The Whole Mystery of Christ:
Creation as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor
by Jordan Daniel Wood
Foreword by Fr. John Behr
A thoroughgoing examination of Maximus the Confessor's singular theological vision through the prism of Christ's cosmic and historical Incarnation.
Notre Dame Press has graciously granted Clarion permission to post Dr. Wood's PREFACE to the book here.
Readers can also CLICK HERE to visit this 15-minute video introduction where Jordan Daniel Wood lays out the essence and purpose of The Whole Mystery of Christ.
PREFACE
Perhaps the last serious Western reader of Maximus Confessor (580–662 AD), prior to the twentieth century at least, was the Irish monk, prodigious translator of significant Greek fathers (Maximus among them), and court theologian John Scotus Eriugena (815–77 AD). Eriugena attributes many insights to Maximus. He credits Maximus with special insight into the riddle of the world’s procession from God. And so he writes in the preface to his versio Latina of Maximus’s Ambigua ad Iohannem:
To mention a few of many points, [Maximus most lucidly explains] in what way the Cause of all things, who is God, is both a simple and manifold One: what sort of procession there is—and here I mean the multiplication of divine Goodness through all the things which are— which descends from the summit all the way down, first through the general essence of all things, then through the most general genera, then through less general genera, still further through more specific species right into the most specific species, even into differentia and properties. And again, concerning the same divinity, we see what sort of reversion of Goodness there is—I mean the gathering together, through those same grades, from the things that exist in infinite diversity and multiplicity right up to that simplest unity of all things, which is in God and which God is. So [we see] that God is all things and all things are God. And [we understand] indeed in what way this divine procession into all things is called ἀναλυτικὴ, that is, unraveling, but reversion [is called] θέωσις—deification.1
Maximus taught Eriugena how the light of God’s ineffable transcendence most glitters when we see that and how God and the created world are “one and the same.”2 And to see this you need the crucial lens Maximus cuts: the “primordial reasons” of all things not only find their eternal ground in the Word of God, they “are the very [Word] Himself.”3 God and world are identical because the one Word is both.
I share Eriugena’s conviction that with Maximus dawned what may be the profoundest insight of patristic tradition into the peculiar role the Word plays in God’s creative act, the Word who remains consubstantial with Father and Spirit even as he descends into and as the generation of all things. I stand with Eriugena too when he says of the God-world relation—more exactly, how God and world are identical and distinct in the Word—that “there is no more profound question than this that seekers after the truth should investigate.”4 I sympathize still more when Eriugena, dumb before “the manner and reason of the establishment of all things in the Word,” yet sighs, “Let the one speak who can; myself, I confess I do not know.”5 In one more way I follow Eriugena: just here, where the trail runs cold, I look to Maximus.
Hence a broad and systematic question animates my study: Does the historical Incarnation of the Word disclose anything about the fundamental God-world relation, and if yes, what? I pose this question to Maximus, who, if the genre of ἐρωταπόκρισεις that much of his oeuvre assumes offers any indication, would not blithely dismiss such a ζήτημα.6 That this question motivates the study does not mean the study can resolve it, of course. But it might make a start. I take up another of Maximus’s practices, though without his ingenuity, in hunt of his answer: I comment on texts in Maximus that are, I think, misread, or at least read shallowly. So the systematic question becomes an exegetical one too. I ask it thus: What is the relation between creation and Incarnation in Maximus?
I argue that Maximus conceives creation as Incarnation. More precisely, creation and Incarnation are identified in Maximus because they bear the same logic and are ultimately the same event or act. To those familiar with Maximus or his modern commentators, this may appear a prosaic if overstated thesis. Many have spoken of the intimate link in Maximus’s theology between his Neo-Chalcedonian Christology and his conception of the world.7 Who among those who have read it could forget that breathtaking declaration, this book’s main epigraph: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things”?8 Still I contend not only that recent scholarship on Maximus has moved noticeably away from taking this cosmic Incarnation as literal Incarnation—where literal means in the technical sense of Christology proper, that is, according to the very logic of the Incarnate Word—but that Maximus’s readers have seldom taken him literally here, even his first and greatest reader in the West, Eriugena.9
A BRIEF WORD ON METHOD
This is a work of historical theology. Theology is the noun that historical modifies. Historical theology, if it be anything other than history or systematic (or moral, or fundamental, etc.) theology, cannot forget that theology names its substance, historical its first quality. My focus on Maximus, one of the brightest luminaries in the patristic era, surely makes this study historical. It will therefore traffic in word studies, intertextual connections (patristic and philosophical), liturgical context, the Greek monastic lifestyle, and all the rest as they prove pertinent. The noun theology does not justify shoddy analysis of the sources in their intricate settings.
But neither does understanding a text historically amount to theology, even when the text speaks theologically. Bernard Lonergan helpfully frames this approach in the following way. The historian aims to comprehend “texts,” not necessarily the “objects” these texts refer to. The objects themselves belong to systematic theology.10 The difference here, as Lonergan also knows, is not that history merely reports while theology (or philosophy) constructs or comprehends.11
True, the rise of historical consciousness in the modern era initially induced a decidedly von Rankean, positivist outlook in academic history—“Wie es eigentlich gewesen!”12 Positivists wanted history to replicate the method of the natural sciences in order to replicate their success too. That view died, and not simply under the knife of postmodern philosophy and critical theory. The hard sciences themselves came to know better than to indulge any simplistic subject-object methodological partition. In his 1957 Gifford lectures, for example, Werner Heisenberg found occasion to ramify quantum theory, which he had formulated thirty years prior, into broader precincts. His ten theses pronounce plainly:
“Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.”13 Since “methods and object can no longer be separated from each other,” Heisenberg concludes thus: “The scientific world-view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word.”14 And if so in natural science, certainly in history.15
Still more in historical theology. I seek more than Maximus’s meaning; I seek also the truth he means. Historical theology cannot limit itself to simple repetition or observation. It can suspect an author of inconsistency or even bad faith. It can ask whether an author’s view is true or false, and indeed perhaps more or less true than the author herself did or could know. Theology seeks revealed truth. And divine truth, who is the frolicsome Word playing in ten thousand places (to pair Maximus with Gerard Manley Hopkins),16 can surface in words whose original intent was not the fullness of that infinite Word—for all true words remain preeminently the Word’s before any author’s.17
In fact, permit me another theological justification here. Against certain trends that would commend a strict historicism around scholarly treatments of Maximus’s thought, I maintain that those who wish to give Maximus the spiritual and theological authority he merits should expect his words to disclose far more than their apparently plain sense.18 Observe Maximus’s remark in the prologue of the Ambigua ad Iohannem regarding one of his greatest authorities, St. Gregory of Nazianzus: “For you are well aware that Saint Gregory the Theologian was a man of profound thoughts but of comparatively few words, and so he compels his interpreters—even those who command extraordinary powers of speech and philosophical brilliance—to go on at great length and touch on a wide range of subjects.”19 Maximus suggests that the mark of a truly illuminating intellect is its ability to generate thought beyond the supposedly intended meaning of its words. And to state perhaps the deepest motive for putting specific questions to Maximus’s writings: the more one believes Maximus’s words to bear some special authority, even divine inspiration, the more one should anticipate their nearly limitless power to generate fresh speculative insight. That, after all, is just what Maximus claims of divine scripture and Gregory’s words alike.20 I therefore submit that overcautious reticence to ask of Maximus’s oeuvre pointed speculative questions, however reverent one’s disposition, would amount to denying the divine authority of his words. At the very least it would mean refusing to follow his own example. Yet is he not worthy of imitation?
We must then allow historical theology to ask luminaries a question they might not have asked themselves, or at least not in precisely the same terms. I suspect this is what Cyril O’Regan intimates when he calls Hans Urs von Balthasar’s method “thick retrieval.”21 Retrieving requires first listening to the author in his or her own voice. That is good conversation etiquette.22 But the retrieval, the conversation, is thick, inevitably saddled with the questioner’s own worries and wonders. It is thick too because what the questioner thinks she hears from her bygone interlocutor she must comprehend, judge, and communicate in today’s idiom. There is nothing frivolous or feigned about this enterprise. Nor is it unworthy or impertinent.
Happily Balthasar’s method appears to have made a comeback in modern Maximus scholarship. Paul Blowers makes liberal use of Balthasar’s “theodramatic” categories in his recent and knowledgeable presentation of Maximus.23 And some scholars have ventured defenses of the kinds of questions Balthasar asked. Many once worried that Balthasar’s method transgresses by anachronism. Can you really put Hegel’s questions to Maximus? Elie Ayroulet takes a convincing and optimistic view: “Rather than accusing the Balthasarian reading of anachronism, might we not see therein evidence of the inspiring and creative potency of Maximian thought?”24 Joshua Lollar (as well as Ayroulet) concedes the predictable perils involved in laying modern concerns at Maximus’s feet but also warns us to “be equally cautious with ready dismissals and charges of anachronism lest we miss an essential component of von Balthasar’s interpretation of Maximus, namely, his performance of him.”25 I proceed in concert with these commentators. And so I borrow Ayroulet’s words to characterize this study’s fundamental approach and animating spirit: “Engaging Maximus’s texts in a lively manner, letting them inspire us and thereby to progress in our own understanding of the faith—these are the objectives of our method, which seeks to be that of a speculative and systematic theology in the spirit of Maximus the Confessor.”26
NOTES
1. Eriugena, Joannis Scoti Versio Ambiguorum S. Maximi, praef., ed. E. Jeauneau, CCSG 18 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 3–4, lines 25–37; my translation.
2. Eriugena, Periphyseon III.17, trans. John J. O’Meara, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature) (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987), 161–63: “Proinde non duo a se ipsis distantia debemus intelligere deum et creaturam sed unum et id ipsum.”
3. Eriugena, Periphyseon III.7, trans. O’Meara, 76–77: “Omnia in verbo dei non solum aeterna verum etiam ipsum {verbum} esse.” It is surely significant that Eriugena overtly credits this precise insight to Maximus’s Amb. 7. this precise insight to Maximus’s Amb. 7.
4. Eriugena, Periphyseon III.7, trans. O’Meara, 70–71.
5. Eriugena, Periphyseon III.16, trans. O’Meara, 144–45.
6. Cf. Amb. ad Ioh., prol., PG 91, 1061A. On Maximus’s use of this genre, see Paul M. Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the “Questiones ad Thalassium” (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), and Peter van Deun, “Maximus the Confessor’s Use of Literary Genres,” in The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, ed. Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 275.
7. Already in 1915 Sergei Leontevich Epifanovich, the first major modern scholar of Maximus, identified Maximus’s unique genius in his application of the Incarnation to virtually every other dimension of existence; see the discussion in Joshua Lollar, “Reception of Maximian Thought in the Modern Era,” in Allen and Neil, Oxford Handbook, 565–67.
8. Amb. 7.22, PG 91, 1084CD: “Βούλεται γὰρ ἀεὶ καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγος καὶ Θεὸς τῆς αὐτοῦ ἐνσωματώσεως ἐνεργεῖσθαι τὸ μυστήριον.”
9. Eric D. Perl, “Metaphysics and Christology in Maximus Confessor and Eriugena,” in Eriugena: East and West—Papers of the Eighth International Colloquium of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 253–79. Eriugena openly denies the equation of creation and the historical Incarnation (Periphyseon III.17, trans. O’Meara, 162–63).
10. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (1971; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 168.
11. Whether you move within the discipline of history from experience (research), to understanding (interpretation), to judging (history), to deciding (dialectics); or go back within theology proper from deciding (foundations), to judging (doctrines), to understanding (systematics), and again to experience (communications)— you are always taken up into the “spiral” of a “self-correcting process” spurred on by our natural desire to know. That is, when we try to understanding anything, whether “texts” in history or their “objects” in theology, we are often spinning round the hermeneutical circle of parts to whole to parts to whole again; see Lonergan, Method in Theology, 159, 191–94, 208, passim.
12. See the concise summary of Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–2.
13. John Lukacs, “History and Physics, or the End of the Modern Age,” in Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (1994; repr., New York: Routledge, 2017), 273–315.
14. Lukacs, “History and Physics,” 287; Heisenberg’s emphasis.
15. This is why Thomas Kuhn’s book has become a classic in the humanities; see his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
16. See the meditation, largely on Amb. 71, of Paul M. Blowers, “On the ‘Play’ of Divine Providence in Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor,” in Re-reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture, ed. Christopher Beeley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 183–201.
17. Cf. George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination,” in The Complete Fairy Tales (1893; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 1–15.
18. The advocacy of a strict historicism is a common if natural tendency rehearsed, for instance, in many introductions to translations of Maximus’s work—namely, to lament that this or that theme in Maximus’s writings has been unduly privileged above other important themes so that we are left with something less than the whole portrait of the man. But of course, there is no reason to think presenting a portrait of any truly inspired thinker must always be the goal of any study of him or her, and still less that a whole “historical” portrait actually delivers the whole potency of the thinker’s thought. This would even betray Maximus’s own approach to prior significant authorities.
19. Amb. ad Ioh., prol., PG 91, 1065A.
20. Q. Thal. 1.2.8, ed. Carlos Laga and Carlos Steel, Quaestiones ad Thalassium I, CCSG 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1980), 23: “For the divine word could never be circumscribed by a single individual interpretation, nor does it suffer confinement in a single meaning, on account of its natural infinity.” Hence it is because Maximus deems Gregory’s words divinely inspired that he can easily confront a literal contradiction in Gregory (here confusing John the Evangelist with John the Baptist) in the same way that he would an absurdity in scripture itself: it “cannot be resolved by any means other than spiritual contemplation”; cf. Amb. 21.3, PG 91, 1244B.
21. Cyril O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval: Post-Chalcedonian Symphonic Theology,” Gregorianum 77.2 (1996): 237 and 258.
22. Here I am influenced by Marc Bloch’s “observe” versus “relay” distinction; see his The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It (1944; repr., Toronto: Random House, 1953), esp. 141f.
23. Paul M. Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
24. Elie Ayroulet, “La reception de Maxime le Confesseur l’ poque contemporaine,” Theophilyon 21.1 (2016): 74, my translation.
25. Lollar, “Reception,” 570.
26. Ayroulet, “Reception,” 89, my translation.
CONTENTS
Foreword, by John Behr ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxi
INTRODUCTION. The God-World Relation in
Modern Maximus Scholarship 1
ONE. The Middle: Christo-Logic 19
TWO. The Beginning: Word Becomes World 55
THREE. The End: World Becomes Trinity 85
FOUR. The Whole: Creation as Christ 141
CONCLUSION. The Whole Mystery of Christ 195
Analytic Appendix of Key Concepts 205
Notes 213
Bibliography 333
Index 351
From The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor by Jordan Daniel Wood. © 2022 by Jordan Daniel Wood. Reprinted by permission of University of Notre Dame Press.
This was a wonderful introduction to this work; thank you for sharing it! As I read it, though, I was painfully aware of my ignorance of the work of Eriugena. I wonder if there are any reliable English translations of his major works and, if any, where to start reading.
Posted by: Will B | September 09, 2022 at 05:31 PM