My 23-Part Series on Maximus

At Forging Ploughshares

The Spring term has awakened and demands to be taken seriously. New courses, new students, new weekly rhythms—you track. In the interstices I’m preparing a talk I’ve been invited to give at another institution, “The Future of Hell: That This Doctrine Developed and How It Might Still.” More on that to come.

For now, though, I’d like to draw your attention to a 23-part series on Maximus’s theological vision and spiritual praxis. It comes from an 8-week online course I offered about a year ago at Paul Axton’s Forging Ploughshares (a welcome lighthouse across the dark shoreline of online theological discourse). This series is unique in three ways.

First, it is the most comprehensive presentation of Maximus’s thought that I’ve ever given. Each part clocks in at one hour or so. Tally that up: 23+ hours of content. Its basic skeletal structure conforms to a book I’m (very, very slowly) writing called, A Shadow of Things to Come: Christian Life with St. Maximus the Confessor. The aim is to present in condensed and hopefully more accessible form the vision I laid out in The Whole Mystery of Christ and to see how this vision illumines the practices of Christian life (meditation on scripture, liturgy, prayer, discernment, works of love). Its movement is reciprocal: vision to action, action to vision, ad infinitum, in and as the living synthesis that is person and life and Body and creation and the triune God.

Second, Paul has meticulously worked to retain student participation and questions and the discussions generated therefrom. So in addition to my own planned content and structure you’ll find here several organically generated topics and excurses, quite off-the-cuff. Hence Paul’s titles, which together spin an Ariadne’s thread to guide you through the labyrinth. The order follows the course’s own. But it also includes the side corridors we explored along the way.

Finally and precisely because it retains the unplanned paths, this series includes many themes not necessarily tied exclusively to Maximus’s texts. You even get an entire episode wherein I hold forth on Hegel—something one really should do from time to time, for Christ’s sake.

Here, then, are all 23 parts. Each title is a hyperlink to that episode. Enjoy, and do check out all the treasures hiding in Paul’s cave, Forging Ploughshares!

1. Intro: Understanding the Life and Theology of Maximus as Incarnational Synthesis (Apple link)

2. Synthesis is Everything (Apple link)

3. The Whole Mystery of Christ (Apple link)

4. Neither Mere Man Nor Naked God (Apple link)

5. Understanding Divine Foreknowledge Through Christ (Apple link)

6. The End is the Beginning Through Deification (Apple link)

7. Privation and False Incarnation in Maximus (Apple link)

8. Escaping Duality/Non-Duality and Linearity Through Christ (Apple link)

9. The End is the Beginning as Judgment and Deliverance (Apple link)

10. Reciprocal Causality in Maximus (Apple link)

11. The Necessity of Creation, Incarnation, and Love (Apple link)

12. Maximus’s Treatment of Scripture (Apple link)

13. The Word as Continuing Incarnation (Apple link)

14. Hierarchy and Human Sexuality in Maximus (Apple link)

15. On Christo-logic (Apple link)

16. The Independent and Intersecting Worlds of Maximus’s Mystagogia

17. Beyond Plato, Milbank, Hart and Lonergan (Apple link)

18. Maximus’s Explanation of Prayer (Apple link)

19. Discerning and Becoming the Image of Christ (Apple link)

20. The Hope That All Shall Be Saved (Apple link)

21. Maximus and the Love of God in Synthesis, Personhood, and Humility (Apple link)

22. Comparing Hegel and Maximus (Apple link)

23. Conclusion: Hell, Hierarchy, Nature and Grace in Maximus (Apple link)