1970. Bernard Lonergan Archive https://bernardlonergan.com/archive/23430dte070/ This talk is typical of the direction taken by Lonergan which inspired this blog.

[2] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, the title of book 5 chapter 14.

[3] Origen, On First Principles, Vol. 1, Edited and translated by John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 2.6.3.

[4] 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 7.22.

[5] Matthew Hale, Knowledge, Virtue, and Meaning: A Lonerganian Interpretation of Maximus the Confessor on the Embodiment of the Word in the Christian (Catholic University of America, Dissertation, 2022) 183. As Hale points out, this understanding is definitive of the thought of Bernard Lonergan.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.