Against Nature?

St. Maximus on the Spiritual Humility of Deification in Christ

The following prints a talk I was invited to give as part of my tenure as Visiting Scholar for the Mount Angel Institute. The monks hosted me for ten days, furnishing me the tranquility and resources to make decent headway on my complete, annotated translation of Maximus’s epistles. They asked only that I deliver a talk related to that project. I am grateful for their hospitality, as I will repeat again in the acknowledgements to the Fathers of the Church volume.

I.

In his most recent book, The Afternoon of Christianity, Fr. Tomáš Halík chants a familiar refrain: these days, the Church and Christian faith itself is in crisis. As you might expect, he addresses obvious contributing factors within the Church, such as the decades-long sexual abuse corruption and coverup, along with factors outside the Church, such as the co-opting of religious faith for political ideologies (right and left) and the rise of what is now the third largest sociological group on the world’s religious landscape, the so-called “nones”—those who find no need to affiliate officially with any particular religion or church, even as they self-identify as “spiritual.”

Halík’s book is refreshing, though. Having lived half his life as a priest of the underground Catholic Church in then Czechoslovakia, Halík has managed to avoid the twin temptations of retreating into this or that “Option” for the Church, on the one hand, or of abandoning faith altogether on the other. He seeks instead the providential hand of God guiding us through the Church’s “noonday crisis,” as he calls it, into the “afternoon” of the Church’s history: a time to mature beyond youthful delusions of power and grandeur; a time to attend once more and still deeper to the Spirit who searches the depths of divinity within us; a time to repudiate our supposedly pious fear, which almost always makes us grasp idols in place of the true Icon of God, Jesus Christ; a time indeed to perceive in Jesus the universal Logos of God, the cosmic Christ, the Christ in whom and for whom all things were made, who, as Colossians 3.11 plainly proclaims, “will be and will be in all things.” This is no time to recoil in unbelief: for Jesus Christ is in all things, in the poor especially, even in you and me.

This last point—the need to recover the New Testament’s own “cosmic Christology”—touches upon one profound spiritual cause of our current crisis. It is this: the Gospel doesn’t lose its appeal because those who reject or are indifferent to it are simply evil and hate the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Gospel loses its appeal because we ourselves, believers, often fail to believe in the depths of its beauty, and thus we present but a faded visage of the far more extravagant and indeed erotic vision that perhaps only our “mystics” have ever really glimpsed.

“The idea of Christ as the eschatological destination of history and of every human life,” Halík writes, “opens new possibilities for a second and third ecumenism: it makes it possible to come closer to other religions and to ‘nonreligious but spiritual people.’…. In dialogue with secular humanism, we can again show the mystical depth of our reverence for humanity. Our relationship with nonreligious humanism must not remain a superficial alliance of convenience; it must be theologically and philosophically reflected upon and matured in common meditation. Only then can it be a mature contribution to the common search for an answer to the challenging age-old question, ‘What is man?’.”¹

Here I couldn’t help but recall the rousing lines in the first chapter of Henri de Lubac’s great work, The Tragedy of Atheistic Humanism. De Lubac’s negative polemic throughout is that “in the end, without God, we cannot but galvanize ourselves against humanity. An exclusivist humanism is an inhumane humanism”—a thesis especially difficult to deny in the year he penned these words, 1943.² But his broader and positive thesis is that Christian faith should foster hope in humanity; it should incite us to believe, against nearly all empirical evidence to the contrary, that an unimaginably high destiny beckons us out of dust and into divinity. The Gospel rages against the “ontological slavery” that weighs us down, from our aleatoric birth to our abrupt death—or what Nicholas Berdyaev called “the sheer tragedy of human existence,” which would remain even if all socio-political ills were rectified.³

“Yes, man is made of dust and mire,” says de Lubac,

“and yes, man is also a sinner. The Church never ceases to remind us of this. Nor does this self-estimation come from a superficial or naïve view, since, with Christ, the Church knows ‘what is in man’ [Jn 2.25]. But the Church also knows that the humility of man’s carnal origins does not undermine the sublimity of his vocation, and that all the defects of sin in no way prevents this vocation from persisting as the principle of our inalienable grandeur. The Church thinks that such a vocation must manifest itself in the conditions of this life as a source of freedom and principle of progress, a necessary revenge against the forces of evil. Finally, the Church recognizes in the mystery of God made man the guarantee of our vocation and the consecration of our grandeur.”⁴

What a remarkable idea: that the Incarnation, “the mystery of God made man,” is the very “guarantee of our vocation and the consecration of our grandeur.” And that is exactly what I want to suggest to you today as well. “God became human so that humans can become God”—such is the familiar yet still stunning claim from St. Irenaeus to St. Athanasius and beyond. But that the union achieved in Christ’s own person—the historical, hypostatic union—is the very same union that was already Adam’s destiny? And that, in Christ, we shall become God to “the same degree that God became human”? Or that Christ in us means that our own progress in the spiritual and sacramental life of faith and love “humanizes God” even as he “deifies” us? Such are breathtaking claims of St. Maximus the Confessor.

We’ll take a moment to consider Maximus’s vision, and we’ll use the short letter before you (Ep 9) as our guide. After considering that vision, I’ll end by suggesting that what looks like an overzealous or even inappropriate excess in this vision is in fact necessary for resisting a false humility that can sap our spiritual lives, and for cultivating a true humility that embraces the excess of divine love. It is this excess and this humility that Maximus offers our spiritual crisis today—his way, if you like, of allowing us to glimpse the Gospel’s beauty anew.

II.

In Ep 9, Maximus writes to a North African abbot called Thalassius, a friend and frequent addressee in Maximus’s correspondences. It appears from the letter’s ending that Maximus sensed some deep anxiety in Thalassius in their previous correspondence. We don’t really know to what events Maximus alludes, but this much is clear: whatever was troubling Thalassius seems to have taken the same shape nearly all our crises take: Thalassius was facing some impending doom or dilemma, likely forced upon him against his will, such that some sense of profound pessimism or fatalism had gripped him.

This is a short letter, but, in Maximus’s typical fashion, it still manages to pack a punch. I want to note just three points in it that commence a wider consideration of his overall theological vision.

1. Maximus claims at the start that there are “three things toward which human beings” freely assent to be moved by: God, nature, and the world. Before he specifies what each of these means, his major point is this: we become what we desire.

“They say there are three things that move human beings. Or rather there are three things toward which human beings are freely moved through their own intention and disposition: God, nature, and the world. When one of these draws someone, it pulls that person away from the other two and changes the person moved into itself; it makes that person by position into what the mover itself is known to be by nature.”

2. Maximus then goes on to describe each of these endpoints or terms and their corresponding motions. The extremes are God and the world. The world here means pretty much what you find in many NT texts: it is the realm of evil, fear, deception, passion—the endless vacillation between seeking self-interested pleasure and fleeing pain, both of which thwart our deepest longings. Moving toward the world means becoming “fleshly” or beastlike, both in the sense that one is ruled by mindless urges and that one is deceived about one’s own true end. Moving toward the other extreme, God, means embracing virtue and love, come what may. It means living “in the Spirit,” as Paul might say, even if this frustrates one’s immediate wants and needs. Doing this transfigures a person, makes them “spiritual.”

Most interesting for our purposes is what Maximus variously calls the “intermediary” or “mean” or “liminal boundary” between the extremes, nature. What fascinates me here is the way Maximus characterizes the person who moves toward nature.

“Thus the extremes, God and the world, as well as the intermediary, nature, are wont to vie with one another in an effort to drag away the human being. Now, the mean is the liminal boundary of these extremes. So if it inclines man to set his gaze only on the mean itself then it drives him away equally from both extremes: he does not concede to reverting to God, yet he is also ashamed to let himself sink toward the world.”

The person who moves toward nature, the “natural” or “psychical man,” as Maximus has it, is not simply evil (that’s the “world”). This person is “ashamed,” after all, to wallow in passions and vices. You might even call this person generally “modest” or “cautious” or an experienced realist. Such a person isn’t ostentatious, isn’t overly audacious—he or she sets out a reasonable aim or term. She simply wants to live a just and fair life, neither inordinate in seeking pleasure nor out to cause anyone pain. This person takes a tempered approach to the spiritual life too: one shouldn’t presume too much. Take your place in God’s creation, don’t become a beast, don’t hurt anyone, and take a seat. And don’t expect too much from your destiny: yes, if you walk the line, you won’t receive too harsh a judgment and you might even enjoy eternal life. But don’t be excessive in expectation. You aren’t God, after all. You’re just a human being.

But for Maximus exactly this cautious approach also fails to appreciate our true vocation. So: (1) we become what we desire, and (2) we should not rest content to desire the “mean.” Maximus wants more. Or better, he thinks Christ himself has proven that we all should want more.

3. Why? Maximus quotes from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus gives commandments that, to me at least, seem nearly impossible to fulfill. But that’s not Maximus’s main argument for why we should desire and move toward the excess of becoming “spiritual,” of deification, of “becoming by grace exactly what God is by nature,” as he says in many places.

“If you wish to be persuaded by me, blessed servant of God, it remains only to render grace to those troubling you and, if needful, to endure all their punishments. Instead bless when you are reviled, endure when persecuted, and pray when blasphemed. Do this and you will not become fleshly, knowing and desiring to do only wrong. Nor will you become natural, unwilling to endure wrong. Rather you will become spiritual, voluntarily and knowingly doing good alone, training yourself in ascesis, eagerly and deftly suffering the evil of those who wish it upon you. Do all this for the sake of virtue and cast your gaze upon Jesus, the primordial cause of our salvation. In exchange for every good, which no one had ever been capable of knowing how to grasp firmly, he patiently endured every horrifying thing, which no one had endured from sinners—and yet he did so for sinners. For the aim of the Giver of the commandments was to liberate humanity from the world and nature.”

God’s whole aim in the Son of God’s Incarnation, Maximus says here, was “to liberate humanity from the world and nature.” (Note that it’s not just that this was the aim of giving the commandments; it was rather the aim of the Incarnation, which then saw the Son give the commandments. As Maximus says in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer: Jesus teaches us to pray only for what he himself first accomplished in his Incarnation).

So then, the three points from this letter are: (1) we become what we desire; (2) we shouldn’t desire the “mean,” nature; because (3) God’s whole aim for creation, revealed and accomplished already in the Incarnation, is to “liberate us from the world and nature.” Note well: this means that Maximus’s judgment on the more “modest” or “cautious” approach to our expectation for our end, our vocation, is a direct consequence of his conviction that Jesus Christ is our beginning and end—indeed the “fulfillment of God’s eternal counsel” for all creation.

III.

But still, isn’t this all just a tad too excessive?

How can our God-ordained destiny be opposed to nature, which God also made and ordained? As Metropolitan John Zizioulas remarked about this letter, which Zizioulas loves: it “could expose him to the accusation by some of my critics of ‘manicheism’ and ‘escaping from nature’…. The content of Ep. shows how wrong it is to conceive of grace as an addition to or fulfillment of nature. What we have clearly in this letter of Maximus’ is rather a rupture with nature…and an ek-stasis…from both world and nature, the latter occupying a middle position.”⁵

Zizioulas is right that this is what our letter presents, and, as we’ll see presently, it’s what Maximus says in other places. But he does also speak positively of nature. Maximus too knows that God created nature so that it is good. He once calls Jesus the “creator and successor of time and nature.”⁶ He also claims that we have the “power” in our nature to seek God and to “attain salvation,” so that in acquiring virtue we move from being God’s image to being his “likeness,” “receiving from God to be God” by “natural movement.”⁷ In fact, our very striving in this life for goodness and meaning and purpose is for Maximus evidence of our natural desire for God himself: “nothing that moves has yet come to rest, because its capacity for appetitive movement has not yet come to repose in what it ultimately desires, for nothing but the appearance of the ultimate object of desire can bring to rest that which is carried along by the power of its own nature.”⁸

And our failure to actualize this movement toward God, toward becoming God, is itself what causes nature’s current bondage. We turn our natural power to move toward God into movements toward everything that is not God, so that our “passions” and vices are all fundamentally afflicted by the prospect of death and the apparent randomness of life itself (it’s beginning in birth, the tragedy of all that’s provisionally good, etc.). “Nature revolts against itself according to our own will,” says Maximus.⁹ This then means, in a claim that seems completely opposed to what we just saw in our letter, that “The Lord, who heals human nature and returns it to its primordial grace of incorruptibility, came to liberate nature.”¹⁰

It would be one thing if our letter was an oddball—a one-off, excessively ornate remark perhaps made in the hurry or intensity of Maximus’s desire to hearten his troubled friend. But it isn’t. While Maximus does speak positively of nature, he also and frequently speaks negatively of it, as if nature presents a major obstacle to the fulfillment of the human vocation to become God, in Christ. “Progress” in the spiritual life, writes Maximus, “is the complete renunciation of nature through virtue.” And the height of spiritual “ascent is the transcendence of those conditions in which nature finds itself, that is, place and time.”¹¹ Nature as we know it has been “tyrannized” by “Adam’s characteristic marks, generation and corruption.”¹² We know neither whence nor why we came, and we will all face death’s brutal limit. When we are deified, then, it is precisely this nature left to its own devices—poised as an impoverished mean between relative stability and relative chaos—that we must transcend. Maximus, taking Melchizedek as a model for our own deification (since, as the scriptures say, “he was without generation”), says that he “transcended time and nature,” and that his striving for and embodying of virtue “fought against nature and time.”¹³ When Maximus allegorizes the Exodus narrative, he says that Pharaoh signifies “the law of nature.” Elsewhere he says that, by contrast, Christ “is the complete conqueror of time and nature.”¹⁴

And yet, despite all this, Maximus can say that Christ is “The Word of the Father and the Natural Law” itself!¹⁵ What is going on? Is Maximus just hopelessly inconsistent?

No.

Here’s the short answer, something we glimpsed in our letter: the Incarnation, Christ himself, is for Maximus the very ground and goal of nature itself, and yet Christ himself is a person. Thus the goal of created nature cannot itself be confined to what we usually call “natural.” The goal of nature is inter-personal, and indeed, it is nothing other than the triune love of the Trinity of Persons.

Now for a bit of unpacking. The following passage is fundamental to Maximus’s entire vision. And for many of us who have dwelled mainly within Western Christianity, this point might seem a bit foreign. For Maximus, contrary to some important thinkers in Christian tradition, the Incarnation is not merely a response to the Fall and sin. That would make the Incarnation somehow secondary to God’s absolute intention for creation, and thus for our own vocation. Rather, Maximus thinks that the Incarnation is primary and the Fall secondary. Here is how he describes it:

“This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings. This is, properly speaking, the limit of providence and of the things preconceived, according to which occurs the recapitulation into God of the things made by God. This is the mystery that circumscribes all the ages, and which reveals the grand plan of God, a super-infinite plan infinitely pre-existing the ages an infinite number of times. The essential Word of God became a messenger of this plan when He became man, and, if I may rightly say so, revealed Himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying in Himself the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.¹⁶

The Incarnation of the Person of the Son, who is both divine and human by nature, is itself nature’s own ground and destiny; it is our vocation to become, in Christ, what Christ himself is. This clarifies Maximus’s apparent ambiguity over the status of “nature” in our deification. It does so in both a technical and an existential sense.

First, the technical point. Maximus belonged to a group that scholars today call the “Neo-Chalcedonians.” These thinkers wanted to defend and explain the Christology taught at the Council of Chalcedon, which had been a source of controversy and division ever since. Chalcedon said that there is one “hypostasis” or person who is the “same Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and that this one person “is in two natures,” perfectly God and perfectly human. Critics of Chalcedon, mostly Miaphysites, said that this was a mistake, since the Council spoke of Christ’s one person only then to divide him up into a bunch of dualities: two natures, two consubstantialities, two births. A crucial Neo-Chalcedonian response was to say that natures by themselves do not really exist, rather they always exist in and as a hypostasis. Think of it this way: you never run into an actual thing that is “humanity” or “human nature”; rather you only ever meet human beings or persons. This does not mean that human nature isn’t a reality that is common to all who are human; it means that “human nature” does not exist except as the collective of all human persons, and that it is indeed a common bond for uniting persons. A nature doesn’t have a personal name. But all of you who are persons do. A nature is “what” you are. Your name points to “who” you are. Every what is real only as a who (or many who’s); while every who acts and is acted upon—moves—according to what that who is. So, Jesus was one “who,” but he had and moved in and through two “whats.” This met the Miaphysite challenge because it assured them that saying that Christ has “two natures” does not mean he is two separate realities, since a concrete reality—even a nature’s concrete reality—finds its concreteness and oneness only ever in a hypostasis, a “who” (or “this”).¹⁷

Confused yet?

How does all this help? Well, on the level of technical Christology (and one cannot avoid this if one wants to engage Maximus), it means that Christ’s person, his “who,” is one, while his natures, his “whats,” are two. So that means that who he is, is irreducible to what he is; or again, his person is “more” than his natures considered by themselves. Maximus likes to call this the “hypostatic whole” of Christ’s “two parts,” which are his natures. Therefore, in the case of the Incarnation, it would not only be incomplete to say of Christ simply: “he is God,” or “he is human,” as if the whole truth of who he is, is one of his natures. Rather one must say “He is both God and human,” Creator and creature, uncreated by nature and created by nature, since he reveals himself, his very person, through these natures simultaneously (e.g., walks on water; dies and resurrects). Or as Maximus provocatively puts it: “the Word in whom the universe is gathered…insofar as He is man and God, He truly transcends all humanity and divinity.”¹⁸

So much for the technical point. But even this bit of dense Christology opens immediately upon a profound existential outlook, a kind of transformation of the spiritual life. If, as Maximus claims, the “entire plan of God” for creation is “to deify nature by the power of His Incarnation,” then this means that nature’s very perfection takes the form of the personal.¹⁹ And if created nature’s perfection is not simply that it carries out its task as the prudent “intermediary” between the “extremes” of God and the world, as our letter said, but that it finds its highest vocation and fulfillment in becoming one with the person of Christ; and if the highest way persons unite is through love—then the perfection of creation, through human nature in particular, is precisely the complete, mutual actualization of persons in love.

And isn’t this just what St. Paul already said? “If I fathom all knowledge and all mysteries…and have not love, I am nothing…. At present I know partially, but then I shall know even as I am known.” (1 Cor 13.2, 12)

Perhaps now we can settle on an answer. Maximus conceives our vocation to deification in Christ as at once according to and against nature because (1) if we take as our destiny nature on its own, bereft of personality and love—one might cheekily call this “pure nature”—then we have implicitly denied that Christ, whose person is irreducible to his natures, is truly the ground and goal of created natures; but thinking otherwise (Christ is goal) means going against nature so conceived; (2) if we take as our destiny the Incarnation itself, so that, as Maximus famously declares, “The Word of God, very God, wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his Incarnation,” then we can say that the call to transcend nature lies already within our “nature,” in the sense that our very “origin” lies in God’s own “ecstasy” in “going out of Himself,” as Maximus quotes Dionysius, to become what he loves. Human nature, transfigured and revealed in Christ, is called forth to transcend itself in love’s ecstasy in response to God’s own ecstasy in creating. And “ecstasy,” Maximus often notes, means exactly to exceed what one takes to be one’s natural limits. (God did not set out to create an “order” but “persons”).

Notice then: if in our letter Maximus begins by claiming that we become what we desire, here, at the far end of his theological vision, he shows that this is only because God becomes and thus creates what God desires: us. “God loved us more than his own self, if I might be permitted to say so,” writes Maximus. Or in scriptural terms: “We love because he first loved us.” (1 Jn 4.19)

Our unimaginably high calling, for Maximus, is that God so loved us that he wishes to become us, so that we might also love and become him—the “beautiful exchange” that the Incarnation first realized, and that it is our mission to extend to the ends of the cosmos. The mission is Eucharistic: through deified humanity, says Maximus, “nature will bring forward to the Lord, as if they were offerings, nature’s own divine principles”—where “principles” are logoi, and for Maximus, you might know, the logoi are the one Logos, Christ.²⁰ This recalls the Eastern anamnesis: “we offer your own from your own, always and everywhere.” To become Christ, to become his Body, to give him back to himself through us and thereby liberate nature from its own supposedly “natural” limits, which merely divide (Rom 8), so that it might because Christ’s Body as well—it’s difficult to imagine a higher calling for human nature, for every human person, for all the world.

IV.

Perhaps the greatest Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, Maurice Blondel, wrote in one of his early journal entries: “In the very security of faith, therefore, I feel doubts, the anxiety of the search, the difficulties which the affirmation of Christianity involves…. I feel the full force of modern prejudices and the dreams of a new humanity in my very bones.”²¹

What I’ve suggested today is that Maximus’s theological vision resonates precisely with that dream.

There is a kind of well-intentioned, pious modesty that would counsel temperance and caution when envisioning our end. There is also an earnest intellectual hesitation that would question whether we “human, all-too-human” beings can coherently desire deification in Christ. To the second, intellectual hesitation, I can only quote the great ninth-century Irish theologian, perhaps the last lover of Maximus’s theology in the premodern, Latin West. This comes from his homily on the prologue to John’s Gospel:

“And in case you are tempted to say that it is impossible that mortals should become immortals, that corruptible beings should become free of corruption, that simple human beings should become sons of God, and that temporal creatures should possess eternity—whichever of these doubts poses the greatest temptation for you—accept the argument that faith prepares for you what you doubt: ‘And the Word was made flesh.’ If what is greatest has undoubtedly already gone before, why should it seem incredible that what is less should be able to come after? If the Son of God is made a human being, which none of those who receive him doubt, why is it astonishing that a human being who believes in the Son of God should become a son of God? For this very purpose, indeed, the Word descended into the flesh: that in him the flesh—the human being—believing through the flesh in the Word, might ascend; that, through him who was the only begotten Son by nature, many might become sons by adoption…. He, who from God made himself a human being, makes gods from human beings [De hominibus facit deos qui de deo fecit hominem].”²²

But to the first hesitation, the one which worries that dwelling on so high a vocation might enflame our self-esteem into pride, I can only quote St. Peter, who, on the night the Lord instituted the holy Eucharist, initially refused to allow Christ to wash his feet, to which Christ said, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” “Lord,” Peter replied, “not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” (Jn 13.9).

What Maximus offers to us today is nothing less than an intentionally excessive vision of our end in divine love, of our destiny in Christ to become God, and for God in us “to become Incarnate,” as Maximus often says. God’s ecstasy for creation, which is also his kenosis in becoming all in all, should not be politely refused for a lower “mean,” for nature without love. The truly pious response is St. Peter’s. What might it mean if we held out a Gospel to the world whose message was not the merely pious modesty of “the natural man,” but was instead the zeal of St. Peter, who was humble enough to embrace the Lord’s own humility—always and in all things?

Thank you.

1. Tomáš Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change (South Bend, IN: UNDP, 2023), 130.

2. Henri de Lubac, Le drâme de l’humanisme athée. Oeuvres completes II (Paris: Cerf, 2010), 10.

3. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar; De Lubac, Le drâme, 19.

4. De Lubac, Le drâme, 17–18.

5. John Zizioulas, “Person and Nature in the Theology of St. Maximus the Confessor,” 104 n.52.

6. Amb 10.73.

7. Amb 7.21. So QThal 40.2: God created human nature with “natural power to perform the divine commandments.”

8. Amb 7.3.

9. Exp. orat. dom., PG 901C. So CC 2.16 (cf. Amb 10.8): “a passion is a movement contrary to nature.”

10. Amb 42.7.

11. Amb 20.4.

12. QThal 61.8.

13. Amb 10.72–4.

14. QThal 26.9 and Exp. in Psalm 59, respectively.

15. QThal 63.3.

16. QThal 60.3.

17. Really, then, the next move from disabusing ourselves that a nature exists in itself, was to argue that since natures in themselves do not really exist in themselves (that is, the mode of their actual existence does not conform to the mode of their apprehension), then there are no grounds for assuming that if a nature really exists, it automatically means it exists as its own hypostasis. Rather, it means only that if a nature really exists, it exists in and as a hypostasis(es). In short, while all agreed that one really existing nature = one hypostasis, it doesn’t follow that two really existing natures = two hypostases. Neo-Chalcedonians argued that two natures can really exist as the same hypostasis. This they called the “composite” or “synthesized” hypostasis. See, e.g., Maximus, Ep 12, PG 91, 489C–492C.

18. Amb 37.8.

19. QThal 54.19. I know that many cower before the great specter of “personalism,” as if it implies abstractly reducing the “person” to the “will” and then opposing these two to “nature” (also in the abstract). But it’s nonsensical to suppose that this is the idea that binds together thinkers such as Sergius Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Zizioulas, Charles Winckelmans de Cléty, SJ, Robert Spaemann, John Macmurray, and even the late Schelling (who isn’t, as it happens, as voluntarist or “classical Christian theist” as hasty minds have dreamed up). Perhaps for another series….

20. QThal 51.19. Cf. all Amb 7.

21. Maurice Blondel, Carnets intimes, 1894 (Dru 44).

22. Eriugena, Hom. in Jn., 21.