“The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Maximus, Ambigua, 7.22). As Maximus explains: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings” (QThal. 60.3).[1]
Maximus’ formula not only provides the interpretive key to creation and “everything that exists,” but it establishes the concrete mode in which interpretation occurs. The danger in describing Maximus’ Christo-logic, is to turn it into an abstraction or principle, when he is referring throughout to the person of Christ. There is the constant danger, Maximus warns against, of mistaking words for the Word. The letter, the principle, the abstraction, the form, the theory, threaten to displace the Person. On the other hand, the material, the “substance,” the elemental, threaten from the other direction, when these too are departures (abstractions of a different order). All things hold together, whether symbolic or material, in His Person.
In short, every event, every point of creation, every true idea, contains and is contained in the incarnate Christ. He is a flesh and blood person, but even flesh and blood and person are comprehended in Him. According to Maximus, He is not simply another instance of a person or individual, but personhood and individual are comprehended in Him. Creation is incarnation means that all things are framed and comprehended in the Christ-event.
One way of approaching the difference this makes, is in regard to the Eucharist. The arguments surrounding communion betray the fallacy of reducing the Christ-event to an abstraction. Here is the point at which incarnation takes hold in creation, and yet the discussion focuses on the nature of the elements and the point of transformation. Arguments about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or pure symbolism, miss the Christ-event, confusing it with the material elements. All flesh and blood, all bread and wine, every human body, begins and ends with incarnation. Incarnation is not the transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood, rather here is creation as Incarnation (the Christ-Event). Flesh and blood do not constitute the person, rather Christ constitutes the flesh and blood. The Lord’s Supper is the enactment of the body of Christ – or the person of Christ within believers. Literal reduction or symbolic abstraction of blood and flesh reifies the sign and misses the person of Christ and the purpose of the meal.
The point is to destroy what would reduce and abstract (that which killed him, which was the attempted destruction of the person and a reduction to flesh and blood). The material elements do not constitute personhood, but the Christ-event incorporates these elements into Incarnation and personhood. Christ’s personhood is the condition of creation, and incorporation into this condition is not an abstraction, reduction or symbolization, but is the reality enacted, shared, and celebrated in the love feast of the body of Christ. Transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and Zwinglian symbolism miss the person for the sign, falling short of the person in the material form and missing the Person in pure abstraction.
The Lord’s Supper is the center of the founding of a new community, a new economics, a new ethics of sacrificial love. It is the mystery of the Incarnation actualized. “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.” Creation in Incarnation, enacted in incorporation into the person of Christ. This is the significance of the Lord’s Supper.
[1] On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios abbreviated as QThal.