|
|
Salvation as Transfiguration: The Liturgical Soteriology of
St. Maximus the Confessor
Adam A.J. DeVille, Ph.D. (cand.)
Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute at St. Paul University
Ottowa, ON
Introduction
Writing in the late 1930s, the great Swiss theologian
Hans Urs von Balthasar observed a process of destruction of Western culture and
Christianity that has only increased in the intervening sixty-five years. In
such a context, von Balthasar suggested, the inclination on the part of many is
to attempt to recover a lost Eden, a garden of delights unspoiled by the acids
of modernity and the exigencies of a frequently troubling history. For many
Christians, this paradisiacal age is thought to be found in that of the
Fathers, and our task is simple: we must return to the way things were done in
their time.[1]
Yet, between the
Patristic age and our own, there is a great gulf fixed. The former age was one
in which highly sophisticated theological disputes were thrashed out frequently
at the cost of exile, excommunication, and even death for those on the wrong
side.[2]
Our present age, by contrast, is one in which many people doubt the very
concept of truth, and are supinely indifferent to the ongoing existence of
incommensurate and patently contradictory “truths,” thinking none of them worth
dying for.[3]
Moreover, even many Christians, especially in North America and Western Europe,
doubt many (especially moral) truths of the faith “once delivered to the
saints.”[4]
In such a context, can a thoroughgoing Byzantine theologian
like Maximus the Confessor be relevant--and if he is relevant, can he be
approached across such wide expanses
of time and space and such profoundly different cultural contexts?[5]
This essay will argue that Maximus is relevant to us today[6]
and can be accessed, but not by simply adopting all his ideas or
imitating all his solutions to the problems of his age. As Alexander Schmemann
cautioned us, any return to the Fathers will prove destructive if we seek only
to return to their ideas or their texts, and not to their spirit and mind:
It is my impression that with a few exceptions, the “patristic
revival”… is a return much more to patristic texts than to the mind of
the Fathers, as if these patristic texts were self-sufficient and
self-explanatory. It is indeed the “original sin” of the entire western
theological development that it made “texts” the only loci theologici,
the extrinsic “authorities” of theology, disconnecting theology from its living
source: liturgy and spirituality.[7]
The problem with such a textual approach to the
Fathers, including Maximus, is that their life was not lived in books but in
churches and monasteries, in prayer and at liturgy. If we in our day seek to
understand what Maximus has to teach us about salvation, we will be sorely
mistaken if we look only to his written works and do not undertake the
practices necessary for such salvation. Reading Maximus, in other words, is not
enough: we must also act. Accordingly, after examining his tripartite process
for salvation as understood in the light of Christ’s Transfiguration, we will
close with a reflection on the liturgical texts for Feast of the
Transfiguration since it is in the liturgy above all that the Fathers remain
alive with us and are able to teach us from beyond the grave. Thus do we outwit
the hermeneutic problem of approaching those long dead: we look beyond their
texts to their living communion with us in the liturgy and their on-going
intercession on our behalf. As von Balthasar so eloquently put it:
[W]e shall not collect the living and sacred documents of our life (and
the history of the Church is our life) as a person would collect stamps or
butterflies. That would be to demonstrate that we are already dead. Let us read
history, our history, as a living account of what we once were, with the
double-edged consciousness that all of this has gone forever and that, in spite
of everything, that period of youth and every moment of our lives remains
mysteriously present at the wellsprings of our soul in a kind of delectable eternity.[8]
I: Salvation as Transfiguration: Foundational Ascetic
Practices
At first glance, the Confessor’s soteriology may
seem hopelessly abstruse. Any sign of “delectable eternity” is well hidden by
writing that is notoriously dense and rhetorically florid. Maximus would seem to be the last person to
whom to look for practical counsel on what is necessary that we might obtain
eternal salvation.[9]
Yet, for all his over-fondness of speculation and sentences that seem never to
end, Maximus instead had as his uppermost consideration that of prayer and the
practical life.[10]
The antinomy of Maximus’s life is that this most complex of theologians is also
but a simple monk and man of prayer whose whole concern centres on “ascetic
struggle,”[11]
leading, as we shall see, to transfiguration in Christ.
This holy monk’s
soteriology—insofar as we may treat it systematically, since Maximus was not a
systematician—may be summed up as the process of transfiguration of the soul
through prayer and ascetic struggle, leading up an ascent through virtue
to spiritual knowledge and culminating in theology.[12]
We shall consider each of these in turn.[13]
This monastic concern manifests itself repeatedly
throughout Difficulty 10, in which we find
the Confessor returning again and again to the theme of “ascetic
struggle.”[14]
Difficulty 10 is a wide-ranging reflection—which moves from many topics
in a pattern of “lateral thinking,” as Louth has put it—but is nonetheless
linked by the common concern for the practical means necessary for the contemplation
of God and for obtaining salvation.[15]
Thus does Maximus return frequently to the examples of, inter alia, Moses,
Abraham, the prophets and patriarchs, and the saints who, in possessing “the
inerrant knowledge concerning God and divine things…rightly proceed along the
straight path.”[16]
That straight path is secured through ascetic struggle against the sins to
which our fallen nature is prone in an attempt to deny or avoid death.[17]
Without such a struggle, it is impossible to begin the process of knowing God:
“ascetic struggle destroys evil and through the demonstration of the virtues
cuts off from the world those who are completely led through it in their
disposition.”[18]
Such a struggle, Maximus writes in another place, “overthrows the flesh, sense
and the world, through which the relationship of the mind to the intelligible
is dissolved, and by his mind alone through love comes to know God.”[19]
For Maximus, ascetic
struggle as the first stage in the process of salvific transfiguration aims
most simply at “the complete mortification and cessation of desire in the
senses,”[20]
or what is commonly known among Byzantine theologians as apatheia.[21]
One arrives at such a state through ascetic struggle, which is itself composed
of a disciplining of the bodily desires—including, inter alia, “conceit…pride
and self-esteem,”[22]
“‘ignominy of mouth,’”[23]
“gluttony”[24]
and “envy”[25]—chiefly
through prayer[26]
until one becomes “completely oblivious of wealth and health and other
transient goods which the virtues transcend.”[27]
For Maximus, then, the first step along the path to salvation is to undergo
that rigorous training which any mountaineer would undertake before attempting
to scale a high mountain.
So, too, in the spiritual life, the ascent to
Mount Tabor and the uncreated light of Christ’s saving divine power can only be
attempted by those who first undertake the rigorous practice and discipline of
the body in order to purify the soul and leave the world behind, ascending to
God who is without form and beyond the world. [28]
As Lev Gillet notes: “before attaining the light of the Transfiguration, the
hard path of asceticism is necessary.”[29]
Let us now turn to the fruit of ascetic struggle, viz., those transcendent
virtues whose achievement marks the second step in the process of transfiguration
leading to the ultimate goal of sanctified deification and thus salvation.
II: Transfiguration Through Virtue
After one has begun
the process of ascetic discipline, one begins to move to the next stage in the
salvific process of deification. That stage consists in the acquisition of
virtue, which Maximus defines simply: “Virtue is a stable and utterly
dispassionate state of righteousness.”[30]
For Maximus, such a state is intrinsically valuable, sought for its own sake as
much as for its role as the “divine chariot” carrying us to God.[31]
As he puts it, if a man “has virtues alone and for their sake, he is
blessed….If you take away all bodily and external advantages from the condition
of general blessedness, and leave nothing whatever but the virtues, it remains
a state of blessedness. For virtue, by itself, is sufficient for happiness.”[32]
While Maximus does acknowledge
that the acquisition of virtue is a gift from God, he stresses repeatedly that
the responsibility is ours to accept or reject: “‘The Lord has given us the tropos of
salvation and the eternal power to become sons of God; henceforth, our
salvation is in our power.’”[33]
It is not, in other words, within God’s power to force us to cooperate with His
will:
“created
man cannot become a son of God and god by grace through deification unless he
is first through his own free choice begotten in the Spirit.”[34]
Once a man makes that choice, then the entire panoply of salvation, and the
entire pantheon of saintly warriors, open up to him:
For God provides equally to all the power that naturally leads to
salvation, so that each one who wishes can be transformed by divine grace. And
nothing prevents anyone from willing to become Melchisedec, and Abraham, and
Moses, and simply transferring all these Saints to himself, not by changing
names and places, but by imitating their forms and way of life.[35]
Of those forms of
life crucial for the virtues, none rate so high an encomium as that of
humility, which Maximus regards as the sine qua non of all
virtues. Humility is the characteristic virtue of the saints who “hold fast to
the form of the virtues par excellence, I mean humility. Now humility is
a firm safeguard of all that is good, undermining everything that is opposed to
it.”[36]
As he puts it elsewhere, “the highest of all blessings [is] humility, that
conserves other blessings and destroys their opposites.”[37]
One of the blessings that virtue, founded upon
humility, conveys, is the ability to read and understand divine revelation,
especially scriptural revelation: “As soon as anyone practices the virtues with
true intelligence, he acquires a spiritual understanding of Scripture”[38]
and thus avoids the literalism that Maximus denounces in many places.[39]
Such a reading of Scripture is part of the acquisition of spiritual knowledge
leading to contemplation and ultimately our salvation: “Every lover of
salvation is totally committed either to the practice of the virtues or to the
contemplative life. For without virtue and spiritual knowledge no one can
attain salvation in any way whatsoever.”[40]
To the matter of spiritual knowledge, then, let us turn next to understand this
further step in the climb up the Mount Tabor of our salvation.
III: Transfiguration Through Spiritual Knowledge
For Maximus,
spiritual knowledge is that which enables one to soar beyond the fleshly and
the worldly and ascend to great heights of contemplation. Once one has
undertaken ascetic struggle, acquired humility, and advanced in virtue, one
proceeds concomitantly to develop knowledge of things divine that enables one
to contemplate the Providence of God.[41]
These is not a strictly linear process and often what we might think of as
discrete stages overlap and circle back on one another or occur almost
simultaneously. As Louth reminds us, “ascetic struggle is not simply an initial
stage to be accomplished as quickly as possible, it is an abiding concern of
the spiritual life.”[42]
Just as a mountaineer does not always ascend to the top in a direct line, but
sometimes has to descend in order to ascend from a better position, or move
laterally to find a better vantage point from which to continue climbing, so
too with the relationship between virtue and spiritual knowledge: “man’s
manifestation through the virtues of the God who is by nature invisible is
correlative with the degree to which his intellect is seized by God and imbued
with spiritual knowledge.”[43]
Virtue and spiritual knowledge, then, go
together—although not always, and in some rare instances one who is “smutted by
the passions may possibly deduce knowledge of divine things by means of
plausible guesswork; but they cannot grasp or express such knowledge with any
accuracy.”[44]
Maximus recognizes, in other words, that what he calls spiritual knowledge is
not simply the result of “mere learning,”[45]
which, as often as not, is simply a human creation.
By contrast, Maximus
insists that we may attain correct knowledge of things divine, but such an
attainment is not of our own devising: “a man whose intellect has been formed
by the knowledge that comes by dint of the virtues through the divine Spirit is
said to experience divine things; for he has acquired such knowledge not by
nature, thanks simply to his existence, but by grace, thanks to his
participation in it.”[46]
Spiritual knowledge, then, is a divine gift, but once again we must freely
choose to participate in it. Our participation is not in a simple,
natural acquisition of facts about God, but in a completely transforming
process in God and for God so that, with St. Paul, we may say, “It is no longer
I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”[47]
This transposition of the self, this total gift of the self, means that any
spiritual knowledge acquired consists not in a tangible facts and figures that
can be demonstrably discussed and disseminated but is to be understood more as
“erotic” knowledge beyond the empirical.[48]
Whilst qualifying his terms so that we do not misunderstand him, Maximus
nonetheless presses the point: “spiritual knowledge unites knower and known” in
“an erotic union in the Spirit.”[49]
For Maximus, then, “spiritual knowledge,” the
second stage in our transfiguration in Christ, is to be understood more in
monastic and marital terms--as the union of lovers--than academic and
scientific ones. Spiritual knowledge, as that intercourse between human and
divine, between our efforts and God’s gracious revelation, is embodied above
all in Christ’s nuptial self-giving.[50]
As Aidan Nichols comments:
Faced with the mystery of the Incarnate Word,
Maximus at last grasped that man is not divinised by a simple prolongation of
his natural dynamism, but by a change which fulfils his natural aspiration only
through transposing it into a new key, in that realm of being and action proper
only to persons. Hencefore, where salvation is concerned, divinisation and
Christology will form one single mystery.[51]
For Maximus, divinisation and Christology form one
single unity and the spiritual knowledge we acquire does not provide us with
any “new data” beyond the Christological. Maximus, ever eschewing the role of
innovator and the temptation of Gnosticism, suggests that spiritual knowledge
simply takes one into the realm of tried and true dogma: “the saints have
received the many divine mysteries…and were immediately initiated into
knowledge of reality in accordance with the tradition passed down to them from
those before them.”[52]
Moreover, Maximus is at pains in several places to
stress what is perhaps the central antinomy of the Christian life: the more one
draws closer to the Triune God, the darker one’s knowledge becomes—or, to put
it in terms of the metaphor we have been using throughout, the higher up one
draws to the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, the more one becomes blinded
by the light, until, at the peak and thus closest to Christ, one cannot see at
all with only eyes of flesh. This antinomy of hidden-revealed is drawn out at
length in Difficulty 5:
Having become man he [ie., Christ]
himself remains completely incomprehensible, and shows his own Incarnation…to
be more incomprehensible than any mystery. The more he becomes comprehensible
through it, so much the more through it is he known to be incomprehensible.
‘For he is hidden after his revelation,’ the teacher says, ‘or, to speak more
divinely, also in his revelation. And this mystery of Jesus in itself remains
hidden, and can be drawn out by no reason, by no intellect, but when spoken of
it remains ineffable, and when understood unknown.’[53]
The higher one climbs, the more one perceives Christ to be unknown;
the greater spiritual knowledge one has of divine things, the less one is able
to see and say. In other words, the more
the light of spiritual knowledge brightens one’s mind, the darker one’s
perception of God becomes, and so one is thrown back on faith. This theological
antinomy occupies a large place in Maximus’s writings, especially on the
Transfiguration, and so we turn to it next.
IV: Transfiguration as Theology:
Antinomic Method
Accustomed as we
moderns are to thinking of theology as an academic discipline with discrete
boundaries and definite subject matter, we may come to Maximus’s use of this
term and find it puzzling. Yet, in light of the foregoing, we may surmise by
now that for Maximus “theology,” like the other stages of the salvific ascent
up Mount Tabor, is not an academic discipline (Maximus, after all, was the
successor to Evagrius, for whom the theologian is simply the one who prays[54])
but, rather, the result of prayer. Theology is largely a synonym for
contemplation in and through Christ of the Trinity, as brought about by
Spirit-inspired prayer: “Theology is taught us by the incarnate Logos of God,
since He reveals in Himself the Father and the Holy Spirit.”[55]
Such a contemplation of the Triune God is as much
a revelation as a veiling, as we saw earlier. In this, Maximus takes us once
again to the classical antinomy between a theology of negation and that of
affirmation, which he understands again via a reflection on the
Transfiguration:
For I think that the divinely-fitting events that took place on the
mount at the Transfiguration secretly indicate two universal modes of theology:
that is, that which is pre-eminent and simple and uncaused, and through sole
and complete denial truly affirms the divine, and fittingly and solemnly exalts
its transcendence through speechlessness, and then that which follows this and
is composite, and from what has been caused magnificently sketches out…through
affirmation.[56]
Maximus is here suggesting that the one path we have been following
up Mount Tabor is now about to diverge. All the climbers have undertaken
ascetic disciplines and practiced virtues leading to spiritual knowledge, but
once they have progressed through these stages, some will ascend still higher
via a “hidden apophatic theology” in which “the blessed and holy Godhead is by
essence beyond ineffability and unknowability and countlessly raised above all
infinity, leaving not the slightest trace of comprehension to those who are
after it, nor disclosing any idea to any being.”[57]
Others, however, will engage in a positive
contemplation, or what the Confessor calls “the affirmative mode” which has
three components to it: “activity,” “providence,” and “judgment.”[58]
Whether via such “active” means or by the more negative ones, the goal is still
the same: “it is our aim to make the intelligence stand alone, stripped through
the virtues of its affection for the body.”[59]
Only one so stripped may ascend to the top of Tabor and there see, and be seen
by, the uncreated light radiating from Christ, who is the source and summit of
the Christian life.
When one thus prepared arrives at
the top, Maximus sketches out what awaits them as awaited the Apostles whom
Christ took with Him to His Transfiguration:
[T]hey passed over from flesh to spirit, before they had put aside this
fleshly life, by the change in their powers of sense that the Spirit worked in
them….Then, having both the bodily and the spiritual senses purified, they were
taught the spiritual meanings [logoi] of the mysteries that were shown
to them….Thus they arrived at a clear and correct understanding concerning God,
and were set free from every attachment to the world and the flesh.[60]
Those who scale Tabor, then, find
themselves arriving at the top in human form, but yet taken beyond human form
to contemplate God in a way that is pure, clear, and free from human frailty
and fallibility. As Nichols puts it:
For Maximus, the whole “matter” of
existence, whether thought or action, is not just renewed but
“innovated”–recreated from the roots up–by entrance into the life of the
children of God. As Creator, the Logos furnishes man with these “materials” but
as Word Incarnate, he communicates to him the new life which “innovates” nature
in his person.[61]
This innovation and re-creation, as we
have suggested, is for Maximus akin to climbing Mount Tabor, which is not a
one-time affair but an on-going transfiguration for all of us.[62]
Salvation is thus a process akin to mountaineering. The base of the mountain of
salvation is the ascetic practices of prayer and self-denial; the first step is
the acquisition of virtue, of which humility is the most important; the next
level is spiritual knowledge; the penultimate peak is “theology” or
contemplation of the divine along paths of both negation and affirmation; and
then the summit is complete transfiguration whereby the self is transposed and
we become deified, hearing, like Christ, the Father’s commendation, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well
pleased.”[63]
Such a commendation from the Father puts squarely before us now the entire
purpose of our ascent: to know the Father’s love and be utterly transfigured
in, and ecstatically enraptured by, it.[64]
Such, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has reminded us, is the source and summit of
man’s life as Maximus understood it: “pour Maxime, l’amour est la synthèse de tout
ce que est humain dans l’homme.”[65]
V: Salvation as Transfiguration
and Deification: Some Liturgical Conclusions
We began by asking how Maximus might be relevant
for us today, and how we could receive wisdom from a figure who lived so long
ago and in such profoundly different times. We are now in a position to give an
answer. As Maximus himself would not hesitate to counsel, what matters is not
reading his own often-difficult treatises but what matters is prayer, and above
all the liturgy. We conclude with a brief reflection on how the three stages of
salvific ascent to transfiguration come through in the liturgical texts for the
Feast of the Transfiguration[66]
on August 6th.
Maximus argues that the first stage of the ascent
of Tabor is that of ascetic struggle. Without struggling against our fallen
nature, we will never advance in the spiritual life. This theme is even today
still pointedly put before us in the Ikos of Orthros on August 6th:
“Come, stay awake! If we let laziness chain us to the ground, our spirits will
never rise to lofty matters. Let us rise and go up the slope of the divine
Mount.”[67]
Thus there is, in one of the opening hymns of the feast day, a clear call
sounded to all of us to take up the necessary work of disciplining our passions
and overcoming our laziness so that we might be ready for the ascent.
The second stage, as we saw, is the acquisition of
virtue. This, too, comes out in the hymnography, drawn out clearly in the
fourth stichera from Great Vespers: “O Lord, when You were transfigured on a
high mountain in the presence of Your foremost disciples, You radiated with
glory, showing how those who lead an outstanding life of virtue will be made
worthy of the glory of heaven.”[68]
Once more, a Maximian theme may be detected.
Third and finally, the stage of contemplation
takes one into the Triune God and allows one to see clearly the mystery of each
Person. This theme comes out in several of the texts of the feast, but is
perhaps best summed up by the exapostilarion of Matins: “Today, O Word, You
reveal Your light on Tabor, O unaltered light of the eternal Father’s Light!
And in Your light, we see the light of the Father and the Holy Spirit, guiding
all creation with eternal uncreated light.”[69]
We have been arguing that salvation for Maximus
the Confessor is a tripartite process of gradual transfiguration in which we
are challenged to ascetic practices, virtue, and spiritual knowledge before
ascending to theological contemplation of the uncreated light and thus to
deification. In sum, salvation for Maximus is a process of cooperating with,
and participating in, the grace of God through several stages of ascent,
leading to a freedom from every earthly attachment and the ability to see God
as Moses and Elijah did on top of the mountain. This is not a direct progression from one
absolute, discrete stage to the next, but much more of a circuitous process:
not a straight path upward, but a spiral that circles back on itself and only
gradually ascends. Such an ascent will lead us in the final analysis to our
salvation by our “deliverance from death, separation from corruption,
liberation from slavery, cessation of turbulence, destruction of wars,
dispelling of darkness, rest from suffering, calming of turmoil, eclipsing of
shame, escape from passions and, to sum up, the termination of all evils.”[70]
If such are the treasures that await us atop Mount Tabor, may we all run with
eagerness to ascend it, aided by the prayers of that master mountaineer, our
holy father among the saints, Maximus the Confessor!
Notes:
[1] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Fathers,
the Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communio vol. xxiv no. 2 (Summer
1997):347-396. (This essay was originally published in 1939.) Von Balthasar
demonstrates how fatuously romantic and therefore undesirable—indeed, impossible—the
idea of a return is: “No time is completely like another, and the Church is
always standing before a new situation, and therefore before a new decision in
which she can let herself receive advice and admonition from her past
experiences but in which, however, the decision must be faced directly: The
past can never lighten, let alone dispense from, the decision itself” (p. 370).
[2] See, for but
one germane example, the famous trial of St. Maximus: G. Berthold, Maximus
Confessor. Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985).
[3] See Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981) for one of the most profound and influential treatments of the
philosophical crisis of our age.
[4] Jude 3. For an eloquent and theologically
compelling response to these doubts, see the encyclical letter of Pope John
Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (Vatican City: Polyglot Press, 1993).
[5] For an initial attempt to situate Maximus in
something of an historical context, see Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Place of Maximus
the Confessor in the History of Christian Thought,” in Heinzer Felix and
Christoph Schonborn, Maximus Confessor. Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le
Confessor (Fribourg-en-Suisse: Editions Universitaires, 1982): 387-402.
[6] As Andrew Louth suggests, an increasing number of
people are coming to see Maximus’s relevance for our age, as evidenced by
renewed scholarly attention being paid to him: Andrew Louth, “Recent Research
on St. Maximus the Confessor: A Survey,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly
vol. 42 no. 1 (1998): 67-84.
[7] Alexander
Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,”
in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann,
ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 42. This
essay was originally published in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 13
(1969): 217-224.
[8] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Presence and Thought:
An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark
Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 [1988]), 13. For a brief comparison
between Maximus and Gregory (and his Cappadocian confreres), see George C.
Berthold,. “The Cappadocian Roots of Maximus the Confessor,” in eds. Heinzer
Felix and Christoph Schonborn, Maximus
Confessor. Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confessor (Fribourg-en-Suisse:
Editions Universitaires, 1982): 51-9. Cf. also Andrew Louth, “St. Gregory the
Theologian and St. Maximus the Confessor: The Shaping of Tradition,” in eds. S.
Coakley and D.A. Pailin, The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine:
Essays in Honour of Maurice Wills (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): 117-130.
[9] As Louth tells
us, no less a figure that the Photius, the ninth century Patriarch of
Constantinople, found Maximus very difficult to interpret and understand. And
as Louth observes, Maximus seems “positively shy of full-stops!” Andrew Louth, Maximus
the Confessor (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 81.
[12] Cf. St. Maximus
the Confessor, Difficulty 10 31B,
cited in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 131.
[13] In commenting
on the Transfiguration, Maximus writes “‘these tabernacles represent the three
stages of salvation, namely that of virtue, that of spiritual knowledge, and
that of theology.’” Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 46, quoting CT
II.13-16.
[14] This phrase
occurs numerous times in his writings. In Difficulty 10, it comes up in
sections 1108A (Louth: p. 97), 1109B (Louth: p.98), 1145A (Louth: p.119), 1145C
(Louth: p. 120), 1148A (Louth: p.120), 1149C (Louth: p.122), 1161A (Louth:
p.129). As Louth writes in his introduction, “for Maximus, into whatever realm
of speculation his intellect roams, ascetic theology remains fundamental” (p.
44).
[16] Difficulty
10, 30: Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 128.
[17] Jean-Claude Larchet provides a helpful analysis of
the consequences of sin and death according to Maximus in his, “Ancestral Guilt
According to St. Maximus the Confessor: A Bridge Between Eastern and Western
Conceptions,” Sobornost 20/1 (1998): 26-48. Cf. John Boojamra, “Original
Sin According to St. Maximus the Confesssor,” St. Vladimir’s Theological
Quarterly 20 (1976): 19-30.
[18] Ibid., 1161C, p.129.
[19] Difficulty
10, 1148A: Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 120.
[20] Maximus the
Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer, in The Philokalia, trans. G.E.H.
Palmer, P. Sherrard, K. Ware (London/Boston, 1984), 291.
[21] Cf. Difficulty
10 1148b-D: Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 121.
[22] Maximus the
Confessor, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 262.
[23] Ibid., 265 (cf. 2 Sam. 4:4).
[26] For more
on Maximus’s approach to prayer, see “On
the Lord’s Prayer,” in The Philokalia, 285-305.
[27] Difficulty
10, 1172D: Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 136. Elsewhere, Maximus gives another list of the vices or
bodily desires against which one must war: “Anger, bloodthirstiness, wrath,
guile, hypocrisy, dissembling, resentment, greed, and everything by thich the
one human person is divided up.” Letter 2: On Love 397D in Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 88.
[28] “For truly the
great and fearful gulf between God and human beings is the desire and
inclination to the body and this world.” Difficulty 10 1172A in Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 135.
[29] Lev Gillet (“A Monk of the Eastern
Church”), The Year of Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical
Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church, trans. Deborah Cowan
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001 [original English edition:
1980]), 240.
[30] Maximus, Fifth
Century in The Philokalia, 261.
[31] Difficulty
10 1124B (12) ,
in Ibid., 107.
[32] Difficulty
10 1173A (34) in Ibid.,
136.
[33] Maximus, Liber asceticus, PG 90, 953B : cited in Aidan Nichols, Byzantine
Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship (Edinburgh, T&T
Clark, 1993), 208.
[34] Fifth
Century no. 97 in The
Philokalia, 284.
[35] Difficulty
10 1144A (20b) in
Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 118.
[36] Difficulty
10 1205A (51) in Ibid.,
153.
[37] Maximus the
Confessor, Fifth Century in The Philokalia, 282.
[38] Maximus, Fifth
Century in The Philokalia, 273.
[39] See, e.g., Fifth
Century, paragraphs 27, 33-40 in The Philokalia, 266-270.
[40] Fifth
Century in The
Philokalia, 275.
[41] Providence is
a common theme in Maximus: see, e.g., Difficulty 10 1188D (42)-1193A in
Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 144-47.
[42] Andrew Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 69.
[43] Fifth
Century in The
Philokalia, 278.
[48] Fifth
Century nos. 84-88 in The
Philokalia, 280-282.
[49] Ibid., no. 91, 88 in The Philokalia,
282.
[50] Cf. Ephesians
5:25-32.
[51] Aidan Nichols,
Byzantine Gospel, 207.
[52] Difficulty
41 1304D: Louth, Maximus
the Confessor, 156.
[53] Difficulty
5 1049A in Ibid.,
173.
[54] For more on
the relationship between Maximus and Evagrius, see Louth, Maximus the
Confessor, 35-38.
[55] On the
Lord’s Prayer in The
Philokalia, 287.
[56] Difficulty10 1165B (31B) in Louth, Maximus the
Confessor, 131.
[57] Difficulty
10 1168A (31D) in Ibid.,
132.
[58] Difficulty
10 1168B (31c) in Ibid.,
133.
[59] On the
Lord’s Prayer in The
Philokalia, 293.
[60] Difficulty
10 11128A (17) in
Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 109.
[61] Nichols, Byzantine
Gospel, 198.
[62] In his
commentary on the Transfiguration, Archbishop Joseph Raya notes the
“Transfiguration is not simply an event out of the two-thousand-year old past,
or a future yet to come. It is rather a reality of the present, a way of life
available to those who seek and accept Christ’s nearness.” Joseph Raya, Transfiguration of Our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ (Combermere, ON: Madonna House, 1992), 115.
[64] “Deification
through assumption into the divine is produced by perfect love and an intellect
voluntarily blinded, because of its transcendent state, to created things.” Fifth
Century no. 93 in The Philokalia, 283. For more on the theme of
ecstasy in Maximus, see Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 42-43.
[65] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Liturgie
Cosmique: Maxime le Confesseur ( Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1947), 263.
[66] Had we time,
it would be equally fruitful to undertake a study of other texts from this
feast bearing a Maximian mark of influence, including Ode 3 of the Canon, which
celebrates the consubstantiality of Christ in a way reminiscent of the
Confessor’s treatment of it.
[67] August
Menaion: Service Books of the Byzantine Churches (Newton Centre, Massachusetts: Sophia Press, 1994 ,
63.
[70] Fifth
Century no. 76 in The
Philokalia, 278.
|
|
BACK TO CURRENT ISSUE
|
|
