Paul Blowers – Forging Ploughshares

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.

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

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

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

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

Creation Ex Deo

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

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

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

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

Jesus Christ as Mediating Divinity to Humanity

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

Salvation as the Means of Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Blowers, 176.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[10] Blowers, 174.

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

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

[13] Ibid.

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

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

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

[17] Ibid.

[18] Blowers, 181.

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

[20] Blowers, 182.

Christ as Analogy Versus the Lie of the Anti-Christ: Maximus as an Answer to the Challenge of Barth

Though it may be an odd juxtaposition to pit Maximus the Confessor against a much later theological development, it might be argued that Maximus’ notion of transfiguration into the image of Christ (in which he deploys terms like analogy) grounds theology differently than the analogy of being or the univocity of being. Whether or how the analogia entis, as Barth would have it, is the anti-Christ, there is no question that theology, the church, and Christianity attached itself to the worst forms of evil; a failure most ingloriously manifest in the Holocaust but continuing in a variety of forms. The argument is not so much whether theology experienced its own form of the fall, but the question is about the details. Does the fault lie with Constantinianism, Augustinianism, or Onto-Theology? Is it primarily the fault of Rene Descartes, or as Radical Orthodoxy would have it, is it Duns Scotus that ruined everything? The story that one might tell to illustrate where the fault lies is highly contested, but nominalism and voluntarism and the subsequent rise of secularism and atheism describe the reduction of God (to a part of the furniture of the universe) and then his eventual banishment. This result is beyond question, but the issue is whether there is a unified story that explains this disaster and what would constitute its alternative?

In the description of Conor Cunningham, the story can be told through the singular idiom of “meontotheology” (his neologism) in which absolutely nothing serves in place of the divine absolute. “Nihilism is the logic of nothing as something, which claims that Nothing Is.”[1] Cunningham is not so much arguing with the grain of the thinkers he is detailing, but is demonstrating that their key idea or point of mediation often reduces to nothing. He begins his story with Plotinus and Avicenna, fore-echoing Descartes: “Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) was directly influenced by Plotinus. He took from the Neoplatonists the idea that being was equivalent to the intelligible (in this sense creating was thinking) . . .”[2] Being then, is a possibility or logical contingency of thought. Scotus extends this understanding such that Cunningham concludes: “there is but one being, which in its unity is formally distinct from itself (namely God), such that univocity of being again for this reason ‘is not’ being; already as one being it departs from pure existence. This is the meontotheology of nihilism’s logic: nothing as something.”[3] The real univocity concerns not being per se, but nonbeing.

It was not that Scotus’ was arguing toward this conclusion, but as Cunningham makes the case, his system permits the conclusion that what the finite and infinite share is nothing (as an essence). That is “there is a latent univocity of non-being” in God and creation and this is all they share. Scotus would completely separate God and creatures such that “God and creature share in no reality.”[4] Yet, “Every created essence [is] nothing other than its dependence with regard to God.”[5] The substance of this dependence is in a contingency or possibility which reduces to nothing in itself: “Hence God and creatures do share in a certain ‘non-reality’, whose nullity is nonetheless fundamental.”[6] Cunningham demonstrates the same logic at work, in various forms, in Plotinus, Avicenna, Ghent, Scotus, Ockham, Henry of Ghent, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Paul Celan, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, and Žižek. In each of them there is a mediating term or idea that reduces to a reified nothing.

While this may initially appear to be a fantastic claim, I would suggest that what Cunningham has hit upon is more extensive and compelling than he realizes. My work has added a footnote to his understanding, taking it out of the realm of philosophy or theology alone, and describing it in terms of psychology, desire, and even a necessary part of a failed human identity. The philosophical and theological fold into the psychological as they reify the symbolic order. That is, language per se is made substantial and points only to itself, and this is not simply a philosophical dilemma, this is the human dilemma. The truth illustrated by Descartes is that thinking strives toward being. “I think therefore I am” translates into “I would be through my thought.” Nominalism and voluntarism – a separation between God and his word – leaves us with something other than the divine Word and brings us to the Cartesian moment. The word (the symbolic, language, law, thought, propositions, philosophy, etc.) serves in place of the Word (Jesus Christ).

In other words, the problem of theology and philosophy is not a problem apart from what the Bible describes as the universal problem: reliance on the law (trust in the symbolic, trust in Judaism, trust in culture, etc.) displaces a direct reliance, trust and participation in the reality of God given in Christ. By the same token, univocity, analogy, being, propositionalism, onto-theology, inasmuch as they foster a mediating principle which functions to displace the first-order reality of Jesus Christ are then, the anti-Christ.

This will, as John describes, show itself in obvious ways in a series of lying possibilities. There is a lying spirit, there are lying prophets, and there is the big lie of the anti-Christ (I John 4:1-3). The lie which would separate the humanity and deity of Christ is connected to every form of lying and liars, but the primary thing John notes about these liars and their lie is, “They are from the world; therefore they speak as from the world, and the world listens to them” (I Jn. 4:5). Either the world or Christ, in John’s estimate, serves as foundation and ground. This difference marks the lie over and against the truth and shows up in one’s ethical orientation. The truth is connected to love, while the “spirit of error” not only separates the deity and humanity of Christ, but it separates ethics and theological understanding. Theoretically it is possible to hate the visible neighbor and love the invisible God, but this too is a sign of the lie (I Jn. 4:20). Living in God or living through God, is the way John characterizes the truth as it shows itself in love (I Jn. 4:16).

The danger is we might read John analogously, metaphorically, or hyperbolically, (according to the world?), and miss that he is speaking literally. There is no padding, no mediating term, no emanation, in John’s life lived in God. Instead, there is direct identity between the life of God given in Christ and the life of the believer. Jesus is God come in the flesh, and this includes the flesh of his body the church, and only thus is he life and love and truth, and there is no possibility of stating this according the world.

The theologian who has best captured and built upon this literalism of identity, may be Maximus the Confessor. Far from fitting Christ to the frame of the world, Maximus presumes the incarnation of Christ – God come in the flesh – is the truth of the world. Maximus succeeds in holding together doctrine, hermeneutics, and ethics in the singular concept that just as Christ bodies forth God in the world, the world (as his creation, as what he holds together) is subsequent to and taken up in the incarnation. Paul Blowers rehearses many of the themes worked out in my recent blogs (the equation of Christology and cosmology, the incarnation as preceding both Scripture and the world and serving as their logic, etc.) but Blowers specifically pits Maximian theology against analogy: “the Confessor’s primary analogy to convey the condescension of the Word into the logoi of creatures (and of Scripture, and of the virtues) is the incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. In reality this is not an ‘analogy’ at all since it is precisely the Logos ‘destined…before the foundation of the world’ to become the incarnate and sacrificial Lamb (1 Peter 1:19-20) who originally contained the logoi and willingly communicated his presence to creatures through them.”[7] As Jordan Wood summarizes the point: “This remarkable observation—that the ‘analogy’ between historical and cosmic Incarnation is no mere analogy—commits Blowers to the thesis that for Maximus the Word’s condescension in the logoi of creation, in Jesus, in Scripture, and in the deified are ‘eschatologically simultaneous’.” He concludes, “And so the truly astounding insight, one Blowers seems to intimate, is that Maximus rethinks not just how God is present in Jesus in order to distinguish this presence from God’s presence in the cosmos, but that he then reintroduces this mode of presence as the potential mode the Word might be present in the cosmos itself.”[8]

The term analogy may still apply, but it has taken on a direct identity with the divine. As Wood puts it, “Here ‘analogy’ takes on altogether jarring and different senses than we’re used to encountering in much modern theology. Here it implies a symmetry between God and the world grounded in hypostatic identity (like Christ’s natures).”[9] Maximus employs “analogy” in this sense, that saved humanity is analogous to the union found in Christ. It is not an analogy of being, but the analogy of Christ. In the same way that Jesus Christ is constituted a particular individual (the divine in the human), so all humans become who they are, as John describes it, only through participation and union with the divine life. “For each of those who has believed in Christ according to his own power, and according to the state and quality of virtue existing within him, is crucified and crucifies Christ together with himself, that is, he is spiritually crucified together with Christ. For each person brings about his own crucifixion according to the mode of virtue that is appropriate to him . . .” (Amb. 47.2). Humans are both created and infinite, not because these categories reside naturally together in body and soul, but because Christ, in his hypostatic union stands at the head of a completed humanity in which flesh and Spirit inhere. However, in each individual this life will manifest uniquely but “analogously” to Christ.

Maximus illustrates the point with Melchizedek who, “so transcendentally, secretly, silently and, to put it briefly, in a manner beyond knowledge, following the total negation of all beings from thought, he entered into God Himself, and was wholly transformed, receiving all the qualities of God, which we may take as the meaning of being likened to the Son of God he remains a priest forever” (Amb. 10.45).[10] What is true of Melchizedek is true, first of all in Christ: “For alone, and in a way without any parallel whatsoever, our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, is by nature and in truth without father, mother, or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life” (Amb. 10.46). Maximus goes through each of the points set forth in Hebrews: he is without genealogy, as both of his births are inaccessible and incomprehensible. He has no beginning or end of days because he is absolutely infinite – “He is God by nature. “He remains a priest forever, for His being is immune to death by vice or nature, for He is God and the source of all natural and virtuous life” (Amb. 10.46). What is true of Christ and Melchizedek can be extended to all: “And you must not think that no one else can have a share in this grace simply because Scripture speaks of it solely with respect to the great Melchizedek, for in all human beings God has placed the same power that leads naturally to salvation, so that anyone who wishes is able to lay claim to divine grace . . .” (Amb. 10.46). What is true of Christ is true of every believer:

He who loses his own life for my sake, will find it— that is, whoever casts aside this present life and its desires for the sake of the better life—will acquire the living and active, and absolutely unique Word of God, who through virtue and knowledge penetrates to the division between soul and spirit, so that absolutely no part of his existence will remain without a share in His presence, and thus he becomes without beginning or end, no longer bearing within himself the movement of life subject to time, which has a beginning and an end, and which is agitated by many passions, but possesses only the divine and eternal life of the Word dwelling within him, which is in no way bounded by death. (Amb. 10.48).

There is an analogy with Christ, but there is no natural analogy between creature and creator, or between God and being. The creator is absolutely separate, unknowable, and beyond human comprehension. There is no univocity or analogy between God and creation. “God . . . is absolutely and infinitely beyond all beings, including those that contain others and those that are themselves contained, and He is beyond their nature, apart from which they could not exist . . .” (Amb. 10.57). It is Christ alone who has brought together Creator and creation, flesh and Spirit, divine and human in who he is, but he has accomplished this salvation for all who would believe. “For there is nothing more unified than He, who is truly one, and apart from Him there is nothing more completely unifying or preserving of what is properly His own” (Amb. 4.8).

In the words of Ephesians, “He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity” (Eph 2:14–16). There is a law, a symbolic order, a human word which would pursue being, unity, and analogy through a unified nothingness, and it is precisely from this word which the Word of Christ delivers. Christ alone is “all in all” (Col. 3:11) The theological tragedy is not a separate problem from the human tragedy, of trying to accomplish on the basis of the world what can and has been accomplished in Jesus Christ.

[1] Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002), as summarized on the back cover.

[2] Cunningham, 9.

[3] Cunningham, 31.

[4] Duns Scotus, Quodlibetal Questions, V. Quoted in Cunningham, 31.

[5] Scotus, Opus Oxoniense II, d. 17, q. 2, n. 5. Quoted in Cunningham 31.

[6] Cunningham, 31.

[7] Paul M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety, (Oxford: OUP, 2012) 166. Quoted in Jordan Daniel Wood, That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” (Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy, Boston College, 2018) 94.

[8] Wood, 95.

[9] Wood, 30.

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