A Patristic Synthesis of the Word Enfleshed: The Christology of Maximus the Confessor

Abstract

St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) stands out among the Church Fathers as one of the last Christological martyrs. Maximus possessed one of the greatest minds of the Church’s first millennium. The greatest strength of Maximus’s Christology is that he presents a synthesis of all Christological contributions known to him while developing his own Christology of union in distinction. In order to flesh out his system of Christology, this essay works primarily with select works of Maximus’s, namely, the Small Theological and Polemical Works (Opuscula), the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, and the Mystagogy. It will demonstrate that Maximus’s Christology bears the following four predominant signatures: it is patristic, Incarnational, composite, and cosmic. All four features are interrelated, particularly in Maximus’s theory of the λόγοι (logology), and all four hold significant sway over the whole of his doctrine. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of how the Ressourcement movement has benefitted Maximian studies.

1. Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) stands out among the Church Fathers as one of the last Christological martyrs. His detractors, whether his contemporaries or ours, argue that it was Maximus’s recalcitrance and doctrinal intractability that led authorities to impose the harsh sentence of glossal mutilation and arm amputation. They argue, in other words, that the penalties were at least in some sense deserved.1 Whether one thinks that he was too rigid in his adherence to his teaching or that he was a fair interlocutor, his fidelity to his Christological doctrine led to his sufferings in May 662, which undoubtedly led to his death on August 13 of the same year, earning him the title “confessor”.

Maximus possessed one of the greatest minds of the Church’s first millennium. He writes with speculative brilliance across a range of literary genres—chapters, difficulties, questions and responses, letters, dogmatic tomes, commentaries—in response to the many topics he treated, whether philosophical or theological, in conversation with the Scriptures, Councils, and the Fathers before him. He is challenging for newcomers, because to grasp him presupposes knowledge of his own patristic sources—the Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzus especially, Cyril of Alexandria, Dionysius the Areopagite, Leontius of Byzantium, and Sophronius of Jerusalem—as well as their works, much of which would have been part of the intellectual culture of Maximus’s monastic circle.

Authors who have written on Maximus’s Christology have often focused on his theology of the will, for which he is most famously known. The greatest strength of Maximus’s Christology, however, is that he presents a synthesis of all Christological contributions known to him while developing his own Christology of union in distinction. This essay, therefore, will focus on select and distinctive signatures from a range of Maximus’s works—especially the Small Theological and Polemical Works (Opuscula), the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassius, and the Mystagogy—in order to flesh out his system of Christology. I argue that Maximus’s Christology bears the following four predominant signatures: it is patristic, Incarnational, composite, and cosmic. All four features are interrelated, particularly in Maximus’s theory of the λόγοι (logology), and all four hold significant sway over the whole of his doctrine.

2. Patristic Christology—A Doctrine Inherited

Maximus himself meets the four traditional criteria of a Church Father—orthodox doctrine, sanctity of life, antiquity, and approval by the Church (see Jurgens 1970, p. x).2 He is arguably the most consequential Church Father of late antiquity, though one could plausibly make a case for John of Damascus. Maximus is late enough to possess a robust patristic era before him, and it is a stark characteristic of his writings that his theological reflection bears a distinctly patristic flavor. At times, the flavor is so strong one is tempted to ask, “where is Maximus?” While he thoroughly mediates the thought of the fathers who were before him, he deepens and develops their logic into the question of the two wills and the two activities.

Maximus was a Church Father with Fathers, which is to say that he frequently grounded his own theological work in patristic authority. In this regard, he is quite similar to some of his post-Chalcedonian influences, such as Leontius of Byzantium and his contemporary Sophronius of Jerusalem. As Paul Blowers observes, Maximus’s monastic context provides some important background. He writes, “certain ascetical protocols proved formative for Maximus as a theological thinker and writer. One of these was deference to an elder, be it a spiritual father or an esteemed authority within antecedent patristic tradition” (Blowers 2016, p. 69). Not only significant for his work against monenergism, which would set the standard for Maximus’s anti-monothelete agenda, Sophronius himself proved to be a source of authority for Maximus and his community (see Hovorun 2008, pp. 114–17).3

Like Leontius and Sophronius, Maximus concerned himself with defending the Fathers’ thought and compiling florilegia in support of the doctrinal questions of his own day. Maximus lived in an era of the Church that was self-consciously “patristic.” Maximus views himself as a steward of a received tradition, namely a tradition rooted in the Fathers who preceded him. While he is not the first to recollect authoritative sayings, as the Apophthegmata Patrum recounted the sayings of the desert fathers for the formation of the monks’ virtues, Maximus is unique in that he arranges patristic quotes in order to establish doctrinal authority. A figure like Cyril of Alexandria or John Chrysostom is deep in assertion, but Maximus is self-conscious—painfully at times—of his own inadequacy.4 In this regard, no one before him is so keenly aware of the sense of patristic authority’s bearing upon theological discourse. For this reason, Maximus takes great care to authenticate his thought by rooting it in the patristic tradition. It is also the reason he is so intractable in his defense of Christological doctrine. Maximus deploys a thoroughly patristic Christology, one that is enriched by a continuous conversation throughout his works with the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Cyril of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, and others whom he refers to as the approved fathers (ἐγκρίτων πατέρων) (Börjesson 2015, pp. 212–34). Some of his Opuscula are composed of florilegia of patristic quotes.5 It is also likely, Rudolph Riedinger argues, that Maximus is responsible for the florilegium included in the Acts of the Lateran Synod, which he attended and for which he was later punished (Riedinger 1982, pp. 111–21). The synod’s fifth session includes a florilegium of 123 quotes from the Church Fathers in support of the dyotheletism and dyenergism and 42 monothelete or monenergist quotes from the heretics, which follows the pattern Maximus had established in his dogmatic tome that he sent to Stephen of Dora, who is identified at the Lateran Synod as “the first man in the priestly jurisdiction of Jerusalem” (Price 2016, p. 142). Stephen had been tasked by Pope Theodore (642–649) with the deposition of monothelete bishops in the Church of Jerusalem, and it is quite likely that Maximus sent Opusculum 15 to him to assist him in his quest. Twenty-seven of the quotes in Maximus’s florilegium appear in the synodal florilegium. As Richard Price points out, in 21 of these passages “the quotation in Maximus is identical in extent (with the same incipit and the same desinit) to that in the Acts of 649” (Price 2016, pp. 288–89; see also Roosen 2019, pp. 415–533). The significance of this connection between Maximus and the Lateran Synod further solidifies Maximus’s patristic repertoire, as Börjesson has noticed, helping to solidify contact with the thought of Augustine, for example, at least from the time of his sojourn in Rome (Börjesson 2015, pp. 229–30; see also Daley 2008, pp. 101–26).

In a certain sense, one might even say that the writings of the Fathers, in Maximus’s eyes, possess an inspired character akin to that of Scripture itself. Maximus leaves behind several works in the eratopokriseis genre, that is, questions and answers. Several of these have to do with Biblical texts—the Questions to Thalassius (Maximus the Confessor 2018), the Questions and Doubts (Maximus the Confessor 2010), and the Questions to Theopemptus (Roosen and Van Deun 2003). The Ambigua, which treated seventy-one difficulties in the works of Gregory the Theologian and Dionysius the Areopagite (seventy of which pertained to the Theologian), displayed a scandalously similar method to the texts that concern Scriptural difficulties. In other words, Maximus deploys the same interpretative methods for his reading of the Fathers as he does for his reading of the Scriptures.

Maximus gives insight into how he approaches these patristic figures in his prologue to the Ambigua to Thomas. In these disputed patristic words, Christ “by grace has exchanged places with them” and authored the words through them (Maximus the Confessor 2014, pp. 4–5). Maximus, therefore, constructs a system of “dual authorship” in the Fathers. Interpreting them fairly is as much for Maximus an act of piety as was their original writing. This is borne out in his approach to difficult passages in both the earlier and later Ambigua, in the Opuscula, and in the Dispute with Pyrrhus. In the Ambigua, Maximus employs the same interpretative tropes that he uses throughout the Quaestiones texts, turning to a spiritual exegesis of the Fathers, often giving multiple interpretations for readers of the Fathers.

Maximus could have employed, for example, any number of rhetorical arguments to diminish the impact of Dionysius’s phrase ἡ θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια or Cyril’s μία ἐνέργεια formula (see Dionysius the Areopagite, Ep. 4 ad Gaium, PG 3, 1072C; see Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 4.2, PG 73, 577 CD).6 Instead of arguing that Dionysius and Cyril were ambiguous or mistaken, an argumentative trajectory that would not faze modern readers, he asserts boldly that they plainly indicated the dyenergist position and are simply being misread (Opusc. 7, PG 91, 84D–85B).7 Maximus explains in Opusculum 8 that “we do not deny the unique quotes of the God-bearing Fathers—no, not at all!—concerning them, I mean the activities,” since these sayings of Dionysius and Cyril “were piously proclaimed by them because of the union and because of the complete harmony of the natural activities with one another, just as their duality of activities were because of the essential and natural difference of these” (Opusc. 8, PG 91, 100BC). Perhaps Maximus has something in mind along the lines of Augustine’s approach to Scripture, that once one admits falsity into the Biblical account, the whole of it collapses (see Augustine of Hippo, Ep. 28.3–5). For Maximus, it seems, once one undermines the authority of the approved Fathers, then they lose their patristic authority.

In these texts and elsewhere, Maximus shows that it would be to give away too much to allow patristic authority to be undermined in his day. At the same time, he does not blindly gloss over problems in the patristic texts; rather, he carefully nuances interpretative patterns that not only harmonize them with Church doctrine but also shows how the Fathers themselves refuted the difficulties that would face the Church of later centuries. The patristic resonances of Maximus’s thought will continue to be evident in the subsequent sections.

3. Incarnational Christology—Three (or Four) Incarnations

At the core of Maximus’s theology of the Incarnation is the figure of Gregory the Theologian, especially his assumption doctrine articulated in his Ep. 101 to Cledonius: “the unassumed is unhealed.” For Maximus, all of salvation is at stake if his opponents prevail, and so he staunchly defends Gregory’s assumption doctrine, letting this doctrine permeate the logic of his defense of dyenergism and dyotheletism. As was the case for Gregory, however, Maximus’s Incarnational Christology is not merely a negative one; rather, for Maximus, especially in his non-polemical works, the doctrine of the Incarnation is to be found everywhere because of the Word’s condescension in which he allowed himself to be stretched.

In Ambiguum 33, responding to a difficulty from Gregory that “the Logos becomes thick” (Ὁ Λόγος παχύνεται), Maximus writes that Gregory has several things in mind when he speaks this way. From this, Maximus develops a theory of the various “incarnations” of the Logos (Amb.Io., 33.2; Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 38.2). In this ambiguum, Maximus mentions three, though a fourth is to be found in Ambiguum 7 and deserves attention (see also Blowers 1991, pp. 117–22).

First and most obviously, the Logos “becomes thick” in the economy of salvation by becoming incarnate in the flesh, completely like us “apart from sin” (Heb 4:15). It is noteworthy that even in this brief and non-polemical mention of the embodiment of Christ in the flesh, Maximus cannot help but insist that there is a key distinction between Christ’s manner of existence and our own. For Maximus, Christ’s human nature is perfect, and anything less than a perfect humanity would not render Christ more like us. Instead, it would obliterate the economy of salvation. At the same time, his human presence is “from us” (ἐξ ἡμῶν), “for our sake” (δι’ἡμᾶς), and “according to us” (καθ’ἡμᾶς). Underlying this logic is Maximus’s logology, or his theory of the λόγοι. Each nature (φύσις) has its own λόγος that preexists from all eternity in the divine Λόγος. When, therefore, the Eternal Son becomes man, he does not alter humanity’s principle of nature (λόγος τῆς φύσεως).8 Even though the nature is preserved without change, it is “innovated” in a real but limited way for Maximus, at least here. Maximus says that “the only novel thing He introduced was the innovation of nature, by which I mean His conception without seed and His birth without corruption” (Amb.Io. 42.25; see also Dalmais 1975, pp. 285–90).

Secondly, the Word “becomes thick” in the aforementioned λόγοι. Here in Ambiguum 33, there is what one might call a “book of creation.” Each creature represents a “letter” that “proportionately” (ἀναλόγως) signifies the Word, with each created thing offering a corresponding glimpse of him. Further, the diversity within created beings does not diminish his simple and incomposite deity. The paradoxes of the contact between the Logos and the created beings do no violence to him; rather, it is in the many logoi that the creatures and the Logos have an Incarnation or Incarnation-like contact (Amb.Io. 33.2). Elsewhere, Maximus argues that it was “with reason (λόγῳ) and wisdom” that God created the world, and therefore, contemplation invariably leads one “to know the one Logos as many logoi, indivisibly (ἀδιαιρέτως) distinguished amid the differences of created things, owing to their specific individuality, which remains unconfused (ἀσυγχύτως) both in themselves and with respect to one another?” (Amb.Io. 7.15)

Thirdly, because of those who are “thick” (τοὺς παχεῖς) of mind, by which of course Maximus means all of humanity, the Logos allows himself to be clothed with letters (γράμμασι), syllables (συλλαβαῖς), and voices (φωναῖς)—units of expressed communication from the most basic to the more complete. In this manner, Maximus leaves something ambiguous himself. It seems that this third way reckons with the scriptural nature of the revelation of Christ both in Old and in New, but the ambiguity also suggests that all communication about Christ is part of this incarnate clothing, gathering believers in the Spirit and elevating them “to the simple and unconditioned idea of Him” (Amb.Io. 33.2). This would also seem to make room for the “wise elders” and “mystagogues” who lead others into a deeper knowledge and contemplation of the mysteries, which would be in accord with Maximus’s monastic deference to his betters.

Finally, the fourth way in which Christ becomes incarnate is closely linked with Maximus’s logology. For this insight, one must turn to Ambiguum 7, where Maximus is fixated on resolving the difficulty regarding how Gregory could have said, “we who are a portion of God that has flowed down from above” (Amb.Io. 7.1). Maximus does not take this passage in an Origenist direction regarding the possibility of preexistence. Instead, it is the logos of one’s being that preexists, which can only be actualized through virtuous living. Thus, Christ may be seen incarnate, fourthly, in the lives of virtuous believers. The challenge of the life of the faithful is to be configured to the logos of one’s being. All sin and misery are due to the disproportion between one’s manner of life and one’s logos. In those who are worthy of deification, he “wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” (Amb.Io. 7.22). These worthy ones become God by grace and God becomes incarnate in them. As Maximus explains in a response to Thalassius, “God always willingly becomes man in those who are worthy. Blessed, therefore, is the one who through wisdom has actively made God man in himself, who has brought to fullness the inception of this mystery, and who passively experiences becoming God by grace, for this experience will never come to an end” (Q.Thal. 22.8).

4. Composite Christology—Hypostasis in Relation to Natures, Activities, and Wills

In his text on Maximus’s Christology, Demetrios Bathrellos explored Maximus’s dyothelete thought alongside his teachings about person, hypostasis, essence, and nature. Even though “dyotheletism” is perhaps the best-known characteristic of Maximus’s Christology, the question over the two wills (dyotheletism) cannot really be treated in isolation, according to Bathrellos (Bathrellos 2004, p. 6). The disadvantage of an isolated approach would be that it too strictly frames our understanding of him, letting the crisis of Maximus’s day condition our reception of him. Instead, one must notice that Maximus’s Christology is dyothelete as a consequence of its being dyenergist; and his Christology is dyenergist as a consequence of its being dyophysite; and his Christology is dyophysite as a consequence of his understanding of the economy of salvation. The twoness in these notions, however, is grounded in the oneness of Christ’s single divine hypostasis. This is, of course, the logic Maximus gives us in his account of Christ’s composite hypostasis (σύνθετος ὑπόστασις), a brilliant solution to a difficult problem occasioned by the ambiguities of the Chalcedonian definition, a solution that, according to Brian Daley, “draws out in new ways the implications of this ontological analysis of Christ’s person for a basic Christian understanding of the human vocation” (Daley 2018, p. 213).

The preservation of the two natures is crucial for the logic of salvation. If Christ did not assume humanity’s natural will, then the will, which was the first thing to fall in Adam, remains unhealed. If Christ did not assume humanity’s natural activity, then humanity would be inactive in salvation. In either case then, salvation would be incomplete. Maximus notes this not only in his polemical works but also in the trial records. Christ need not, however, assume all the fallen characteristics of the will, such as the vacillation between contraries—that is, γνώμη. This state occurs due to the darkening of the pathways of human choice in the fallen state.9 This disordered “inclination” is not natural, as Maximus asserts. Instead, Christ is “perfect according to both” (κατ’ ἄμφω τελείως) the divine and human natures, which includes the natural activities and the natural wills (Amb.Io. 42.5). For Maximus, “like us in all things but sin alone” means that Christ need not exhibit the same inclinations that we experience in the fallen state. Thus, saying that Christ has no γνώμη is not somehow a violation of the assumption doctrine. The most vivid account of this principle may be found in Q.Thal. 21, concerning the stripping off of the principalities and authorities (Col 2:15), accomplished in two phases: once at the time of his temptation in the desert when he overthrew the passions associated with pleasure, and again at the time of his suffering when he overthrew the passions associated with pain, namely the fear of death. In these decisive victories, Christ triumphs over the demons who are unable to find anything of their own in him (Q.Thal. 21.7).

The idea of one will (monotheletism) or one activity (monenergism) invariably leads to the idea of composition in the nature itself, violating the prior conciliar decrees. Thus, Maximus develops the theological justification of the notion of “composite hypostasis” (ὑπόστασις σύνθετος; e.g., Opusc. 23, PG 91, 264C), following the lead of Second Constantinople and Leontius of Jerusalem, as Dirk Krausmüller has argued (Krausmüller 2022, pp. 122–42). Composition can only be located in the hypostasis; there is no possibility of composition elsewhere (see Q.Thal. 60.2 and 62.5). Regarding the two natures, one often encounters the triadic formula “from which and in which and which” (τὰ ἐξ ὧν καὶ ἐν οἷς τε καὶ ἅπερ) Christ exists or subsists (Opusc. 9, PG 91, 121BD).10 It is in this formula that Maximus strikes the synthesis with post-Chalcedonian and Cyrillian thought (see Opusc. 22, PG 91, 257B; DP, PG 91, 289B).11 Christ is from the natures, is in the natures, and is the natures. According to Maximian logic, a composite nature, activity, or will would annihilate this incarnational tension, making Christ a goat-stag (τραγέλαφος), a mythological tertium quid, neither fully human nor fully divine, thus unable to truly effect the redemption of the human race (DP, PG 91, 341D; Opusc. 9, PG 91, 117B; see also Amb.Th. 5). Such a confection of Christ would do great violence not only to the οἰκονομία but also to the θεολογία, making a quaternity of the Trinity. Maximus must, however, account for what he calls the sublimity of the union (Opusc. 20, PG 91, 236A), which requires that he speak of the union of human and divine in a way that preserves each of the natures whole and entire. For example, he writes to John Cubicularius, “Now, we say the union has happened from two natures, and one composite hypostasis (μίαν ὑπόστασιν σύνθετον) of Christ results from these same natures from which he is composed, as a whole both keeps and safeguards its own parts without ceasing from the natural properties and without change, also in these the union was kept and preserved as a whole in parts” (Ep. 12, PG 91, 493A, my translation). Maximus’s Christ does not make something else of humanity than what it is. The union occurs in his personhood, yet in such a way that he really is human.

Composite hypostasis is a concept that is thoroughly soteriological. Gregory’s assumption doctrine stands, once again, at the core of this insistence on the perfect preservation of the divine and human natures unmixed (see Balthasar 2003, pp. 256–71; Clarke 2017, pp. 479–500). Maximus’s opponents in Constantinople run afoul of this principle by displacing composition onto the activity or will, which is the same as locating composition into the nature. This is why Severus of Antioch makes for such a convenient whipping boy for Maximus; Maximus is able to indirectly scold his Constantinopolitan contemporaries—such as Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople until 638, who had denounced Severus as “accursed” in his first letter to Alexandrian patriarch Cyrus and in the monenergist Ekthesis (Allen 2009, pp. 165, 215)—by showing that monotheletism and monenergism are essentially Severan thought. In the Confessor’s eyes, Severus is the one who mixes par excellence—only Nestorius receives as much attention as Severus (e.g., see Opusc. 3, PG 91, 49C; see also Clarke 2022c, pp. 105–26). The proponents of a composite nature, while attempting to secure the unity of the personhood, miss the point that the natural properties (φυσικὰ ἰδιώματα) of the divine and human natures become indiscernible in a mixed single nature.

Maximus is careful, however, not to articulate a notion of Christ’s humanity that leaves it humanly depersonalized (see Daley 2002, pp. 164–96). In this regard, he leans upon Leontius of Byzantium and his notion of the hypostatic. In Maximus’s own discussion of the hypostatic (ἐνυπόστατον) and the essential (ἐνούσιον), he observes that there can be no really existing nature that is without subsistence (ἀνυπόστατον) (Opusc. 16, PG 91, 205AB; Opusc. 23, PG 91, 261C; see Leontius of Byzantium 2017, pp. 130–41; see also Garrigues 1974, pp. 198–203). Therefore, even though the Son was a divine person rather than a human person, his human nature was not without subsistence, recalling once again the triadic formula mentioned above (τὰ ἐξ ὧν καὶ ἐν οἷς τε καὶ ἅπερ). Quite the contrary, his humanity was on full display through the Word’s full and voluntary exercise of the passions, even at the time of the refusal of the chalice, an action that Maximus understands—as did Cyril—to be a full demonstration of a rightly functioning will with its natural appetite (DP, PG 91, 297AC; see also Cyril of Alexandria 1995, pp. 105–6). As Paul Blowers has said, “the real struggle in Gethsemane for Maximus was not, then, between Christ’s human and divine wills (as his deified human will was ‘naturally’ disposed to obedience) but within his human volition itself, in the complexity of its relation to his deep-seated desires and aversions” (Blowers 2016, p. 163). Indeed, Christ’s repugnance of death does not suggest any variance between the divine and human wills, but rather the full humanity at work in Christ’s final struggle against sin and death, serving in an exemplary way for the rest of humanity that challenges us to willingly conform our wills through grace to the divine will (see Cooper 2005, p. 231).

As a consequence of the divine power in his hypostasis, the personal unity of Christ is a vigorous one that deeply permeates his humanity. The dynamic interplay between the divine and human natures in the divine hypostasis compels Maximus to deploy similarly dynamic terms and images to illustrate the concept. In pursuit of a clearer understanding of Christ’s composite hypostasis, Maximus turns to the notion of περιχώρησις, suggesting the interpenetration or coinherence of the divine and human natures in the composite hypostasis of Christ. While John of Damascus would later expand the use of this term, he does so on Maximian grounds. Maximus seems to draw this notion from Gregory Nazianzen, who uses the verb περιχωρέω in Ep. 101 to Cledonius when discussing the apparent mixture of the two natures.12 Maximus notes that there is no mixture of the two natures, but that the divine power (δύναμις) was united to the human nature, completely interpenetrating it (δι’ὅλου περικεχώρηκε) but without mixture. It is in this perichoretic way that Christ elevates human nature by his new mode of existence, even changing the ordinary human passions into volitional works (Amb.Th. 5.14). This is, of course, how Christ accomplishes divine things in a human way and human things in a divine way. Maximus writes that “as God, he was the motivating principle of his own humanity, and as man he was the revelatory principle of his own divinity. One could say, then, that he experienced suffering in a divine way, since it was voluntary (and he was not mere man); and that he worked miracles in a human way, since they were accomplished through the flesh (for he was not naked God” (Amb.Th. 5.18).

The Maximian go-to metaphor for such union in distinction is the fiery sword that produces indistinguishable activities. As Maximus said to Pyrrhus, “neither is the burning devoid of the cutting after the union, nor the cutting devoid of the burning. And neither on account of the doubling of the natural activities is ‘two’ introduced into the burning sword. Nor on account of the oneness of the burning sword is their essential differences made confused or commingled” (DP, PG 91, 340A).13 In the red-hot iron, one can point to two distinct activities that have become so one as to be seemingly inseparable. The dynamism of this image captures and illustrates the mutual interpenetration of the divine and human in Christ, an image of the divinized life of the faithful that Christ mediates. In fact, περιχώρησις provides a notional transition linking Maximus’s composite Christology with his cosmic Christology because of his use of this term in Ambiguum 41, which I will treat below (see Amb.Io. 41.5).

5. Cosmic Christology—Christ’s Mediatorial Role and the Working of Grace

Indeed, for Maximus, as has long been observed—most clearly by Lars Thunberg—man is a “microcosm” occupying a middle place that unites the whole cosmos in himself (see Thunberg 1995, pp. 132–43). In the Mystagogy, Maximus says that the whole cosmos is a human being and the human being is a cosmos (Myst. 7; see also Thunberg 1985, pp. 113–29). The Church in particular signifies the human being, with the various parts of the sacred space corresponding to the faculties of the human being. In the center of this cosmos, of course, is Christ.

In Ambiguum 41, Maximus speaks about the way in which Gregory Nazianzen’s saying that the natures are innovated (καινοτομοῦνται φύσεις) in the Incarnation of Christ could be interpreted (see Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 39.13). The treatment here focuses not on the division that results from sin but the division that appears to be part of the original ordering of the cosmos. Maximus thus identifies five divisions that Christ mediates between. The first, he explains, is the division between “uncreated nature and all of created nature” (ἀκτίστου φύσεως τὴν κτιστὴν καθόλου φύσιν). The second division happens in creation, which is divided by God into “the intelligible and the perceptible” (νοητὰ καὶ αἰσθητά). The third division occurs in perceptible nature, which is divided into “heaven and earth” (οὐρανὸν καὶ γῆν). The fourth division is the division of the earth into “paradise and the inhabited world” (παράδεισον καὶ οἰκουμένην), and the fifth is the division in “newly made man himself into male and female” (ἐπεισαχθείς ἄνθρωπος εἰς ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ) (Amb.Io. 41). Notice that Maximus traces these divisions through the second term each time (created nature, perceptible nature, earth, and the inhabited world) in his path to “male and female”, while the first term (uncreated nature, intelligible nature, heaven, and paradise) he leaves undivided. “Man” (ὁ ἄνθρωπος) himself, whom Maximus calls “a most capacious workshop” (συνεκτικώτατον ἐργαστήριον), could have, had he moved in accord with (κατὰ φύσιν) his natural movements, united all the divisions in the created world in himself in his natural ascent to God, being completely interpenetrated (περιχωρήσας) with the divine by the state of grace, becoming everything that God is but without identity of essence (Amb.Io. 41.2–5). Instead, he moved around the lower things in a way contrary to nature (παρὰ φύσιν), effectively rendering humanity unable to bring about the unification on its own.

Because of this, the Son came as savior for the lost man (ἀπολόμενον ἄνθρωπον), not only on a rescue mission but on a reunification mission. For Maximus, the Incarnation of Christ renews the natural world by restoring union among these divisions. In Christ’s becoming man, he descends through these five divisions into man in order to effect harmony throughout the cosmos, working his way back up through the five divisions, uniting them in himself in the mystery of his passion through his ascension into heaven and enthronement at the Father’s right hand. By heading up all things—that is, the whole created order—in himself, he shows “that the whole creation is one, as if it were another human being, completed by the mutual coming together of all its members” (Amb.Io. 41.6–9). What’s more, it is clear that in Maximus, the deification of creation holds primacy in the divine plan. Christ becomes incarnate to save the fallen, as he notes elsewhere in a response to Thalassius, but also the providence of the Word brings about the deification of the elect, a mystery that was “predetermined before the ages” (Q.Thal. 63.19).

Cosmic harmony is most clearly realized in the divine liturgy, whose sanctification of the Christian fold accomplishes union in diversity for the whole cosmos. In Maximus’s treatment on the Mystagogy, he writes that God gives to all “equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ” (Maximus the Confessor 2019, p. 53; see also Louth 1996, pp. 74–77). The unity of form, however, does not destroy the diversity within the body of believers. In this regard, Maximus’s sacramental economy is thoroughly integrated into the deifying mode of the believer’s being made into Christ. He writes there that it is by the mysteries that “the Church fashions each one into the image of Christ—each one of us who conducts himself properly to the very best of his ability—and she reveals the gift of adoption that is given through holy baptism in the Holy Spirit and that perfects each one into the image of Christ” (Maximus the Confessor 2019, pp. 93–4). The mystery of deification—or, as Blowers and Wilken describe it, “the ultimate ‘passion’ of deification” (Maximus the Confessor 2003, p. 34)—endures into the ages, because of the divine goodness, as the elect who through the life of the virtues and knowledge of the mysteries “actively made God man” in themselves “passively experience becoming God by grace”—a transformation that never comes to an end (Q.Thal. 22.8; see also Clarke 2022a, pp. 390–95).

6. Conclusions

The above represents an attempt to sketch the most salient features of Maximus’s Christology. In sum, it must be observed that Maximus’s Christology cannot be confined to the observations above, or even to the works above. Much more could be said about Maximus’s reading of Christ from the Old and New Testaments, Christology and the virtues and passions (particularly love), Christ’s sending of the Holy Spirit, and so on. A towering mind comparable to that of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Maximus continues to draw the interest of theologians both of East and of West, particularly in the renewal elicited by the Ressourcement movement of the past century, which has significantly benefitted Maximian studies, as evidenced by the increasing number of symposia and colloquia honoring the Confessor. In many ways, Maximus stands out among Ressourcement figures, as the crises he was responding to touch upon issues of our own time—such as the nature and meaning of human freedom, the collaboration of God and mankind in the work of redemption, God and the cosmos, the deification of believers, and so on. For these reasons, Maximus will always be a subject of intense interest who continues to speak to students of the Church Fathers.

The outcome of his life only adds to his intrigue.14 The Byzantine Maximus shared a similar fate to Pope Martin I for their collaboration at the Lateran Synod in 649 in support of the two activities and two wills of Christ, which infuriated the young Emperor Constans II who had them both arrested. Pope Martin was banished into exile where he died. Maximus would be held prisoner for some years before he earned in his flesh the title Confessor. He became one configured bodily as a disciple to that of his master. As noted above, for his Christological doctrine at odds with that of Constantinople, his tongue was gouged out and his right arm cut off, leading to his death in Lazica several months later. The same sentence was imposed on his disciple Anastasius.15 One would imagine that in their mutilation, their wounds were likely seared to prevent blood loss and immediate death, though such details are missing. In the glowing iron that may have touched his own flesh, granting him a few more months of life, Maximus must have perceived in the glowing metal the image of the Lord’s union of divinity and humanity as well as that of their future glory, a never-ending deification full of the divine life.