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Four Hundred Chapters on Love

St Maximus the Confessor, tr. Sherwood, 1955

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What then was the Confessor’s concept and view of Christianity for which his whole life and death had been but a constant witness? We can say with perfect truth that it was the same as ours. He himself told his examiners at the Process: ‘I have no private teaching, but the common doctrine of the Catholic Church.’¹ Yet such an answer would completely evade the question that has but now been asked. What is wanted is to know the concrete contour and form which this common doctrine took in the teaching of St. Maximus. Here we must say at once that his whole system is ascetical and mystical;² yet it is equally necessary to explain the import of these terms as applied to our author. For in fact these terms apply not so much to the content of his writings as to the point of view from which they are written. Revelation, Scripture, the Fathers, philosophy, and other human knowledge is all laid under contribution in so far as it may serve to advance man towards his end. Neither theological nor philosophical speculation simply as a development of truth has any place in St. Maximus. He considers everything in its actual, existent state, that is, as saturated with the unique end of creation—deification.³ ‘Because of this the whole arrangement of created things exists, they abide and were brought into being from nothing.’⁴

Our sketch then of Maximus’ doctrine will fall into three divisions: on God, on man, on man’s deification. This division follows, in a way, Maximus’ own thought. God is at once the principle and end of all things, who provides the means for attaining to Himself. Therefore the concept of God commands the whole. Of equal importance is the concept of human nature and of man’s actual condition. These then provide the elements for the doctrine of salvation and deification. Man’s becoming God is considered only as the result of God’s becoming man; the mystery of Christ therefore stands at the very heart of the Maximian synthesis, is that synthesis.⁵

a. God

God’s nature. The utter simplicity of God and His goodness are the most salient characteristics of the divine essence. God is good, is goodness itself. The good, which is God, is the end of the whole life of virtue, of the practical life.⁶ Thus charity, which God is, and the good are placed in close relation; for charity is the supreme virtue of the practical life and that which deifies most of all. It is in fact because God is by nature good and passionless that He loves all men equally; it is in imitation of Him that man must practice the same even-handed charity towards all.⁷ It is here perhaps that we touch a critical point in Maximus’ relations with his masters, Evagrius and Denis. On the one hand, Evagrius allows that love for neighbor may not always be the same for all, but that at least we must be free from hate and rancor.⁸ Further, the love for neighbor can be a hindrance to the love for God.⁹ This certainly is not Maximus’ doctrine who exacts an equal love and declares that the love given to God and neighbor is one and the same.¹⁰ On the other hand, for Denis goodness, whose relation with love in Maximus we have just seen and of which apparently Evagrius does not make capital, is the name pre-eminently befitting the transcendental substance of God.¹¹ This enhancement of the goodness of God to parity with His simplicity as chiefly imitable in Him¹² has consequences which will be seen later in treating of deification.

God alone is simple; all creatures are in some way compound, either of matter and form as bodies, or of substance and accidents as non-corporeal things.¹³ God exceeds every multiplicity, every duality, every relation even if it be only that of subject and object, of thinker and thought.¹⁴ The divine transcendence and the divine uniqueness (μόνας) are alike implied in this doctrine of the divine simplicity. Certainly this is common doctrine and forms part of the teaching of Maximus’ chief masters, Gregory Nazianzen, Evagrius, and Denis the Mystic.¹⁵ But if it be a common doctrine it is also of capital importance in Maximus’ thought. It is this which hinders any confusion of creature and creator, it is in becoming simple that the vision of God is attained.¹⁶ This aspect of the divine simplicity is met with on every page of Maximus and of Evagrius for whom the state of prayer always requires the absence of concepts, the mind’s utter simplification.

The simplicity of God leads at once to a consideration of the divine transcendence, to what is customarily termed negative or apophatic theology. God and creatures can in no way be included in the same affirmation or negation. If we assert that God is, then creatures are not; if we affirm of creatures that they exist, then God does not exist. The reason is that there is absolutely no common causal ground which would justify including God and creatures in the same affirmation or negation. Our concepts, not less that of being, are totally inadequate before the transcendent reality of God. ‘For He has an existence simple, unknowable, inaccessible to all and entirely inexplicable, being beyond both affirmation and negation.’¹⁷ This last point should not be overlooked: neither affirmation nor negation are adequate in God’s regard. God infinitely exceeds any relation or category whatsoever.¹⁸ In fact our knowledge of God is at best tenuous. Our knowledge of Him attains only the fact of His existence, in no way that which He is, His substance.¹⁹ In the 15th question of the Ambigua²⁰ Maximus is most explicit on this point. He is there treating of the motions of creatures towards God, who is of course the term of all such motion. All things receive the end of their motion ‘in the infinity about God.’ And he explains the phrase: ‘the infinity about God, but not God, who indeed lies incomparably above it.’ This infinity (ἀπειρία) is not to be taken as our unique knowledge about God; it rather summarizes the things about God which we may know. These are His eternity, limitlessness, goodness, wisdom, and power that creates, provides for, and preserves beings.²¹

The distinctions or powers just indicated are those taken later from Denis the Mystic as the foundation of the Palamite theology, understood however in this special sense, that is, as ‘uncreated energies ineffably distinct from the divine nature’ which remains completely unknowable in its essence, but completely revealed in its energies.²² This doctrine presents itself as the development of the patristic tradition, especially, of course, of Denis and also of Maximus. It is worth noting therefore how Maximus designates the things knowable about God. They are θεωρήματα. ‘The Divine,’ he says, ‘is knowable in the contemplations concerning It, unknowable in the things of Its essence.’²³ The intention of this terminology is clear—it is to safeguard the distinction between Creator and creature.

We have here a problem of the relations of the finite with the infinite, of our participation in the divine nature,²⁴ a problem of mystical theology which is not solved by the block rejection of, or the failure to understand, those distinctions and tendencies in Byzantine writers which were developed later into the Palamite theology.²⁵ This problem cannot be entered into here; I would only note that the elements and phrases of Maximus’ distinctions are already to be found in Gregory of Nazianzus, whom Maximus quotes in this connection in the last chapter of the first Century on Charity.²⁶

The divine infinity occurs not only in connection with our capacity for knowing God and for union with Him, as we have just seen, but similarly in connection with our desire for Him. The similarity, however, goes no further. The satisfaction of our desire, the participation in God Himself, who is our end, is extended ad infinitum in proportion to our desire, without satiety ever being reached.²⁷ Thus, however one considers the activity of creatures, it is God’s infinity that they attain and in that infinity God, who alone sets a limit to His own infinity.²⁸

The Triune God

What we have so far said about God is common to the three Persons; we have now to speak of what is proper, that is, Unbegottenness, Begottenness, and Procession, or, more simply yet, of the mystery of three in one and one in three. Father von Balthasar gives three pages to Maximus’ doctrine on the Trinity. He there says:

In the end God remains for the Greek the ultimate unity at the top of the multiple structure of the world pyramid—since Aristotle and Philo nothing has changed in this regard. Maximus makes no exception. A thoroughly, a startlingly significant indication of this is the way the Trinity is assigned to the negative theology, while the positive is concerned only with the ‘economic’ God who governs the world with Providence and Judgment.²⁹

For the present I would note but two things. Something has changed since Aristotle and Philo, the supreme unity is no longer utterly one, but triune. This is at the very heart of Maximus’ thought and the kernel of the imitation of God. Nor is it surprising that the Trinity should be assigned to the negative theology, inasmuch as this distinction refers to our human efforts to know God, not to the divine self-revelation. Our knowledge then of the blessed Trinity is to be sought primarily in that revelation, in the Church, and in her sacramental-liturgical life. Von Balthasar therefore very justly remarks that the litanies of Trinitarian formulas³⁰ in which Maximus sometimes indulges are not dry, but full of liturgical spirit.³¹ Yet his generalization remains too broad to touch Maximus’ doctrine in the quick. This should be apparent from the following exposition and from the apposite paragraphs in the third chapter on man’s deification.

There are five headings under which we may class the passages more explicitly referring to the blessed Trinity: (1) the assertion of the fact; (2) the reference of the Trinity to the negative theology; (3) the consideration of nature and person with regard to the Trinity and Christ; (4) the relations of the persons of the Trinity to the Incarnate Dispensation; (5) traces of the Trinity.

1. Assertion of the fact. This we have just noted occurs in a long series of formulas not unlike those of the Athanasian creed. Maximus insists on the unity of the divine substance, by reason of its essence and being excluding all thought of any sort of composition, and on the Trinity of persons by reason of the mode of their existence without the least sort of confusion or alienation of one person from the other.³² The supreme mystery is unity in trinity, whose imitation in the soul is the summit of God-likeness, the similitude which perfects the image.³³

2. The reference to negative theology. It should be patent to all that the mystery of the Trinity as such is known only through Revelation.³⁴ It therefore properly falls outside the scope of positive and negative theology, which consists in the motion of the human reason towards God from creatures by means of affirmative and negative predication, neither of which is adequate for the purpose in view—a knowledge of the transcendent deity, in the mode of His existence.

Maximus affirms that positive theology gives a basis for our faith.³⁵ But with regard to the Trinity he expresses himself differently. In the first Ambiguum he considers one of Gregory’s texts in which he speaks of unity passing beyond the dyad to the triad. ‘There is here,’ he says, ‘no αἰτιολογία (explanation from causes), but the exposition of a pious opinion about the Trinity.’³⁶ The motion in the Godhead from unity to trinity is apparent only, due not to God, but to us who understand first that something is, then its mode of existence.³⁷ And he concludes: ‘The motion of the Godhead effected through manifestation (ἔκφανσις) constitutes a knowledge, for those able to receive it, about Its being and the mode of Its existence.’³⁸ The basis then of our knowledge of the Trinity is a revelation. The mystery we may not only accept, but also exercise our intelligence upon it in an effort of understanding. That Maximus himself could and did make such efforts will be evident from the following sections.

Nonetheless, to emphasize the divine transcendence, Maximus can in a subsequent Ambiguum remand the mystery of the Trinity to the negative theology. The passage in question is a direct citation of Denis: ‘And therefore the transcendent deity, celebrated at once both as Unity and as Trinity, is knowable neither as Unity nor Trinity neither to us nor to any other. . . .’³⁹ The context has nothing to do with Revelation.

3. Nature and Person in the Trinity and in Christ. The distinction of nature and person coincides with that of the common and proper. It is a two-edged weapon in the Monophysite controversies; assured as regards the divine nature and persons, it applies equally but inversely to the two natures and divine person in Christ. For the most part, however, the distinction appears in Maximus in a particular form as a distinction between the λόγος of the nature and the τρόπος—mode—of its existence.⁴⁰

As we shall see more fully later, it is not simply the nature of a thing that is immutable, but its λόγος. This λόγος φύσεως is practically what we are accustomed to term the metaphysical essence of a thing whose change in the slightest detail involves the whole in corruption. These λόγοι: do not exist in the nude, but each has its certain mode of existence (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως).148⁴¹ Whatever pertains to the λόγος of a certain nature pertains equally and inalienably to all who partake of that nature; it is the common. The mode, however, pertains to the person and always refers to the concrete reality; it is the proper. In man, because the human mode of existence is common to all as contrasted with the divine mode of human existence in Christ, Maximus will speak of the mode of use or of motion (τρόπος χρήσεως, κινήσεως),

The distinction is very sharp for Maximus, nor ever far absent from his mind. The abstract character of the λόγος φύσεως is clear. This leads to conceiving οὐσία similarly in an abstract manner as second substance, whereas in the earlier Trinitarian doctrine it had always signified a concrete reality, first substance. This shift of sense makes the defense of the divine unity more difficult.⁴²

On the other hand, the mode of existence, the modes of use and motion are always concrete realities, pertaining to the person. In the Godhead the properties which determine the three divine modes of existence are: Unbegottenness, Begottenness, Procession.⁴³

4. The relations of the persons of the Trinity to the Incarnate Dispensation. The whole Trinity co-operated in the mystery of the Incarnation, each Person being wholly in the other, yet only the Son and Word took flesh. The Father approved, the Holy Spirit co-operated, the Son effected His own Incarnation.⁴⁴ In this manner the effective causality of the Incarnation and of our salvation that flows from it is reserved to the substance of the Godhead, yet the personal activity of the divine Persons is not obscured. And in fact our salvation is often enough put in relation with the diverse Persons, as is clear in the matter of our sonship by adoption,⁴⁵ or as when life and sanctification are especially referred to the Holy Spirit as His personal prerogative.⁴⁶ This preference for noting the personal relations in regard to our salvation is cognate with the manner of conceiving the divine processions prevalent among the Byzantines.

…⁴⁷

Elsewhere the same doctrine is expressed in a context which draws together the illuminating role of the Holy Spirit and His Procession. Christ in His humanity is head of the Church, as God He possesses the Spirit whom He imparts to the Church as its head.

The Holy Spirit, then—says Maximus—as He is by nature and in substance God the Father’s, so also He is by nature and in substance the Son’s as ineffably proceeding out of the Father substantially through the Son in the latter’s being begotten—this Holy Spirit bestows on the candlestick, that is on the Church, His own operation as it were lamps.⁴⁸

The reason why Maximus inserted in this context this concise exposition of the divine processions is his effort to tie up the work of our salvation with the Persons of the Trinity, particularly with the Son and the Spirit. So is explained the co-operation of the Holy Spirit in the Incarnation.

5. Traces of the Trinity. In a passage cited by von Balthasar,⁴⁹ Maximus affirms that the Godhead has left no trace, however insignificant, for an understanding of Itself, especially how It is one and three. After what we have just said of the reference of the Trinity to negative theology, this further passage is no surprise. Again there is no question of Revelation. Hence the denial of a trace for comprehension, the disallowance of any idea of the mystery left to any creature, would wrongly be understood as a denial of any traces discoverable when the fact of Revelation is taken into consideration. Maximus’ practice is here more instructive than isolated affirmations in the spirit of the negative theology.

The thirteenth question of Thalassius asks about the famous verse of St. Paul on the invisible things of God being knowable through the visible creation; and not only that, but also His eternal power and divinity.⁵⁰ The first explanation tentatively identifies the invisible things of God with the essences of things; His power with providence that preserves all in existence; His divinity with His deifying operation.⁵¹

The second explanation tentatively identifies the invisible things of God with His eternal power and divinity. Maximus then reasons as follows:⁵²

As from creatures we believe of the really existent God that He is, so from their essential distinction into species we are taught of His essential and inborn Wisdom that it is objectively existent and conserves creatures. And again, from the essentially and specifically distinct motion of creatures we learn of His essential and inborn Life that it is objectively existent and brings creatures to their fulfilment. From a wise consideration of creation we perceive the idea concerning the Holy Trinity, I mean the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For the Word of God is eternal as consubstantial power and the Holy Spirit eternal divinity.⁵³

However imperfectly, there cannot be the slightest doubt that Maximus here indicates an adumbration of the Trinity in creation. The Scriptural question is but an occasion for him to develop his thought. The triad to be descried in creation is the cause and its properties, power and divinity, which announce, he says, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.⁵⁴

In one of the Ambigua⁵⁵ Maximus gives us an even more explicit explanation of the possibility of proceeding from creatures to some adumbration of the Trinity. This is all the more valuable as in this Difficulty he undertakes to give a summary exposition of the five ways of ‘natural consideration.’ The five considerations are: substance, motion, difference, composition (κρᾶσις), and position (θέσις). Of these the latter two refer rather to ethics; thus the first three, referring to ontology, concern us more directly. Through these three aspects in things God is known to man as maker, provident, and judge. Now Maximus has immediately to explain very clearly what he means and does not mean by provident and judge (discerner); for Origen and Evagrius had used these same terms in the context of their heretical speculations on the origin of the world. First of all, one can attain only to a knowledge of God’s existence, not at all of what He is in Himself. The motion is ontological, by which creatures are seen in their respective inalienable identities, whence we understand Him who preserves each of them inviolate according to its proper λόγος. The motion meant is that of the power and operation essentially consequent on the λόγος of each creature. By difference, the discerner is manifest who distributes wisely to every creature the natural powers that suit it.

Therefore in these ontological considerations the moral sense of providence and judgment does not enter at all, that is, providence as leading men to right action and judgment as distributing punishment. It was Origen’s error—Maximus does not say so, but clearly he knew it to be so—to use the moral sense of these terms in an ontological context, so that judgment decreed the crassness of each spirit’s body in proportion to its sin, while providence, through many worlds, would bring back all to the original spiritual state and unity.⁵⁶

So far there is no reference to the Trinity. But when the ethical considerations are joined to the ontological—position, implying firmness in virtue, to motion and providence; composition, implying virtuous life, to difference and judgment—then, declares Maximus, we may perceive the cause by the caused: that it is, that it is wise, that it is alive; by which perception one goes beyond the simple knowledge of God’s existence to perceive also its mode—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.⁵⁷

We are here in presence, in each of the examples just given, of triadic arrangements; their sources we may identify and so control the extent of Maximus’ manipulation. The triads are the Origenist-Evagrian:

maker provider discerner
δημιουργός προνοητής κριτής

and the Dionysian:

being (goodness) wisdom life (power).

Of the first the Origenist element is manifest; however a passage of Evagrius is its immediate antecedent. In the Selecta in Psalmos, 138.16, Evagrius⁵⁸ says that God is known as demiurge, wise, provident, and judge. He then assigns reasons. Notice, Maximus has reduced a fourfold division to a triad and expressly corrects the false explanations given by Evagrius for provider and judge.

Of the second triad the source may be found in Denis the Mystic. In the Divine Names, 5.2 and 3,⁵⁹ there recur repeatedly goodness, being, life, wisdom. Sometimes goodness is omitted so that a triad is already present. In fact we may also indicate Denis’ source. Proclus in Propositions 101 and 102 of his Elements of Theology⁶⁰ propounds the triad: being, life, mind. The order is fixed according to the extent of predication. This is the ground of Denis’ objection in 5.3. The dependence therefore is manifest. Denis, while changing mind to wisdom, has added a fourth term, goodness, which is his chief name for God. Maximus returns to a triadic arrangement, but places wisdom in second place as representing the Son; life is for the Spirit the life-giver.

In these two instances it is clear that Maximus not only uses his sources with discretion, but adapts them to his own thought—an express Trinitarian thought, not a mere Proclean triadism. In each case the Evagrian triad remains a thing of ‘natural consideration’ whence the spiritual man may ascend to some perception of the Trinity in Dionysian terms.⁶¹

The foregoing traces of the Trinity are drawn from the external world and can be attached to the famous verse of St. Paul to the Romans that the invisible things of God are perceived through the works of creation. But there is within us an image of the Trinity, our mind and word and spirit, which should be conformed to the archetype, to the great Mind and Word and Spirit.⁶²

Maximus is here using an image of the Trinity first occurring, so it seems, with Gregory Nazianzen and precisely as a living image.⁶³ The relation of Νοῦς to Λόγος as illustrative of Father and Son was employed by Origen in a passage that Maximus borrowed for his theological centuries.⁶⁴

But in this triad what can be the function of the spirit, coming necessarily in the third place, while St. Paul places it above the vows: if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my understanding (νοῦς) is unfruitful?⁶⁵ Gregory leaves no doubt as to the sense he attaches to this triad; he says: ‘to know the one and the same nature of the Godhead, characterized by lack of origin and birth and procession, as by our mind and word and spirit.’⁶⁶ The spirit then is the breath, the breathing out (of the word conceived by the mind) and thus falls naturally into third place in this triad. Maximus in fact enlarges on the master’s teaching as to the role of the Spirit. As the soul equally pervades the whole body giving its various members life, so God operates among men, making them members of God.⁶⁷ Such functions of spirit are among those related by Verbeke. Spirit is considered as a ‘bond of union, whether it be between soul and body, or between man and divinity.’⁶⁸

In a passage already cited from the tenth Ambiguum Maximus describes the summit of the spiritual life not only as union with the blessed Trinity but as ‘the unity understood in the Holy Trinity.’ This unity is made up of three elements: a perfect simplicity, realizing as much as may be the substantial simplicity of God; goodness, by the habitual possession of the virtues in imitation of the divine goodness; the putting off of divisive idiosyncrasies, by the grace of the unitive God.⁶⁹ One could easily indicate the relations of this triad with the single persons of the Trinity; Maximus however finds a statement of the triad sufficient.

In another place Maximus undertakes to explain these words of Gregory: ‘At the start the monad was moved to a dyad and stood fast at a triad.’⁷⁰ Clearly some explanation is needed, for God is before all immovable. The reply is wholly and consciously based on Denis. First of all, Maximus establishes that God as uncaused is completely immobile; then, that as principle and end of created things He moves them. But further, as cause of all that exists God in some way receives the predication of the things He has caused, and thereby is said to be moved.⁷¹ This is but a preliminary explanation. He continues with a free citation of Denis.⁷² God is eros and charity and at the same time object of eros and charity; as the first He is moved, as the second He moves. This being moved is for Denis the ecstasy of goodness and love by which God places being and goodness outside Himself.⁷³ But they are placed outside Himself only that they may be brought back to Himself; all of which He Himself operates. Maximus is more precise and restricts this natural overflowing of the divine goodness. The Divine, he says,

is moved inasmuch as He implants an immanent relation of eros and charity in those capable of receiving it; and moves as naturally attractive of the desire of those moved towards Him.⁷⁴

Now then as regards Gregory’s remark he explains the matter thus:

The blessed Trinity is moved in the mind, whether angelic or human that is receptive of it, in that by means of It and in It it (the mind) makes enquiries about It; and to speak more clearly, It teaches it immediately at its first movement the aspect of oneness, lest division be attributed to the first cause; but then leads the mind on to perceive the ineffable divine fecundity of this oneness, lest it should ever be forced to suppose the Good bereft of the consubstantial, objective Word and Wisdom or sanctifying Power; lest the divine be conceived as composed of these as of accidents and not be believed always to be these existent things. The Godhead therefore is said to be moved as cause of the enquiry as to the mode of its existence.⁷⁵

The overflowing of the primal goodness, the divine fecundity, is satisfied then within the Trinity Itself, in contrast to Denis’ doctrine where this fecundity is seen primarily in creation. Yet even so the term Maximus uses for the Holy Spirit (sanctifying power) implies a necessary reference to creatures. Whom else would this power sanctify?

This is a speculative explanation of the movement to Trinity; Maximus adds an historical one. The Scriptures only gradually manifest the mystery of the Trinity, beginning with the Father and going on to the Son and ending with the Holy Spirit—one substance and Godhead, one power and operation, worshipful in three Persons.⁷⁶

This question of movement to Trinity was a persistent difficulty. Maximus deals with it again in the first of the later Ambigua. The answer is quite the same, but stripped of explanations. The first that we know of God is that He is; there follows knowledge of the mode of His existence, namely in three Persons.⁷⁷ Thus for Maximus the ultimate mystery of Christianity and of mystical theology is simply ‘the unity understood in trinity.’

The Trinity is truly triad completed by no divisive number . . ., but the substantial existence of three-personed monad. For the Trinity is truly monad, because so it is; and the monad truly triad, because so it objectively exists—one Godhead that is being as monad and objectively exists as triad.⁷⁸

Whatever may be the difference of Trinitarian doctrine between Maximus and the Cappadocians, the sum and summit of their teaching is the same. Dr. Prestige condenses their teaching thus: ‘God is one object in Himself and three objects to Himself. Further than that illuminating paradox it is difficult to see that human thought can go. It secures both the unity and the trinity.’⁷⁹

To close our study of Maximus’ doctrine of the Trinity with the citation of these hard, arid formulas would give a false impression of the whole. This mystery is first of all a fact which we grasp by our participation in the life of the Church and only then conceptually explain as much and as best we may. It is to this participation in the Triune life that Maximus refers in his comment on the Our Father as recited in the Liturgy:

The all-holy and venerable invocation of the great and blessed God and Father is symbol of our adoption as sons freely to be given through the grace of the Holy Spirit, an objective and existent reality. By reason of this the saints, every human peculiarity overcome and covered over, will be called and will be sons of God—all those who already in this time through virtues adorn themselves brilliantly with the divine splendor of goodness.⁸⁰

Here is expressed the blessed Trinity and the Christian life in its present struggle and future consummation when we shall stand in the perfection of our sonship in Christ before the Father.

b. Man

Theology and anthropology are two quite distinct objects of study, yet one cannot be understood without the other. This is especially true of St. Maximus, who tends always to consider everything, especially man, in the light of the first Cause and the last End. Thus it is that after our description of Maximus’ doctrine of the one God in three Persons we have now to consider his doctrine on the constitution of the world and of man; then the concrete situation of mankind ensuant upon his creation and fall. Here will be manifest some of the enrichments of Christology and anthropology due to Maximus and the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies. The last section will then draw upon the first two in explaining Maximus’ doctrine of deification.

God and the World

Before describing the constitution of the world, it will be good to make quite plain the insuperable difference that exists between the world or any of its beings and the Creator of all. Though the distinction of negative and affirmative theology is based on this difference, it is seldom that Maximus comes to speak explicitly of the creation of the world from nothing. Yet when he does so, it is with perfect clarity and force.

God in His utter simplicity and transcendence is alone; nothing whatsoever can be conceived as eternally coexisting with Him. The very thought, that of eternal coexistents one should be the maker of the other, is absurd. No, God, who ever is, made time and eternity⁸¹ and all that is in them, bringing things into being from nothing, not imperfectly and in parts, but altogether and completely. In Him they are conserved and to Him they return, each as to its proper term.⁸²

Note that he says that things are brought into being altogether and completely. The reason for this is that God creates things according to their λόγοι: that pre-exist in Him from all eternity. Nothing in God is adventitious, nothing contrary to His intent. Things are in their substance forewilled, preconceived, foreknown, and brought to being each at its appropriate time. These λόγοι as complete in God cannot suffer any increase or diminution on their realization in the created order; therefore whatever comes into existence, whether a simple or a composite nature,⁸³ does so as a whole, neither part, in the latter case, existing before the other.⁸⁴

The dominion and pre-eminence of God is transcendent not only as regards the bringing of things into existence, but also as to their activity. When it is objected that one cannot speak of rest in connection with God inasmuch as there is no precedent motion, Maximus replies: ‘Creature and creator are not the same.’ And then:

One ought not to say of any creature that it acts with absolute independence, lest we introduce the senseless notion of an uncaused something apart from God; but, that it is naturally energized to do what as energized its nature is capable of doing.⁸⁵

The Constitution of the World and of Man

Maximus developed his doctrine of the constitution of the world and of man in conscious opposition to the heretical Origenist doctrine. This doctrine supposed that the created spirits had originally formed but one thing with God in whom they had their abode and resting place. After this primitive rest and unity the spirits were scattered diversely, occasioning the formation of the material world, in which world some of the spirits were bound to bodies in punishment for former sins. Such is the myth as it was current in Maximus’ own time. He presents it at the outset of the 7th Difficulty as a Hellenization of a passage of Gregory of Nazianzus.⁸⁶

This myth acquired a summary expression in the triad: becoming, fixity, motion (γένεσις, στάσις, κίνησις). Maximus did not object to the terms of the triad, but to their order. The uniquely possible order is becoming, motion, fixity. In the Origenist view motion followed fixity, resulting from a certain satiety with the good; thus not only sin, but the visible world was explained. Yet motion so understood is properly inconceivable because interminable. Motion can only be understood in relation to an end. For motion is a ‘natural power tending to its proper end. And this motion is either a passion, that is, a change from one state to another, the end being the impassible, or effective operation, whose end is the perfect-in-itself (to αὐτοτελές).᾽194’⁸⁷ The impassible, the perfect-in-itself are none other than God Himself. Thus God Himself is the end of all creaturely motion; in Him is the perfection of creatures; in Him they find their fixity through the activity of their natural powers.⁸⁸

It is at once obvious that the Maximian triad—becoming, motion, fixity—in no way reduces the extent of the Origenist, that largeness of cosmic view. The Maximian goes from creation to the final consummation; it provides the framework for the whole of his anthropology. It will be useful then to consider more closely two points concerning this triad: how is the result of this becoming to be conceived; and, what is the type of motion proper to the rational creature?

The resultant of becoming is, of course, the creature. Though, very emphatically, God alone is immovable,⁸⁹ yet Maximus can qualify the creature’s becoming also as immovable.⁹⁰ In what sense? It is here that one must put in relation with the triad of becoming this other: substance, power, operation (οὐσία, δύναμις, ἐνέργειο).⁹¹ For in the passage just now referred to it is implied that motion is the power of becoming since fixity is the end of the dynamic operation. It would, indeed, be over-simple, too mechanical, merely to superimpose one triad upon the other. The thought seems rather to emphasize that the term of the becoming is οὐσία (together with its natural power and operation), an οὐσία which, as produced according to its divinely foreknown λόγος, is utterly immutable. Thus it is that Maximus can say that God alone is immobile and then speak of an immobile becoming. In fact these three—οὐσία, natural power, operation—flow from one another in the order named, remaining nonetheless immanent in one another.⁹² For the privation of things that are commonly and generically predicated of a substance make it cease to be what it is by nature, would alter its λόγος.⁹³

The subject then of motion as a substance, a nature essentially immutable, and the motion itself, essentially teleological not in relation to a created end⁹⁴ but to God Himself in His unattainable majesty and mystery, make up the chief elements of Maximus’ theory or rather philosophy of motion, by which he rejects the Origenist errors and retains the characteristically Alexandrine and Neoplatonist tendency to, and drive toward, God.

This motion has its ultimate base in the very nature of man, in his natural desire for the enjoyment of God. Of this more will be said when we consider the concrete situation of man ensuant on the Fall. This motion, however, inasmuch as it is not merely an impulse and drive of nature but a rational act and activity, is properly a human, a gnomic act directed to man’s well-being with regard to the end. This motion then is of the same sort as man’s nature, free and intellectual; if, however, intellectual, then with love for the object of understanding; but if this be loved, then the subject is outside itself (ἔκστασις) until it attains and is wholly informed by the object of its love and is conformed as an image or seal to its archetype. In fact this is no destruction of the free will, Maximus is careful to remark, but rather its solid, unalterable affirmation, that is, its ‘gnomic emigration’ (ἐκχώρησις γνωμική).⁹⁵ We seem without any doubt to be moving here in a Dionysian atmosphere, the ecstasis of the soul toward the good and the lovable. Yet it is interesting to note that the term of this motion is expressed by an Evagrian phrase: ‘when the ultimate desirable appears and is participated.’⁹⁶

If here it is only the term that is Evagrian, we have in the 10th Difficulty a long description of the three motions of the soul which introduce us into the eminently Evagrian ‘natural considerations.’ Once more the disposition is triadic; the general motions are those of mind, reason, and sense. The whole is presented as being carried out under the influence of grace. The motion of the mind is simple, ineffable, receiving no knowledge of God whatsoever from creatures and, no longer operating in its connatural fashion, effects a commingling with God through the Spirit.⁹⁷ The motion of reason is natural, causal, scientific, penetrating to the reasons (the λόγοι!) of things, which, united, it refers to the mind.⁹⁸ The motion of sense is composite, drawing from sensible and visible things, ennobled by reason, and represents to reason the λόγοι of these things.⁹⁸ In a word, for the spiritual man neither sense nor reason operates on its own account but only as contributing to and under the influence of the higher power. The mind, on the other hand, employs sense and reason, but also operates absolutely. This operation is the summit of prayer.

The term then of becoming is substance which has its powers and operations—of the mind, of the reason, of sense. These are moved and move towards the end, which is God. Maximus is not at all interested in the specific and proper objects of these powers, but only how they may all be made to subserve the attainment of God.

Such in its main lines is Maximus’ correction of Origen’s triad and his refutation of the Origenist myth. There is however implied in this myth another error which Maximus combatted at even greater length—the preexistence of souls. Such a doctrine, of course, serves no purpose once the phantasy of a primitive fixity of spiritual beings is rejected and refuted. Yet it is perhaps with more vehemence, certainly with greater frequency, that Maximus opposes this supposition.

Such an error was the more easily admitted in that Christian writers before Maximus’ time had on the whole tended to follow the Platonic doctrine of the soul as a complete substance. This they did with the best and quite necessary intention of defending the soul’s immortality and incorruptibility. In fact Maximus’ more recent predecessor, Leontius of Byzantium, expressly affirms that the parts of man, body and soul, are perfect (in the sense of: not incomplete) and that this must be maintained if the incorporeality and immortality of the soul is to be saved.⁹⁹

The Composite Nature of Man

Maximus classes man with composite natures. Now composite natures are characterized first by the fact that the parts have nothing whatsoever to do with their being joined (this in contradistinction to the synthetic person of Christ); secondly, that the parts are joined simultaneously; thirdly, that a complete whole is formed, which in its turn is conducive to the splendor of the universe.

The first point is forcibly expressed in a letter to John the Chamberlain:

The soul, without use of will, holds the body fast and is held by it; without choice it gives it life by the very fact of being in it; and by nature receives motions of pain and grief on account of its innate susceptibility for them.¹⁰⁰ The thing that binds the parts together is no special power inherent in either of them, but rather the creative act by which they were brought into being.¹⁰¹ This implies that composite natures are brought into being according to their respective λόγοι pre-existent in God. The ultimate reason therefore of the simultaneity of parts in composite natures and these natures’ character as a complete whole is the pre-existent λόγοι of each several nature.

The necessary simultaneity of parts in composite natures is rather a negative fact, preventing the affirmation either of the pre-existence of the soul or its post-existence¹⁰² with regard to the body; it says nothing however of the relation in which these two parts of the whole stand with regard to one another. In fact for Maximus the parts are not merely simultaneous in their coming to be, but at that moment enter into an essential relation with one another so that a complete species is formed. Now here the fundamental point, which Maximus does not attempt to prove but simply accepts, is that man forms a complete species; so much so that even death does not dissolve it.¹⁰³ The reason why the body and soul cannot be admitted to be complete substances is that on being joined one or the other would have to give over its proper identity, as body or soul, in order that the composite might truly become a complete species.¹⁰⁴

Here then we finally have a doctrine on the structure of the human being which assures either part of the composite a sure place. It is true that Maximus does not always seem to have kept this position in mind, at least not always to have been aware of its implications. Thus he is able to follow Leontius of Byzantium in comparing the union of the two natures in Christ to the union of the body and soul in the human hypostasis.¹⁰⁵

Maximus therefore marks a signal advance in Christian metaphysical anthropology. He has really explained the essential unity of the human composite, without however recurring to the Aristotelian hylomorphic definition, which in the then common estimation was still too deeply stained with materialism for Christian use. And if he has made an advance, it is only in part that this is due to his philosophical acumen, that is, for the technical expression and defense of his doctrine. The doctrine itself and the firmness with which he held to it comes from his concentration on the mystery of Christ. The Son of God from the first instant of His being conceived in the womb of the Virgin was perfect man; therefore all the elements of a perfect man were there at the moment of conception, nothing existing beforehand nor being added afterwards.¹⁰⁶

Von Balthasar’s statements therefore in his Cosmic Liturgy need to be read with some added precision. He there¹⁰⁷ writes:

The ineradicable distrust of an independent, objective nature, composite of body and soul, anterior to all grace, the distrust of the radical analogy of being, was necessarily a constant temptation to the Fathers, in the wake of Origen, to look for the truth of the creature in its immanence with God, . . . and on the other hand to put its actual reality in connection, either overtly or covertly, with the Fall.

This it seems is that intuition (Weltgefühl) which, according to von Balthasar, Maximus and with him the Byzantine middle ages have taken over almost intact from the Origenist myth. Now I would note that there are in this sentence of von Balthasar three questions which must be carefully distinguished: the question of the metaphysical structure of man; the question of his concrete, historical condition; the question of his finality. We have just seen Maximus’ doctrine of the λόγος of man; we shall have to explain shortly his doctrine of the natural desire for God, which was diverted in the very first movement of the first man to sensible things—this is the explanation of the historical condition; the unique end of man is God, the enjoyment of God as He is. Maximus does not confuse these questions, but precisely corrects Origen by developing his theory of γένεσις, κίνησις, στάσις, in which the λόγος of man and nature’s concrete, historical tendency to the end have their due place. It would seem therefore that it is legitimate, even necessary, to seek the truth of man (it is von Balthasar who underlines in the original text) in his supernatural finality and to understand his actual condition in relation to the Fall, provided only—and this is of utmost importance—that this end and this condition are not metaphysicized.¹⁰⁸

In refuting the doctrine of pre-existence of souls Maximus succeeded in establishing a far saner metaphysical doctrine of the unity of the human composite; in connection with the Origenist doctrine of experience of evil as necessary to liberty Maximus again develops a clearer doctrine of freedom, which it will now be enough to indicate.

Correlative to Origen’s hypothesis of the pre-existence of souls is that of reaching the good through experience of evil or that freedom necessarily consists in the possibility of choosing good or evil.¹⁰⁹ Such an hypothesis brings with it a whole false concept of the nature not merely of human liberty but of man. Therefore its refutation to be successful must be built upon a just concept of man and his liberty. This Maximus has done not only in refuting the Origenists but in defending the perfect humanity of Christ. For Christ in His humanity was perfectly free and yet incapable of deflecting from the good. Freedom therefore cannot consist in the possibility of choice between good and evil.

Freedom

Maximus’ doctrine of freedom has its roots in motion. Bodies are by their nature immobile, in so far as they lack an internal principle of movement.¹¹⁰ Movement derives from the soul; in movement and operation the life of creatures is made manifest.¹¹¹ Now there are three kinds of life, vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual, each with its distinctive movements, that is, of nutrition, growth, and generation for the plant, of impulse for the animal, of self-determination (αὐτεξούσιος κίνησις) for the rational being. This self-determinative power is, without any question, to be identified with the will.¹¹² It forms an essential element, is the image of God which man is.¹¹³

In defining this self-determination Maximus twice cites freely the definition given by Diadochus of Photice. ‘Self-determination is a willing of the rational soul, tending without let to whatever it wants.’¹¹⁴ Elsewhere it is variously expressed. For instance: ‘legitimate dominion over the things we may do,’ ‘unhampered dominion of the use of the things subject to us,’ ‘unenslaved appetite of the things subject to us,’¹¹⁵ ‘naturally inherent self-moved and masterless power,’¹¹⁶ or again, ‘self-commanding will.’¹¹⁷ The essential then of free will seems sufficiently clear: the intrinsic self-determination of the rational creature. This self-determination, however, is not absolute but essentially relative, as image to the archetype.

God alone is perfectly immobile (ἀκίνητον) not only because as incorporeal and omnipresent there can be no question whatsoever of spatial motion, but, more fundamentally still, because He alone is absolutely free, so that He only may be called self-movement, self-power (αὐτοκίνησις, αὐτοδύναμις). Every creature in relation to God is said to be moved, not in contradistinction to God’s activity, but because in being created they received their essence from Him who is the cause sustaining the universe.¹¹⁸ If then the rational creature is essentially free, self-determinative, he is so by analogy. We are said to be and are existent, living, good, and the like, not just as God is said to be and is existent, living, good, and the like, but as effects of a cause. We are the participants, God the participated. The predication of existence, life, and the rest belongs to both not as said synonymously of identical substances, but equivocally, as it were, by a sharing in the name, while the things themselves remain infinitely distant one from the other.¹¹⁹

Self-determination pertains to the image, is relative. In what then does it fall off from the archetype? This self-determination is a movement, is therefore a movement in regard to an end. In God this self-determination is not merely self-moved (that can be said of every living creature), but self-movement, because He is Himself His end. His self-movement therefore is utterly immobile, inflexible, immutable; the creature’s self-determination, however, is mobile, flexible, mutable. Between the divine and human mode of self-determination Maximus makes a perfectly clear distinction which turns precisely upon its immutability. He says:

The will of the human element in our Savior though it was natural, yet was not merely natural as with us, no more than was the human itself, because supremely deified among us by the union; to it impeccability properly belongs. But ours is manifestly merely human and in no way impeccable, because of its deviation to this side or that. This is not to say that the nature is altered but that the movement has deviated; or, to speak more truthfully, that the nature has changed its mode. This is manifest from the fact that the nature does many things irrationally, yet its substance from its inherent rationality never passes over into something irrational.¹²⁰

Self-determination, liberty, is natural to the creature and remains whole and intact even there where there is no possibility of choice as in the Lord, all of whose acts while being perfectly free, because of the inherently natural quality of self-determination, are wholly determined, moved by the divine Person in whom the human nature exists and whose the human acts are. But where there is not this divine fixity in the good, there the created self-determination has its created mode and cannot be other than flexible, as left to itself. This flexibility then of the human will as it exists in us is due to our creaturely condition—more precisely, is due to the fact that creatures cannot be their own end, cannot be self-movement.¹²¹ The perfection then of self-determination is to imitate the divine fixity and immutability. In so imitating it the image is elevated to the likeness.¹²²

We have just seen that the self-determination which is characteristic of every intellectual creature is anterior to the mode of its existence. It may be therefore and is preserved alike in mutable, sinful man and in the unalterable, sinless and impeccable Christ. In other words, it is something primarily of the nature in question which consequently is exercised according to the conditions of the person in whom the nature attains its act and existence. In Christ the person is divine, hence the nature and will are wholly divinized, not as to their nature which remain ever human, but as to the mode of their existence. This is the mystery of Christ, for the penetration of which it will be helpful to see more precisely what is meant by the human mode of the will.

To do this we can probably do no better than follow Maximus’ use of the word γνώμη. A single-word version of it is impossible; its root, γνο-, indicates knowledge, its actual use gives a certain predominance to the will, without however excluding the sense implied in the root. A perhaps tolerable circumlocution is ‘a set or tendency of the mind.’ I shall use then in what follows the Greek word itself as alone capable of preserving the continuity that exists between its various uses.¹²³

The first occurrence of γνώμη is in the first of Maximus’ works, Ep 6 on the soul. At once there appears one fundamental distinction, concerning which Maximus never hesitates—γνώμη is not of those things that directly affect the nature and substance of things, but rather the motion consequent upon that nature. Here γνώμη receives as an explanatory alternative, διάθεσις, disposition.¹²⁴

Further in this same letter there is a discussion of mutability (τροπή) in explanation of the rise of error and sin. Mutability is characteristic not of the substance, but of the motion; hence this mutability is not to be referred to the ‘everlasting motion toward the fair or divine.’ This latter is a ‘natural operation’ and therefore never ceases. Mutability consequently is ‘weakness,’ a ‘falling away,’ a ‘motion contrary to nature.’¹²⁵

In writing of love to John the Chamberlain, all dissension between God and man is referred to the devil as to its author by guile and to γνώμη as to its seat. Similarly all inequality, for by nature men are all equal, is attributed to γνώμη.¹²⁶

In the Centuries on Charity I have noted two uses. The term occurs in the plural and is then practically synonymous with opinion (δόξα) and certainly implies diversity and disagreement.¹²⁷ Yet it may likewise bear a laudative sense.¹²⁸ By far more significant is the declaration of Char 4.90: ‘God alone is good by nature, only the imitator of God is good through conformity of will’ (γνώμη). In this sentence the whole of the spiritual life is placed in the imitation of God and the means for doing it are likewise indicated, conformity of our γνώμη with God’s.

The commentary on the Pater Noster makes only more plain the ordinarily divisive and sinful character of γνώμη¹²⁹ Yet the sense of the word is still large enough and the Christological debate still calm enough that a few paragraphs above γνώμη may be attributed to Our Lord with the sole proviso that in Him it was entirely without passion and in no way at odds with nature.¹³⁰

In the earlier Ambigua γνώμη comes up several times. Two points are especially noteworthy. First, being and eternal being are in the sole gift of God; He is simply the Beginning and the End; well-being and the motion from the Beginning to the End is His gracious gift and at the same time the result of our γνώμη¹³¹ But more than this the perfect imitation of God, that is in His fixity in the good, is to be attained only through a surpassing of γνώμη, a complete handing-over of our self-determination to God; and this is not its destruction but its perfect fulfilment according to the capacity of its nature.¹³²

The Questions for Thalassius only confirm points already noted.¹³³

In the series of definitions which form TP 14, it is said that a relational union reduces different γνῶμαι to one will.¹³⁴ This is in perfect harmony with Maximus’ use of the terms in his earlier writings; but it was written before one will had become a point of Christological dispute. When such a use of terms is transported to Christology, one might assert one will in Christ, denying that divisive γνῶμαι have any place in Him; or, when the orthodox position is maintained, one only will being denied of Christ, every effort must be made to avoid any sort of opposition of the volitive faculties.

The first indication of the effective operation of this logic is in one of the early dyothelite documents where the difference of created and uncreated, of visible and invisible in Christ are said to be due to the properties of the natures, not (and this in the line of argument is unexpected) to contrariness of γνῶμαι,¹³⁵

It was not all at once that Maximus came to deny γνώμη to Christ. In the tome to Marinus the Deacon, which I have reason to date about 642, he denies explicitly that there is any opposition in Christ, not even of γνώμη and of the things that pertain to it; for in Christ it concords with the λόγος of nature.¹³⁶

The intimate connection, however, of γνώμη with mutability, with sin, with rebellion against nature, brings about finally its denial to Christ, in whom there is no mutability, no sin, no rebellion, but only perfect concord of nature with its divinely complete exemplar and immediate motion of the human by the divine. This is stated by Maximus in an important tract shortly after 643. He does so, however, not as giving his own opinion, but that of a certain monk whose definition of will he had previously cited.¹³⁷

There remain the two great documents of Maximus’ Christological work, the Dispute with Pyrrhus and the great tome to Marinus. It is hard to decide which of them was written first. For our question it matters little as the doctrine of either is quite homogeneous with that of the other.¹³⁸

At this stage of controversy what is γνώμη It is ‘a certain willing (θέλησις) by which one adheres by habit to a good or to what is reckoned as such.’¹³⁹ Or else it is ‘an innate appetite of things subject to us, whence election comes, or the disposition for appetitive deliberation on things subject to us.’¹⁴⁰

Now γνώμη is placed in a series of acts which proceed from our rational and volitive nature through wishing, enquiring, consideration, deliberation, judgment (here γνώμη fits in), election, and impetus to use.¹⁴¹ For ‘γνώμη is related to election (προαίρεσις) as habit to act.’¹⁴² This being so, γνώμη implies in its subject ignorance of the thing sought, uncertainty as to the result of the thing chosen, an acceptance of contraries with judgment of them.¹⁴³ It is therefore the greatest blasphemy to attribute γνώμη to Christ.

When Pyrrhus had come to this admission in the course of the dispute, Maximus felt it at once necessary to mitigate the impact of the condemnation, lest denial of γνώμη to Christ be read back in all the texts of the Fathers (and his own too doubtless) where the word occurs.¹⁴⁴ In fact, according to Maximus, γνώμη or more especially its derivative γνωμικόν has quite a history, not entirely orthodox. For the union in Christ taught by Nestorius is a union of will by γνώμη, so that the unity of willing in Christ may be called—so Nestorius—a gnomic will.¹⁴⁵ It was, however, the Ecthesis and its patronizing of the one will in Christ that brought these elements into focus.¹⁴⁶

We have seen the evidence. The summary will run thus. There are in every intellectual creature two powers, rational and volitive; in man as he now is these attain their end (use) through a series of acts which, as a whole, may be termed gnomic, though γνώμη in its restricted sense is as a habit preparatory to election. Inasmuch as most of these acts imply ignorance, indecision, mutability (the correlative of sin), they are excluded from Christ, under the name of γνώμη, as incompatible with the hypostatic union. Expressed in another way, these acts are of the person or hypostasis,¹⁴⁷ not therefore directly of the nature. They have no place in the divine Person of the God-Man; but even in simple man, heaven being attained, election and the other middle acts will no longer have a place. All ignorance and uncertainty being done away, there will be only the effective appetite delighting in its goal, God, infinitely extending beyond it. All will be alike in the natural law of willing; one willing of all will be manifest;¹⁴⁸ but the mode and degree of willing will differ.¹⁴⁹

If now for a moment we return to the concept of self-determination, both it and γνώμη will be considerably clarified for us. Self-determination is something of the nature and, as such, not of the person. In Christ it received a divine corroboration and fixity, and in doing so suffered no detriment or diminution whatsoever. The reason is that the human will of Christ on the personal level is exercised by the divine Person, the Son of the Father. Man, on the other hand, preserves it essentially whole and intact, though it is merely human and operating through a human person. Immutability does not pertain to its λόγος. In the first movement of Adam it determined itself on itself, as only God can do, instead of determining itself on God and partaking of His immutability. Thus the primordial fault of man is self-love (φιλαυτία), whose commonest manifestation is an attachment to things of the world and of sense; yet without an essential impairment of that tendency towards the desire of the true end—God.

I have here deliberately anticipated on the following section, that I might have the opportunity of underlining the coherence of Maximus’ work—Christological and ascetical, late and early. Note how the full exposition of γνώμη is from the Christological works, but in fact gives the theoretical basis for the ascetical doctrines expounded earlier. Of the Christological heresies Monothelitism at least is a transposition to the hypostatic union of the explanation given for the union of the faithful in Christ. Thus the saints and angels have but one will with God, a relational union, a gnomic will. Apply this to Christ and you have Monothelitism. This shows, if no more, how intimately related were dogmatic and ascetical theology at that time, an intimacy of relation working ultimately to the advantage of both.

Man—Adam

Maximus speaks several times of the first man, of Adam. This was inevitable for one to whom all is in Christ. For Adam is the type of the Christ. What Adam brought upon man by his act, all that Christ took away by His. The antithesis is fully Pauline; it is scarcely less Maximian. The whole of the 61st question to Thalassius is devoted to a symmetrical development of this antithesis, beginning with the Fall and continuing through baptism to the attainment of the end, deification in Sonship.¹⁵⁰

Our purpose will be well served then if we follow Maximus’ own exposition, elucidating and supplementing it where necessary from similar passages of his other works.¹⁵¹

Man as he issued from the hands of God was not bound to the motions of pleasure and pain in his sense faculties, but was rather endowed with a power for ineffable spiritual enjoyment of God. This power, Maximus expressly states it, is ‘the natural desire of the mind for God.’¹⁵² This is the fundamental motion of the creature towards God, his end; and it is the mainspring of all human life.

Had Adam remained as God made him, he would never have been subject to corruption and death; nor would he have initiated the chain of carnal generation that weighs so upon mankind; but would have enjoyed the life prepared for him.¹⁵³ And with him the whole of creation would have remained in peaceful subjection.¹⁵⁴

But this was not to be. ‘On his coming to be,’¹⁵⁵ man gave himself up to sense and through sense to sense objects, so that his very first movement resulted in pleasure outside the scope of his nature,¹⁵⁶ short of the scope of his nature.¹⁵⁷ This defective operation was a complete absorption of the intellectual power in sense and in sense knowledge whence derived the fatal tendency to the passions, in a word, a bestializing of man’s rational nature.¹⁵⁸ Immediately upon this miscarriage of ‘the natural desire of the mind for God,’ that is, of his capacity for a divine pleasure, towards sense pleasure, God joined to this sense pleasure pain, so that from then on man was subject to these contrary motions.¹⁵⁹ From desire of the one and fear of the other all the passions were to spring.¹⁶⁰ The full extent of these consequences will have to be described below as the antithesis of the work of grace and charity; for the present the precise character of this first act must be further determined and some of its implications examined.

Adam the first man chose the tree of knowledge rather than the tree of life. His first act, done with knowledge of the divine command, makes of him a disobedient transgressor of the divine law. Of this there can be no question. Maximus explains his various interpretations of the ‘tree of disobedience’ in his prologue to Thalassius with the remark that ignorance of God, the first effect of this disobedience, resulted in a divinization of the creature, a self-love, a self-worship.¹⁶¹

From the exposition of self-determination already given,¹⁶² it should be self-evident that this first act of Adam, involving his whole self and the whole of human kind after him, cannot be other than a full exercise of this most divine of intellectual faculties—an exercise in a creature who as creature must determine himself on the uniquely possible end of his nature, God alone, but who, using his inalienable prerogative, determined himself upon himself and became thereby enslaved to sense, to the search for pleasure and the flight from pain—in a word, to self-love.

The texts we have so far considered raise three suspicions about Maximus’ doctrine. He says that God did not concreate, with man’s nature, sense pleasure and pain.¹⁶³ Are we then to conclude that man’s sense faculties are posterior additions to his nature? The conclusion would be both hasty and false. We have already seen Maximus’ doctrine on the λόγος of man.¹⁶⁴ But he speaks more plainly of the body as instrument of the intellectual soul, as receiving life from the soul.¹⁶⁵ But that the soul, conversely, received from the body necessarily the sense-impressions of pleasure and pain, is not clearly stated. In the first question Maximus speaks bluntly:

The passions themselves were not primarily concreated with the nature of man, as then they would enter the definition of nature. I declare, however, following the great Gregory of Nyssa, that because of the fall from perfection they were brought in, pertaining to the irrational part of nature. . . .¹⁶⁶

And the result of the Fall, he goes on to say, was that man lost the divine image and took on the likeness of brutes. Passion is here used in a dominantly concrete sense, so that the passions as disordered are more in view; yet not completely. For he says in this same question that their morality depends on their use, if they be reduced to obedience to Christ. Elsewhere and before these Questions he has made perfectly clear the distinction between passion as a natural motion and as a moral defect. But one must wait till the year 642, in a passage already cited, for an unambiguous statement that the sense of pain, at least, is simply a consequence of the human composite: ‘The soul . . . by nature receives motions of pain and grief on account of its innate susceptibility for them.’¹⁶⁷

Yet Maximus must always have supposed such innate susceptibility, if man was to receive pain, labor, and death in punishment for his sin.¹⁶⁸

Another suspicion is that the soul for Maximus, despite his doctrine of incomplete substances and a whole species (which alone is man), is not only subjectively independent of the body in its intellectual operations but also in this life to some degree objectively independent. A sentence of the prologue gives body to this suspicion:

The transgressor . . . having joined fast the whole of his intellectual power with the whole of his sensitivity, acquired for himself that composite, destructive knowledge, active in the passion of the senses. . . . Inasmuch as man was anxious for knowledge of visible things by sensation alone, so far he bound on himself ignorance of God.¹⁶⁹ The implication seems to be that all sense knowledge whatsoever is a result of the Fall and not inherent in man’s composite nature.

Now in one respect there can be no doubt that Maximus asserted for the soul the ability to reason and to think for itself and by itself, as the soul cannot be said to be for the sake of the body. But it also reasons, thinks, and knows with the body.¹⁷⁰ And after death the soul, will continue to reason, to think, and to know, for these are its natural powers, active so long as the soul has being.

There can then be no doubt that Maximus does teach a knowledge of creation derived from the senses; but was this a result only of the Fall? It may be; but again it may be that this composite knowledge is compound not precisely with the senses as such, but with them as the seat of the disordered passions. Further on in the same prologue he speaks of

self-love, of which there is, as it were, a mixed knowledge, the experience of pleasure and pain, on account of which all the slime of evils was brought into man’s life.¹⁷¹

Can one take this ‘mixed knowledge’ as an equivalent of the ‘composite knowledge’ mentioned in the first citation?

And the third suspicion. How is it that if there had been no sin there would have been no carnal procreation, no succession from corruption to corruption, that is, from birth to death, pleasure ever uncausedly preceding? Does not this imply that the first pair were something less than man and woman, not having, or not having the use of, their sex faculties; or that, in any case, the joining of man to woman is always something sinful?

In our question to Thalassius, the universal corruptibility of nature, when pain and death had been added to the first uncaused sense pleasure, is emphasized. The bestializing of man’s nature is rather a result of the first act, not the act itself. But our answer is clear in the doctrine of Gregory of Nyssa, cited by Maximus at this point. For the Cappadocian there was a double creation, first of man as image of God, which is in the intellectual part, and then the biological life as a consequence of sin, by which man has the likeness of the irrational beast.¹⁷²

That this doctrine implies no scorn of marriage as evil, no Manichaeism, is quite evident from Maximus’ refutation of those who would postpone the infusion of the rational soul into the body till some time after conception, because of the impure pleasure at conception. Such a position, he says, means that marriage is evil, that the law of generation is evil, that consequently the author of both these things must be reckoned the author of evil. The statement of such consequences is their refutation. Then, giving other reasons for the soul and body being joined at conception, chief of which is this same simultaneity in Our Lord’s conception in the Virgin, he adds that

nature after the transgression drew upon itself carnal conception and birth with corruption, losing thus the divine and spiritual increase, but not the λόγος φύσεως by which the rational soul and body come into being together.¹⁷³

Maximus therefore feels nothing incongruent between Gregory’s doctrine of a double creation and his own of man’s essentially and simultaneously composite nature.

How did Gregory come to such a doctrine? He clearly argues to the conditions in Paradise from the future state in heaven, of which Our Lord says: At the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but are as angels of God in heaven.¹⁷⁴ Such also was for Maximus the state from which man fell, though it were in the very instant of his creation. It was then Adam through his disobedience and immersion in sense pleasure who gave reality to the ‘law of voluptuous generation’ and of ‘death in condemnation of nature.’¹⁷⁵ The act of generation is not said to be sinful; it may be well used, marriage is good; yet the condition of mankind which dictates its use is part of the primeval curse.¹⁷⁶

Let us now pick up again our account of man’s fall and present condition. From man’s first motion, perverted from God to sense, followed the enslavement to pleasure, with its correlative flight from pain and hardship, added in punishment by a provident God, ending in death, lest such a perverted order should continue indefinitely.¹⁷⁷

The first result of the perversion is negative, aversion from and, consequently, ignorance of God; the second is positive, conversion to sense and experience of material delight with the ensuant self-love that drives us to pleasure and away from pain and hardship. From these spring all evils. The first and greatest is division from God; there follows division of our nature whether internally in the struggle of passions within a man or externally (socially) in the fragmentation of the race in warring groups.¹⁷⁸ There follows likewise the whole throng of vices, due either to pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain and hardship, or to some mixture of these causes.¹⁷⁹

The remedy for this situation, man’s salvation, is on two levels, which in the individual compenetrate, the work of Christ and asceticism.

As in nature, that is in Man, in Adam¹⁸⁰ the first pleasure was uncaused, save by the wilful perversion of man’s God-ward desire, so the consequent hardships were fully caused in punishment and ultimately death fully justified in condemnation of the sinful nature; so in the new Adam—in Christ, there having preceded His birth no carnal pleasure (as the conception was virginal), the hardships were fully unjustified and the death most wicked. And here the wonder of this counterpoint—the hardships and death that had been in condemnation of nature are now converted into condemnation of sin and liberation of nature. The disobedience of the first man had ended in the condemnation of nature; the obedience of Christ, the second Adam, in undergoing the punishment of the first, freed that nature, restored it, deified it.¹⁸¹

This is realized generally for nature at the time of the great mystery of the Man-becoming;¹⁸² and actually for individuals at the time of baptism, when each receives the grace of sonship. This new generation in the Spirit enables them in the observance of the commandments through much suffering and finally death, to condemn sin.¹⁸³

Here we have clearly expressed the ultimate theological basis of Christian asceticism, although this asceticism is not here fully expressed. Much will be said of self-mastery (ἐγκράτεια). The quest for this may be expressed in a wealth of moral analysis and terminology of Stoic origin. Yet it is part of the condemnation of sin in the large sense; for this condemnation is not merely negative but implies finally restoration to the paradisiacal state and deification. For Pyrrhus, therefore, Maximus will explain asceticism and its consequent hardships as the separation from the soul of the deceit effected by immersion in sense, so that the virtues stand out in their natural character.¹⁸⁴

c. Deification

We have just remarked (at n. 286 f.) that the remedy for man’s fallen condition is on two levels—the work of Christ and asceticism; and that moreover the two levels compenetrate in the individual. Now this compenetration takes place not in the isolation of the individuals but in the community of the Church, in the sacraments from whence the eternal, supernatural worth and power of the ascetical struggle is drawn.

All these then are the medium in which and the means by which the end is attained. This end is objectively God, subjectively our salvation or deification in Christ. Our procedure therefore in this section will be first to elucidate the meaning of deification, then to speak briefly of the sacramental medium and means, and finally to expound in a brief synthesis Maximus’ ascetical and mystical doctrine, in such a manner that it will form an immediate introduction to the following translations.

Deification is the ultimate fulfilling of human nature’s capacity for God. The λόγος of our nature remains intact; its powers are renovated, in the Incarnation, that it may attain this end; so then deification is wholly a gift of God and is not attainable by nature’s nude powers. In actual historical fact deification and salvation are the same.¹⁸⁵

To illustrate this statement I shall cite a few passages, warning the reader that all must be understood in the light of the doctrine on God and man already expounded.

By reason of our salvation He takes delight in these (our good works), and alone standing in need of nothing, He will grant us whatsoever He truthfully promised us. These are what eye hath not seen. . . .¹⁸⁶ For unto this He made us, that we might become partakers of the divine nature¹⁸⁷ and sharers of His eternity, and that we appear like to Him according to the deification of grace, on account of which there exists and abides the system of created things, and the creation from nothing of non-existent things.¹⁸⁸

According to this text the last end of the whole created order is man’s deification, which is here at once placed in connection with salvation and based on St. Peter’s celebrated text.

In practically every instance where mention is made of deification there also it is qualified as being by grace, or by some other limiting phrase. Once Maximus had to excuse a loose statement he had made of there being one operation of the saints and God in heaven. It is God’s working alone, he replies, that deifies. In fact, a deifying power is not implanted in our nature, and consequently there can be no exercise of it.¹⁸⁹ Yet, and this is important for the ascetical life, our salvation and deification lie within the possibility of our own renewed power. This renewal is of course God’s own pure gift, yet it makes possible our own participation in the work of Redemption. Indeed if deification is rather in the powers and qualities of man (for it cannot alter his nature), then these divinized powers and qualities must have also their proper divinized function.¹⁹⁰

Again and again deification is represented as the result of the Incarnation. It is then often expressed with an anti-strophic arrangement: to the condescension of God in His Man-becoming responds the imitation of man in God-becoming, by the grace and power of the God-man.¹⁹¹

Inasmuch as the likeness given in deification necessarily excludes any mutation in the λόγος of man’s nature, it remains that he become God by possessive imitation of the divine qualities. Thus immortality is granted to the body and immutability to the soul;¹⁹² or it is a question of the divine simplicity.¹⁹³ But the fullest effect of this deification is in love, whereby as Christ loved us still being His enemies and died for us, so we not only care for spiritually but are ready to die willingly for one another.¹⁹⁴

If one seeks for the agent of this transformation, it is immediately the Holy Spirit who seizes upon man in his will and brings him to suffering divine things by grace, whereas God is these things by nature.¹⁹⁵

It is only occasionally that mention is thus made of the Spirit in regard to deification; but this relative infrequency does not adequately represent the place of the Spirit in Maximus’ thought. We have already cited a passage about the Church¹⁹⁶ in which it is declared that all the activity of the Godhead is finally bestowed in the Church through the Holy Spirit.

Agents of Deification The Church

There is also another series of passages which attribute all life in the Church to the Spirit. As the soul is entirely present in the whole body and in each part, giving it life and unity, so likewise the Spirit of God.¹⁹⁷ This doctrine is consciously developed in the Pauline context of the Epistle to the Ephesians; and refers not merely to a spiritual doctrine but to the concrete reality of ecclesiastical life, as is clear from his letter of exhortation to some apostate nuns to return to the ‘living, whole, and spotless body of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.’¹⁹⁸

Now this Church Maximus nowhere defines; he describes it though with a certain ampleness when he comes to explain the text: Behold a candlestick all of gold, and its lamp upon the top of it. . . .¹⁹⁹ The candlestick of pure gold is the Church.²⁰⁰ This Church is adorned with virtues, not stained with passions, free of impure spirits, unchanged as to faith and morals under the impact of heresies and persecutions; and above all keeps whole and intact the mystery in faith of knowledge of God.

Another powerful description of the Church, this time as imitator of God, is found in the Mystagogia.²⁰¹ Here God is looked upon as cause, beginning, and end of all, to whom therefore all are seen to be related in unity. The Church by giving the one faith and name to all sorts and conditions of men, differing in age, sex, tongue, capacities, and so on, brings them all to unity as a body worthy of the head which is Christ. The supreme work of God and of His Church is unity.

And the basis of this unity is faith. Right faith is of supreme value for Maximus. By exact profession of the faith is a man sanctified.²⁰² The unity of faith is more important than cultural unity.²⁰³ This faith is given in baptism and should be accepted with good will, lest it afterward be rejected.²⁰⁴

It is not faith alone whose function it is to bring peace among men and some order. Rulers have their part in keeping the divisive and destructive tendencies of fallen man in check.²⁰⁵ But these functions are clearly to be distinguished. In doctrinal questions ‘it belongs to the bishops to enquire and define the saving dogmas of the Catholic Church.’ In this the emperor has no part. ‘He does not stand at the altar, nor after the consecration of the bread raise it and say the Holy to the holy. Nor does he baptize or consecrate the myrrh. . . .’²⁰⁶ Thus on the ecclesiastical side all is clear. But to the objection that Scripture makes Melchizedek king and priest, Maximus replies that Melchizedek is a type of one thing only and cannot therefore have two diverse fulfilments, one sacerdotal, one regal. The question of the relation of Christ’s royalty and priesthood in the Church is left unanswered.

If now we turn our attention to authority in the Church, whether to teach or to rule, we find Maximus again most explicit in the Process. When urged once more to accept the Type for peace’ sake, he cries out:

I cannot grieve God by keeping silent what He ordered to be spoken and confessed. For if, according to the divine Apostle, it is He Himself who has set in the Church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly doctors,²⁰⁷ it is clear that He has spoken through them. By all of Holy Scripture, by the Old and the New Testament, by the holy doctors and synods we are taught. . . .²⁰⁸

This passage is doubly interesting. It gives us an unmistakable seventh-century interpretation of a disputed text²⁰⁹ that identifies the doctors of St. Paul with the bishops. It further joins the synods to the bishops, thus giving them a share in the same authority.

If then the doctors are the bishops and they owe their authority in the Church to their divine institution, this authority is exercised in certain preferred ways, such as are indicated in the following passage.

The natural essences of united objects the God-minded doctors of the Church in no way denied, but concordantly with the evangelists and the apostles and prophets they declared Our Lord and God Jesus Christ in both His natures volitive and operative of our salvation. Pyrrhus: Can this be shown from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament? Maximus: Of course, for the Fathers did not draw from their own resources but learned this from the Scriptures and charitably taught us. For it is not they who speak but the grace of the Spirit who entirely permeated them.²¹⁰

Here then the Fathers are the doctors, are the bishops. I do not pretend that either term is exclusively applied to bishops; in a context, however, of tradition and authoritative teaching it would remain the ordinary sense. Now in this passage the authority of the Fathers is based on their Spirit-assisted understanding of Scripture. Authority in the Church therefore has a threefold basis: the divine institution of bishops; Holy Scripture; the bishops’ Spirit-assisted interpretation thereof.

How was this ordinarily exercised? In synods, at least for the more serious affairs. But what synods are binding and true? The question was necessarily put, because Sergius and Pyrrhus had held several synods in favor of their heretical doctrine. Of synods Maximus notes that not all dogma is expressed in synodical decrees.²¹¹ Furthermore, practice shows that imperial convocation is not required; many Arian synods were so summoned and many orthodox synods were not so summoned. No, the ecclesiastical canon accepts those synods known for their right doctrine.²¹² This surely is a rather indecisive criterion. But the ecclesiastical canon knows of another means. The emperor and the patriarch with his synod should refer the case (in this instance rejection of the Type and absolution) in writing to Rome. Maximus, a simple monk, can do nothing, especially as the Roman anathema of the Type has intervened.²¹³

Concerning the Roman See but two documents deal directly, TP 12 and 11. The former, as we have already noted, urges Pyrrhus’ submission to Rome and the Roman doctrine.²¹⁴ The reason for this he also makes plain: satisfaction to the Roman See suffices for the whole Church:

The Apostolic See . . . from the very Incarnate Word of God and from all the holy synods of all the churches throughout the world in their sacred canons and definitions has received and possesses, in and for every thing, dominion, authority, and power to bind and to loose. With it the Word, set at the head of heavenly powers, binds and looses in heaven.²¹⁵ …

The other document, written after the Lateran Council, witnesses to the same doctrine. From the Roman Church all receive the holy dogmas of the Fathers, as the six synods (the Lateran must here be included) declared them. From the beginning the other churches had their basis in the Roman Church against which the gates of hell should not prevail. She holds the keys of right faith and confession in Christ.²¹⁶

… In the first document it may have seemed to pertain rather to discipline—an absolution from condemnation and excommunication, but here it is said that the Roman Church holds ‘the keys of the orthodox faith and confession in Him.’²¹⁷

These last remarks on the Church’s hierarchy may seem far removed from our theme of salvation and deification. …

The Sacraments

Of the Church I have first spoken because she is the milieu in which salvation is apprehended; the means by which we apprehend are the sacraments, of which the first and fundamental is baptism.²¹⁸

Already I have had occasion to note that the whole or salvation which Christ effected in the Incarnate dispensation was individually laid hold of in baptism.²¹⁹ It is therefore essential to anyone who would be saved, yet the mere rite performed with faith is not sufficient. It is the first mode of birth which grants adoption potentially only. The second mode is actual and effects in addition to faith the likeness of the Father, inasmuch as the election and γνώμη of the individual are formed anew like God. The Holy Spirit is the artificer of this reformation that is effected in man’s γνώμη²²⁰ In fact it is through our human powers and habits being renewed in the Incarnation and by their good use that we are able to realize to the full the effects of the new birth given at baptism.²²¹

Baptism then is a new, a second birth, not according to the law of corruption established by Adam’s sin and presiding at our first birth, but a birth in the Spirit that renders us sinless,²²² restores a provisional incorruptibility,²²³ that is only preserved by the keeping of the commandments. A fuller view of baptism is that which sees the power of Christ’s hardships and death to condemn sin conveyed to the baptized so that their hardships, sufferings, and even death condemn sin also, not merely their personal sin, but those of mankind.²²⁴

Most of these elements are contained in a chapter from the Theological and Oeconomic Centuries:

We, who have put on the first incorruptibility with ritual baptism in Christ through the Spirit, let us await the last (which will be) with Him in the Spirit, having preserved the first unspotted through progress in good works and death voluntarily accepted. . . .²²⁵

After baptism one might expect some word on penance. The material however is far too scanty, so far as I have found it, to provide a satisfactory account of this sacrament.²²⁶

While baptism frees from original sin, penance frees from post-baptismal sin.²²⁷ But there remains a variable use of the word: does penance (μετάνοια) remit the guilt only, or also in its fulness wipe out the consequences of sin, so that the fruit of penance may be said to be the calm of detachment (ἀπάθεια So then, how may we understand the forgiveness of post-baptismal sin in the text just referred to? As due to the sacrament or as due to the spirit of penance?

Of the Eucharist only have special studies appeared.²²⁸ Of these the first is quite superficial; the second is a refutation of the first and, though it adduces more texts, is not a complete study of Maximus’ Eucharistic doctrine.²²⁹

There are two difficulties that beset any such study. Maximus has nowhere left us a complete exposition of the Eucharist. Even in the Mystagogia he has deliberately passed over some things lest his inadequacy should reflect on the work of the divine Denis;²³⁰ among these things are all those that occur between the Sanctus and the Our Father. Another difficulty is the luxuriousness of allegorical interpretation which passes with utmost ease through the various modes by which the soul is nourished. The Word of God is the connatural food of the soul; that the soul is fed is, for Maximus, paramount whether this be by the Scripture, which is the word of God, whether by contemplation, whether by the Sacrament, whether by com-pagination in the body of Christ—it matters only that the soul is fed.²³¹

Clearly there is a ‘priesthood of the gospel’ after the ‘order of Melchizedek,’²³² which was instituted by Christ to take His place visibly on earth and to make present His mysteries for those capable of perceiving them.²³³ The purpose of this priesthood is to be deified and to deify.²³⁴ It therefore involves leadership in the whole of Christian life and is above all else an imitation of its author.²³⁵ This priesthood is here understood with an amplitude and an exigence not always met with among ourselves.

In the sacrifices of the Old Law the flesh was eaten, the blood was poured out at the foot of the altar.

However, Christ being come high priest of the good things to come, He sacrifices Himself an ineffable sacrifice and in addition to His flesh gives His blood to those who have the senses of their soul exercised by perfection, for distinguishing good and evil.²³⁶

Such a combination of Pauline texts²³⁷ forms a distinctly soteriological and eucharistic context, though the strictly eucharistic aspect, that is, the reception of the Body and the Blood in the Sacrament, is entirely passed over, or rather presupposed in the deeper interest for the res sacramenti. For the flesh is straightway explained as virtue and good works; the blood as knowledge of the λόγοι of things.

Of the reception of the Sacrament he speaks directly in the Mystagogia. It comes at the end of the whole service and by the participation in the Sacrament the recipients are made over in its likeness, so that they may be called really gods by grace, because of the divine presence of God, who leaves nothing unfilled by His presence.

The conformation to the Logos thus achieved, the deification is neither identical for all men nor uniform. It is more fully given to those who have done greater works, according to exaltedness of mind.²³⁸ It is furthermore adapted to the ‘harmony of the divine body.’²³⁹ This indication permits also an ecclesiological understanding of the eucharistic and nourishment texts.

Though these texts be few, though they be difficult for us, of another mentality, to savor and to understand, yet they are enough to permit us to say: the Eucharist is at the heart of the Christian life. Maximus supposes it so; he, a simple monk, never had occasion to catechize, but rather to exhort to go on to gathering the fruits of this tree of life which is given us by the Word of God.²⁴⁰

Asceticism and its Technique

We come now to describe what may be called the technique²⁴¹ of the ascetic and mystical life in St. Maximus. One must in no way think that this forms a separate entity²⁴² in Maximus’ thought; it is integral with the Christian life in its ecclesiastical and sacramental aspects, with which we have just dealt. They are all aspects of one and the same life. In this integral view he is but following his predecessors—Gregory of Nyssa,²⁴³ his beloved Denis, and is typical of the whole subsequent Byzantine tradition.

The reason for the relative distinctness of the ascetical work is that it is precisely a work which each man can and must do for himself, a work cut to each man’s measure. Maximus will himself even say that salvation is in our own will. For it is the work of gnomic reform, of a perfect realization of the capacities of our nature.²⁴⁴

Again, from the human side the principal motive force of the whole struggle is the desire for God. This, as we have seen, is identified with the will of man and is fully natural. It is at the same time a teleological impulse of an intellectual nature for its end, an impulse which cannot be eradicated and, because a tendency of an intellectual creature, realized in the mode proper to this creature’s self-determinative character. But how can this natural and this self-determinative be reconciled—the one implying necessity, the other freedom? So far as I understand Maximus, this question (which he nowhere raises) would have been for him no insoluble difficulty. His answer is to be found in the distinction of λόγος and τρόπος, which is coincident with that of nature and person. The will is free first in the nature; its freedom is exercised only by the person according to the concrete, actual conditions of its existence; the nature of man is essentially self-determinative, this power of self-determination may be realized in a strictly divine mode (the Incarnation) or in a variety of human modes—in Adam, before the law, under the law, in the light of Revelation, and in all the diversity of circumstances in which men may find themselves. It happens therefore that this fundamental desire which is by rights a desire for God is perverted to the creature; it may take a right direction but be misinformed and extrinsically deformed; it may reach full blossom in the Church. Or those who are of the Church may again pervert it by preferring the creature. But always the freedom remains as also the distinction of what we now term the natural and supernatural order, since, in fact, the explicitation of this desire follows immediately not the metaphysical structure of man, but each man’s concrete historical condition as a living person. If it be explicitated in the right sense, really for God, it tends towards God in His fulness; but if without Revelation, towards Him in His fulness, remaining, however, for such an individual, the material object only; it tends towards God in proportion to the powers of its nature, which unless renewed by Christ by His Incarnation, necessarily remains totally inadequate to attaining the divine, because merely human.

This fundamental orientation of the individual to God is the primordial exercise of the creature’s power of self-determination, of his free will. It is that of which some modern theologians are again speaking in regard to another question, namely the final determination of the damned in hell and, contrariwise, of the saved in God.²⁴⁵ Yet if a man has not now to die, but to live, this fundamental determination must be made now as best it may and deployed consequently in all the contingencies of life, so that the human γνώμη may be in all things deiform.

Another question immediately arises. This desire is the mainspring for the ascetic and mystic life. It places therefore Maximus’ doctrine under the patronage of ἔρως; the charity which crowns and satisfies it is therefore necessarily tainted.

Without adding an excursus to a digression in criticism of Nygren’s work,²⁴⁶ it will be necessary to remark that this desire is natural and even inevitable in an intellectual creature (though still capable of perversion). Αγάπη then cannot eradicate it, nor can it be opposed to it in its natural reality; yet in its actual expression in fallen man this desire puts on all the forms of self-love, which is directly contrary to ἀγάπη. The divine gift then of ἀγάπη to the creature enables him so to be fixed in the faith already here on earth and in the good, that, partaking of the divine fixity and firmness, he can in that measure imitate the divine love which loved us while yet sinners and sends His rain on the just and the unjust—the divine love, whose condition is precisely that fixity of fulness and non-indigence, of which man partakes by faith.

But if this desire be the mainspring of the ascetical and mystical life, it is utterly impotent to overcome its own perversion into self-love. Therefore all turns upon the Incarnation and the struggle of Christ with the devil who strained every nerve to induce Him to fail in love for God or neighbor. This is the theme developed in the first part of the Ascetic Life. This is the model for all ascetic struggle, as is not only indicated there, but reaffirmed in the Centuries.²⁴⁷

Now in Christ the combat was necessarily extrinsic; for mere men it is largely intrinsic, a war of passions and virtues. The devil always remains active; but he has an entrance within us, through our body or through our love for it.²⁴⁸

This struggle gives rise to a technique of opposition, elaborated first for the control of the passions and the right use of the natural powers—the practical aspect; and also for the attainment of understanding and knowledge—the theoretical, the contemplative aspect. These are two aspects of one life which should never be separated, nor, if separated, can they attain the goal. The theoretical has an absolute need of the practical; it may however be left in a relatively inchoative state as in the Ascetic Life. In any case God and deification remain the unique goal.

The practical aspect of this life is analyzed according to the psychological structure of man. Maximus in this drew chiefly from Evagrius.²⁴⁹ The basic distinctions may be expressed in the following table:

mind=the reasonable (part of the soul)
soul = the concupiscible the passible
the irascible
body

There are here two triads. Neither of them is reckoned a metaphysical distinction by Maximus, whatever may be the judgment on its use by other authors.²⁵⁰ The combination of these parts will vary. Thus the reasonable, concupiscible, irascible will be reckoned as parts of the soul,²⁵¹ or the mind will be distinguished from the passible part, or more frequently the passible part will be considered alone.²⁵² It is properly in the control of this latter part that asceticism and the practical life consist; the direction of the reasonable part or the mind is the work of natural contemplation and prayer.

The whole of the moral life is in the tension between the two elements of the passible and in their control. Whether one speaks of the concupiscible and the irascible, of desire and anger, of pleasure and pain, the antithesis is always the same and the various virtues and vices are ranged under one or the other.²⁵³ The mother of all the vices is self-love, which is the perversion of desire and therefore pertains to the concupiscible part of the soul. Pain, we have seen, is secondary to the miscarriage of the primordial desire. It is necessary to note the subordination of these two parts of the soul. In their generation desire comes first and always supplies anger with its matter; but anger is the more firmly rooted, and dislodged with greater difficulty. It is therefore over it that the victory is the greatest.

So far the doctrine is common to Evagrius and Maximus.²⁵⁴ But whereas Evagrius sees the evil of anger in the harm done to knowledge, Maximus finds it predominantly in the transgression of the commandment of love.²⁵⁵ It is thus that the place held in Evagrius by meekness²⁵⁶ as the great antidote for anger is assumed by love in Maximus’ thought. Maximus, however, does not exclude meekness from this role, especially in his commentary on the Our Father.²⁵⁷

Anger then and the irascible are the more redoubtable foes in the ascetic struggle; they nourish themselves on desire and concupiscence of all sorts—for food, for money, for the pleasures of the flesh. Against all these is the other master virtue of the practical way—self-mastery or continence (ἐγκράτεια). This virtue has a larger sense than is conveyed by its ordinary English equivalent, continence. It restrains every kind of desire and permits the individual only what is necessary and useful.²⁵⁸ The fruit of this restraint is detachment (ἀπάθεια), which is the calm of ordered faculties now responding only to those things that are good and worthwhile.²⁵⁹

Parallel with this struggle for self-mastery and charity is a struggle with demons. This is foreshadowed in Maximus in the Ascetic Life where the whole struggle of Our Lord, proposed for our imitation, is a struggle with demons, either directly or through his agents, the Sadducees and Pharisees. But in fact demons play a much less prominent part in Maximus than in Evagrius. The reason is that Evagrius lived in the Egyptian desert, that was reckoned as the proper habitation of devils.²⁶⁰ Maximus never even came to Egypt. With the Lord the demons could work only from the outside; with fallen man they have an entrance through his desires. The ascetic, however, by his very way of life has cut off the occasion of sinning with most things. It remains that his great danger and temptation is first and principally in thoughts (λογισμοί). Now thoughts are of two sorts: they are either simple and unadulterated, or composite and joined with the passions.²⁶¹ And often, especially in Evagrius, it seems to make little difference whether the temptation is attributed to a thought or to the corresponding demon.²⁶²

Again, as there is a certain hierarchy among the passions, so among the demons. The demon of anger is by far the most difficult to fight off. This is the demon who strove throughout Our Lord’s ministry to make Him sin against fraternal charity. It is against hate and anger that the commandment of love works.²⁶³

The ascetical struggle therefore is comprised in the acquisition of self-mastery or continence and love.²⁶⁴ This supposes throughout a severe renunciation that in all things God may be preferred to the creature. The fruit is that calm of detachment which permits the mind to devote itself to a God-directed contemplation of creatures and to pure prayer.

Prayer and Contemplation

The necessity of methodical exposition has forced me to treat first of the practical aspect and now of the contemplative aspect of the Christian life; in fact, they are aspects of one Christian life and only with disaster are they separated.

But having made this statement, I feel that I must at once modify it. There are actually two elements which are here comprehended under the contemplative aspect—‘natural contemplation (or: consideration) of things’ and prayer. The first is a technical procedure for rising from the simplest sense impressions to the λόγοι of things and thence to the supreme Λόγος who in Himself comprehends all others. I have already had occasion to write of these above, where I spoke of the Trinity and of motion.²⁶⁵ This procedure supposes no small philosophical culture and, doubtless, a perseverance in following it out, possible only to a few monks. Laymen may have had the culture, but scarcely the necessary leisure and retirement; not all monks had the philosophical training of an Evagrius or a Maximus.

Πρᾶξις should always be joined with some θεωρία, that is, with prayer. ‘Natural contemplation’ of course must always be joined with πρᾶξις; yet it may be omitted. This view suggests itself because in the Ascetical Life there is no mention at all of ‘natural contemplation’; but there is of prayer, in which the mind stripped of every image is joined to God and does not fail to ask what is fitting.²⁶⁶ Similarly Ep 2 on charity, addressed to a man of the world, though it reckons charity as the first good beyond which one cannot go, effecting union with God and man and opening the door to the vision of the blessed Trinity,²⁶⁷ makes no mention of ‘natural contemplation.’

This practical disappearance of ‘natural contemplation’ in the highest stages of prayer is confirmed by Char 2.6, where two supreme states of pure prayer are distinguished, one for the practical, one for the contemplative. The first is characterized by the uninterrupted making of prayers in the presence of God; the other by seizure by the divine light and love, apart from all perception of things. Consequent on this rapture the mind is moved constantly about the properties of God and receives clear impressions of Him.²⁶⁸

Now if we look once again at those places where ‘natural contemplation’ and pure prayer are described side by side or as the second and third members of a triad, where therefore their interrelation should be most manifest, we find a distinct break of continuity. This is true of the description of the three motions of the soul according to sense, reason, and mind. The mind in its own proper motion receives no knowledge of God from any created thing, it is fully separated from any motion in regard to things.²⁶⁹ It is true that the ‘reasons of things are referred to and unified in the mind,’ but this is quite another function, however necessary, however useful, and cannot be confused with its activity toward God.

In the 25th question for Thalassius, Maximus explains the phrase of St. Paul, the head of every man is Christ,²⁷⁰ interpreting it of the practical mind, of the mind given to ‘natural contemplation’ in the Spirit, and of the mind of mystical theology. Has Maximus confused his teaching in Char 2.6, as Pegon there supposes? The conclusion is hasty. For here as elsewhere the ‘natural contemplation’ is turned towards things and their essences, λόγοι, reducing them ever to the first Λόγος Christ, while mystical theology implies that one deprive oneself of oneself and things.²⁷¹ For the mind, stripped of every idea and knowledge, can look upon the very Word of God only without eyes.²⁷²

It is in this context that are to be understood the numerous references to the mind in God, that is, in the highest state of prayer, being stripped, shapeless, formless, uniform, deiform. These are but so many ways of saying our images and concepts have no place in the highest prayer.²⁷³ It is another way of saying that the attribute of God which, when imitated, makes us most like Him, is His simplicity.²⁷⁴ This imitation can naturally imply for Maximus no immutation of the λόγος of man’s composite nature, no etherialization.²⁷⁵

Here a delicate and difficult question cannot be avoided. Is this supreme state of prayer conceived by Maximus in the Evagrian mode or the Dionysian? Is, in other words, the mind stripped of all images, concepts, and created things that in itself it may regard the perfect image of God and so see God,²⁷⁶ or must it go outside not only all created things but also itself that it may attain thus to the ray of the divine darkness?²⁷⁷ Hausherr²⁷⁸ has dealt with the problem. And while he has made unmistakably clear the antithetic nature of these two concepts, he has not considered Maximus’ writings other than the Centuries on Charity and has assumed with Viller not only the textual borrowing but also that Maximus borrowed likewise the Evagrian doctrine. Hence his conclusion that the Dionysian element is merely superimposed.

Note that in the very chapter (Char 3.99) which occasioned the discussion occur the words providence and judgment, eminently Evagrian but, as I have already pointed out,²⁷⁹ understood by Maximus in a different sense. Hausherr (355) remarks that Evagrius even where he is citing other authors en passant may very well be expressing his own thought. This possibility cannot be denied to Maximus.

In relation to the Evagrian doctrine it must be remembered that Maximus refutes the Origenist errors and has a very definite doctrine on the λόγος of man as composite of body and soul.

Our evidence comes from the Ambigua and the Questions for Thalassius.²⁸⁰ In Amb 10 the unknowable motion about God does not derive from knowledge of any creature, because the divine exceeds, so that the mind ceases from its natural activity. But then:

Some say that God and man are examples (παραδείγματα) one of the other; and that for man God becomes man out of kindness, insofar as for God man, enabled by charity, has deified himself; and that man is rapt by God to the unknown²⁸¹ insofar as he has manifested God, invisible by nature, through his virtues.

Whoever may be the man whom Maximus here quotes, the whole passage (with its strange inverted allusion to the Incarnation) cannot be a patron for the Dionysian ecstasis; but it can neither be taken as a full affirmation of Evagrian doctrine. The emphasis falls on charity and virtues.

In Thal 63 wisdom, the gift and activity of the Holy Spirit, is granted those who are worthy of deification, which leads them without intermediary to the cause of things. They are characterized by the properties of divine goodness. Thus from God they know themselves and from themselves God. Thus they were brought to the infinitely infinite summit of all, through speechless and ineffable silence and ignorance. Here again note that these wise men are known by the properties of divine goodness. But if through their virtues holy men manifest God, is it not by this manifestation also that from themselves they know God?

These are the clearest passages in an Evagrian sense. They suggest a moderate acceptance of the Evagrian position in this point, with a shift of emphasis towards charity. After seeing what role Maximus attributes to charity, I shall return again to the question of Evagrian introspection and Dionysian ecstasis.

Charity

The true heart of Maximus’ doctrine is love. The lodestone of all his thought, I noted at the outset, was the mystery of the Incarnation. This is for him the mystery of love.²⁸² In the two treatises of which the English version is here published, love is deliberately chosen as the main theme—in the Ascetic Life illustrated by Our Lord’s life and passion, in the Centuries inculcated directly by many aphorisms and indirectly by the very number of the Centuries. They number four and this was doubtless chosen as being the number of the gospels in which the commandment and example of love are contained. In charity the whole of Christian life is summarized and contained.

A special consideration of charity is further forced upon us for other reasons. In it Maximus is most clearly distinguished from his master Evagrius; the import of this divergence must be assessed.

The doctrine on charity I shall recapitulate under ten heads.

1. Charity is first of all the preference of God to all creatures, even one’s own body. This is the absolute requirement and goes directly contrary to the primordial sin, self-love. Of the commandment of love it is the first part exacting love for God. In the definition of charity given in Char 1.1 it is the knowledge of God that must be preferred. This is typically Evagrian, but it is not the last word on charity.²⁸³

2. We have already seen that love (of neighbor) is opposed in a special way to anger.²⁸⁴ This is part of Maximus’ greater emphasis on fraternal charity, in which he manifests a greater sensitiveness to the communal and social life of the Church.

3. Charity and the calm of detachment (ἀπάθεια)²⁸⁵ again and again stand in the same relation to knowledge and the mystical life. They are the finished product of the practical life²⁸⁶ which, as a continuing possession, permit the fulness of contemplation. They both are natural to God and for us are acquired by the exercise of choice and intention (γνώμη²⁸⁷

4. But if charity can be used synonymously with the calm of detachment, they are not in the full extension of their meanings synonymous. This is quite manifest when we find Maximus putting love not only after calm but after knowledge.²⁸⁸ The full sense of this will be clear later.

5. Now charity is not merely the supreme virtue, the summary of the commandments, it is further an abiding condition and state without which any knowledge or other term of the Christian life would be impossible. Thus Maximus speaks of the charitable state, to which a region of hate is opposed.²⁸⁹

6. In this state of charity all are loved equally and indeed it is but one and the same love which we extend to God and man.²⁹⁰ This is a distinct change from the Evagrian doctrine, for whom the most that is possible is to be without hate or rancor towards any, to maintain the calm of detachment in their regard.²⁹¹ Now Maximus not once but many times insists on love for one’s neighbor and six times in the Centuries exacts an equal love, and precisely as an imitation of the divine love which is the same for all without distinction and without special attachments.²⁹² This must be particularly noted: though the calm of detachment is necessary for such love, it is only love itself which can go out to men in imitation of the divine love. This equality of love is based on the divine will ‘to save all men and bring them to a knowledge of the truth,’²⁹³ but does not exclude a diverse modality of love for the good, who are loved for their virtues, and for the bad, to whom compassion is shown in their estrangement.²⁹⁴

7. Charity, especially fraternal charity, is opposed to self-love. As it was self-love that originally destroyed the unity of man and the harmony of his powers, so it is charity, made possible to us in Christ, which restores that unity and harmony.²⁹⁵ Charity, having such a role, cannot be something inferior; it is supreme, it imitates God, it makes like God, so that a man will lay down his life for another.²⁹⁶

8. In a word, charity unites with God and deifies. This is often repeated in various ways. Essentially it ties in with the Incarnation. The Word out of love became man, fully and perfectly, with the intent that in proportion as He had become man out of love, so man might become God, as much as his nature would permit.²⁹⁷

9. It is necessary to know a little more precisely what this divinization implies. There are passages which speak of knowledge (ἐπίγνωσις) as the ultimate goal, after the phrase of St. Paul.²⁹⁸ This certainly is not to be forgotten; but more useful for us is the statement of Char 2.52 that the man of prayer has practically all the divine properties, elsewhere, qualities.²⁹⁹ This enables us to ask what are the properties or qualities of God which most of all effect this deification. One can reply with a list of virtues and qualities, as Maximus does in the chapter just cited. But if we look for those source qualities from which the others derive, we can name perhaps but two, goodness and simplicity. Of these I have already spoken.³⁰⁰ It remains now to see how their imitation and participation by man effects his deification.

It is easy enough to see how the divine simplicity exacts of the ascetic and gnostic a progressive purgation in his prayer of every sense image and concept, so that the mind itself becomes in this way simple as its archetype. And this process, accomplished in the uppermost reaches of prayer, is a withdrawal within oneself. It is in the line of the Evagrian mysticism. Maximus speaks of the divine simplicity alike in the Centuries³⁰¹ as elsewhere,³⁰² and very explicitly in connection with our deification in the Questions for Thalassius.³⁰³

Let us not suppose for a moment that the notion of the divine simplicity is peculiar to Evagrius or to the Alexandrians. Clearly it is a cardinal doctrine also for Denis. The point is that diverse materials were at hand in the building lot of mystical theology. Evagrius built chiefly with simplicity; Denis rather with goodness and love; Maximus entering the same lot, with the same materials at hand and the examples of his predecessors, endeavored to use in the construction of his arch not one but both.

The emphasis on the good as the principal attribute of God Maximus doubtless took over from Denis.³⁰⁴ Now the divine good is the end of every created motion, in which only the creature may attain an immutable firmness.³⁰⁵ It is the going out of the free will, the self-determinative power, to God, this ‘gnomic emigration’ which achieves for us the final unshakable union with God in Christ through the grace of the Spirit according to the words of St. Paul: I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.³⁰⁶

It is true, the climax of this passage refers to the future state of the blessed, as Maximus himself says in a later explanation,³⁰⁷ where there will be but one operation of God and the saints. Yet this does not permit us to overlook that the tenor of the whole passage is that of an ecstasis. Is one therefore directly to conclude that this is Dionysian doctrine pure and simple? Let us not be hasty. Clearly we are here dealing with ecstasis. Earlier in this same passage Maximus had said: ‘If (the rational creature) loves, then surely it suffers ecstasis towards the intelligible object as lovable.’³⁰⁸ Then, having introduced the idea of subjection to God and hence the exercise of self-determination, Maximus speaks of this deifying ‘gnomic emigration’ which brings the image to the archetype and so, among other things, it ‘enjoys the ecstasis from the things that naturally are and are understood of itself, because of the grace of the Spirit.’³⁰⁹

What does ecstasis here mean? Or rather, outside of what things is the image reckoned as standing? It would seem outside its natural powers and their exercise; for deification, of which this ecstasis is here a consequent, is always the work of the divine power and operation, and manifest in the assumption of the divine properties—virtues even now, and eventually stability and immortality.³¹⁰ Further, the sense of the whole passage is to refute the Origenist doctrine of the henad.³¹¹ It is this that explains the emphasis on deification and the infelicitous phrase about one operation between God and the saints.

If then this use of ecstasis is due to the Dionysian influence, it is not here used in the full Dionysian sense of an irrational, supra-rational estrangement of the mind in the divine darkness. The over-all sense is that of an outgoing of the volitive power, which effects the final gnomic harmony and unity in love.

We see now that Maximus has modified or at least muted both the Evagrian and the Dionysian concept of the mystical life. Are these two as really incompatible as Hausherr suggests? Von Balthasar proposes to consider the two doctrines as extreme examples of a mysticism of immanence and of transcendence. ‘Why cannot they both be reconciled in the one analogy of being?’³¹² In this case the antithesis which Hausherr has so clearly made manifest is not to be understood on the metaphysical level, except insofar as Evagrius or Denis are exclusive extremists, but, for the truth involved in their positions, as a difference of mystical technique. Maximus has perhaps himself indicated the solution when he affirms³¹³ that God is above every relation of subject and object, of thinker and thought. Immanence and transcendence fall easily into such a dyadic polarization. God is Himself therefore above them.

10. It remains now only to summarize what is most characteristic in Maximus—his doctrine of love. And how can one better do this than by turning to the epistle (2) to John the Chamberlain? Love is the fulfilment of faith and hope, it embraces the ultimate in desire and puts a term to that motion; it restores man to unity within himself and with other men, because of the harmony already established with God.³¹⁴ Than love there is nothing higher to be sought. The love given God and man is one and the same, due to God and joining men. The activity and proof of perfect love for God is love for our neighbor. Love is the way of Truth which is the Word, that places us in the calm of detachment before the Father; it is the door³¹⁵ by which he who enters makes his entrance into the holy of holies and is made worthy to see the holy and royal Trinity; it is the true vine. The whole of the Law and the prophets and the Gospel is directed towards it; by it God is honored above the creature and all men are equally honored.³¹⁶

In all this it is to be noted that love knows no limits; or rather its limits are those of God. It repairs nature; it is expressed in the Johannine figures of the way, the door, and the vine—figures which of their very nature surpass the limits of a mere ascetical and mystical interest. Charity for Maximus is as catholic as the Church.

The Maximian Synthesis

Yet, however much one may exalt charity, it is not alone as the ultimate in Christian perfection. It is a door, it is a way as well as a vine and a state. It leads to truth. So far as I know, Maximus never asserted the relative superiority of one to the other; that belongs to a controversy of a later time. He does, however, very definitely co-ordinate them and insist on their mutual necessity. If he does give at times a preference to charity and the practical, his ultimate reason is doubtless the fact of the mystery of love, the Incarnation.

Let us see how he does co-ordinate them. Two passages will suffice.

In the Mystagogia he speaks of the soul alone as image and type of the Church. The soul’s intellectual power is distinguished into the theoretical and the practical, to which correspond the mind and reason, the term of whose activity is the truth and the good, which are God.³¹⁷ It is useless to follow all the subtleties of the five pairs which he builds up and the comparison of this decade with others. The essential is simple and clear: the whole of the ascetic and spiritual life are unified in their one object, though they may tend toward it under different aspects. This will be the ultimate basis why, apart from the example of the Incarnation, one must always insist on having both theory and practice.

This same thought appears more concretely in the preface of one of his later works. Maximus summarizes briefly Marinus’ struggle for God and then concludes:

So then life has become for you (Marinus) interpreter of reason; and reason has become the substance of life, the two thus describing the man verily new in Christ, who is a well-made copy of God the creator, bearing His image and likeness, which here must be understood as truth and goodness, which are respectively the goal for theory and practice.³¹⁸

Here a further note is added. The image is referred to the truth, the likeness to the good. Why? Because the image is the rational soul itself; the likeness was lost and is restored only by the gnomic activity, returning the image to the divine likeness.³¹⁹ I do not wish to imply that the image, the rational part, suffered not at all; in fact ignorance is its primary defect³²⁰ from which all the others flow. Yet, in this phrase Maximus perhaps best of all indicates what is most proper to his thought: the insistence on gnome and on love.

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