Di5522 - Patristics (Mark Elliott)
Maximos’ Promising Difficulties
The Origins, Trajectory, and Potential of the Confessor’s Ambigua
In the following paper, I set out to describe the significance of the Ambigua of Maximos the Confessor in terms of his own oeuvre and career, theological development before and after its composition, and finally as an example for doing theology today. In the first section, I outline Maximos’ overall theological career and writings in terms their placement within the debates of the seventh century. In order to appreciate the uniqueness of his writings, we must consider the political implications that gave rise to them as well as the debates they later inspired. Before moving on to the theological significance of the Ambigua, I briefly explore two early translators responsible for their preservation, namely Anastasius the Librarian and John Eriugena. The focus in the second section turns to the particularly theological significance of the Ambigua, especially the intellectual and literary trajectory Maximos attaches it to, namely that of Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus. Maximos was keenly aware of the dual human and divine natures in Christ that the Chalcedonian formula proclaimed as orthodoxy. In order to make sense of Christ simultaneously fully God and fully man, he developed the concept of perichoresis, or rotating interpenetration, for which Ambigua 42 is especially illustrative. A third and final section will explore the special significance of Ambigua 10 for doing theology today by focusing on a concept that Maximos strengthened substantially but did not himself create. Maximos’ middle way of divination, between the Augustinian notion of human depravity and the Pelagian heresy that it answered, proves instructive in light of the persisting schism centered on the soteriological value of human activity.
I. The significance of the Ambigua within Maximos’ oeuvre and career
Born in Constantinople in 580 CE, Maximos grew up in affluence and was probably provided an extensive classical education. That education almost certainly included being steeped in the Greek philosophical schools to which he would later owe much debt. The extent of his family’s prestige must have been great, as he was employed as the secretary for emperor Heraclius by the time he was thirty. However, he cut his worldly privilege short and left his post after only three years, in 613. One could easily interpret his departure as a rejection of the prosperity to which he was accustomed, entering the austerity of a cloister of monks near Constantinople, but it is not entirely clear.
What is clear is that Maximos wrote exhaustively, both exegetically and theologically. His monastic experience and interest are clear in his writings, many of which were composed for and distributed within aesthetic communities in the Greek east. Though some works may have had their genesis in his first monastic experience at the monastery at Chrysopolis, many were not compiled and published until after his exodus from the city “on account of its insecurity from hostile attacks.” He eventually settled near Carthage, in North Africa, where he came under the instruction of Sophronius and began reading patristic fathers in light of his earlier philosophical training. The most influential theological writers for Maximos became Evagrios Pontikos, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, as well as Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus especially, who will be discussed in section two.
The diversity of his writings cannot be overstated, nor can their practical import for individual Christians. Maximos’ Chapters (alternatively translated “Centuries”) on Love, written shortly after his exodus, reimagined 400 “passages from Evagrios Pontikos [whose] signature stress on human knowledge is systematically shifted to divine love, which Maximos places at the center and summit of the human experience of God.” These Chapters, with another on Knowledge (or “Theology”), were to be used as a guide for the intellect in the midst of prayer. Maximos’ Mystagogy explains the Church’s symbolism and liturgy, proposing that all creation is imbued with symbolism, the center of which is the Body of Christ. His exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer (found in the Berthold volume) and Psalm 59 reveal Maximos’ allegorical interpretation of scripture and his appreciation for the centrality of the exegetical task, even in extra-Biblical texts such as Gregory’s orations, which we will discuss momentarily.
In his Scholia, Maximos focused his attention on Pseudo-Dionysius in order to defend the findings of Chalcedon against the heretical Monophysites, who were using the Dionysian corpus to buttress their claims about Christ having only one nature. However, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy shows that John Sythopolis could have written the Scholia attributed to Maximos. Toward the end of his life, he produced polemical works that display Maximos’ mature thought leveraged against controversies rocking the Church as the distinction between eastern Greek and western Latin Churches expanded. As one of the latest theologians to be named a saint by both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, Maximos holds a unique place in ecumenical history and dialogue to this day. In all of Maximos’ writings, one finds a deliberate and highly nuanced focus upon the implications for the depth of theology upon the lived reality in which Christian communities found themselves.
The work of Augustine of Hippo had the eventual effect of forcing a wedge between the grace of God in faith and the work of the person, Maximos’ literary oeuvre and career occupied a strategic location suited to undermine the prevailing Latin view of the western Churches, that faith must exist apart from human work. Indeed, his writings emerged out of and insist upon the real world experience of faith, insisting as they do on practical expression in Christian living. The Ambigua, or “Difficulties,” are therefore Maximos’ crowning achievement and most impressive contribution to theology. Although the mystical and aesthetic nature of his oeuvre meant it tended to appeal particularly to fellow monks, even the Ambigua was grounded in the realities of life. It is not merely for the “inexhaustible complexity of language” he employs, but because it lays out “the science of divination” in the form of questions and answers, ostensibly composed as correspondence.
There are two groups of difficulties divided by addressee, with five being written to “a certain Thomas” followed by sixty-six written to John of Kyzikos. The larger body, of Johannine difficulties, were written first, “composed around 628 to 630, shortly after Maximos had settled in North Africa” having left the company of its addressee, the abbot in Asia Minor under whom Maximos had been directed. The Thomistic Ambigua have the distinction of being written later by a more mature thinker, “around 634, when Maximos was being drawn into a controversy concerning the activities (or ‘energies’) in Christ.” The fundamental shape they take is exegetical, with each focusing on an individual ‘difficulty’ raised by a passage of text written by Gregory the Theologian. Gregory’s influence in the east cannot be overstated, being the second most cited source in Orthodox ecclesiastical documents after the Bible.
Maximos has always been a central figure in Greek Orthodox theology, but the Latin world has only shown sporadic interest in his theology. The early transmission from Greek to Latin does, however, display his profoundly ecumenical theological traction. In less than 150 years, his works began being translated by Anastasius the Librarian, who only undertook translation in piecemeal and with a political agenda in mind. Anastasius is credited with translating: “a partial translation of the Mystagogy; a passage from Maximos’ letter to Marinos on the procession of the Holy Spirit; a collection of seven documents covering events from the time of Maximos’ first trial (655) down through his death in Lazica (in August, 662)… and Maximos’ final and arguably most mature (if polemical) Christological statements.”
Were it not for Anastasius, it is unlikely that any of the original Greek manuscripts could have been preserved. His interest in Maximos, while politically motivated, was the catalyst for John Eriugena, an Irish philosopher-theologian, to fill in the gaps. Whereas Anastasius’ translation was dynamic and catered for Latin audiences, Eriugena’s was far more literal, preserving awkward phraseology that allowed later scholars to reconstruct the original Greek rather reliably. Whereas Anastasius’ translations are “important for textual scholars insofar as they pre-date all of the surviving Greek manuscripts,” Eriugena’s attention to the original language, to the detriment of Latin readers, was pivotal for the preservation of the Ambigua.
The Ambigua stands out in Maximos’ oeuvre not merely because it engages decisively with problems arising from Monophytism or because of the renewed interest Chalcedon brought upon the writings of Origen, but because of its applicability to everyday life. The most pressing problems Maximos addresses in his work were raised “not from contemporary ‘Origenists,’ but from the conciliar documents of the preceding century, especially the edicts of Justinian.” The Justinian edicts were legal measures brought by the emperor in order to unify belief under the theology backed by the ecumenical councils that, among other things, condemned parts of Origen’s teachings. A disparaging reflection on the implications of imperially enforced decree might provide the context for understanding not only his early departure from the royal service but also his eventual torture at the hands of imperial loyalists.
Indeed, Constas is unequivocal in his judgment that Maximos earned the title Confessor not at the hands of ecclesiastical agents, but the remnants of Roman rule. In the end, it was “when he dared to criticize the theological policies of the imperial government, he was tortured, sent into exile, and died in a military prison.” Thus bringing to an end the career of one of the Church’s most illustrious and creative theologians. But a theologian’s career often begins well after their death, and this was certainly the case with Maximos, as we shall see in the next section.
II. The significance of the Ambigua in terms of prior and subsequent theology
IIa. Prior Theology: Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus
Although Maximos’ works are largely “cast in the conventional forms of traditional monastic literature” in a structure that would be accessible to many, he situates himself deeply within the theological debates that had been raging for hundreds of years. Though he exegetes the work of Gregory of Nazianzus, he is very interested in the doctrines of Origen, hoping to reimagine certain elements of the Alexandrian’s thought deemed heretical by the Second Council at Constantinople in 553. Origen’s teachings about the preexistence of souls and universal salvation were rightly condemned, and one way in which the Church anathematized him was to translate away some of his most controversial teachings. Maximos, however, saw much to be valued in Origen, and sought to preserve some aspects of his thought by radical reinterpretation rather than mere linguistic gymnastics. He is cautious to never to mention Origen by name, since that would raise too many red flags, but close reading reveals Maximos’ careful attention to the controversial metaphysics espoused by Origen in On First Principles.
Constas agrees, that “Maximos’ transformation of Origenism… entails… a complete redefinition of his fundamental grammar… identifying ‘stability’ (stasis) with love, uniting the saints by grace to a Trinity united by nature in love.” Although Maximos rejects the “Origenist idea of a primitive henad of rational beings, coexisting with God and from which, by surfeit, they have afterwards fallen,” the Confessor sees in Origen the potential for “securing Christian asceticism and spirituality on solid theological, philosophical, and anthropological foundations.” In the Ambigua, Origen’s heretical views only seldom appear explicitly. Instead, Maximos focuses on a figure with whom the Church was far more familiar (and comfortable), Gregory of Nazianzus, who Maximos uses to help revise Origen’s otherwise heterodox theology.
Gregory the Theologian’s “thought and language were so widely disseminated that, after the Bible, he is the most frequently cited author in all of Byzantine ecclesiastical literature.” His popularity stemmed not only from his erudition, but also from his incredible use of language. Maximos praises Gregory as “a man of profound thoughts but of comparatively few words” who imbues his texts with an “excess of language” that confronted “the reader with a surplus of meaning.” It was this rhetorical flourish that sometimes obscured Gregory’s meaning, a problem that prompted John and Maximos to correspond in the first place. The ‘difficulties’ the two faced in interpreting Gregory’s theology was probably like that of Origen’s, of an otherwise illustrious man of faith being misunderstood and therefore highly suspect at worst or at least inaccessible to the common reader. After all, the Gregorian orations Maximos exegetes in his Ambigua were largely sermons addressed to congregations, not fellow philosophers.
It is therefore not simply the fact Gregory was a beautiful writer that Maximos focuses his attention on him, but because he was seen particularly in light of the holiness of his life, in keeping with the Ambigua’s emphasis on the saints. The permeability between scripture and contemporary life is much more apparent in eastern Churches loyal to the Byzantine tradition. This is made abundantly clear in Maximos’ essentially exegetical treatment of Gregory’s orations, a level of textual scrutiny so venerated in Latin Churches that it is usually reserved for scripture. The eastern Churches have far less anxiety about comparing subsequent lives to the standard presented in scripture. In fact, calling Gregory “the Theologian” in the east evokes the evangelist John, who shares the same title. “To the Byzantine mind, Gregory was simply a link in a succession of divinized saints stretching back to the apostles and prophets.”
IIb. Subsequent Theology: Rotation of the Two Natures in Ambigua 42
One thing in particular that can illustrate Gregory’s prior influence on Maximos and how he shaped subsequent theology is the coexistence of divine and human natures within Christ. Central to the Chalcedonian formula looming large over Maximos’ entire career was the problem of defining how Jesus could be both man and God simultaneously. To describe how Jesus could be both man and God at once, Maximos borrows a concept from Gregory that would come to shape subsequent theology; perichoresis.
In Epistle 101, to Cledonius, Gregory uses a verb to describe the “nature which belongs to God… perceived by the mind” that is “mingled with” and “flows into” the nature of man that is in Christ. The Greek verb Gregory uses is perichoreo, which is to rotate, but Maximos establishes a mingling or flowing as a fundamental part of the duality of natures in Jesus. In Ambigua 42.5, we find Constas translating the verb as “interpenetrating,” which Maximos uses to describe the “unconfused union” by which “the soul [is] united to the body.” What Maximos is arguing against is the idea that, if souls preexist bodies, then one could argue that preexistence lends itself to predestination, suggesting that God created an entire class of creature “contrary to His own purpose.”
Beginning in paragraph 13, Maximos addresses the Origenist heresy of the preexistence of souls, which in his own time was condemned by emperor Justinian. With Gregory’s help, Maximos argues that such a view denigrates the body and by extension undermines the human nature in Christ, which he insists is in fact both conceived and “saved together with the soul.” It is not that the two natures of human and divine, or the two substances of body and soul, are constantly rotating or interpenetrating, but that their very essence is that of being rotation, of being interpenetration. Thunberg, a Swedish theologian and Maximos aficionado, suggests “the term perichoresis [rotation] - as an expression of the kind of communicatio relationship which exists between divine and human natures in Christ - seems to have been used for the first time precisely by Maximos.”
Based on this, Thunberg posits that “it seems in the context as if the mutual application of attributes is seen more as a consequence of the perichoresis than as its cause.” In other words, this divine/human cohesion is almost accidental, as though the natures differ in essence, justifying his translation not as the passive “flowing” but as the active “penetrating.” It follows, then, that Maximos developed a unique understanding of rotation (or ‘mixture,’ which is Thunberg’s translation of Gregory) than Gregory himself intended.
To understand the rotational connotations of perichoresis, one must remember Maximos’ emphasis on deification as a human ascent toward God. Coupled with the incarnation, which is “the divine penetration into the human level,” one can see where “a certain reciprocity” can be confused with a blasphemous assumption about human equality with God. Though each nature is active in this ‘mutual adhesion’ in Christ, the divine is the initiator and primary energy involved. In other words, incarnation (of God) and deification (of humanity) “condition each other mutually,” but union does not imply similarity; we should not take the Christological question (of human and divine natures) and apply it equally to the created realm (of body and soul).
This brings us back to Origen, whose teaching on the eternality of souls set one creaturely substance (soul) above the other (body). Maximos argues against this, insisting on “neither preexistence nor postexistence of either soul or body, but of coexistence.” He argues instead that there are three births that affect both body and soul, coinciding with his progress of humanity from being, to well-being, and eventually toward eternal-being. The first is common to all humanity, which is “our birth from another body, which constitutes the single birth of both – I mean of soul and body” in which we simultaneously receive our spiritual and somatic being (the former being provided by God’s “vital inbreathing”). Our second birth is baptismal, which imbues believers with “well-being.” Our third and final birth is resurrection, by which “we are transformed by grace unto eternal well-being.” Maximos stresses all this in light of the Origenist idea about the body/soul distinction, which the Confessor insists is not of substance, but of nature. Furthermore, the false ideas Origen was spreading could lead to the conclusion that one nature must pre-exist the other in the human/divine natures of Christ, which cannot be tolerated by the Chalcedonian formula Maximos defends.
Advocating against the zero sum game of preexistence or postexistence in favor of “the middle way” of coexistence evokes Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which excellence resides not at a pinnacle, as though virtue was a mountain, but in a balance between twin vices. Indeed, perichoresis makes perfect sense in light of Aristotle’s emphasis on telos, insofar as any rotating movement is seen “as a development in the direction of a unifying end, fixed by God in his creation.” The Aristotelian influence is not lost on Constas, who reminds us of Maximos’ pragmatic instinct running throughout his writings; “Returning to God is identified with progress in virtue, insofar as the essence of every virtue is God himself, who wills to be incarnated in the virtuous.” The pursuit of excellence and the inherently performative nature of the virtues frame Maximos’ account of sanctification, relying as he does on Greek philosophy to buttress his claims about divination. However, he is not promoting Aristotle so much as he is reinterpreting the ancient philosopher in much the same way he does Origen. “Maximos’ aim is not to extend the tradition of the philosophers into Christianity, but with the tools of philosophy to elucidate the tradition of the Fathers and the Councils.” Aristotelian virtue enables Maximos to develop a robust ecclesiology consistently reflected throughout his oeuvre and career, which is illustrated by our next and final section.
III. The significance of deification in Ambigua 10 for doing theology today
For most modern western Churches, the debate between faith and works was settled long ago, if not by Augustine against the heretic Pelagius, then certainly by Luther and the Protestant Reformation. It is assumed that humanity cannot earn salvation, it is totally and freely a gift from God. That Latin descended “Catholic” Churches recoil at the proposal that human activity has soteriological value is foreign to Churches that derive from the Greek “Orthodox” tradition. The latter have developed an advanced theology of divination, for which Maximos is especially responsible, not least of which is due to his emphasis that we have seen on the coexistence of soul and body together, of the divine and the human being intricately bound up in such a way that the latter does not damage the former but that each are irrevocably bound up together. The virtues enable Maximos to articulate this unified vision, for “the disposition of the virtuous… is hidden in the depths of the soul but manifested through bodily practice.”
“The Ambigua is truly the science of divination... The authorities that [Maximos] regularly invokes for this science are the ‘saints,’ the living substance of divination.” Between two sets of difficulties, addressed to Thomas and John, Maximos establishes himself as one of the first and most thorough hagiographical theologians. Unconventional to be sure, but it is clear he is grounded in the realities of human life while maintaining his gaze on the horizon of the divine, the road to which is paved by the saints. Although Maximos privileges cenobitic monasticism, a very particular form of life, he acknowledges, “the bodily practice of asceticism… by itself does not create virtue, but merely manifests it.” In the created world inhabited by corruptible human beings, divination requires both embodied “practical reason” as well as a thoughtful “contemplative intellect,” which the saints uniquely bind together. This dual emphasis of mind and body aligns well with the duality reflected in the interpenetration of natures in Christ of God and humanity.
Maximos is an important ecumenical figure because he can uphold the profound difference between Creator and creation with the west while also insisting, with the east, that the fundamental relationship between them is benevolent mutuality rather than essential alienation and depravity of the latter. In Thunberg’s estimation of Maximos, “a sharp distinction and a positive relationship between earthly creation and its creator must go together.” The Latin Church’s major theologian, Augustine of Hippo, is known for his sharp critique of Pelagius’ teachings that human work could ultimately accomplish salvation, which led to the western Church’s anxiety about human works. Indeed, as far back as the ninth century, we find that “the idea of deification, [Erigena] says, was difficult for his fellow Latins to understand.” We have already explored, however, the false dichotomy between human effort and divine agency, as though it is a zero sum game in which God’s perfection necessitates creaturely depravity.
The idea of total depravity that the Latin Church eventually produced can only follow from the reduction of Christ’s full humanity. The problem with Augustine’s defense is that it went too far: if people are so corrupted as to be deprived of communion with their Creator, then God either is not fully man in Christ or at least not human enough that the Cross redeemed humanity. In fact, it was under a former Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther that his notion of ‘faith by grace alone’ found full fruition. But to the Church in the east, “Maximos’ fully human Christ offers human beings the possibility of divination in body and soul without the loss or destruction of the essential principles of human nature.” The Chalcedonian formula, however, required two full natures in Christ, not bits and pieces of one or another. Maximos’ defense of Christ’s full humanity relates to his claim that God and humanity are defined by mutual benevolence, that the alienation between God and humanity is only fleeting, not fundamental. In fact, “God and man are paradigms of each other, so that as much as man, enabled by love, has divinized himself for God, to that same extent God is humanized for man by his love for humanity.”
This has profound ramifications for humanity’s ability to commune with God by their ongoing sanctification. For Maximos, “forming oneself in accordance with the saints… one is raised up by pious thought to know God.” The link to the Church Militant on earth is the Church Triumphant with Christ. Whereas for western Churches Christ alone bridges the immeasurable distance between God and man, in the east the bridge might be more precisely called the body of Christ, which is made up of the saints. It is the virtuous dead before us who, “having wisely reflected on the futility of and transience of this present life… were secretly taught that there is another life, which God created in the beginning consistent with His goodness.” Maximos insists we are to follow their example.
In a space as divided as the modern Church, Maximos provides the expansive and ambitious language by which to chart a unifying path, with both its origin and destination in God. He “characterizes [divination] as the deepest longing of the saints, the desire of human nature for assimilation to God, and the yearning of the creature to be wholly contained within the Creator.” The Ambigua are focused especially on the art of holy living, of the unity of both body and soul as well as that of God and humanity. Like the interpenetration of Christ’s human and divine natures, Maximos relates the Christological perichoresis with anthropological virtue as a kind of “reciprocal interchange” between intelligible contemplation and sensible experience. Such an interchange mirrors the duality of natures rotating, mingling, and unifying within Christ. Thunberg insists that Maximos’ thinking about the way these two properties cohere “made a pioneering contribution, not least because in his thinking he has also provided a well thought out foundation for his theology of deification and spiritual perfection.”
Righting our relationship with God requires we take up Maximos’ thesis, that the relationship between divine and human is not defined by depravity but from the beginning has been constituted by benevolent mutuality. His encouragement forces us to look away from ourselves and focus on God, the path toward Whom is paved by the lives of the saints, who help us increase in virtue. “Let us turn back” Maximos insists “so that the excellence of the saints in everything… might be shown forth.” Constas’ patron saint and namesake is right to suggest that “St Maximos’ thought for today… points to a way of life and to a way of doing theology that both reveals our fragmentation and challenges us to move beyond it.” The difficulties he settles are not unlike the scriptural differences that at times divide us. But the west can learn from the east, that textual “obscurities, notable for their failure to signify, are in fact sites of hidden meaning accessible only through the transformation of both the text and the reader.” This is as true for Biblical obscurities as it is for theological ‘difficulties.’ The Ambigua, however, shine a light on the path ahead, back toward the saints who display for us the Christian journey of transformation in and toward God.
Conclusion
The preceding paper has attempted to explore the significance of Maximos the Confessor’s Ambigua in terms of three things: his overall oeuvre, prior and subsequent theology, and the theological task today. We began by outlining where and how the Ambigua fit within Maximos’ literary career and the world in which he lived. Particular attention was paid to his interest in the lived realities of faith, evidenced by the simple epistolary form the Ambigua took as well as their careful attention on a figure as popular in the Church as Gregory the Theologian. Before moving into a second section covering the theological trajectory they inhabited, consideration was given to the means by which his writings were preserved, namely Alexander the Librarian and John Eriugena. The context for understanding the Ambigua’s significance for prior theology was shown to be situated somewhere amidst the metaphysics of Origen in the third century and Gregory’s orations in the fourth. In terms of subsequent theology, on the other hand, we looked specifically at perichoresis, a concept he developed to explain the interpenetrating rotation of Christ’s two natures. Finally, we identified deification as an aspect of Maximos’ thought critical for doing theology today. Though we could only hint at its vast potential for repairing deep theological rifts between Churches in the east and west, the possibilities Maximos provides for moving past such ‘difficulties’ are at once both exciting and challenging. Let us hope he finds a renewed interest in our world today.
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