jesus of nazarteh and cosmic redemption - copy

Modem Theology 12:2 April 1996 ISSN 0266-7177

JESUS OF NAZARETH AND COSMIC REDEMPTION: THE RELEVANCE OF ST. MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR1

DAVID S. YEAGO

The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos is the key to all the arcane symbolism and typology in the scriptures, and in addition, gives us knowledge of created things, both visible and intelligible. He who apprehends the mystery of the cross and the burial apprehends the inward principles (logoi) of created things; while he who is initiated into the inexpressible power of the resurrection apprehends the purpose for which God first established everything.2

I. Introduction

In a letter of 28 January 1936, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asked concerning his own Christology, "Is this still indeed the Christ of the Gospel?"3

Whatever the right answer to that question in Teilhard's case, it brings into focus a recurrent tension in theological reflection on "cosmic redemption": the tension between the particularity of the "Christ of the Gospel" and the universal scope of the transformation necessarily envisioned by any scheme of "cosmic redemption."

The easy way to think about cosmic redemption is in terms of immanent divine power everywhere at work in the depths of cosmic order. All things move, on views of this sort, by an inner dynamism, perhaps on a time-scale which we can scarcely imagine, toward some final redemptive flourishing. Or perhaps it is the process of the cosmos itself, its constant creative

Dr David S. Yeago Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, SC 29203, USA

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achievement of new syntheses and coherences, rather than any putative goal of the process, that is redemptive. In any event, redemption is conceived as universal process, as a dimension or concomitant of the reality of the cosmos as such, an impulse dispersed, so to speak, through the generality of things.4

Within such a view, Jesus Christ functions most commonly as the symbolic focus of the universal process of redemption. In his life and destiny, the essential dynamism of the redemptive process comes into view with a unique clarity and urgency, perhaps to such a degree that in him the process as a whole achieves critical mass and becomes irreversible.5

The implication of this approach is that Jesus Christ is redeemer insofar as his life and destiny bring into focus a truth, a value, or a dynamism which is not unique to him, but dispersed throughout the generality of things.6 One could not, perhaps, discern the operation of the redemptive process in the universe at large were it not first focused and represented in his life and destiny; but the dynamism of the process could, in principle, be described without constitutive reference to him. Even if his life and destiny are taken to be the point at which the redemptive process becomes irreversible, what becomes irreversible in his life and destiny is a process that is not particular to him, but is rather a general feature of the ontology of cosmic being as such.

The difficulty with this approach is that it runs counter to deeply held Christian convictions about the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians have usually believed, implicitly or explicitly, that the particular person Jesus of Nazareth is the universal savior precisely as a particular person, in virtue of that which is unique to him, and this conviction is deeply imbedded in the liturgies and spiritual practices of Christian communities, as well as in the New Testament scriptures.7 According to this common Christian view, it is indeed the "Christ of the Gospel" who is the redeemer, the singular figure whose unique story is recounted in the canonical gospels, and his universal saving significance cannot be abstracted from the singular particularities of that narrative. Therefore redemption itself cannot be described without constitutive reference to the particular person who is the redeemer, and to the concrete specificity of his story.

It is not the purpose of this paper to argue for this common Christian view of the particularity of Jesus Christ; I want rather to take it as a starting-point and explore its implications for a theology of cosmic redemption. How can we think of Jesus of Nazareth as redeemer of the cosmos, if we hold to the common Christian view that Jesus is redeemer precisely as a particular person, by virtue of the singular identity and story which distinguish him from all others?

The difficulties posed by this question are immediately apparent. Theology, especially in modern times, has had trouble enough making sense of the claim that a particular first-century Palestinian Jew, in his particularity, is the saviour of all humankind, of universal and unsurpassable

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redemptive significance for every human person.8 But at least when we talk of the redemption of humankind by the particular person Jesus, there is a sort of starting-point in Terence's homo sum et nil humanum alienum a me puto. To talk of the non-alienness of one person's singular identity and destiny to other persons is by no means already to talk of universal and unsurpassable saving significance. But it does perhaps serve as a starting-point for conversation.

When we turn to the matter of cosmic redemption, however, we seem to lack even this vague and indefinite point of departure. What sense could it make to say that a particular Jew, and the thirty-odd year sequence of events which make up his singular story, are of universal and unsurpassable redemptive significance for the whole cosmos? That the final meaning and purpose of the galaxies, the amino acids, and the fruit fly subsist in their relation to the particular person Jesus of Nazareth, precisely insofar as he is a particular person? It is, we might as well admit, an exceedingly odd-sounding claim, and one that poses enormous difficulties for reflection.

This essay will not attempt any positive resolution of these difficulties; that would exceed both the scope of the undertaking and the qualifications of its author. Rather, I want to explore at a formal and methodological level the conditions which any proposed resolution must meet, if it is to hold as an initial premise that Jesus of Nazareth is the redeemer by virtue of his particularity. That is to say, I want to consider the conceptual constraints which the particularity of the redeemer imposes on a Christian theology of cosmic redemption.

I shall do so by way of a consideration of the thought of a significant figure in Christian history who was much exercised with just these issues, St. Maximus the Confessor. If contemporary schoolchildren knew this sort of thing, every schoolchild would know two things about the theology of St. Maximus: that he was a great christologian, and that he though profoundly about cosmic redemption. Moreover, the question of the particularity of Christ and its significance is at the heart of his christological achievement: it was, after all, for the sake of his interpretation of the narrative of Christ's action in the Garden of Gethsemane that he endured torture and exile and received the title "Confessor" in the memory of the Church.

One could go about this in either of two ways: one could begin with Maximus' theology of cosmic redemption, and work out its links with his christology, or one could begin with his christology and consider its implications for cosmic redemption. In this paper, I shall pursue the latter course, which has certain advantages for an inquiry whose aims are primarily systematic rather than historical. In the next part (II) of the paper, therefore, we shall look at Maximus' account of the particularity of Jesus Christ; then we will consider the logical implications of this account for a theology of cosmic redemption (III.l) and in a final section (III.2) ask whether there is any reason to suppose that Maximus himself acknowledged


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these implications in his own reflection on the meaning and destiny of the cosmic order.

II. The Particularity of Christ

1. The Neo-Chalcedonian Christology A few words need to be said about the specific tradition of christological reflection in which Maximus stood. Maximus was the inheritor, and I would say the perfecter, of what modern scholarship refers to as the "Neo-Chalcedonian" christology in the eastern church. This christology was a theological development of the sixth century whose central conceptual moves were worked out in the writings of Leontius of Jerusalem; it was given a very competent popularization in the christological writings of the emperor Justinian, and achieved conciliar reception in the formulations of the Second Council of Constantinople (552) .9

The aim of the Neo-Chalcedonian christology was to interpret the definition of Chalcedon in a manner faithful to the central christological insights of Cyril of Alexandria. The main conceptual device used in doing so was the notion of hupostasis, which had developed into a fairly precise instrument through its employment in trinitarian theology, but had not previously been used with equal rigor in discussions of christology. The chief conceptual achievement of the Neo-Chalcedonians was the notion of "union with respect to hupostasis" which was the centerpiece of their attempt to integrate the Chalcedonian "two natures" into a consistently Cyrillian insistence on the strict identity of the divine Logos with the human Jesus.

I will make three assumptions about the character of this Neo-Chalcedonian christology for whose validity I cannot argue in this paper, even though some or all of them may be controversial.

i. The Neo-Chalcedonian direction in christology involves a particular way of taking the christological problem. The language of Chalcedon has often been taken to suggest that the christological problem is essentially that of making sense of the union of two apparently mutually exclusive "natures." How can the divine and the human, the uncreated and the created, the infinite and the finite, be one? Thus, as Paul Wesche has pointed out in the case of the Antiochene tradition, the unity of Christ is seen as the product of the incarnation; the christological problem is taken to be that of explaining how such a metaphysically odd product could be constituted.10

The Neo-Chalcedonians follow Cyril by, in effect, rejecting this formulation of the problem. The subject-matter of christology is not "natures" and their possible or actual synthesis, but rather a person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is confessed to be the Son of God. The one Jesus Christ is the datum, the presupposition, given in Scripture and the doxology of the Church; the starting-point for christology is the single ascriptive subject of the Gospel narratives and the praise of the community.

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The christological problem, consequently, is rightly understood not as a metaphysical puzzle about how the divine and the human might be one, but as the more modest problem of explicating coherently what the Bible and the liturgy say about Jesus. It is said of this single subject that he created the world and died on a cross, that he healed by a word of command and hungered, thirsted, and grew weary. What's going on here? What shall we make of this? How shall we explicate this language?

ii. This leads to the second assumption I shall make. The Neo-Chalcedonian christology is not intended to offer a speculative description or explanation of the reality of the incarnate Son of God. This would make nonsense of the repeated assertions of all the ancient Greek christologians that such a description is impossible in principle. Rather, Neo-Chalcedonian christology should be read as a highly technical attempt to explicate the logic of Christian claims about Jesus of Nazareth. The question animating the Neo-Chalcedonians is not, that is to say, "What is the being of the incarnate Logos like?" but rather, "What does it mean to say 'the Logos became flesh'?" What is being asserted in that sentence, and what not? In what senses should we take the terms of which it is composed, and in what senses not? How does it cohere with the analogy of faith, with the complex of other judgements which seem obligatory for Christian belief—for example, "the Logos, being God, is not a part of the world"?

iii. Since they are being employed in this sort of project, the technical conceptualities of the Neo-Chalcedonian christology should be taken as open-textured, formal categories, instruments of analysis rather than heavily determined, materially weighted concepts, carriers of far-reaching substantive commitments. They are, so to speak, grammatical rather than constitutive categories, metaphysica generalis rather than metaphysica specialis, heuristic rather than explanatory in function. They are formal tools of analysis, which help us articulate the logic of our judgements, rather than constitutive principles of a worldview or a speculative ontology.11

Thus, for example, I would suggest that the distinction between ousia/ phusis and hupostasis/prosopon, which is central to the Neo-Chalcedonian christology, is at bottom a simple, commonsensical distinction, grounded in observation of the way we talk in ordinary language.12 We talk about things in two different registers, the register of ousia and the register of hupostasis, which might be described roughly as providing answers to the questions, "What?" and "Who?" or "Which one?" respectively. The distinction of these two registers provides the Neo-Chalcedonians with a heuristic axis along which to order and explicate and coordinate the Church's scriptural-liturgical discourse about Jesus Christ: some kinds of things are appropriately said when we are talking about who Jesus Christ is, when we are speaking kath' hupostasin, other kinds of things are appropriately said when we are talking about what Jesus Christ is, when we are speaking kat' ousian. The fact that extremely complex analyses can be developed from


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this simple starting point does not tell against its basic formal-grammatical character.13

2. The Particularity of Jesus Christ in Letter 15 In his writings against the followers of Severus of Antioch, Maximus employs the Neo-Chalcedonian conceptual tools above all to refute the charge that the Chalcedonian distinction of natures necessarily implies a Nestorian division of the one Christ. In doing so, he develops very subtle and sophisticated accounts of the grammar of such concepts as sameness and otherness, identity and difference. It is in the course of such an analysis in perhaps the most impressive of these early writings, Letter 15, that he comes to deal with the significance of the particularity of Christ's humanity.

His argument starts out from some general observations on the different ways in which we talk of "unity" in the registers of ousia and hupostasis:

Things united according to one and the same ousia or nature ... are in every case of the same ousia with one another and different in hupostasis. They are of the same ousia, by the principle (logos) of the common quality of essence observed in them indistinguishably, in natural identity, with respect to which one is not that which it is and is called to a greater degree than another, but all admit one and the same definition and description (logos) of ousia. They are different in hupostasis, by the principle (logos) of the otherness of person distinguishing them, with respect to which one is distinguished from another, not coinciding with one another in the features which are characteristic with respect to hupostasis; rather, each one brings in the collection of its features an altogether particular description (idikotaton logon) of its own with respect to hupostasis, with respect to which it does not admit sharing with those of the same nature or ousia.14

Maximus' argument is essentially a simple one: when we say that two or more things are one in what they are, we necessarily admit at the same time that they are different in who or which ones they are. Were they said to be one in both registers, there would be no grounds for speaking of the "union" of "things united" (ta henomena) in the first place; there would in that case simply be "one thing," identity undifferentiated in any respect.

We say that things are one in the register of ousia, in what they are, when we can ascribe to them indifferently some common quality (koinotes) of ousia; we say that they are different in the register of hupostasis, in who or which ones they are, when we can assign to each some collection of distinctive features (idiomata) which is not shared with any other. Thus whenever we say that two or more are homoousia, we recognize a "logos of the common quality of essence" in virtue of which we predicate oneness in the register of ousia, and an "altogether particular logos" or a "logos of



otherness of person" in virtue of which we predicate otherness in the register of hupostasis.15

The converse, according to Maximus, is also true:

On the other hand, things united according to one and the same hupostasis or person, that is, things making up one and the same hupostasis by virtue of union, are of the same hupostasis with one another and different in ousia. They are of the same hupostasis by the principle (logos) of the indivisible personal singular (monas) made up of them by virtue of union. By virtue of this principle (logos), the features differentiating each from its own common quality of ousia are rendered characteristics of the one hupostasis made up of them, by virtue of the conjunction (sunodos) with one another which is simultaneous with their existence. With respect to this one hupostasis, they are observed to be identical with one another, admitting no differentiation at all. . . They are, on the other hand, different in ousia by the principle (logos) of the otherness of their natures from one another, with respect to which they by no means admit the definitions and descriptions (logoi) of one another with respect to ousia. But each will yield a description (logos) of its own ousia which does not coincide with that of the other.16

Thus when we say that two or more distinguishable realities have become one in who or which one they are, we necessarily admit that they are different in what they are. Again, if they were not different in what they are, in the register of ousia, there would be no sense in speaking of "union" (henosis) in the register of hupostasis at all. We talk of "union" only against a background of difference; if the union is in the register of hupostasis, then the difference must be located in the register of ousia, and vice-versa.

We say that two or more are one in hupostasis when they make up an "indivisible personal monas,"17 a singular subject of attribution. This is the case when the particular features of each, by which each is distinguished from others of the same kind, are found in "a conjunction with one another which is simultaneous with their existence." That is to say, we always find that which distinguishes A' from other A together with that which distinguishes B' from other B, so that while we the differentiate A from B, we cannot differentiate A' from B'. The particularities of A' and the particularities of B' thus make up one single particular: they are the same one, indistinguishable in which one or who they are, in the register of hupostasis. In this respect, Maximus says, A' and B' are identical with one another, admitting no differentiation at all, even though they are different in another respect, in respect of what they are.

The example Maximus gives of this concept of "union with respect to hupostasis" is the union of body and soul in a particular human being:

Thus it is in the case of the human soul and body. For the features which mark off someone's body from other bodies, and someone's soul from


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other souls, coming together by virtue of union, characterize and at the same time mark off from other humans the hupostasis made up of them, that of Peter, for example, or of Paul. But these features do not mark off the soul of Peter from his own body. For both, soul and body, are identical (tautos) with one another, by the principle (logos) of the one hupostasis made up of them by virtue of union. For neither of these actually exists on its own, separate from the other, before their composition (sunthesis) to produce the species. For the production (genesis), the composition, and the constitution (sumplerosis) of the species by virtue of their composition, are simultaneous with one another.18

It is important to see here that Maximus is not proposing that the union of the two natures in Christ is "like" the union of body and soul in a human being. The example does not illumine the phusiologia of Christ directly but rather the grammar of the ways in which we use the concepts of identity and difference in the interplay of the registers of ousia and hupostasis.19

Maximus is not providing a "model" for incarnation, but suggesting that clarity about the grammar of these concepts will enable us to talk coherently about identity and difference in the inexpressible mystery of Christ.20

Thus we distinguish body and soul with respect to what they are, and we also distinguish particular bodies and particular souls from other bodies and souls with respect to which ones or whose they are. But the characteristic features by which we differentiate Peter's soul from other souls do not differentiate Peter's soul from Peter's body in its corresponding differentiation from other bodies. On the contrary, it is these characteristic features which mark the identity of Peter's soul with Peter's body in the register of hupostasis.

Thus if we describe the characteristic features of Peter's soul, and ask "Who is that?" we will get the answer, "Peter." But if we describe the characteristic features of Peter's body, and ask, "Who is that?" we will get exactly the same answer: "Peter." It is never possible to isolate the idiomata of Peter's soul from the idiomata of Peter's body and ascribe them to different subjects; they have no real existence apart from one another, and so they make up an indivisible monas, a single, irreducible ascriptive subject, in the register of hupostasis. In this register, they are simply identical with one another and admit no differentiation at all. And Peter is Peter in particular insofar as he is inseparably this body and this soul at the same time.

It is by way of this grammar of sameness and otherness in the interplay of the registers of ousia and hupostasis that Maximus proposes to explicate the logic and implications of Christian claims concerning Jesus Christ.

For it was not by those features by which the flesh was marked off from other humans that it preserved its difference from the Logos; nor, by the same token, was it by those features by which it differed from the Logos



that it was also marked off from us. But by those by which it was marked off from us, it preserved its union or identity with the Logos with respect to hupostasis, and by those by which it was naturally united with us it kept intact its difference in terms of ousia from the Logos. Likewise too the Logos, by those features by which he was marked off from the common deity as Son and Logos, preserved the union or identity with the flesh with respect to hupostasis; and united with respect to ousia with the Father and the Spirit by those features by which he guards as God the difference in nature from the flesh, he preserved both difference and identity alternately in relation to himself and to the two terms [i.e., of humanity and deity].21

In the case of Jesus, we distinguish deity from flesh with respect to what they are, and at the same time, we distinguish this one who is God from the Father and the Spirit, and this flesh from other flesh, with respect to which ones or who they are. But the characteristic features in terms of which we differentiate the flesh of Jesus from other flesh do not differentiate his flesh from his deity in its corresponding differentiation from the deity of the Father and the Spirit. Rather, those features which distinguish Jesus' humanity from the humanity of others, and those which differentiate the deity of the Logos from the deity of the Father and the Spirit, are precisely the features in terms of which we identify Jesus and the Logos as one and the same, a singular subject admitting no differentiation at all, in the register of hupostasis.

Thus if we ask, "Who was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered under Pontius Pilate?" the answer is "Our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God." But if we ask, "Who was begotten of the Father before all worlds?" we get exactly the same answer: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God." The particularities of the humanity and the particularities of the deity cannot be abstracted from one another and ascribed to distinct subjects; in the mystery of the voluntary kenosis of the divine Logos, they have no real existence apart from one another, and so make up an irreducibly singular subject of attribution.22

In all this, Maximus is in effect offering a careful conceptual analysis of what was described above as the common Christian view that the particular person Jesus of Nazareth is the universal savior as a particular person. On Maximus' terms, it is when we speak of Jesus as a particular human that we speak of him as identical with the divine Logos: it is insofar as the flesh of Christ is this flesh, and no other, that it is the flesh of the Son of God.

... being distinguished from the two terms, his Father and his Mother, by the principle (logos) of the uniqueness (idiotes) of his own parts with respect to hupostasis, he displayed himself as having the singular reality (to monadikon) of his own hupostasis without any differentiation

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whatsoever (paútelos adiaphoron), united in every respect in the supreme identity of person of his own parts with one another.^

Thus if we speak of the human reality of Jesus in non-particular terms, in terms of what is common to it and to all other human reality, then our discourse remains in the register of ousia, in which we must distinguish between the flesh and the Logos who is God by nature: "... by those idiomata by which it was naturally united with us, it kept intact its difference from the Logos in the register of ousia (ousiode) ..." The human Jesus is one and the same subject as the universal Logos of God insofar as he is a particular person, insofar as he is this human, and no other. If only one who is God can be said to be of universal and unsurpassable saving significance, and if the human Jesus is identical with one of the Holy Trinity insofar as he is a particular human, differentiated from all others, then Jesus is of universal and unsurpassable saving significance precisely insofar as he is a particular human, this one and no other.

Moreover, the same logic of particular and universal holds with respect to the deity of Christ.

By those features by which the flesh is marked off as differentiated from us, it was identical with the Logos with respect to hupostasis; and by those features by which the Logos was differentiated from the Father and the Spirit, marked off as Son, he kept intact his singleness (to monadikon) with the flesh with respect to hupostasis.24

Thus it is precisely as Son and Logos, insofar as his deity is particularized in relation to the Father and the Spirit, that the Logos is one singular subject with the human reality of Jesus. And this implies that it is precisely with reference to his distinctive role in the indivisible working of the Triune God that we must identify the Logos as the particular human Jesus: it is as the Logos by whom all things were made (John 1:2-3), the Image of the unseen God, in whom all things hold together (Col 1:15,17), that the coessential Son of God is one irreducible singular (monas) with the particular flesh of Jesus, without any differentiation whatsoever.25

3. Identity and Agency in Ambigua 5 The analysis in Letter 15 is quite formal and relatively abstract; in particular, it makes no reference to the concrete agency of Jesus Christ, to his singular history. Nevertheless, his sophisticated development of the conceptual tools of Neo-Chalcedonian christology made it possible for Maximus to deal with issues of agency and history in the context of the monoenergist and monthelite controversies.

When the christological issue was posed in terms of energies, the theme of agency became unavoidable, for as Maximus defines it in Ambigua 5, his



great essay against the monoenergists, the two concepts of energy and agency are intimately linked:

The sole and true demonstration of the ousia is its constitutive natural power (dunamis). One would not go wrong if one called this the natural energy, which is properly and primarily characteristic of the ousia as its formative movement, the most typical element in the total overall uniqueness (idiotes) inherent in it, apart from which it is merely non-being.26

Thus we might speak of energy as "character in action," the distinctiveness of what a thing is in motion, by virtue of which it appears in the world as that sort of thing. Thus energy is the apodeixis of ousia, its self-display or manifestation in the world. Thus when we speak of the energies of Christ we are speaking of what he is (in the register of ousia) insofar as it is displayed or manifested in characteristic activity.

It is easy to see why, within the conceptual framework of Neo-Chalcedonianism, the question of energies could easily lead to confusion between the registers of ousia and hupostasis. If the notion of energy can be described as that of "character in action," then the concept does involve reference both to ousia and to hupostasis in a way that requires careful handling. Energy itself falls in the register of ousia; it is the dynamic kinesis characteristic of what a thing is. But the acts in which energy is manifested must be spoken of in the register of hupostasis, since ousia cannot in a strict sense be an ascriptive subject of action, only particular somethings or some-ones, hupostases. Thus it is necessary to say that a hupostasis performs actions in which the specific energy of its ousia is concretely displayed. A response to monoenergism required a clear account of the logic of the relationship between the hypostasis/action nexus and the energy/ousia nexus, in the unique and unparallelled case of Jesus Christ.

The application to questions of agency of the Neo-Chalcedonian analysis worked out so precisely in Letter 15 is signalled by a terminological shift. In Letter 15, Maximus spoke of two "logoi" which determine the relationship between things which are of the some ousia: "the logos of the common quality of essence observed in them indistinguishably," and "an altogether particular logos (idikotaton logon) of its own with respect to hupostasis, with respect to which it does not admit sharing with those of the same nature or ousia."27 In Maximus' later christological writing, this distinction is subsumed into the logos/tropos distinction, about which so much has been written in recent scholarship.28

For we know that the principle of being (ho tou einai logos) is one thing, and the mode of being-in-a-certain-way (ho tou pus einai tropos) is another, the one attesting the nature, the other the economy. The


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coincidence of these, which brings about the great mystery of the supernatural natural constitution (phusiologia) of Jesus, displayed the differentiation of energies and their union, preserved in the same one, the differentiation observed without separation in the description (logos) in terms of nature of those realities which have been united, the union signalled without confusion in the single (monadikös) mode (tropos) of those things which have come to pass (tön ginomenön).29

The crucial distinction here is that between what a thing is, determined by its logos of being, and how a thing is, the particular way or tropos in which its nature is actualized. The former is a matter of general truths about things of a specific kind, and thus falls in the register of ousia; the latter is a matter of the concrete actions of particular agents, and so falls in the register of hupostasis. The connection of tropos with hupostasis is also made explicit in a passage from Opusculum 3, written in the monothelite controversy:

But the capacity to will and the act of willing are not the same, just as the capacity to speak and the act of speaking are not the same. For one is always capable of speech, but one is not always speaking. The one is a matter of ousia, contained in the principle (logos) of the nature; the other is a matter of deliberation, shaped by the intention of the one who speaks. As it is a matter of nature to be capable of speech, but a matter of hupostasis how one speaks, so it is with the capacity to will and the act of willing.30

Capacities, energies, then, are a matter of what one is; but how those capacities are actualized concretely is shaped by the intentions of this one or that one, by particular hupostases. Thus in Opusculum 10:

For each of us displays energy (energei) chiefly as being something (ti), not as being someone (tis), while as someone, Peter or Paul for example, one forms the tropos of energy, with more or less intensity, this way or that way, shaping it of oneself as one intends (kata tën gnomên). Thus in the tropos there is discerned the changeability of persons with respect to action (praxin), while in the logos there is discerned the unchangeability of natural energy.31

So, Maximus argues, there are two distinguishable energies in Christ, corresponding to the two natures, but there is a single (monadikos) tropos of their concrete realization in act, corresponding to the singularity (to monadikon) of the acting subject, the one hupostasis named Jesus Christ, God the Logos.

To talk of the singular tropos of the concrete realization of the energies of Christ is inevitably to talk of his story, of his singular history. The correlation of tropos and narrative is clear in the passage from Ambigua 5 cited above. The concept of tropos is connected with the economy and with ta genomena,



the res gestae of Christ. Specifically, the tropos tou pös einai of the "things which have come to pass" both "attests" the "economy" and "signals" the union of the energies in the one hupostasis of Christ. That is, the economy as the res gestae of a single divine subject is attested and signalled by the consistency of the singular narrative pattern of Christ's actions, despite the fact that irreducibly diverse natural energies are manifested in those same actions. The singular hupostatic agency of Christ, in which the two natures are concretely one, is manifested in the singular tropos of "the things which have come to pass," in the consistency of the way in which the divine and human energies are actualized in his concrete story.

... it is necessary to confess devoutly both of Christ's natures, of which he is the hupostasis, and his natural energies, of which he is the true union, with respect to both natures, for he displays energy (energön) self-consistently (heautö prosphuös), as a singular agent (monadikös), that is to say, according to a uniform pattern (henoeidös),and in all that he does manifests inseparably from his divine power the energy of his own flesh.32

The union of the natures and energies is not, it should be noted, conceived in abstract or merely conceptual terms. Christ himself, as a single subject, a single hupostasis, is the true union of the divine and human energies, and their unity is displayed not in any abstract "godmanhood" which could be described in general terms, but in the self-consistent, singular pattern of his contingent actions, in a word, in the concrete Gospel narrative.

More specifically, this singular tropos of the manifestation of the divine and human energies is the

tropos of exchange (antidosis) by virtue of the inexpressible union, which makes those things which are present naturally in one part of Christ present in the other by way of interchange (katr epallagên), without transforming or mingling either part into the other with respect to the principle (logos) of nature.33

Once again, it is important to see that this interchange of natural properties, the interpénétration of the energies of the two natures, is not a general state of affairs, an abstract synthesis of the abstract categories of humanity and deity. That would be precisely the monoenergist error Maximus is combatting. The interpénétration of energies occurs not in the register of ousia but in the register of hupostasis. The interpénétration of energies is the concrete act of the singular agent, the one hupostasis, Jesus Christ the Son of God; he is, as we have seen, in his hupostatic singularity, himself the true union of the energies.34 And the "tropos of exchange" in which the naturally diverse energies are manifested "by virtue of the inexpressible union" which he is, is simply the way things go in his story: divine things are done humanly and human things divinely.


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"He truly became human in a way that surpasses the human," keeping joined to one another without destruction the supernatural modes (tropoi) and the natural principles (logoi). Of these latter, whose synthesis was impossible, he to whom nothing was impossible became the true union, in neither of those of which he was the hupostasis working in separation from the other, but rather giving evidence of each through the other. For he is both in truth, as God moving his own humanity, as human being revealing his own deity. He endured suffering divinely, so to speak, for it was voluntary, since he was not a mere human being; he worked miracles humanly, for he did so by means of the flesh, since he was not bare God. Thus the sufferings were miraculous, made new by the natural divine power of the one suffering; while the miracles were passible, accomplished by the passible natural power of the flesh of the one who worked these marvels.35

For the incarnate Logos joined the whole passible power of his own humanity to the whole active power of his own deity by virtue of the indissoluble union; being God in a human way, he worked the miracles, which were accomplished by the flesh which is passible by nature, and being human in a divine way, he under went the sufferings of the human nature, which were accomplished by divine freedom. Or rather he did both theandrically, as God and human being at the same time.36

In this way, the notion of the tes antidoseos tropos of the manifestation of the divine and human energies is a description of the singular texture of the Gospel narratives, a characterization of what is distinctive about the pattern of the doings and sufferings of the particular person Jesus of Nazareth.

It is this association of the notion of tropos with singular agency, and so with the contingent and particular, that underlies its other major association in Maximus' thought, with eschatological, redemptive newness. Redemption, for Maximus, does not mean the alteration of the logos of the ousia of that which is redeemed: what it is remains the same. The newness of redemption is a newness of how things are, of the way in which they exist.37

And this newness comes on the scene precisely in the singular agency of Christ, in the contingency of his story, in the particular way in which he acts and lives, in which the human and the divine are united in a surprising and unexpected pattern of joint manifestation.

[The life of the saviour] was new, not only because it was alien and contradictory (paradoxon) to those on earth, and as yet unknown to the nature of things, but also because it was the character of a new energy of one living life in a new way (tou kainös biosantos).38

Thus Maximus' application of Neo-Chalcedonian analysis to the question of energy and agency confirms and extends the conclusions we reached in



considering Letter 15. There we saw that the humanity of Jesus is identical with the Logos of God insofar as it is a particular humanity, and conversely, the Logos of God is identical with his humanity insofar as he is another than the Father and the Spirit. Now we can say also that the redemptive unity of the divine nature with the flesh appears in the world in the particular tropos of the redeemer's history, in the singular pattern of the res gestae of the unique agent, Jesus Christ.

The unity thus manifested is not a generality but rather a particular, the hupostasis of the Logos itself, the single acting subject, the monas, as which the divine and the human are one. It is in the concrete particularity of this subject that the divine and human energies interpenetrate, and the manifestation of their redemptive interpénétration is the Gospel history itself. Thus redemption is not a general state of affairs, something which could be described without mentioning the particular person of the redeemer; redemption is what happens in the story of Jesus, impossible to characterize without constitutive reference to "the things that have come to pass" in that particular narrative.39

III. Particularity and Cosmic Redemption

1. The Universality of a Particular Person: The Problem of Connection The christology of St. Maximus, as we have seen, offers us a conceptually sophisticated explication of the common Christian claim invoked at the beginning of this paper: the claim that it is precisely "the Christ of the Gospel," the particular one whose unique story is told in the scriptural witness, who is as such the redeemer. With Maximus' exposition behind us, we are now in a position to consider more closely the implications of this common Christian conviction for a theology of cosmic redemption.

According to this conviction, that which is of universal and unsurpassable redemptive significance has the logical status of a particular. This point is clear in Maximus' exposition. Though the distinction of the two natures in the register of ousia is essential, the actuality of redemption is always located in the register of hupostasis. And that means that redemption falls logically in the register of particularity; what I have called the register of ousia is the logical domain of generality, while discourse kath' hupostasin is always talk of particular someones or somethings as particulars. Thus, according to Maximus, Christian faith identifies the universal with a particular person and the particular "things which have come to pass" in his story; that which is of universal and unsurpassable redemptive significance is, in Hans Urs von Balthasar's phrase, a universale concretum, a concrete and particular universal.40

In making this claim, Maximus violates what Robert W. Jenson has called the "no-persons rule" in the western philosophical tradition.41 From the


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pre-Socratic philosophers on, that tradition had regularly assumed that the universal must be found by way of generalization, and thus by abstraction from particularity of the sort that characterizes persons. That is, talk of the universal must logically be talk in the register of ousia rather than the register of hupostasis. The universal must be something like an ideal, a principle, a common structure of being or dynamic of process, a ground that is equidistant from every phenomenon, or something of the sort. And the relationship of the universum to the universale must be described in the same terms. It is by virtue of some "universal property" in the register of ousia, observed in each indistinguishably, that the totality of things relates to the universal.

The christology of Maximus, and according to him, the logic of Christian belief as such, denies this rule, asserting that "the particular historic reality of Jesus of Nazareth is the key function in the true metaphysical structure of reality."42 The universal is a particular person, who is universal precisely by virtue of the "logos of the prosopic otherness" distinguishing him from others as a particular person, and the singular tropos of the things which have come to pass in his story. The problem which this claim poses to any theology of redemption, especially to a theology of cosmic redemption, is what might be called the problem of connection. If the redemptive universal is a particular, how is this particular redemptively related to everything else? What is the logic of the connection between the universale and the universum, if the universal is itself a particular?43

The identification of that which is of universal and unsurpassable redemptive significance with a particular person and his singular history logically excludes the modes of connection commonly relied on by ontologies cast in the register of generality. Thus, to begin with, the universal cannot be related to the totality of things as a class is related to its members, so that the universal is a general property in the register of ousia which characterizes each particular. Therefore, on Maximus' terms, it will not be possible to say that Jesus is cosmic redeemer because we see more clearly in him than elsewhere that redemptive dynamic which is at work everywhere in the cosmic order. For that involves describing what is redemptive about Jesus in terms that do not distinguish him as a particular person.

But it will also be impossible, on this premise, to speak of the universal in terms of a particular that is universal in that it is related to others with reference to some shared property on a scale of intensity. This seems to be what Ian Barbour recommends when he suggests that the redemptive relationship of Christ to other humans (and so to the cosmos) is a matter of "differences in degree" which "can add up to differences in kind, but with no absolute lines."44 That is to say, in Christ we see the same redemptive process that is going on elsewhere—"only more so." That redemptive impulse which is more or less intensively operative in other persons, and in the cosmos as a whole, is operative with unique and perhaps unsurpassable



intensity in Christ; and it is by virtue of this intensity that the particular person Jesus is redeemer.

But this also is incompatible with Maximus' particularist christology. For here too, that which is redemptive about Jesus Christ is not defined in terms of the "logos of prosopic otherness" with respect to which he is differentiated from others; that is, he is not designated redeemer as a particular person, but as manifesting a general property in a quantitatively significant way. The line between Jesus and other persons, according to Maximus, is first and foremost the very ordinary line that can be drawn between any particular and other particulars, between this one and all others. And it is this line, the one that marks off Jesus as a particular person, that delineates his universal redemptive significance.

The exclusion of these two modes of relationship between the universale and the universum, the class/members relationship and relationship on a scale of intensity, also excludes the reflective operations by which we chart such relationships. Thus, for example, we cannot chart the relationship of redemption and a redeemer to the redeemed by way of logical inference: to take the case of cosmic redemption, we can neither proceed inductively from what we know of the cosmic order to a conception of its redemption or its redeemer, nor deductively from the idea of redemption of a redeemer to construct an image of the cosmos. Both these operations run aground, in the context of a christology like that of Maximus, on the irreducible contingency of particulars.

All these ways of understanding the relationship between the universal and the universum, the redeemer and the redeemed, are variants of what Louis Mink has called theoretical understanding. Mink distinguishes this type of understanding from what he calls "configurational" understanding, a distinction whose theological usefulness has been explored by Michael Root. According to Mink,

Theory makes possible the explanation of an occurrence only by describing it in such a way that the description is logically related to a systematic set of generalizations or laws. One understands the power of a spring-powered watch, for example, only insofar as one understands the principles of mechanics, and this requires describing the mechanism of the watch in terms, and only in terms, appropriate to those principles ...45

Those accounts of the relationship of the redeemer and redemption to the redeemed, of the universal to the universum, which Maximus' christology excludes are all instances of theoretical understanding in this sense: they make it possible to account for what is redemptive about the redeemer and redemption only by describing them "in such a way that the description is logically related to a systematic set of generalizations," that is, to a set of characteristics falling in the register of ousia.


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By contrast, configurational understanding is the kind of grasp of connections offered by a narrative. As Root points out,

the sort of understanding gained from narrative does not abstract from the concrete individuality of that which is understood. Narrative depict events "... as elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships. Thus a letter which I burn may be understood not only as an oxidizable substance but as a link with an old friend. It may have relieved a misunderstanding, raised a question, or changed my plans at a crucial moment. As a letter, it belongs to a kind of story, a narrative of events which would be unintelligible without reference to it. But to explain this I would not construct a theory of letters or of friendships but would, rather, show how it belongs to a particular configuration of events like a part in a jigsaw puzzle." Narrative helps us understand events by locating them within larger, meaningful patterns. Thus Mink calls this sort of understanding configurational.46

Thus configurational understanding accounts for what is to be understood by placing it within a configuration of particulars, forming a singular meaningful pattern. Within such a configuration, the significance of a particular is not grasped in abstraction from its particularity, as a generality of which it is an instance. Rather, the significance of the particular will be found in its concrete placement in the pattern, in the singular network of contingent relations in which it stands to other particulars within the pattern. And a particular can be of "universal significance" within a configurational pattern to the extent that by virtue of its singular particularity—the singular tropos of its concrete existence—it is centrally placed within the pattern, so that the significance of every other element must be described with reference to it as focal point. Thus the centrality of the resolution of a plot in relation to the incidents, characters, and themes leading up to it, or the centrality of the central figure in a painting, is a configurational centrality.47

Thus a christology like that of Maximus could be said to require a "configurational" account of the redeemer in relation to the redeemed, of the universal in relation to the universum, in which the redemptive significance of Jesus Christ is explicated by describing the unique position which he occupies, as a particular person with a singular, contingent history, in the "single and concrete complex of relationships" that makes up the reality of creation. Thus just as in Mink's example there is no general theory of letters in terms of which I can account for the significance of this letter, only the particular configuration of events in which it has played a singular role, so too there is no general concept of redemption in terms of which to account for the significance of Christ, only this person Jesus of Nazareth with his singular story, and the unique role which Christians believe him to occupy in the total configuration of events which is the reality of creation.



Connections between the redeemer and the redeemed will have to be charted, therefore, not by any sort of demonstrative procedure, but by arguments from narrative or aesthetic consistency, discernment of correspondences and analogies, and the like. Conclusions will be arrived at, not by logically compelling chains of inference, but by judgements of fitness, on the basis of what the western scholastics would call rationes convenientes. It may be possible to exclude some accounts of the redeemed, of the universum, on the grounds that they would make impossible a fitting construal of the relationship of the redeemed to this particular redeemer, of the universum to the concrete universal. It will be more difficult to say that a particular construal of the universum in its relation to the concretum universale (including Maximus' own) is the only one possible; at most, one will be able to argue that it is more fitting, more apt, more consistent with the particularity of the redeemer, than other alternatives.48

2. Configurational Understanding in St. Maximus: The Parallellism of "Natural" and "Scriptural" Theoria

To this point, we have been working out from St. Maximus' particularist christology to what would seem to be necessary in a theology of cosmic redemption consistent with it. Now we must ask if there is any reason to suppose that Maximus himself actually drew these conclusions in practice in his own theological reflection on the cosmos.

It is important to be clear what kind of evidence we may reasonably expect. Although Maximus' thought is marked by a deep internal consistency, it is not developed in a systematic way. We should not, therefore, expect to see Maximus himself working out from his christology to his theology of cosmic redemption as we have just done. Despite its profundity, his theology of cosmic redemption is occasional, prompted by requests for clarification from others or specific theological challenges; moreover, he is always, in such writings, working with large blocks of traditional material— Origenist, Cappadocian, Dionysian - which he labors to bring into an orthodox synthesis. At all times, his interest in spiritual formation predominates over any concern for systematic comprehension. Under these conditions, the most we may reasonably anticipate is a convergence of his reflection on the cosmos toward the formal christology and its exigencies, points of intersection rather than systematic correlations.

It seems most economical to pursue this question by way of a conversation with the recent work of Paul M. Blowers on Maximus' scriptural exegesis, with special reference to a phenomenon which Blowers highlights, the parallel and complementary roles played in Maximus' work by "natural" and "scriptural" theoria.

Building on the observations of Hans Urs von Balthasar and others, Blowers points out that Maximus presents cosmos and scripture as "objective


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economies of divine revelations that stand in a perfect analogous relation to the Logos-Revealer."49 The relation between the two is one of a "fundamental reciprocity, and indeed interchangeability, established between creation (natural law) and scripture (written law) in virtue of their underlying symbolic structure and their common access to the intelligible mystery of the incarnate Logos.',so Thus Maximus writes in Ambigua 10:

I am thinking here, on the one hand, of the natural law, which is ordained as uniformly as possible according to reason, and which, in the manner of a bible contains, through its interrelated wonders, the harmonious web of the universe (to enarmonion tou pantos uphasma) ... On the other hand, I also have in mind the written law, which is ordained for our instruction. Through the things it wisely dictates, the written law is constituted, like another "cosmos," of heaven and earth, and the things in between—that is, of ethical, natural, and theological philosophy. It displays the unspeakable power to make known its Dictator, and demonstrates that the two laws are interchangeably the same in relation to one another: the written law is identical kata ten dunamin with the natural law, while the natural law is identical kata ten hexin with the written law. It shows that the two laws disclose and conceal the same Logos: disclosing him in the words (të lexei) and in what appears (to phenomeno), and hiding him in the sense (tê noësei) and in what is concealed (to kruptomeno).51

The cosmos, then, is a sort of bible, and the bible is a cosmos, each at once concealing and revealing the Logos, who for Maximus is never anyone else than the incarnate Jesus Christ. Scripture makes Christ manifest in its discourse (lexis) while at the same time hiding him in its sense (noësis); the cosmos makes Christ manifest in the external phenomenon, while at the same time hiding him in what the phenomena conceal.

Note that in the parallel, the terms relating to scripture are relatively concrete (words/sense) while the terms relating to the cosmos are abstract and materially uninformative (what appears/what is concealed). This would seem to indicate that at this point, the natural law is being understood in terms of the written law: we are invited to regard the phenomena of the cosmos as a sort of text, a discourse, and that which is hidden in the cosmos as its noèsis or sense.52 The cosmos relates to Christ as text to meaning, as discourse to sense, just as the words of holy scripture can be grasped only when we have discerned how Christ is their unique skopos.

In contrast to the Evagrian tendency to regard the phenomena of the created world and the letter of scripture as obstacles to be overcome on the way to a pure intellection of the divine, Maximus proposes a kind of permanent dialectic of manifestation and hiddenness: the Logos makes himself available, "incarnates" himself, in the externality of both cosmic and



biblical text in order to draw us to himself as their hidden noësis. Thus Maximus continues the passage just cited:

For just as, when we call the words of holy scripture the garments of the Logos, and interpret its ideas as his flesh, we conceal him with the former and reveal him with the latter, so too when we call the visible species and external forms of created things garments, and interpret the logoi according to which they were created as flesh, we likewise conceal him with the former and reveal him with the latter.53

Thus the Logos is hidden precisely in rendering himself available, and is manifest as the hidden meaning of that which makes him available. Again, the practice of spiritual exegesis in the tradition of Origen is the controlling image: like the letter of the scriptures, the discourse of the cosmic text both hides and grants access to the Logos who is the true meaning of both.

As Blowers points out, it is Maximus' "theory of the unification of differentiated logoi in the divine Logos" that makes possible this simultaneous "scripturalizing" of the cosmos and "cosmologizing" of scripture.54 To be very brief indeed, two central moves in this theory are especially relevant to our purpose here. The first is Maximus' identification of the pre-existing logoi of created things with the divine intention or will in creating them.55 The logoi are not, that is to say, "forms" which pre-exist eternally by their very nature; rather, they pre-exist in God as intention pre-exists action, as the choice of the end pre-exists the selection of the means. Thus for Maximus the pre-existence of created things in God means that they are presided over not by the necessary exigencies of a system of cosmic being, but by the freedom of a God who is beyond being, huperousios. If the ultimate reason of the things that are is located in free divine choice, then it becomes possible to imagine that the coherence of the real might be a contingent configurational pattern rather than a system describable in generalizing theory.56

The second critical move in Maximus' theology of the logoi is his identification of the Logos in which they cohere with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos. This is spelled out with all clarity in the famous Questions to Thalassius 60:

This is the great and hidden mystery (musterion). This is the blessed end (telos) for which all things are ordained. This is the divine objective (skopos) conceived before the beginning of created beings. In defining it, we would say that it is the preconceived goal for which everything exists but which itself exists on account of nothing. With a clear view of this goal, God created the essences of created beings. It is, properly speaking, the terminus (peras) of providence and the things under its care. Inasmuch as it leads to God, it is the recapitulation (anakephalaiosis) of the things he has created.57

Thus the various intentions of the Creator which underly the existence of the multiplicity of created realities are all moments or aspects of his single,


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Controlling intention, which is Jesus Christ, the Logos made flesh. Maximus in this way affirms precisely the odd proposition with which this paper began: all things, the greatest and the least, the whole assembly of created beings, including the galaxies, the amino acids, and the fruit fly (Maximus doubtless knew about the latter, if not about the first two), find their meaning and purpose in their relationship to the particular person Jesus of Nazareth, who is, precisely as a particular person, the Logos of God in which all the logoi are integrated.

Taken together, these two aspects of Maximus' theory of the logoi serve to explicate, as Blowers puts it,

... how the incarnate Logos, who is in himself the law of grace, being ontologically anterior, yet historically posterior, to the natural and written laws, is the common skopos of them both; and that the historical incarnation is not merely another provisional economy but carries in itself, from the beginning of time, the eschatological key both to the destiny of creation and the fulfillment of scripture.58

It is important to note the structure which Blowers describes: what is ontologically anterior to cosmos and scripture is a particular person, the incarnate Logos, Jesus of Nazareth, who is historically posterior to the cosmic and scriptural orders of which he is the ontological ground.59 In this way, both cosmos and scripture are construed eschatologically: they can only be accounted for in terms of one who comes after them, a concrete particular who is, in a manner contingent upon the free choice of their Creator, their telos and skopos, the goal and the point aimed at in their coming-to-be.

A great deal could be said about this, but for our purposes it is important to note how this conception assimilates reflection on the relation of cosmos and Christ to the model of spiritual exegesis. The logoi of created things are related to the incarnate Logos as the letter of scripture is related to the spirit. And although Maximus very often speaks in terms of a simple opposition of sensible and intelligible reality, I.-H. Dalmais has pointed out that this distinction is always being taken up into a narrative relation between promise and fulfillment, preparation and accomplishment. "All the Hellenistic rationalism finds itself assumed into the interior of a plan of salvation, totally gratuitous, which transcends the constitution of nature."60 As Dalmais also points out, by construing the relation of scripture and cosmos to Christ in terms of a dialectique préparation-réalisation, Maximus introduces the "dimension of duration" into his synthesis.61 It remains only to point out that a synthesis of cosmos and redemption on an axis of promise and fulfillment, which allows for temporal duration and identifies the fufillment with a contingent particular, is a narrative synthesis, one in which the coherence of creation and redemption is construed as a narrative configuration.

"Natural contemplation" is the attempt of the believing intellect to grasp this configuration, passing from the appearances of created things to the



divine intention which they realize; and to apprehend the embrace of divine intention around creation necessarily means apprehending creation in relation to the Creator-Logos, Jesus Christ, whose mystery is the one divine objective in which all the logoi of creatures are united. In effect, the aim of natural contemplation is to "read" the cosmic scripture as prophecy of Jesus Christ, to discern in the contingent order and diversity of created things a provisional "embodiment" of the Logos which finds its fulfillment in the newness of the hupostatic union. Both the "tropoi of the virtues" and the "logoi of things which are able to be known by nature" are thus apprehended as "types and préfigurations" (tupoi kai procharagmata) of the "gift of the good things beyond the ages and beyond nature" which we are to receive "through the grace that is in Christ."62

Such as eschatological relation between cosmos and Christ cannot be charted by the logical operations inherent in what we have called "theoretical" understanding. There is a logical gap between the prophecy and the fulfillment; fulfillment does not simply follow from prophecy, as conclusion from premise, or cohere with it as a particularly significant instantiation of some shared general quality. "That which is capable of being known by nature" is the type and préfiguration of that which is beyond nature, received only by the grace which is in Christ. The phrase "beyond nature" marks the logical gap, the impossibility of a simple inferential movement from the promise to the fulfillment. That is to say, the fulfillment supervenes contingently on the prophecy, and the continuity between them can only be construed retrospectively, from the perspective of the fulfillment's actual occurrence. Such a continuity is, once again, necessarily a narrative continuity.

Narrative allows for both continuity and discontinuity, and thus for both kataphatic and apophatic moments in reflection on the relation of all things to Christ. Since the newness of redemption is located in the free contingency of hupostatic tropos, constitutively in the new theandric tropos of Jesus Christ and of the things that have come to pass in his story, it is not possible to anticipate the eschatological novelty of redemption by extrapolation from the logoi of the natures of the things which are to be redeemed. Thus in the archetypal case of the humanity of Jesus, Maximus writes:

For the superessential Logos, putting on all the things of the nature along with the nature in the inexpressible conception, had nothing human, kataphatically asserted by the natural logos, which was not also divine, apophatically negated by a tropos surpassing nature. The knowledge of these things is not susceptible of demonstration and so beyond understanding; it is comprehended only by the faith of those who sincerely venerate the mystery of Christ.63

Redemption preserves the logos of the nature of that which is redeemed, but negates its familiar tropos of existence. Since the latter is a matter of


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hupostasis, of concrete agency, the newness of redemption can be grasped only as it contingently comes on the scene, first of all in the singular tropos of the res gestae of Jesus of Nazareth.64

Thus for Maximus, reflection on cosmos and Christ is a kataphatic enterprise of the apophatically-disciplined believing imagination, seeking to comprehend created things as embraced by the divine intention whose single objective is the particularity of Jesus Christ and the newness that makes its appearance in his concrete agency. Or as Blowers has described it,

... its principle objective is the apprehension of the Logos-Christ (and thus too the whole Trinity) as Creator and Cause, and as Instigator of the redemptive economy concealed within the logoi of the natural creation and of scripture. One could call it, in general terms, a kind of "informed intuition," a kataphatic or affirmative confession of the magnificence (megalourgia) of the God of creation and the Mighty Acts (megalourgemata) of the God of salvation history. This contemplation is itself a grace, an open-ended kind of knowledge that is constantly needing to be elevated and spiritualized ... by the Logos himself, who is conducting the human subject toward a participation in the redemptive musterion.65

As such, the purely speculative claims of natural contemplation are inevitably modest and open to revision. Given the parallel Maximus draws between the two, we may perhaps appropriate some remarks of Blowers concerning scriptural contemplation also for our understanding of natural contemplation:

Divine pedagogy aside, anagogical exegesis, from the subjective standpoint of the exegete, can claim no direct or immediate apprehension of the mystical depth of scripture. Since the higher meanings of a text will be discovered only through sensible words, letters, and syllables, the Confessor admits that there will be considerable "stumbling and staggering over the determination of the truth" (to ptaiein peri ten krisin tes alëtheias kai sphallesthaï).

The anagogical postulates of the exegete can in the meantime be put forward only as "good and pious speculations" (kalë kai eusebë theoremata) based on an ongoing and discipled research (exetasis) into scripture.66

Reflection on cosmic redemption is thus an inevitably fragmentary and provisional enterprise, more doxological than apologetic, aiming more at consistency with the texture of a larger way of life than the speculative consistency of comprehensive vision.

Indeed, it would be a mistake to think of natural contemplation, as Maximus understands it, as an enterprise whose primary goal is speculative at all. The Christ/cosmos configuration, precisely because it is an



all-inclusive and redemptive configuration, can never be merely an object of reflection. On the contrary, reflection on the cosmos is ingredient in the fulfillment of human destiny in God, a fulfillment which Maximus describes most impressively in his scheme of the five mediations which it is the vocation of the human creature to perform.67 Two points about that scheme should be noted.

First, these unifying mediations are, in the actual history of salvation, performed first of all by Jesus Christ:

The wisdom of God the Father and his prudence are the Lord Jesus Christ, who holds together the general kinds of beings by the power of his wisdom, and likewise contains the particulars which make them up by the prudence of his understanding, since he is the creator and provider of all things, and brings what is separated into unity through himself, putting an end to the war among beings, binding all things together in peaceful friendship and indivisible harmony, "things in heaven and things on earth," as the divine Apostle says.68

Other human beings participate in this unifying role now as his disciples and participants.

Second, those mediations which are performed by contemplation—those between heaven and earth, and the sensible and intelligible creation—are placed firmly in a larger context. They are preceded by the two mediations which have to do chiefly with human agency, the mediation of male and female and of paradise and the inhabited world, which Maximus takes to be symbolic of the purification of the passions and the cultivation of the virtues. And they are followed by the mediation of God and creation in the final realization of theosis, in loving union with God. This suggests that for Maximus, natural contemplation can never be abstracted from the question of our practical relation to created things, in the context of a peaceful life ordered to union with God in Christ. While this point is somewhat tangential to the present inquiry, it may not be the least of the ways in which St. Maximus is relevant to contemporary reflection on cosmic redemption.

We may conclude, then, that there are points of convergence between Maximus's reflection on cosmic redemption and the logical demands of his particularist christology. The non-"theoretical," ascetically imaginative, open-ended character of his description of natural contemplation, understood as it is on a close analogy to the spiritual exegesis of scripture, does seem to approach in practice a "configurational" account of the connection between the universal land the universum of the sort that a particularist christology seems to require. I would suggest that both the rigor with which he pursued the logic of Christian claims about Jesus of Nazareth, and the creativity with which he addressed the problems of connection with which those claims present theology, render St. Maximus eminently relevant to the contemporary reflection on christology and cosmic redemption.


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NOTES

1 This paper was originally presented to the Eastern Orthodox Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Francisco, 23 November 1992 I am especially grateful to Robert Wilken and Paul Blowers for their comments and encouragement

2 Maximus the Confessor, "Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God, Written for Thalassios," ("The Gnostic Centuries"), First Century, no 67, in The Philokaha, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makanos of Corinth, Volume 2, translated and edited by G Ε H Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kalhstos Ware (London Faber and Faber, 1981, ρ 127 Translation altered

3 Cited by Henri de Lubac, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, trans Rene Hauge (London Collins, 1967) ρ 67

4 It should be noted that with respect to this issue, it makes no difference whether the redemptive dynamic is considered to be naturally immanent in cosmic process, or a gift of grace, not natural to the cosmos but everywhere at work in it In both cases, redemption is a general concept

5 Cf Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans W V Dych (New York, 1978), pp 178-203, esp 192-195

6 The durability of this pattern of thought, at least in the English-speaking world, can be seen in two sets of Gifford Lectures separated by forty years First, Charles Raven " if we are to see the creative process as a whole and culminating for us in Christ we shall regard it as at every level reflecting in its own measure something of the quality of deity from atom and molecule to mammal and man each by its appropriate order and function expresses the design inherent in it and contributes, so far as it can by failure or success, to the common purpose We can refer to it in three main terrestrial phases, as a preparation for the organism, as a process of organic individuation, as a culmination m a community of persons, and can interpret these phases as due to the continuous nisus of the indwelling Spirit If so, then it is surely congruous that at a definite stage in the process, as the partial reflexions of the divine reach their human fulness, they should be consummated in the perfect image of God, and that thus the goal of the whole adventure should be interpretable m terms of the attainment by mankind of its true stature and significance the stature of the Christ and the significance of the family of God " C E Raven, Natural Religion and Christian Theology, Gifford Lectures, 1952, Second Series, Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1953), ρ 157 More recently, Ian Barbour "I suggest, then, that in an evolutionary perspective we may view both the human and the divine activity m Christ as a continuation and intensification of what had been occurring previously We can think of him as representing a new stage in evolution and a new stage in God's activity Christ as person was part of the continuous process that runs back through Australopithecus and the early forms of life to those atoms formed in primeval stars

But we can also view Christ as the product of a divine activity that has a long history For millions of years there was the continuing creation of the world, and then of humanity and culture, at an accelerating rate In the great religious traditions of the world, and especially m the history of Israel, God's immanent creativity was increasingly focused, and individual persons were increasingly responsive In Christ, both divine intention and human response allowed a more powerful revelation of God's nature than had occurred previously We have, then, a basic continuity of creation and redemption " Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science The Gifford Lectures 1989-1991, vol 1 (San Francisco Harper and Row, 1990), pp 211-212

7 An example of spiritual practice which enacts this conviction is the Jesus Prayer The practice of the Jesus Prayer involves focusing intently on the proper name of Jesus of Nazareth, while at the same time purging the mind of all concepts and general ideas The conviction that Jesus is saviour as a particular person, and not in virtue of his symbohzation of some general truth, could not be more precisely acted out

8 Cf J -J Rousseau's The Creed of a Priest of Savoy, trans Arthur H Beattie (New York Unger, 1982), pp 50-76, for a classic early modern rejection of the very idea that any particular could be of universal saving significance

9 For recent work on the Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, cf Τ Patrick Grey, The Defence of Chalcedon in the East (451-553) (Leiden, 1979), Felix Heinzer, Gottes Sohn als Mensch Die



Struktur des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus Confessor (Freiburg, 1980), John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (St Vladimir's, 1975), Kenneth Paul Wesche, "The Christology of Leontius of Byzantium Monophysite or Chalcedonian?" St Vladimirs Seminary Theological Quarterly 321 (1987), pp 65-95, idem, trans, On the Person of Christ The Christology of Emperor Justinian (St Vladimir's, 1991)

10 Cf Wesche, "General Introduction," On the Person of Christ, pp 15-19 11 After completing this essay, I reread the following lines of Donald Mackinnon on the

homoouswn, which so perfectly describe the approach I am taking to the Neo-Chalcedonian christology, and apparently exercised so powerful a subliminal influence on it, that they deserve to be quoted in extenso "Too often those who write in general terms of the relation of Christian theology to philosophy imply that in their relation we have to reckon with a series of alliances, often ill-conceived, between individual theologians or more powerful groups thereof and this or that essay in speculative thought Far too little attention is paid to the inevitable interplay between theology and the work of conceptual analysis which, as much as any essay in speculation, has belonged to the deepest concerns of philosophy We cannot begin to understand and appreciate the homoouswn unless we bear in mind that the doctrine of substance, properly understood, is a part of analytical philosophy rather than an essay in speculation " And again "If we learn anything from the homoouswn, it concerns less the manner of Christ's relation to the Father than the way in which that relation is to be understood, it is a second-order rather than a first-order christological proposition That is to say, it is more something we say about what we say concerning Christ, than something we actually say about him that begins to lift the veil from the face of the God whom he discloses, with whom he is one " Donald M MacKinnon, " 'Substance' in Christology—A Cross-Bench View," in S W Sykes and J Ρ Clayton, eds , Christ, Faith, and History Cambridge Studies in Philosophy (Cambridge, 1972), pp 288 and 297

12 Here I would disagree with the logical status ascribed to this distinction by certain contemporary Orthodox theologians, for example Chnstos Yannaras, Person und Eros (Gottingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982) Yannaras argues, in effect, that the distinction between ousia and hypostasis in the Fathers is as such a metaphysically revolutionary move, implying an entire ontology I would not deny that the theology of the Fathers is metaphysically revolutionary, but I would argue that the revolution occurs in the explication of Christian claims about Jesus Christ for which the Fathers use the ousia-hypostasis distinction, not in the distinction itself The latter, I am suggesting, is a much more formal and modest sort of conceptual move than Yannaras supposes It is noteworthy that Yannaras does not give any detailed textual grounding for his claim that the Patristic term prosopon contains in itself such a wealth of metaphysical content, but appeals rather to the etymology of the word, at one point identifying this with its "original conceptual content" (p 16)

13 This accounts for the fact that it is extremely difficult to argue textually for a metaphysical notion of "personhood" in the Patristic uses of the terms hupostasis and prosopon Thus Maximus uses the example of "a crowd of people or horses or cattle or the like" of which we know that "they exist each on its own and each is differentiated distinctively (idikös) by the hupostases" (MPG 90, 476C) Likewise in Letter 15 "For angel differs from angel, human from human, cow from cow, and dog from dog, with respect to hupostasis " (ibid, 550C) I would argue that this is not a defect, a metaphysical shortfall, but an altogether normal use of an open-textured, formal-grammatical category This is not to say that an ontology of the person might not be developed legitimately from Patristic christology and sotenology as a whole, but it is not already present in the concept of hupostasis

14 MPG 91, 552 B-C A note about the translations from Maximus in this paper (1) I have tried consistently to sacrifice elegance to precision, Maximus is a notably inelegant writer in Greek (though capable of an impressive crabbed eloquence, which is not the same thing) and it seems pointless to try to improve him in English (2) I have left a number of technical terms untranslated, so as not to confuse the issue by conjuring up the connotations they have come to have in the distinctive history of western philosophical and theological terminology I have mostly followed instinct in doing this, thus "nature" seems harmless enough for phusis, while both "essence" and "substance" seem misleading for ousia


190 David S. Yeago

15 I would suggest that logos in this passage, while it has substantially the same meaning as the Latin ratwne, "by reason of," has not lost altogether the sense of "discourse" or "talk " In the case of oneness m the register of ousia, we talk in terms of a universal essential property, in the case of difference m the register of hupostasis, we talk in terms of a "prosopic" otherness The multidimensionahty of the term "logos" in his usage is often remarked on by Maximus' commentators

16 MPG 91, 552D-553A 17 The adjective "prosopic" has to be added here to distinguish this monas in the register of

hupostasis from the Trinitarian monas in the register of ousia 18 MPG 91, 552D 19 "The analogy between these two unities"—that of body and soul and that of the two

natures m Christ—"is entirely restricted to the fact that both may be called synthetic unities"—ι e unities in the register of hupostasis "And since the 'synthetic hypostasis' which is established in Christ and which includes two inseparable natures is and has to be quite unique, there is no analogy between it and the 'synthetic nature' of man on the ontological level " Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund, 1965), pp 443^44 Cf also Maximus, PG 91, 532B, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie Das Weltbild Maximus der Bekenners (Emsiedeln, 1988), pp 234-243

20 Thus when Maximus says (MPG 91, 553C) that by this example of body and soul "there is rendered clear to us, with no obscurities, the logos of the becoming flesh, or becoming human, of one of the holy and coessential and adorable Trinity, God the Logos," the first "logos" should be taken much more m the sense of "discourse" or "way of talking" than that of "plan" or "explanation " Otherwise we cannot avoid ascribing to Maximus what he himself repeatedly and explicitly declares impossible, an attempt to explain the inexpressible mystery of the phuswlogia of Jesus

21 MPG 91, 557 AB 22 Of course, one of the reasons that there is no ontological similarity between the composite

hupostasis of Christ and the composite nature of the human creature is that the sunthesis of humanity and divinity in Christ is not "natural" but voluntary, the free kenotic act of the divine Logos Thus is can't be said that the deity of Logos has by nature no real existence apart from his humanity, but one can say that this is so by the free choice of the Holy Trinity I am not aware of any technical study addressing the question of the logos asarkos in Maximus, but all studies note that in all God's dealings with the world, including creation, the Logos is identified with Jesus of Nazareth Cf the remark by Paul Blowers cited m note 25, below

23 MPG 91, 556B 24 MPG 91, 560AB 25 "In Maximus' thought the transcendent Logos is never conceptually separate from the

historically incarnate Christ " Paul M Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium (Notre Dame, 1991), ρ 118

26 MPG 91,1048A This citation suggests that Maximus does not take energeia m the sense of an Aristotelian contrast between potency and act, for here he seems to equate energeia with dunamis Thus, although energeia can, of course, be translated "action" or "operation," this definition seems to suggest that we take it to mean that about the ousia which is manifested m particular actions or operations

27 MPG 91, 552BC 28 I say "subsumed into" rather than "replaced by" because the logos-tropos distinction, as

Maximus uses it, is wider in scope than a simple distinction between the general and the particular On this distinction, cf especially Alain Rioux, Le Monde et l'Eglise selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris, 1973), pp 73-121, Juan Miguel Garrigues, Maxime le Confesseur La chante, avenir divine de l'homme (Paris, 1976), pp 100-112, Heinzer, Gottes Sohn als Mensch, pp 29-145

29 MPG 91,1052B 30 MPG 91, 48A 31 MPG 91,137A 32 MPG 91, 1052C 33 MPG 91, 1057D-1060A



34 " nous devons rappeler que les termes d'hypostase et de penchorèse ne doivent pas être pris comme des concepts, fussent-ils concepts-clés, que l'on pourrait objectiver En elles-mêmes l'hypostase et la penchorèse ne sont rien Elles manifestent dans la Trinité le non-depassement des Hypostases par une essence antérieure—ne serait-ce que logiquement— qui les engloberait, dans la Personne du Christ, la non-synthèse des deux natures en autre chose que la tension antinomique de l'hypostase " Rious, ρ 108 I am not sure that Rioux's notion of a "tension" between the orders of ousia and hupostasis, logos and tropos, is quite justified I would rather speak of the "non-synthesis of the two natures in anything but the concrete actuality of the hupostasis " The hupostasis and the penchoresis are thus "not anything" in the sense that they are not anything in the register of ousia not a kind of thing, not a "what " And the hupostasis could be said to be "antinomic" if one took that to mean that it cannot be subsumed under any general concept

35 MPG 91, 1056AB, citing Ps -Dionysis, Letter 4 36 MPG 91,1060B 37 "To speak generally, all renewal takes place with regard to the tropos of what is renewed,

not the logos of nature For if the logos were made new it would corrupt the nature, which would not keep unaltered the logos by virtue of which it exists, the renewal of the tropos, while the logos of nature is preserved, displays the power of miracle, that is, it manifests the nature acted upon and acting in a way that surpasses its own limits ' MPG 91,1342D

38 MPG 91,1057D 39 Since Maximus's anti-monothelite christology is entirely constructed of the conceptual

materials we have already discussed, we can summarize this final stage of development by a brief consideration of his interpretation of the scriptural locus classicus of the controversy, the words of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not my will but your will be done " According to Maximus, the words "let this cup pass from me" demonstrate that Jesus had a natural human will, which naturally shrinks from what is harmful to its kind But the total utterance, which puts this natural shrinking into the context of a freely willed acceptance of the will of the Father, displays the tropos of the union of divine and human in a single subject, the Son of God By these words "he shows, simultaneously with the shrmking-back, the impulse of the human will shaped and come to be in harmony with the divine will, by virtue of the interweaving of the natural logos according to the tropos of the economy, inasmuch as incarnation is a manifest display of both nature and economy that is, of the natural logos of those realities which have been united, and of the mode of the union according to hupostasis, which both confirms and makes new the natures without change or confusion" (MPG 91, 48C) Thus the words of Jesus show the human will made new in the "tropos of exchange" appropriate to the concrete unity of the divine and the human which Jesus is as hupostasis They display both what he is by nature—true human being with a natural human will and true God with the one divine will that he receives from the Father—and who he is as an agent in the narrative of the economy, the one incarnate Son and Logos of God the Father The deification of the human will by the divine will is identical with his particular choices of love and obedience, for deification occurs, not in the register of ousia, by some fusion of deity and humanity in the abstract, but m the concrete way in which is exercised in the single subject Jesus Christ "As it is a matter of nature always to be capable of speaking, but a matter of hupostasis how one speaks, so it is also with the capacity to will and the act of willing" (MPG 91, 48A)

40 Cf Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (New York Sheed and Ward, 1963), pp 89-90, for this notion Von Balthasar is perhaps the twentieth-century theologian most indebted to Maximus, I believe that a careful examination would show that the inner structure especially of his Theodramatik is deeply Maximian

41 Robert W Jenson, The Triune Identity God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia Fortress, 1982), ρ 176

42 ibid 43 For the discussion of logical issues in the following, I am deeply indebted to an un

published paper by Bruce D Marshall, "Women, Men and Method in Barth 's Theology " 44 Barbour, op at, ρ 213 45 Louis O Mink, "Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument," in The Writing of History

Literary Form and Historical Understanding, eds Robert Η Canary and Henry Kozicki


192 David S. Yeago

(Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp 131f Cited by Michael Root, "The Narrative Structure of Soteriology", Modern Theology 2 (1986), ρ 150

46 Root, ibid, pp 150-1, citing Louis O Mink, "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension", New Literary History, 1 (1970), ρ 551 For a more extended discussion of configurational understanding, cf D S Yeago, The Drama of Nature and Grace A Study in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Yale dissertation, 1992)

47 Thus in addition to narrative coherence we might also speak of an aesthetic coherence, as for example in the case of painting and sculpture, in which the configuration is composed not of events but of elements in a formal structure In the case of a theology of redemption, we might say that the movement towards redemption will be understood as a narrative configuration, in which the story of Christ is the climax and resolution which unifies the plot, while the achieved state of redemption will be an aesthetic configuration with the figure of Christ at its center

48 If the logic of the redeemer/redeemed relationship in Maximus is indeed of this sort, it would follow that one could find more fitting an alternative to, say, Maximus's negative view of the relationship of Christ the redeemer to human sexuality, without thereby calling into question the structure of his thought as a whole For the implication is that Maximus's understanding of redemption constitutes not a system but rather a discernment of a contingent configurational pattern

49 Blowers, ρ 102 Cf von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, pp 288-312 50 Blowers, ρ 106 51 MPG 91, 1128D-1129B I have taken the translation from Blowers, pp 104-105, making

some changes to bring out implications germane to the present inquiry I am not sure what the contrast of kata ten dunamin/kata ten hexin means, von Balthasar takes it to imply that the written law potentially includes the natural law, while the natural law fashions the disposition that enables one to accept (aufzunehmen) the written law, cf Kosmische Liturgie, ρ 293 This seems speculative, bending the notion of the natural law more towards its moral sense than the context seems to permit Another possibility might be to take hexis as referring to the natural law's own "state" or "condition" Then the sense might be that the written law is identical with the natural law "dynamically" while the natural law is identical with the written law as it were "statically " This would imply that the flow of interpretation between these two parallel witnesses to the Logos runs from the written law to the natural law But this is only a suggestion

52 I take it that we should regard the whole of a "scientific" account of the natural world as falling under to phainomenon, it is the cosmos apprehended by our best efforts at understanding that is the text whose noësis is Christ

53 MPG 91,1129B, translation by Blowers, ρ 105 It is significant that Maximus does not make the flesh what hides the Logos and his deity what is revealed (as Augustine might have done), this is another indication that the Logos to be revealed m cosmos and scripture is always the incarnate one, Jesus of Nazareth

54 ibid , ρ 106 While Blowers suggests, certainly correctly, that the cosmological logos-doctrine provides the underpinnings for Maximus' account of exegesis, I am suggesting that, in a larger perspective, the converse is also true the practice of spiritual exegesis provides the model for his cosmological theory of the logoi

55 "The logoi of created beings, which were prepared in God from eternity, as he alone saw fit, and which are invisible, and customarily called God's 'good intentions' (agatha thelemata) by the divines, are clearly perceived from the things which he has made For God's natural creations, which we intellectually contemplate with the necessary science, declare to us secretly (kruphws) the logoi according to which they were made, and display together with themselves the divine objective (skopos) for each created thing" Questions to Thalassius 12, CCSG 7, 94, trans Blowers, ρ 157, η 43, with minor alterations As Riou observes, in reference to another text (MPG 91,1080C) but with regard to this same notion of the divine skopos, "Cette reference éminemment économique vient détruire toute interpretation du texte de saint Maxime dans le sens d'une métaphysique classique de idees divines Au contraire une lecture fine de ce texte nous permet de la situer dans un tout outre universe " Riou, ρ 57

56 It is not unimportant, in this regard, that Maximus includes the contingent coming-to-be (genesis) of each created thing in its logos, that is, in the divine intention which is the cause



of its being "The logoi of all things are solidly fixed in God, according to which he is said to know all things before their genesis, in that they are in him and with him who is the very truth of all This is so even if all these beings, those which are and those which shall be, are not launched into being simultaneously with their logoi, or with their being known by God Rather, each of them having been created at the appropriate moment (to epitedew kairo), according to the wisdom of the Creator, in a way befitting their logoi, they receive in themselves actual existence " MPG 91,1081A

57 Corpus Chnstianorum, Series Graeca (CCSG) 22, 75, trans Blowers, ρ 126 58 Blowers, ρ 118 59 In the case of scripture, this is true differently for the Old and New Testaments of the Old

Testament in the obvious way, of the New Testament in that it bears witness to Christ as the future culmination of the redemption inaugurated in his historic incarnation

60 Irenee-Henn Dalmais, "La manifestation du Logos dans l'homme et dans l'église typologie anthropologique et typologie ecclesiale d'après Qu Thal 60 et la Mystagogie," in Heinzer, F and Schoenborn, C , eds, Maximus Confessor Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur (Fnbourg, 1982), ρ 21

61 ibid 62 Questions to Thalassius 22, CCSG 7,140-141 63 MPG 91,1053CD 64 It is worth noting that with respect to knowledge of God, the relation of kataphasis and

apophasis to ousia and hupostasis is reversed God is unknown with respect to ousia and known to us in the hupostatic particularity of Jesus of Nazareth But these two relations are interrelated it is the co-presence of the incomprehensible divine nature with the human nature in the singular tropos of the existence of Christ that makes it necessary to deny apophatically the familiar tropoi of the human nature As God, the absolutely unfamiliar, becomes accessible in a concrete union with the familiar, the familiar itself is rendered strange and new (in its tropos) in that very concreteness

65 Blowers, ρ 139 66 Blowers, pp 186-187, citing PG 91, 1160B, PG 90 677D, CCSG 7, 269 67 On this, cf Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, chapter VI, as well as his briefer

treatment in Man and the Cosmos The Vision of St Maximus the Confessor (St Vladimir's, 1985), pp 80-91

68 MPG 91,1313B


^ s

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