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.

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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.