“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.

Personalism Rather than Foundationalism

Beginning with the Person of Jesus Christ as ultimate reality, the center of understanding of ourselves, the world and God, means that this particular Person, in whom reside both the divine and human, is our logic and point of departure. Though we might infinitely multiply the seeming alternatives to Christ, these alternatives boil down to one. The symbolic order, the world as we have it, natural law (or simply law), rationalism, human nature (or just nature), foundationalism, karma, being, etc., consist of the same impersonal, flat, closed system. Principles and theories replace the Person. Or in philosophical terms, the Unmoved Mover replaces Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Or in more prosaic terms, in the church, grand buildings, elaborate hierarchy, ornate symbolism, (which may not be inherently problematic) tend to replace Person and personhood as primary.

What is left out of these systems or the system, is the God/man, personhood, absolute hospitality, unconditional forgiveness, unconditional love, or simply the primacy of relationship. Christ is not a first principle, a law, or a doctrine, but a Person. We do not know this Person primarily through propositions, doctrines, or theories, but in relationship. He is relational by definition, as is God the Father and the Holy Spirit. These three Persons are who and what they are in relationship. The Person, Christ, is not a type or genus or species, reducible to an already existing form, but Person is the shape and form of reality. All things hold together in him, both in heaven and earth, meaning that the incarnate Christ precedes creation. He is divine and the very definition of Creator and creation. If we do not begin with the incarnation, God made human, the danger is that we lose both God and humanity.

Beginning with being or creation subjects God to what is. Likewise, in Christology, to begin with the preincarnate Christ rather than the incarnation, the Logos is a cipher which can and has been filled in by philosophy and human speculation. God, as an abstraction, is inevitably bound up with conceptions of being. For example, there is the positing of the economic and immanent Trinity, in which we can only know of the economy and not the reality of God. The distinction between God, in God’s self and God for us, through abstraction and intellectual speculation, has effectively meant the loss of God. To affirm with Karl Rahner, that “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity,” the abstraction and speculation must be displaced by the incarnation as starting point. Who God is for Himself, He is for us.

In turn, where the image of the incarnate Christ is set aside, the human image or the human mind is made its own mirror. Rather than the historical other of Christ, interior reflexivity is presumed (explicitly or implicitly) to contain and capture the divine. It is presumed this image presents a ready coherence or access to God by virtue of human self-consciousness. Rather than God made accessible through the Person of Christ, God is equated with the structures and functions of the mind. The Platonic Forms, the Cartesian cogito, the Anselmian word, the self-positing I, the inner dialectic, or human self-awareness are divinized. Augustine’s psychological analogy of the Trinity, perhaps unintentionally, began the process of abstract speculation about God grounded in the human mind. The end result is that mind (“nous”) is equated with the being of God. Human nature becomes the interpretive means of grasping God, displacing the divine nature, the enhypostation, of Christ. There is no fully human one apart from being joined to God in Christ. Humanity is made for deity, and this is the order established in Christ.

As the council of Chalcedon defined it:

One and the same (Person) Christ only begotten Son […] acknowledged in two natures, without mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance not divided or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son only begotten God Word, Lord Jesus Christ.[1]

The bringing together of two natures (the human and divine) in one Person, is the very essence and end of human personhood. Human nature, in this understanding, is not a given which Christ assumed, rather he is the exemplary human. Certainly, human nature has parameters and necessities, but in Christ we recognize this finitude and delimitation is not definitive of what it means to be a person. Personhood, in its fulness is in and through his Personhood. Participation in the divine is not innate to human nature, but it is that for which human nature was made, as realized in Christ.

Christ as the “new Adam” does not simply restore the nature of the first Adam, but recreates or brings human nature to its proper end, with participation in the Trinitarian relationship. While nature may be plottable and definable, this Christic notion of personhood is beyond nature in its indefinable eternal depths. As Romans 8 describes, those in Christ take on a Divine consciousness, as in the Son, and by the Spirit we are brought into an Abba relation with the Father. The relation with the world, human nature, law, the symbolic order, are no longer definitive. God Consciousness (knowing Christ) is distinct, (for example, from knowing the Unmoved Mover). This is a holistic, subjective, personal, and relational knowing.

Knowing may be the wrong word, as this is trusting, believing and having faith. While we may commonly speak of knowing a person, there is a sense in which this is an endless process. We can know scientific facts. We can know mathematical trues, but “knowing” persons is no longer an objective but a relational order. The depths of this experience are more like trusting, relating, loving, believing. This may be inclusive of knowing, of propositions, of natural trues, but this relationship passes beyond full comprehension and is an ever-unfolding dynamic process.

This Personal constitution of reality brings a depth to all of nature, including human nature, such that psychology and physiology only begin to touch on this mystery. A person is more than their constituent parts and this form of reality is only apprehended relationally rather than rationally, psychologically, or propositionally. Thus belief, devotion, meditation, community, communion and prayer, are the proper modes for entering fully into this relationship.

This entails a continual openness to an ever-unfolding reality in which final apprehension is an impossibility. There is no end to knowing persons, and a reality that is Personal, has eternal depths for ever-renewed understanding. There is not a final knowledge allowing for a definitive set of propositions. If nature were the final “given” of reality we might expect a closed and rationalistic approach to be sufficient (foundationalism), but nature fused with Divinity, as in the Second Person of the Trinity, opens up a new order of understanding. Reality has no limit, no bottom, as it is an ever-unfolding Personal mystery to be explored and approached in a relational (Personal) rather than a foundational understanding.   


[1] Colin Patterson, Chalcedonian Personalism: Rethinking the Human (Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd, 2016), n. 148.