Reply to My Critics

Three Passages They Should've Used

In this final installment, I play my own critic. We’ve seen that though criticisms vary drastically in quality, none is grounded in Maximus’s writings. Across eight or so reviews that together comprise thirty or so pages, we met three citations and a few generic appeals to those texts. One suspects that beneath these criticisms lie various other sources of discomfort, theological or philosophical or otherwise. Fair enough, so long as one doesn’t then mistake such criticisms as addressing the book’s subject matter. (And I still think getting Maximus right is a prerequisite for properly treating him as an interlocutor, even if you disagree with him).

And yet there are texts to be conscripted for the critical cause. I wish to highlight three passages that my critics should have marshaled against me. Below I summarize the passage, raise the relevant objection to my book, and reply in turn.

1. Centuries on Theology 2.84

Objection:

Near the end of these profound and often cryptic meditations on theology and “economy” (the Incarnation and all its entailments for God’s disposing providence), Maximus writes:

“We are said to be the body of Christ according to the passage, ‘And we are the body of Christ, and an individual limb’ [1 Cor 12.27]; not by virtue of a privation of our bodies do we become his body, nor, furthermore, as if he passed over in person into us [καθ᾽ὑπόστασιν εἰς ἡμᾶς μεταβαίνοντος] or were cut limb from limb; but rather, by the corruption of sin being shaken off by way of likeness to the flesh to the flesh of the Lord. For as Christ by nature was sinless in flesh and soul…so also we who have believed in him, and have put him on through the Spirit, are able, in him, to be without sin by choice.”

Two points here gainsay the overall argument of The Whole Mystery of Christ. First, Maximus obviously intends seemingly extreme (New Testament) language in a qualified sense. Here the qualification proves critical: we are not Christ’s Body “as if he passed over in person into us,” or, more literally, as if “transforming into us according to hypostasis.” Yet this is exactly what the book entails, that the “is” of all creation is the Son’s own hypostasis such that we are “enhypostasized” in the Word at the end (which is creation’s true beginning) (e.g. pp. 75–81). Second, once we see that Maximus qualifies this language, we see how his meaning is primarily moral, not ontological. We are Christ’s Body “by the corruption of sin being shaken off.” In other words, we become “identified with” God the Word not in some ontological (and indeed pantheistic) sense but simply by imitating him in our virtuous way of life. There is therefore no need to subject the relevant language to “Christo-logic” to take Maximus’s language seriously. Indeed, doing so risks distorting his actual and more modest aims.

Reply:

To the first: what Maximus denies here is a very precise type of identity between Christ and the deified member of his Body. Christ does not “pass over” or, more literally, “transition” or “change into” us (μεταβαίνω). It’s not as if our becoming Christ and Christ’s becoming us means the obliteration of either. That would not be a true “synthesis” in Maximus’s sense, and it’s not what I argued anywhere in the book. But the true synthesis does entail, Maximus also says, that we do not “rest a mere simulacrum” but “become the Lord himself,”¹ that all things are “enhypostasized in him,”² and even that we are “made into him.”³ This achieved identity is such that, as he says elsewhere in this same work,

“As long as I am imperfect and unruly…Christ must be reckoned—because of me—to be imperfect and unruly with respect to me. For I disparage and restrain him, not growing together with him in my spirit, since I am ‘the body of Christ and an individual limb’ [1 Cor 12.27].”⁴

Which brings me to the second point: in the Body of Christ there is no absolute, tidy division between the moral on one side and the ontological or “real” on the other, for the simple reason that “Christ is the essence of virtue.”⁵ So completely intertwined are these dimensions of our ascent to God and God’s descent to us that God himself “takes form” and “receives his likeness” to us in our own practice of virtue.⁶ That we are to become Christ’s Body leads to the most striking identity statements: uniting ourselves to Christ’s humanity makes us “one and the same with him,”⁷ the “whole mass of humanity” is to become his one Body,⁸ and indeed the Body signifies basically everything there is to signify of creation:

“The ‘body’ of Christ is either the soul, or its powers, or sensations, or the body of each human being, or the members of the body, or the commandments, or the virtues, or the logoi of created beings, or, to put it simply and more truthfully, each and all of these things, both individually and collectively, are the body of Christ [ἰδίᾳ τε καὶ κοινῇ, ταῦτα πάντακαὶ τούτων ἕκαστόν ἐστι τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ].”⁹

So, the preponderance of this language in Maximus supports the thesis I argued, while the passage in question denies a view of the final synthesis I never proposed.

2. Opusculum 1 (PG 91, 28A)

Objection:

In the light of the later Monothelite controversy, Maximus had to qualify some earlier statements about the “one will” that in the end all shall possess in common with God. He denies flatly that, “as these people say will happen,” divine and human wills shall “become one and the same thing in number.” And not only the gnomic will, mind you. Maximus also denies that the divine and human wills are identified as one natural will. Otherwise, he says, deified creatures “will find themselves simply identified with the divine, which is absurd and, in my view, the effect of a simplistic and deviant way of thinking.” Absent any identity of natural will between God and the deified, Maximus sees only—and here he sounds almost existentialist—a “quality” or even “accident” of that which exists in itself. Of the latter category he lists only two possibilities: essence or hypostasis. In other words, the deified will refers either to the quality of the human essence or to that of a person as such. Maximus rejects that it is a quality of the human essence, lest we “proclaim a single nature of both God and the saints.” But what if the deified will is a quality of the hypostasis?

“And if the will’s quality is of a hypostasis, there will be one hypostasis of all, of both God and the saints, all confused with one another in identity [μία πάντων ἕσται, τοῦ τε Θεοῦ καὶ τῶν ἁγίων ὑπόστασις, πάντων ἀλλήλοις εἰςταυτὸν συγχωνευθέντων]. For if a quality rooted individually in someone is contemplated invariably in others, then all are confused with each other. And this makes the principle (logos) of each one’s mode of being entirely indiscernible.”

This manifestly rejects one hypostasis of all, even in the final synthesis. Such a notion would spell the confusion and consequent obliteration of all the saints, thence of creation in its freedom and hypostatic integrity. If, Maximus carefully observes here, we were destined in the end to become Christ’s own person, this would render us no longer distinguishable as individuals. How to discern Paul from Moses from Peter if each’s own principle (logos) is equally predicable of the other? That’s a bit of nonsense. Maximus was right to reject it, just as The Whole Mystery of Christ was wrong to propose it as his view.

Reply:

On its face, this passage presents the strongest objection to my book’s argument. Not only its content but its very occasion raises difficulties for my approach. Here, after all, Maximus has to clarify language he’d earlier indulged, language that might seem too extreme in light of later and more precise controversies. And when he does, he appears, we’ve seen, to clarify matters in a way that should at least qualify my interpretation. And yet I think this text only clarifies parts of my interpretation that most have neglected. It does indeed problematize any easy enlistment of Maximus’s “natural will” for the claim that we shall become Gods by nature. And, as many know, I have been criticized precisely from both directions—to wit, either I’m a christological pantheist who obliterates the all-hallowed creator-creature distinction (most critics), or I’m a crypto-Barthian mythologist who incants “person” to dissipate ostensibly antinomous natures (David Hart and John Milbank). Predictably, these two opposite charges reveal more about their own shared prejudices than anything else, the most basic of which is that creation is not really God unless it is naturally God. But I reject the assumption that what is real must be what is natural, as Maximus’s christological metaphysics does as a matter of course. That’s a topic for another time, and that time will come. For now, to the passage at hand.

Notice first that Maximus’s immediate concern here is the same one we met in the first passage, namely to reject any entailment that the final synthesis of God and the deified, through Christ, spells the annihilation of either (here the accent falls on the integrity of the saints’ personal modes of willing). Since I address that very concern at some length in my book (pp. 127–32), I don’t reproduce it here. But it’s critical to see that here Maximus targets the Monothelite strategy of seeking in Christ a single “natural will”—which is just another way to posit that what is “one” in Christ is natural rather than hypostatic, i.e. is some abstractly identifiable metaphysical principle rather than the actual living person as the principle of union—and thence characterizing the final, deified state in the same terms: just as Christ possessed only a single (natural) faculty of will, so too, the logic runs, shall the deified creature possess only a single (natural) faculty of will. In this picture the deified become numerically one with God; union with God means annihilation of the deified as discernible persons or natures. It’s this specific picture that Maximus rejects.

Not that Maximus rejects their formal intuition. We’ve seen throughout this series, and I document copiously in the book, that Maximus too wants to see in Christ the origin and end of creation, that creation is Incarnation, and that therefore one must get Incarnation right to contemplate the logic of creation itself. The content of Christology becomes the content of creation (from so-called protology to so-called eschatology), and getting this right actually preserves the formal judgment which identifies Christ and creation as God’s single act. For Maximus, then, precisely because what is “one” in Christ is his very person, therefore nothing else needs to achieve that oneness or identity—not one nature, not one operation or activity, not one faculty of will. If the logic of person is how naturally or essentially contrary (or contradictory) realities are really one, then nature as such, nature considered by removing it from any actual person or act or event (even and especially Christ himself), is exactly not how such realities are one. After all, how could the very principle by which such realities are distinguished at all be the same level or dimension or logic by which they are also one? That, if anything, is an empty incantation that resolves nothing at all.

Still, given the specific denial of one hypostasis of God and the saints, isn’t Maximus exposing an absolute difference between Christ’s case and that of the deified? Initially, yes. But what I develop in the book as Maximus’s “Christo-logic” is not composed of a single element—something very few have realized. The event “in the middle” of history, the so-called “historical” Incarnation, reveals itself as a manifest mystery exactly because the peculiar identity there countenanced is that which is manifest in “the generation of opposites,” of natural opposites (humanity and divinity, the impassible and the passible, and so on).¹⁰ That’s Christo-logic’s second element (cf. 1.3). The third element, most critical here, is that exactly because we don’t need to force realities that are naturally contrary into a natural identity—an absurdity, Maximus said above, and “the effect of a simplistic and deviant way of thinking”—these very realities can relate supra-naturally as the mode proper to that most supra of all supra-natural realities, the Triune God. Put concisely: the mode proper to God himself as Three, perichoresis, is in Christ “brought down,” as it were, and made the seemingly impossible logic of creation itself in relation to God. Not only does the whole God penetrate the whole saint, but the whole saint penetrates “the whole God, and becoming everything that God is, without, however, identity in essence.”¹¹

And since this identity, which generates difference, which effects the unthinkable perichoresis of those who differ by nature—since this all this occurs not on the level of nature but on that of person, the sole and absolute way it’s achieved is by love, by experience, by the living synthesis Christ himself, the synthesized person (usually translated as “composite” person). The achievement is not asymmetrical, no more than Christ himself is an asymmetrical relation (a vacuous notion). Rather it accomplishes for all creation the same “marvelous exchange” Christ himself entirely was. Which is why Christ is not merely the end but the beginning of creation, indeed he is the identity of the two, alpha and omega in equal measure and as himself. “For love’s most perfect work,” writes Maximus, “the far horizon of its activity, is to prepare those realities love itself unites to become fitted, through mutual exchange, to each other’s characteristics and appellations.” In the deification of the world God’s own form “is likened to each one.” “In and through” each one’s spiritual life and perfection in virtue, “God receives his likeness to human beings.”¹²

So yes, as Maximus insists here and elsewhere, “Deification does not come from what derives from our capacity by nature; it is not in our power. For there is no principle of things above nature in our nature.”¹³ And it’s true that the final synthesis, Christ, does not need to obliterate hypostases to be a single hypostasis. But one must tread carefully here. It is not as if Maximus’s denial of one hypostasis in this context is simply the opposite affirmation of what he denies. He does not deny the single hypostasis of God and deified creation out of an abstract need to “make room” for difference, as if Christ must never be our persons so that we are “free” to be different from his person. This would be merely to retreat to crude spatial logic for the sake of avoiding the equally spatial logic of annihilation. Triune perichoresis, love, the logic of “whole-in-whole, wholly,” already exceeds this apparent dilemma. Rather, the Lord’s own “unified” and “transcendent mode of existence” just is the mode he enjoys as the Second Person, the only mode of actual and infinite love. This mode Christ opens to all in himself, since he joined it to “the principle of his humanity.”¹⁴ Otherwise it would be a blatant contradiction for Maximus to say:

“For to each person Christ Jesus becomes his own proper lamb, to the extent that each is able to contain and consume Him. He becomes something proper to Paul, the great preacher of the truth, and again, something distinctively proper to Peter, the leader of the apostles, and something distinctively proper for each of the saints, according to the measure of each one’s faith, and the grace granted to him by the Spirit, to one in this way, and to another in that, so that Christ is found to be wholly present throughout the whole of each, becoming all things to everyone [1 Cor 9.22].”¹⁵

3. Ambiguum 36.2

Objection:

The Whole Mystery of Christ fundamentally depends on the claim that the logic of the historical Incarnation is the very same as creation’s. Here such a claim is refuted. Maximus glosses Gregory of Nazianzus’s remark that the Incarnation “communicates a second communion, far more marvelous than the first,” by contrasting the “first” creation of the human being with that of Christ:

“In the first instance, nature did not in any way whatsoever obtain unity with God according to mode or principle either of essence or hypostasis [κατ᾽οὐδένα τρόπον ἢ λόγον οὐσίας ἢ ὑποστάσεως], according to which all beings universally are seen to exist. Now, however, through the ineffable union, nature has obtained unity with God according to hypostasis, preserving unaltered, on the level of its essence, its proper principle of difference in relation to the divine essence, with respect to which it has become one and not different, by virtue of having been united to it in a union according to hypostasis.”

This seems a rather straightforward, sequential claim: first creation, in Adam, did not attain its goal, and then later, in Christ, it did. How then can creation be Incarnation, either as having the same logic or especially as being the same “event” or act? Your speculative thesis totally upends the simple narrative and its consequent distinction of creation and Incarnation.

Reply:

I note first and generally that my thesis does not negate but incorporates the more intuitive, sequential grasp of creation's unfolding. An important point, since this text indeed assumes a sequential presentation as dictated by Gregory’s remark. My book accommodates the sequential presentation in two specific ways (both name implications of Chapter 4).

First, there is the natural fact that being created means having a beginning and thus a sequence or path of development. This is the argument of Amb 7. And even in Christology proper, the fact that Christ too had to develop in his own human, chronological life, does not mean either that such a development is sinful or that he wasn’t truly God. The whole logic dictates that he is a creature in a way that both preserves the natural necessity of development and also does not mitigate his essential identity with the Father and Spirit. Insofar as the natural sequence proper to a creature implies chronological or sequential development, then, we should expect that the logic by which the Son's hypostasis is that same developing creature is not itself confined to the logic of sequence as such. In other words, Christ must both develop as created and be eternally complete as uncreated, and he must be both, and he must be the “is” that makes both one. So we should expect a natural sequence, but we should also expect that the logic of sequence does not delimit what is finally true of either “side” of the sequence, created and uncreated nature. Sequence is admitted into the whole, yet it is not the whole.

Second, Adam's primordial sin or Fall leaves us unable to grasp our true beginning (QThal 59), thence also to misapprehend our beginning as if it were merely the beginning of the sequence proper to created nature as such. At the same time, this leads us falsely to deify finite things as such, then to perpetual disappointment with the finite, i.e. the oscillating dialectic between pleasure (our “natural” origin) and pain (our “natural” end in death). So, not only does my reading incorporate a good sense of development proper to created nature as such—which should thus be exemplified in the history of any and all creatures—but it also incorporates our own false apprehensions of what our beginning truly is, what Maximus calls the “other beginning introduced into our nature,” our "beginning/arche according to Adam" (see esp. 4.2.1). All to say, then, that a text such as this one presents the bare sequence curtly and with a specific aim. My thesis can incorporate that sort of presentation without thereby conceding that the sequential presentation is the whole story (this is most extensively developed in Amb 42).

And yet even this passage contains signs of that greater picture I tried to capture. Three signs to note here.

First, that created “nature” did not obtain union “according to the mode or principle...of hypostasis” means first of all that it is not, in itself, simply one with the divine essence—a point we saw in the previous text. In other words, on my thesis, while we do perhaps have a “christological monism” or a “panchristism” (my preference), we do not have a miaphysite monism according to which the principle of hypostasis is coterminous with the principle of essence or nature. That’s clear in Ep 13, where Maximus notes three ways that “union by nature” differs from “union by hypostasis,” principally that the latter involves no blind necessity or abstract “completion” of the divine essence by union with Christ’s created human nature. But, second and more specifically, we must note that the very same nature (ἡ φύσις, which is here the perpetual and same subject of the contrast) that Maximus says failed in the first case to “obtain unity with God according to mode or principle either or essence or hypostasis” does, it turns out, attain just this in Christ: “Now, however, through the ineffable union, nature has obtained unity with God according to hypostasis” (νῦν δὲ τὸ καθ᾽ὑποστασιν ἓν πρὸς αὐτὸν [i.e. with God] διὰ ἀφράστου ἑνὠσεως ἔλαβε [the subject of this verb is still “nature”]).” Now, unless we want to say Christ saved and united merely his own particular created nature, then this very passage implies a union “according to hypostasis” for the very same general “nature” that at first—at the beginning of the sequence—failed to attain it. Third and finally, Maximus himself says just this. While “nature” in Christ’s union still retains its natural difference “with regards to the principle of its being (according to which it was created and exists)...with regards to the principle of how it does exist, it should receive its hypostasis in a divine manner [τῷ δὲ τοῦ πῶς εἶναι λόγῳ, τὸ ὑφεστάναι θεϊκῶς λαβοῦσα [again, the subject of this verb is the selfsame “nature”].”

In fact, the way Maximus speaks here of the whole of nature (all creation) “receiving” its “hypostasis” repeats the way Maximus speaks of the creation of Christ’s human nature:

“He became a complete human being, in other words, by the assumption of flesh possessing an intellectual and rational soul, a flesh that received both its nature and hypostasis in him—i.e. it received both its ‘to be’ and its ‘to subsist’ [τὸ εἶναι τε καὶ τὸ ὑφεστᾶναι] instantaneously in the Word’s conception.”¹⁶

And this recalls, to quote it once more, the way Maximus eschatologizes the truth of creation in Amb 7.31:

“When this happens, God will be all things in everything [1 Cor 15.28], encompassing all things and enhypostasizing them in Himself [πάντα περιλαβὼν καὶ ἐνυποστήσας ἑαυτῷ], for beings will no longer possess independent motion or lack any portion of God’s presence...we are, and are called, Gods, children of God, the body, and members of God [Eph 1.23, 5.30], and, it follows, ‘portions of God,’ and other such things, in the progressive ascent of the divine plan to its final end.”

So then, Amb 36’s sequential presentation, which contrasts the modes of union, fits within my thesis considered in its complexity and fullness. But even here, the same “nature” said not to have attained unity according to hypostasis earlier, “now” does so in Christ. Finally, that same (entire!) created nature receives exactly its “hypostasis” in and as the Word, but in a way that seems to us paradoxical: in the end, not in the (natural) beginning, we and all created nature are “enhypostasized” in Christ, just as his particular human nature has “already” been. And since there is no such thing as particular or universal nature as such, but rather these exist really only in and as hypostases, then their “completion” as hypostases is actualized in the end, which is also the beginning—both are the Incarnation (QThal 60.3-4). Beholding Christ’s actual existence among us, we see both our primordial beginning and end, and we see that these are one. Paradoxical as it sounds (but what else would you expect?), we are enhypostasized in him in the “end,” but also our apparent beginning appears already fallen (i.e. failing to obtain unity with God) “at the very instance of coming into being” (see 4.1). And so, while there’s nothing inherently wrong with presenting the sequence, it would be wrong to think that this sequence encompasses the whole truth of either Incarnation or creation, still less their truth as one. The latter is what I attempted to capture in the book, at any rate.

1. Amb 21.15.

2. Amb 7.31.

3. In fact, the strongest language to this effect appears in Maximus’s descriptions of the Eucharist: it “transforms into itself” (μεταποιοῦσα πρὸςἑαυτὴν) its worthy participants (Myst. 21), its grace “transforms [μεταποιοῦσαν] and changes [μετασκευάζουσαν] each person who is found there and in fact remolds [μεταπλάττουσαν] him in proportion to what is more divine in him and leads him to what is revealed through the mysteries which are celebrated” (Myst. 24), mysteries that grant to participants “likeness and identity, by which man is deemed worthy from man to become God [τὴν πρὸς αὐτὸν κατὰ μέθεξιν ἐνδεχομένην δι’ ὁμοιότητος κοινωνίαν τε καὶ ταυτότητα]” (Myst. 24).

4. CT 2.30, PG 90, 1137D–1140A (Salès 126–7).

5. Amb 7.21. Lest anyone think this too is a figure of speech, Maximus expressly says that “in a way befitting His love of mankind the Word becomes the essence in concrete wholes, the very Word who alone is above nature and reason [ὥστε φιλανθρώπως τὸν ἐν τοῖς ὅλοις Λόγον τοῖςπράγμασιν οὐσίαν γίνεσθαι τὸν μόνον ὑπὲρ φύσιν καὶ λόγον]” (Amb 48.7, PG 91, 1365b-c, modified).

6. Ep 2.8, my translation.

7. Amb 7.37.

8. Amb 31.9.

9. Amb 54.2, PG 91, 1376C, lightly modified from Constas; see too CT 2.25.

10. Amb 5.14.

11. Amb 41.5.

12. Ep 2.9, my translation.

13. Opusc 1, PG 91, 33D: “Οὐκ ἔστι δὲ τῶν παρ’ ἡμῶν κατὰ δύναμιν γίνεσθαι πεφυκότων ἡ θέωσις, οὐκ οὖσα τῶν ἐφ’ ἡμῖν· οὐδεὶς γὰρ ἐν τῇ φύσει, τῶν ὑπὲρ φύσιν λόγος”; cf. too Amb 20.2.

14. Amb 5.11 and 14.

15. Amb 47.2: “Ἑκάστου γὰρ ἴδιος γίνεται ἀμνὸς Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς, ὡς ἕκαστος χωρεῖν τε καὶ ἐσθίειν αὐτὸν δύναται· ἴδιος Παύλου τοῦ μεγάλουτῆς ἀληθείας κήρυκος , καὶ ἰδιοτρόπως ἴδιος τοῦ ἀκροτάτου τῶν ἀποστόλων Πέτρου, καὶ ἰδιοτρόπως ἑκάστου τῶν ἁγίων κατὰ τὸ μέτρον τῆς ἐνἑκάστῳ πίστεως καὶ τὴν ἐπιχορηγουμένην χάριν τοῦ Πνεύματος, ᾧ μὲν οὕτως, ᾧ δὲ οὕτως εὑρισκόμενος ὅλος καὶ ὅλῳ, πᾶσι δὲ πάντα γινόμενος.” See esp. 3.3.

16. Ep 15, PG 91, 553D.