Reply to My Critics: Jonathan Bieler

Jonathan Bieler has written the most extensive review of my book. It spans twelve single-spaced pages in a recent issue of Modern Theology¹ The first half contains a generally accurate and comprehensive summary of the book’s argument, though leaving out some key details. Most laudable in Bieler’s review is his grasp of the complex nature and task of historical theology as a discipline. Unlike Plested and others, Bieler sees that my claim to read Maximus literally is “to be taken in the sense of a systematic and speculative reading” (2). Careful attention to texts and historical context is non-negotiable, in other words, even as that attention seeks simultaneously to attend to the systematic connections and the whole truth those very texts seek. It’s a delicate enterprise. Bieler, a good Balthasarian, seems happy with it. And that seats us at the same methodological table where a proper debate can thus transpire.

Still, I must note upfront two tendentious features of Bieler’s review, both of which fall prey to the risks inherent in our shared method. First, Bieler’s summary reads like a merely speculative overlay of my own devising that is then draped over the true surface of Maximus’s texts. We’ll see that Bieler does think this. The problem is that this conviction leads Bieler to present my argument as if it has essentially no basis at all in Maximus’s own texts. Sometimes Bieler even quotes me quoting Maximus without mentioning the latter.² Once he even appears to assign a quotation to me that is nothing but Maximus’s own.³ Second and relatedly, across the twelve pages of Bieler’s critical review one meets only three of Maximus’s actual texts, two cited without specific exegesis at all. Bieler certainly knows Maximus’s corpus, as his scholarship elsewhere demonstrates (some of which I cite in the book). So it’s disappointing that a potentially substantive review, especially one that doesn’t shrink from issuing judgments about what Maximus “actually thinks” or that my interpretation conceives something in a way “not found in the texts of Maximus,” relies so entirely on a sustained sigh of disbelief, as it were, punctuated by red-scare adjectives such as “Kantian,” “Hegelian,” and “universalist.”⁴ One is tempted to suspect that Bieler projects just what he suspects in me: a systematic overlay upon not just Maximus’s words but my own as well.

Bieler’s critique appropriately assumes two orientations, historical and systematic. Bieler’s historical objection is that I offer “an incoherent interpretation of Maximus’ thought as a whole.” The more restrained systematic critique is that I trade on a “misrepresentation of Balthasar’s systematic view of the analogy of being” (6–7). Below I summarize and reply to the arguments Bieler makes in support of these two charges.

Historical Critique

I count three basic objections in Bieler’s historical case against my reading of Maximus.

[1] I impose on Maximus a “Gnostic” and/or “Kantian” critique of God’s good creation.

Bieler generally worries that I redefine traditional concepts through a kind of “Kantian critique” that leaves what once seemed intuitive now unintelligible. And this for Bieler is quite unnecessary since these concepts’ content are ostensibly obvious in Maximus’s thought. In truth I was simply trying to hold together what scholars besides me have already noticed are aporias or at least extreme paradoxes or tensions in Maximus’s own writings.

Bieler’s chief concern is over creation. He alleges that whereas I conceive creation as “identical with final deification,” Maximus “by contrast” thinks “deification is the goal of creation” (7, his emphasis). Bieler is unimpressed by my distinction between bodily and spiritual birth, even though that is a distinction Maximus explicitly makes (sec. 4.1.1). And he doesn’t seem to grasp that the claim that creation is Incarnation (not simply deification as a last moment of a sequence) entails process, since the Incarnation itself is as much an achievement in time as it is an eternal fact. For Bieler everything sits in a neat sequence: God is there first, then God acts creatively, creation is the (separate?) result of that act, and this progression means that all creation, including creaturely freedom, is given. When I say that created spirits must also first be free before they can truly be, this is “effectively flipping Maximus’ point in Ambiguum 7 on its head.” There the point is that we must first be and only thereafter can we be in motion. For Bieler, my emphasis on the contrary sequence—that birth by the Spirit according to Christ also entails the precedence of freedom over being—ultimately “seems to cancel out the very goodness Maximus assigns not only to creation, but created motion, especially as given by God in the first and then taken up by Christ in the Incarnation.” If sin, the misuse of freedom, possesses the nearly primordial “power” of characterizing the very conditions of our current experience of this world, then Bieler can detect here nothing but “the Gnostic demiurge” (7).

Bieler’s objection is wrong in at least four ways. First, he mischaracterizes my whole view of being and freedom as if it were a simple inversion of the traditional sequence of creation. But my view is openly paradoxical, not merely inverted. I do not simply flip the sequence, as if the Origenist triad (stasis-henosis, kinesis, genesis) were Maximus’s own. That indeed would contradict “the whole of the actual text of Ambiguum 7.” Rather, I delineate what I call in the book the “extraordinarily profound dilemma” of creation (162 –7). I describe it thus:

“On the one side, being simultaneously created and destined to become uncreated necessitates an initial (and in itself blameless) state of imperfection, including actual ignorance of God (incomplete rational motion). On the other, considering the concrete judgments of created rational beings when they confront visible creation in ignorance of God, it appears virtually inevitable that these persons should lapse into the dialectical prison of misapprehending God, the world, and themselves. We must become accustomed to God, but we must also become accustomed to creation and to ourselves, and we cannot really do one without having done the other.” (166)

I paint this picture from many texts in Maximus’s writings, including one Bieler mentions generally and without attention to detail. The introduction to Maximus’s Quaestiones ad Thalassium does deprive evil of any Aristotelian category, as Bieler notes. But it also gives a second and fuller formulation of evil as “the irrational movement of natural powers toward something other than their proper goal, based on an erroneous judgment.”⁵ For Maximus, as is clear in Amb 7 and indeed throughout his entire refutation of monenergism, there is no such thing as an actual yet neutral natural motion. A rational motion, a choice or judgment or act or reaction or desire or anything else proper to such a motion, is always more or less actualizing its proper end.⁶ So evil, though devoid of essence and hypostasis in itself, is nevertheless made real through the self-giving act of an actual rational person, a hypostasis. Hence Maximus’s last remark: “based on an erroneous judgment.” Erroneous or otherwise, a judgment doesn’t make itself. A judgment is an action, a motion, enacted by and through an actual judger. Because Maximus’s language is clear and precise, Bieler has to concede that Adam’s sin “hypostasizes” evil. Bieler then adds his own gloss: “in the sense of being personally responsible for it” (7). But that’s not what “hypostasizes” means. When Maximus says that sin itself “hypostasized pleasure” through Adam’s act of transgression—that is, the pleasure that delights in finite phenomena at the expense of truly infinite satisfaction in God—he’s pretty clear about what that entails: “through pleasure sin affixed itself to the very foundations of our nature, condemning the whole of our nature to death, and through man it was pushing the nature of all created beings away from existence.”⁷ Sin has no nature, yet it has made of our nature its very foundation in fact. Out of ignorance and perversion we give our very hypostases, our selves, our actions, to embody that which is in itself nothing at all. That’s why Maximus insists, in line with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and the whole Philokalic tradition, upon the primordial role of ignorance in evil’s emergence. Evils are literally parypostasis, “outside of” and “dependent upon,” in parasitical fashion, the “subsistence” of another who enacts them, and they are “not generated from God.”⁸ Rather, when an actual soul—my very own!—turns from He who is life “according to nature,” it becomes (in its actual motion) “the demiurge of evil, which has no substantive existence.”⁹ Maximus’s words, not mine.

The “profound dilemma” I lay out in the book is a dilemma because Maximus affirms simultaneously what seem to be (and abstractly are) irreconcilable claims: the fact that creaturely being is by nature given does mean it must rightly begin and progress in a motion appropriate to its kind (Bieler’s emphasis); but also the fact that the kind of beings we are—rational, desiring, zetetic beings—necessitates that our actual acts of perception and judgment can “hypostasize” what is in itself nothing at all, such that without first “having already become God through deification” we are inclined from our (phenomenological) beginning to err in our judgments about and embodiments of ourselves, God, and the world.¹⁰ Even if Bieler disputes the paradoxical vision here, historically or systematically, he doesn’t come close to presenting it accurately. He instead imagines that my interpretation is a straightforwardly “Gnostic” one according to which we simply begin, again at the start of a self-evident sequence, as totally deprived of God’s given goodness. In truth, Bieler’s simplistic appeal to given goodness and his fear of a Gnostic appeal to given badness comprise two sides of the same merely sequential coin, neither of which plumbs the depths of Maximus’s actual vision.

Second, then, a point Bieler doesn’t address at all: that for Maximus, as von Balthasar himself put it, “the bronze doors of the divine home are slammed remorselessly shut from the very start of our existence.”¹¹ This is one of those bold claims Maximus makes that many (except for von Balthasar) have tried to explain away or downplay, and which I address at length in the book through about five exegetical arguments (sec 4.1.2). Here it suffices to observe that Bieler’s generic appeal to the metaphysics of genesis and motion as presented in the first part of Amb 7 in no way erases or mollifies Maximus’s insistence that Adam’s primordial transgression is not simply a mistake or act of rebellion that occurred at some obvious point in temporal sequence (as we apprehend it). Rather, it constituted “another beginning” for Adam himself and the “corruption of becoming” itself.¹² What makes Adam’s—that is, everyone’s—sin so thoroughly deluded is that it reduces to an attempt to establish oneself, as finite, as one’s own beginning and end (sec. 4.1.4). Thus we constantly seek the infinite Good, our only true beginning and end, not just in lesser goods (in Augustinian fashion), but in lesser goods whose truth we have simultaneously reduced to mere objects, as if their finite appearance as phenomena were the whole of what they themselves are and are for (and this, I note in passing, is found only in their logoi, who is the Logos, who is Jesus Christ). In other words, there lies a seed of truth even in our false deification of merely finite phenomena, in that this very desire obliquely and unintentionally intimates the truth that the “Word of God, very God, wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his Incarnation.”¹³

Adam’s actual existence and condition is precisely one of existential contradiction (not paradox). Granted, that Adam is created means he must begin and move (Amb 7). But that doesn’t mean every perceived beginning and movement is good. Nor does it mean that false/bad movements cease to embody something. Sin is not merely birthed in ignorance; it perpetuates its own character by extending our ignorance to our very origins and ends, so that we misapprehend and live from these in actual fact. Adam “put his own beginning behind him through disobedience” so that “he was unable to seek what lay behind him.” And so, Adam’s world, the world we know, experience, and partly “create” through our own hypostases, appears always already in free fall away from God, “at the very moment of his coming into being”—a startling claim Maximus makes three times and that Bieler never mentions.¹⁴ Is this too “Gnostic”?

So Bieler ignores Maximus’s view of sinful Adam’s state of existential contradiction, of living simultaneously from two contrary “beginnings” and towards two contradictory “ends,” just as Bieler also misses the paradoxical (not contradictory) framing of creation through Christ. These two meet in the following passage, which also invokes the third way Bieler’s critique fails:

“In the same way, our Lord, having become man, and having created for our nature another beginning of becoming through the Holy Spirit [οὕτως καὶ ὁ κύριος, γενόμενος ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἄλλην ἀρχὴν δευτέρας γενέσεως ἐκ πνεύματοςἁγίου τῇ φύσει δημιουργήσας], and having accepted death through suffering that was justly imposed on Adam, but which in Him was completely unjust—since it did not have as the principle of its beginning the unrighteous pleasure that arose from the disobedience of the forefather—destroyed both of these two extremes (I mean the beginning and the end) of human becoming according to Adam, neither of which was brought into being by God [ἀμφοτέρων τῶνἄκρων, ἀρχῆς τε λέγω καὶ τέλους, τῆς κατὰ τὸν Ἀδὰμ ἀνθρωπίνης γενέσεως, οἷα δὴ προηγουμένως οὐκ ὄντων ἐκ τοῦθεοῦ].”¹⁵

Once more we see the contradictory character of sinful Adam’s existence: the beginning and end “according to Adam” were not “brought into being by God,” and yet, in Adam’s hypostatic life, they “are.” Notice too that the Incarnation, which is for Maximus our true beginning and end, creates “another beginning through the Holy Spirit.” Both initially appear paradoxical. Yet they differ in this way: the first is an existential contradiction, the second is the true paradox of creation itself. Bieler misses both.

But he also misses the great significance of Maximus’s describing the “beginning” Christ introduces as “becoming through the Spirit.” I won’t here rehearse all that I do in the book (sec. 4.1.1).¹⁶ Bieler never addresses any of the texts marshaled in the book, whether the one quoted above, Maximus’s gloss on Gen 1.27 as meaning “being born of the Spirit in the exercise of [Adam’s] own free choice,” or the stark claim that Christ freely subjected himself to “the spiritual birth of adoption so that bodily birth might be abolished”—that is, so that we might be born and become “after the manner of the angels,” following Gregory of Nyssa and others.¹⁷ Maximus is clear that there is genesis, becoming, “according to Adam” on the one hand, and genesis “according to Christ through the Spirit” on the other, and that Christ came to establish the latter against the former. Does Bieler think spiritual becoming isn’t true creation? Or is it not true becoming? And if it is a becoming that is somehow a simple continuation of our “natural,” bodily becoming, why would Christ’s birth and becoming “abolish” and be “in opposition to” it?¹⁸

In brief, Bieler’s obeisance to the logic of sequence blinds him to any of the complexities in Maximus’s views around true and false beginnings and ends. For Maximus, the hypostatic union and the deification it effects is not merely the “goal” of creation, as Bieler claims, but is simultaneously the arche, the “origin,” as Maximus claims.¹⁹ And the precise form this arche-telos takes is fundamentally paradoxical (neither merely sequential nor contradictory). Indeed the very form of Christ’s bodily birth is both the initiative of and response to Adam’s fallen form of bodily birth, which is above all marred by necessity.²⁰ This a major reason why Maximus regards the Virgin Birth as essential to the Incarnation’s entire goal, which is to renew “the laws of the first and truly divine creation” (does Bieler know of another?).²¹ This is not for the prudish reason that sexual procreation is too “bodily” or something, but rather because beastly acts are devoid of rational freedom, and rational freedom is the sine qua non of a truly spiritual beginning. That Christ intended and willed his own birth, and that Mary intended and willed to bear him, makes Christ’s conception and birth the primordial realization of that “first and truly divine creation,” the act wherein spirit is most itself in knowing and desiring its own being, and simultaneously being its own knowing and desiring—all in love.

[2] I say Christ’s humanity is universal.

Bieler claims my presentation of Maximus’s Christology “suffers from an ambiguous oscillation between universal and particular human nature Christ,” so that the emphasis on Christ’s universal humanity allows me to “extend the Incarnation or hypostatic union of Christ to all human beings.” Bieler objects, somewhat oddly and again with any text (recall that this is supposed to be a historical critique), that “this does nothing to elucidate what creation actually is in its own right,” especially creation’s God-given freedom as expressed in Mary’s “yes” to the Incarnation (8).

I suspect here that Bieler’s objection owes more to his own Balthasarian commitment to the dramatic character of freedom, where drama apparently refers to the personal interaction of at least two self-standing agents, than to anything I or Maximus say. It can’t be that Bieler worries that I suppress creaturely freedom. After all, he’s just criticized me for absolutizing it to such a degree that not even our true creation can come about except through our rational freedom. And then too, why would “what creation actually is in its own right” be the criterion for a proper “elucidation” unless Bieler is surreptitiously assuming the very thing not found in Maximus’s text—namely an actual creation in its own right? Creation “in its own right” is fallen creation, I’ve argued (4.1.4). Perhaps that is partly what creation as Incarnation elucidates in Christ’s universal humanity, which only ever is as him: creation “in its own right” is a phantom we falsely think pious humility requires. At any rate, for Bieler’s worry to stand, he needs to address the fact that Maximus does say that Christ’s human nature is both particular and universal,²² that Maximus’s “universal” is a “collective” universal after the manner of Gregory of Nyssa, and that Maximus repeatedly indicates that the Word’s Incarnation is universal in scope.

[3] I empty “hypostasis” of all form/nature.

This is one several critics have voiced in various ways. That I seek to distinguish and then relate anew the “logics” of essence/nature and hypostasis/person courts that risk, I suppose, perhaps unavoidably. Bieler’s version of the objection runs as follows. He claims I empty “Christ’s hypostasis of all formal content” and so turn “hypostasis into a sort of empty space originally removed from and entirely transcendent to any natural qualification.” I compare hypostasis to a black hole, after all (although Bieler doesn’t notice that a black hole is not nothing; quite the contrary). That’s been the standard critique thus far. But Bieler dilates this objection into the diagnosis of the book’s root problem. Evacuating hypostasis of form reveals for Bieler “a very modern, Kantian kind of ‘self’ that is detached a priori from all natural identity and inclination for the sake of its freedom.” Hence the “critical problem” throughout the book: “all the terms in play, such as creation, incarnation, deification, identity, hypostasis, are submitted to a critique and reinterpretation based on the essential emptiness of the self, understood as freedom and existence independent from any natural modality” (8).

Before descending into the details, let’s take stock of the odd concoction Bieler has mixed: my dismal view of creation is “Gnostic” (which should be deterministic), but I also elevate creaturely freedom to absolute heights, and yet I also suppress (Marian) freedom in trying to secure a God-world identity, and now here I enthrone a “Kantian” detached, spontaneous self in place of Christ’s hypostasis. That last ingredient is especially flagrant, Bieler thinks, since (1) Maximus emphasizes that Christ is his two natures and (2) Maximus defines “hypostasis” in general “in classic Cappadocian fashion as the ‘substance [ousia] with individual properties.’”²³ So Bieler finally manages a few particular exegetical claims in service of the broader and muddled charge of Kantian subjectivity. (Muddled not least because there is no such thing as a “detached self” in Kant).

First, a few general points. Nowhere in the book do I ever say that an actual hypostasis is without nature(s). In fact, I discuss at some length that this was a shared axiom by all parties in post-Chalcedon christological debates, which led to the Neo-Chalcedonian development of “the enhypostatic”—a crucial feature Bieler entirely neglects (sec. 1.3). Hence I characterize the hypostasis not just as irreducible to but also “inseparable” from its nature(s) in actual fact, and write later that “in no case does an abstract nature or hypostasis as such exist, though each bears a principle as such” (208; cf. point 5 on 207). That is why I speak carefully of the different logics of essence and nature rather than the mere difference between them. Logic can and must distinguish aspects or principles whose actual existence nonetheless never conforms merely to the mode of our apprehension of them as logics—a tried and true intuition found in, say, moments of Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology (e.g. Christ’s natures “differ in thought/contemplation alone”).

As it happens, Maximus does distinguish these logics through and through. As I document in the “Analytic Appendix of Key Concepts” in the book’s back matter, the principle or logic (or logos) of nature or essence is fundamentally formal and generic, i.e. must be predicated of many individuals that fall under that nature qua species or genus (206–8).²⁴ But the principle of hypostasis—which, I repeat, isn’t abstractly identical to any actual hypostasis!—is fundamentally existential, positive, relational—in a word, “personal.” No person is merely the nature she is. No “who” is merely its “what.” No Paul is merely his humanity. And you are not simply whatever kind of being you are. Granted, you are not at all without also being and acting through what you are (I do not now exist and act except as human). But it does not follow that what you are is all you are. All this suggests that, for Maximus, we must distinguish properly the logic of hypostasis and nature so that we can hope to relate them anew and in unexpected ways. He even insists that the same procedure of distinguishing and relating helps elucidate God’s triune being: “my account will dare to speak of the greatest of all: even in the first, beginningless, creative Cause of beings we do not contemplate the nature and the hypostasis as identical with one another.”²⁵

From this vantage we can address Bieler’s two supporting arguments.

First, Bieler is wrong to think that Maximus’s insistence that Christ’s hypostasis is his natures means that Christ is simply his natures. Maximus explicitly denies this. The composite hypostasis who is Christ is indeed both his natures, but precisely not in a way that corresponds to any formal or natural differentiation or identity at all. “For the name ‘Christ’ does not refer to an essence or nature, as if to a species predicated of many individuals that differ in hypostasis.”²⁶ So then, to what does the name “Christ” refer? To him, the person of whom we can say: “He is not only out of these natures, but he also is these natures. And not only is he these natures, but he also is in these natures. Thus we know him as a whole out of his parts, and as a whole in his parts, and that he is a whole through his parts.”²⁷ Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, is the “whole” whose “parts” (= natures) he himself is, but in a way that his natures, conceived abstractly, certainly could never be. Bieler confuses the “is” of “Christ is his natures” with the “is” of “Christ is the whole.” That the latter is not the same as the former is what allows the former itself not to lapse into sheer contradiction. Christ is both, really and perfectly, partly because his person is neither exclusively. More precisely: if Christ is his two natures, and yet if each nature is different from the other, then clearly his being both cannot mean that he qua hypostasis “is” his natures in the way either nature “is not” the other. But then if these two natures’ “is” includes their difference from one another, then the fact that he is their “is” cannot mean that this “is” is natural. Otherwise, his very hypostasis, which is one, would be divided exactly along the demarcation of their natural difference, which is what makes his natures two. Bieler’s idea must be flipped on its head: the whole Christ is both natures as himself, not as they are in abstraction. Nor does his “self” present any natural content that would contend with the natures he is. Concisely put, Christ most certainly is his natures, but this “is” is not the “is” of natural but of hypostatic logic. This doesn’t mean Christ is really his formally empty self after all. It means rather that his actual self is simultaneously both forms in precisely a non-formal yet utterly concrete way: his person is the condition and completion of his natures’ actual synthesis.²⁸ Paradoxical? Yes. Unknowable? No. Differently knowable, as all persons are.

A systematic note here too. If Bieler’s contention is that since Christ is his two natures, he is merely those two natures, then one wonders what he makes of the Trinity: since the Three are the one divine nature, is each Person merely that nature? Surely not, and surely because, as we saw Maximus say in Ep 15, even in that “first and anarchic Cause” the logic of essence and that of hypostasis differ. That the Son and Father are the divine nature does not mean that speaking of the divine nature suffices to distinguish and relate anew the Father and Son, nor either or both to the divine nature. Bieler’s objection in Christology creates enormous problems in trinitarian theology. That’s especially relevant here since for Maximus, as for many Neo-Chalcedonians, there must be a univocal sense of “hypostasis” in theology proper (Trinity) and the economy (Christology) or else the Son’s hypostasis is not the same in both.²⁹ And yet that’s exactly the claim of Incarnation.

Second, Bieler’s claim that Maximus defines hypostasis solely along Cappadocian lines is inaccurate. Although the Cappadocians sometimes defined hypostasis as an “essence with characteristics,” Maximus attributes this definition not to the Fathers but “to the philosophers.” He casts the Fathers’ definition of “hypostasis” in relational or even personalist terms: “each human being as he or she is determined personally by other human beings.”³⁰And here again Bieler overlooks the most decisive feature of Maximus’s view, which is the Neo-Chalcedonian view: that nature never exists in itself, while hypostasis does.³¹ I argue in the book that this addition names the basic innovation in the Neo-Chalcedonian development of hypostasis. Yes, Neo-Chalcedonians retained the “Cappadocian” definition of hypostasis, “an essence with individual/proper characteristics,” but they understood this crucially in conjunction with the claim that hypostasis alone exists in and for itself, whereas a nature only ever exists in and as a hypostasis.³² It’s not too difficult to see why Maximus assigned Bieler’s preferred definition to the philosophers: it misses the transformation of essence (ousia) demanded by Neo-Chalcedonian developments in “hypostasis,” according to which Christ’s two natures are at all and are one only as him, his hypostasis, which subsists in itself, and his natures subsist in and through him.³³

In general, Bieler forces hypostasis to bend to nature, seemingly from fear of any sense that person names more than can be traced by any “natural law.” But this distorts Maximus’s own view, whatever systematic worries underwrite such a distortion. When Maximus says that

“if we were to examine, for example, a particular compound, such as a man, or a horse, or an ox, it is not enough, if we wish to have complete comprehension of it, simply to say that the compound in question is ‘body,’ or that a man, or an ox, or a horse are simply ‘begotten,’ or ‘suffer corruption,’ but we must also set forth the subject of these predicates, the very subject who is born, suffers corruption, and is qualified [καὶ τὸ τούτοις ὑποκείμενον, ὅπερ γεννᾶται καὶφθείρεται καὶ πεποίωται].”³⁴

—is this “Kantian”? Or when he goes on to say

“if we wish to have complete knowledge of things, it is not enough to enumerate the multitude of characteristics contemplated around them—I mean by saying something is corporeal, or is born, or suffers corruption, or whatever else is around the subject—but it is absolutely necessary that we also indicate what is the subject of these characteristics, which is the foundation, as it were, upon which they stand [δεῖ πάντως καὶ τὸ ὑποκείμενον τούτοις, θεμελίου τρόπονἐφ’ ᾧ ταῦτα βέβηκε], if we wish to set forth completely and without remainder the object of our thoughts.”³⁵

—is this “Kantian”? Or when he then concludes

“If, then, no being whatsoever coincides with what is and is called the assemblage of characteristics that are recognized and predicated of it, but to the contrary is something different from these characteristics, to which they all refer [or “surround”], and which sustains them all together, but is in no way held together by them [τὸ ἄθροισματῶν ἡμῖν περὶ αὐτὸ νοουμένων τε καὶ λεγομένων, ἀλλ’ ἕτερόν τι παρὰ ταῦτα, τὸ περὶ ὃ ταῦτά ἐστι, συνεκτικὸν μὲντούτων, αὐτὸ δὲ τούτοις οὐδαμῶς συνεχόμενον]—for it is not derived from them, nor is it identical with them, or with anything from among them, neither is it derived from some of them, or from one of them….”³⁶

And so on—is this too “Kantian” in its claim that the subject is not the characteristics that disclose it? And, as we’ve seen, since the subject is emphatically not the essence or substance (ousia), what to make of Bieler’s claim that the notion of person as “transcendent” of the natures s/he also is, is “a very modern kind of existential identity that, though completely foreign to Maximus, Wood identifies as the implicit basis of a Chalcedonian symmetrical perichoresis between Christ’s natures and subsequently all created persons” (9)? I document the latter two claims at length (secs. 1.4 and 3.3, respectively), so they can’t responsibly be attributed to me rather than to Maximus’s own words. And as for claims “completely foreign to Maximus,” Bieler offers one of his own when he asserts that, “Analogically speaking…the Son is not ‘free’ from or transcendent to his divine nature, but is nothing ‘other’ than the nature as it subsists” (9). Von Balthasar might agree, but Maximus himself says the following, which is also the final quotation I offer in the book (204):

“For the Word, who created all things, and who is in all things according to the relation of present to future, is comprehended as both in type and in truth, in which He is present both in being and manifestation, and yet He is and is manifested in absolutely nothing, for inasmuch as He transcends the present and the future, He transcends both type and truth, for He contains nothing that might be considered contrary to Him. But truth has a contrary: falsehood. Therefore the Word in whom the universe is gathered transcends the truth, and also, insofar as He is man and God, He truly transcends all humanity and divinity [Ὑπερ ἀλήθειαν ἄρα ὁ πρὸς ὃν τὰ πάντα συνάγεται Λόγος, καὶαὖθις, ὡς ἄνθρωπος καὶ Θεὸς ὑπάρχων, καὶ ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν ὢν ἀληθῶς ἀνθρωπότητα τε καὶ θεότητα].”³⁷

Christ transcends humanity and divinity because the Truth Christ’s very person is, is more than—irreducible to!—“truth” as we apprehend it, i.e. as this or that nature in itself. Divine nature is really beyond every nature—an uncontroversial tenet of classical theism and the Christian tradition Bieler seeks to protect against innovation. But the Christological point is that the “beyond” of divine nature is in fact the Three persons, which is itself something revealed only in and as One of the Holy Trinity becoming human, being born in these last days, suffering, dying, resurrecting, ascending to the Father’s right hand, and now sending the Spirit so that the Son might be born “always and in all things.”

Systematic Critique

Bieler’s charge that I move “toward a very modern kind of existential identity” that is “completely foreign to Maximus” is both textually wrong and banally right. Wrong, insofar as Bieler has imposed a Thomistic metaphysics of nature qua supposit-grounding upon Maximus, who explicitly reverses this view for Christological reasons.³⁸ Right, insofar as Bieler’s characterization of my view of hypostasis is more boilerplate Sartrean than what I actually hold, so that I can agree that the latter is indeed absent in Maximus (even as I think with Zizioulas that some rapprochements could be made).³⁹

But Bieler’s basic systematic objection to my reading of Maximus is that it is not von Balthasar’s analogical reading. Here again Bieler never engages any actual text of Maximus. He might have addressed the fact that “analogical” or analogōs or kat’analogian in Maximus most definitely does not mean what von Balthasar sometimes read it to mean (sec. 3.4). One gets the sense, however, that these textless systematic worries really do occupy the heart of Bieler’s own reading of Maximus and his critique of mine. And that, as I say in the book’s Preface, is unavoidable.

To those concerns we turn. Bieler rightly says that I regard the analogy of being as inadequate for capturing the “deeper” God-world identity that is expressed in the actual perichoresis of God and world in Christ. But he incorrectly thinks “inadequate” implies an absolute “oppositional ‘either-or’ between perichoresis and analogy” (11). Inadequate doesn’t inherently entail absolute opposition. An absolute opposition arises from particular judgments or interpretations about the regulative status of analogy in Christology. If one reads, say, Maximus’s Christo-logic through and subject to an asymmetrical analogical metaphysics, at that point I see an opposition that must indeed be addressed. But if one instead reads analogy through Christo-logic (as I do) then one can say (as I do) that analogy is a useful and perhaps provisionally indispensable heuristic whose negative determinations probably must be grasped before the fullness of the whole mystery of Christ can be adequately perceived.⁴⁰ Those negative determinations are simple enough to grasp: God is neither constructed from or dependent upon anything prior to himself (hence the simple identity of his esse and essentia), and God is not a self-contained, absolute “other” standing in opposition to the world of composite creatures; he is rather their sole source (hence the very difference of creaturely metaphysically composite being, essentia + esse, from God’s simple being, is itself analogically like God’s own difference from the world—as Przywara says in his 1927 monograph). The “rhythm” or play of like and unlike between creaturely compositeness and the Creator’s simplicity is thus a sort of modern iteration of premodern participatory metaphysics. Just this is what Bieler thinks I miss or haven’t grasped.

I think Bieler misses the depths of Maximus’s Christo-logic, even as he vaguely intimates it when summarizing von Balthasar’s claim that Christ is the concrete analogy of being. Here’s how he describes it:

“This ‘asymmetrical or vertical’ difference between created and uncreated being is taken up personally or hypostatically by Christ in his Incarnation, so that Christ becomes the concrete analogia entis for Balthasar. In other words, Christ is the difference of created and uncreated being in person, the ‘identity of identity and nonidentity’ as Wood cites Balthasar as saying (39). Christ with his person both reveals and safeguards, for Balthasar, the entirely positive ‘asymmetrical’ and infinite difference between created and uncreated being and thereby the logic of creation.” (10)

What’s so odd about this account is that it moves seamlessly from the claim that Christ “is,” “in person,” the “difference” of his natures, to the conclusion that Christ thereby “reveals and safeguards” the “asymmetrical” and “infinite difference” between those same natures. But the analogical difference is, as Przywara himself said, between his natures apprehended in their distinction as such. That’s why Bieler began with the metaphysics of creaturely esse as contrasted with divine simplicity. Yet every determination in that very construction is predicated of the natures, not of the person as such. If the natural difference between created and uncreated being is “infinite,” then surely this difference is not adequate to the logic by which Christ is also confessed as being that difference “in person”! Said otherwise: Christ is the very same person who is identified with both poles of the asymmetrical relation, since, as Bieler himself emphasized before, he also is those natures (not just their difference). That he is their difference in person means that the logic of persons must differ from the very logic of nature by which we apprehend the difference at all. And that he is both in his singular existence among us is what makes his a rather peculiar identity: “Therein lies the whole paradox: to behold a composite hypostasis without predicating of it a composite nature according to species.”⁴¹ In other words, when you behold the perichoresis of activities and natures in Christ, you expect to find either a “composite species/nature” underlying it or the fantastic “conjunction” of two self-subsisting subjects. But in Christ you find neither. Rather you find a singular identity who is the very natures that thus interpenetrate one another in all he does and suffers, since they are and are different at all only as and in him, his one person! Bieler identifies Christ’s person simply with the “difference” between his natures. But the real paradox is that Christ’s way of being their difference is itself different than their difference as conceived on the level of nature. And so you’re astounded: both his way of being one and his way of being two are different from the way his natures are one (with themselves) and two (as distinct from each other). Bieler’s “is…in person” contains precisely the peculiar, “deeper identity” that he finds so incredible in my reading of Maximus. Only he doesn’t think it through.

The rest of Bieler’s worries trade on the presumption that Christ isn’t both “before” and “after” his own Incarnation, or that Christ isn’t the very same person whose existence is both “in” the Trinity and “outside” it in the economy. So he objects that my reading would mean that only the “historical” and “freely chose hypostatic union” is “the final and ultimate location of any true identity and difference,” thereby “implicating God’s very being in becoming according to Hegelian fashion” (11). He’s read Jüngel. It’s less clear that he’s read me as closely, since the fundamental thesis of the book is that the hypostatic union is at once historical and cosmic. Bieler might have missed that from Chapter 1, but it’s unclear why he missed the final subsection dedicated precisely to the point, “Time and the Incarnation” (4.3), or the concluding remarks cautioning against reducing Christ’s “exceptionality” to mere historical particularity (199–200). At any rate, Bieler goes on to contrast my merely “historical” (or, one suspects, occasionalist) orientation to the Balthasarian orientation towards a “trinitarian perichoresis” that, “together with the unity and difference it implies, is thus the positive ground of the analogy of being of the infinite difference between the created and uncreated natures” (11). Bieler doesn’t see that the “ground” he identifies is, in the Incarnation, also the “grounded.” Here again we’ve abstracted from Christ himself and fixed upon his natures in abstraction to establish a ground-grounded relation, when the real paradox all along is that the same one who is eternally generated of the Father is also generated of the Theotokos and thus is identical to his own extremes.

This error surfaces in a final objection:

“if Christ’s relationship to his natures is purely symmetrical, and his hypostasis, as it were, formally empty and transcendent to his natures, then what does Christ express or reveal when he becomes man? That Christ speaks the things of the Father, and that who sees Him in his human existence sees the Father, demands an entirely positive asymmetry, one ensuring that Christ is in fact the mediator and revealer of the Trinity here on earth.” (12)

And yet I never say Christ himself is symmetrical to his natures, but that they are symmetrical to each other in and as him. Bieler misses that it isn’t an abstract, natural, asymmetrical relation that ensures that Christ is sole “mediator between God and human beings” (1 Tim 2.5). Rather, it is only in his hypostatic identity with his own natures, which makes these “extremes” to be really one even as they remain naturally two, that he is the true mediator and revealer of God and humanity, ultimately of the entire God-world relation:

“[I]n his willing he was found to be the seed of his own Incarnation and became composed according to hypostasis, the very one who is simple and not composed according to nature. He remains one and the same in the permanent fixity of the parts out of which he is composed—unchangeably, indivisibly, unconfusedly—so that he might be, in his own hypostasis, the mediator for those parts out of which he was composed, joining together in himself the interval between the extremes, ‘making peace’ and ‘completely reconciling’ human nature to God the Father, through the Spirit.”⁴²

Christ is before and after the very logic by which we distinguish theology and economy, the “immanent” Trinity and history, the simple God and the composite creature: for he is himself both.⁴³ He is no mere herald of a Father who sits atop an asymmetrical relation, speaking oracularly about things he’s heard from the Father. He is himself the Truth of which he speaks. The very one who speaks to us of the Father is he who is generated of the Father and in the Spirit. The very one who differs infinitely from us in his divinity is connatural with us by his humanity. The very one who transcends his “humanity and divinity” does so precisely as receiving and revealing them in their actual truth, not merely in their abstract truths. All this is not simply “grounded” in the Trinity: it is One of the Trinity among you, reconciling you, making you his very own, identifying with you, suffering with you, dying with you, resurrecting with you, splendidly defying your abstract limits in his very self, for your own sake! He alone is sole mediator. Not because he is related asymmetrically to the Father. But because he himself encompasses and is both extremes of that relation precisely in his symmetrical relation to the Father and Spirit—that is, in and as his one and only self.

Bieler misses Maximus’s genius, indeed his “riches” (12). The price Bieler pays is too high: the impoverishment of the Christian tradition for the sake of a merely common deposit whose bland commonality not only dims the peculiar glint of particular treasures, but misses the revealed depths of that most peculiar of all Christian syntheses, the Alpha and Omega, the Before and After, he through whom all things become and who is himself the “arche of God’s creation” (Rev 3.14). He is one.

1. Jonathan Bieler, “Creation as Incarnation? Critical Objections to a Recent Thesis on Maximus the Confessor,” Modern Theology 39.3 (July 2023). Unfortunately, still lacking access to academic databases, I have solely the online version to hand, which means I cite Bieler’s article as pages 1–12 instead of the print edition’s.

2. When attempting to present what Bieler obviously regards as an absurd view of the world, namely that this world is, in its actual appearance and in our experience, a mixture of true and false (and various degrees of both) incarnations or realizations of what rational beings intend, he quotes me as saying, “Sin’s structural motion is incarnation: we ‘hypostasize’ our imagined delusions. [...] And so we become counterfeit creators of a world of bare phenomena, of absolute limit, of false beginnings (merely corporeal birth) and ends [death] [...] My soul ‘becomes the demiurge’ of evil” (5, quoting from 169 of my book). Bieler doesn’t mention that the latter is a quotation from QThal 1.1.3 (cited at 317 n.153)—a text he elsewhere recommends generally for Maximus’s view of evil (7)—nor does he indicate that his ellipsis excises from my main text the following, which says that the “mutation of nature” that results from sin as its condemnation is not something God made, it “was rather man who made it [ἐποίησε] and knew it, creating [δημιουργήσας] the freely chosen sin through his disobedience” (QThal 42.4). Bieler might have a different interpretation of these and the many other texts I cite (including those from Gregory of Nyssa and Origen on the same theme). But he shouldn’t imply that the language itself comes from anyone but Maximus himself.

3. On another point Bieler finds incredible, he quotes me as saying that the Word in his person “truly transcends all humanity and divinity” (6). He cites only p. 204 of my book, which contains nothing but a block quote from Maximus’s own Amb 37.8, PG 91, 1296CD (discussed below).

4. Bieler claims that a “universalist kind of apokatastasis” that conceives of the final defeat and absolute unity of God and the world might well be “the guiding principle of” my whole reading of Maximus on creation (7), and he mentions universalism no less than three times throughout his review—which is three times more than my entire book mentions it. In fact, the one place I do mention universalism in Maximus sits buried in an endnote and merely mentions the scholarly debate that has raged around this question, and then I don’t even take a strong exegetical stance (323–4 n.239). One suspects that Bieler’s own concern over my personal version of apokatastasis overdetermines his judgment here, which is odd given that his hero, von Balthasar, is the chief champion of the exegetical case that Maximus himself was a universalist of the sort Bieler fears in me.

5. Maximus, QThal 1.2.12.

6. See my discussion at 158–161. But see Amb 7.10 and esp. Opusc 1, PG 91, 21D–24B, discussed at 151–2.

7. Maximus, QThal 61.9.

8. Maximus, QThal 51.18.

9. Maximus, QThal 1.1.3. Cf. too Ep 2, PG 91, 397A, and my discussion at 4.1.3. As I mentioned, this account of evil, which Bieler finds peculiar presumably because he relies on a perfunctory, Augustinian/Thomist theory of evil as pure privation, is not all that peculiar in, say, the Philokalia. “Evil does not exist by nature,” says Diadochus of Photike, but “when in the desire of his heart someone conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence, then what he desires begins to exist.” Indeed “we give it existence through our actions.” See his On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 2; Vol. 1, p. 253 (in Ware et al.’s volumes); and see my discussion of related matters here.

10. Maximus, QThal 1.2.18; cf. Amb 10.60 and the previous note.

11. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 187; cited at 145.

12. Maximus, QThal 61.7 and Amb 10.60.

13. Maximus, Amb 7.22. Cf. too Amb 31.9 and esp. 54.2.

14. Maximus, QThal 59.12. The other two are QThal 61.2 and Amb 42.7. I discuss these and related texts/themes at 4.1.2.

15. Maximus, QThal 61.7, CCSG 22, 91, slightly modified.

16. Bieler habitually labels “Kantian” the idea that our true beginning, and thus our true creation, must for Maximus include our own free will. As we’ll see in a moment, he links this with Kant’s “empty self,” and then thinks that I smuggle this Kantian self into Maximus to make all the paradoxical claims I do. That’s already an odd charge, since Kant’s unity of apperception is exactly not a self, but a transcendental condition of any self’s knowing (so that Fichte’s On the “I” as the Principle of Practical Philosophy is rooted in but an advance beyond Kant). This unity is an intuition, not the self that has it. But the overall problem is that Bieler prefers this vague charge to addressing any of Maximus’s texts.

17. Maximus, Amb 42.31; cf. Gregory of Nyssa, De hom. opif. 17–18.

18. Maximus, QThal 61.7, where the “other beginning” Adam’s primordial transgression “introduced into our nature” stands “in opposition to” the beginning introduced by the Incarnation.

19. Maximus, QThal 60.3, 22.6, etc.

20. Maximus, Amb 42.3.

21. Maximus, Amb 31.2.

22. Maximus, Ep 15, PG 91, 557C: “Hence Christ possessed both the common and the particular of those parts from which he was composed” (my translation); cf. 1.2.2.

23. Bieler cites Ep 15, PG 91, 557D—the only text cited in the whole review.

24. This does not make Maximus a nominalist. Though the nature as such does not actually exist, the nature as universal actually exists as and through the collective whole of all its hypostases. Human nature, for instance, has no actual existence in the mode of “as such.” And yet in and as and through the entirety of all actual human hypostases, human nature exists and does so as the common bond that impels us to unity (QThal 2.2). Hence an “enhypostasized” nature or essence “really subsists in the individuals under it and is not contemplated in mere thought” (Opusc 14, PG 91, 150BC). In other words, nature’s “common” or “universal” existence is no mere figment of the mind; it is contemplated by the mind in all the hypostases that fall under it as a logical species. But again, even as universal, nature is only ever contemplated in and through these hypostases, which are not themselves merely identical, logically or existentially, to their proper nature. In the book I call this the “irreducibility” or “positivity” of hypostasis with respect to nature. That Bieler detects here only a detached self shows that he has failed to grasp the logic Neo-Chalcedonians developed, a logic that deprives nature of any existence “in itself” and instead sees this as the distinctive prerogative of hypostasis (Opusc 26, PG 91, 264A; Ep 15, PG 91, 477A, passim).

25. Maximus, Ep 15, PG 91, 548D.

26. Maximus, Ep 12, PG 91, 488AB.

27. Maximus, Ep 12, PG 91, 501A.

28. Cf. Ep 12, PG 91, 492D–493A. Here Maximus insists against the Miaphysites that no one says Christ’s two natures “achieved two natures.” Instead “we do say that what has been achieved out of these two natures—those very natures out of which he is composed—is the single, composite hypostasis of Christ.” Christ’s person qua person must be distinguished from his natures, which then allows us to relate his person to his natures anew. Otherwise, Maximus’s Christology is simply fundamentally incoherent. If Bieler sees only a detached self here, then I question whether his own pseudo-Kantian antinomy—that either Christ is his natures or else he is detached from his natures—can make sense not just of Maximus’s Christology, but of Christology itself.

29. E.g. Alois Grillmeier, SJ, Christ in Christian Tradition 2/2, 146. One might object that the same Son can and must be apprehended according to the mode of the “register” or conceptual context of these relatively distinct sorts of inquiry. But that doesn’t help matters. If this is made into an absolute rule of what we can know through these modes of inquiry, it would simply mean that the Incarnation isn’t God’s self-revelation in any meaningful sense. It would mean, that is, that God’s act of Incarnation is itself limited by the objective limits that define our methods of inquiry; the Incarnation would be yet another cognitive object among others, whereas it’s supposed to be the “object” that defines all others.

30. Maximus, Opusc 26, PG 91, 276B. This gets closer to Bieler’s own definition: “For Maximus, in fact, being a person has to do with sharing a nature with other persons, indeed, with providing the common nature with a unique subsistence defined by the way one gives/receives it” (9). But that’s not Maximus’s definition even in Opusc 26, which says not that a person is determined by one’s relation to the common nature, but rather by one’s relation “to other human beings,” other human hypostases. Here and elsewhere one suspects Bieler’s own understanding of person and nature à la Pope St. John Paul II’s “personalism” suppresses Maximus’s own view.

31. See n. 24 above, but also pp. 22–24 of the book.

32. Bieler (9 n.8) glances at this crucial feature of the Neo-Chalcedonian hypostasis only while claiming that I incorrectly translated Ep 15, PG 91, 557D in such a way as to overlook Maximus’s supposedly “substantially loaded” definition of hypostasis (“essence with idioms/characteristics”). First, Bieler pulls this translation from a footnote in my 2018 article in Modern Theology. I admit that the nominalization of the Greek substantive is awkward. But Bieler should have attended to the three separate places in the book where I quote this very passage, each in a way that Bieler shouldn’t find objectionable (130, 240 n.140, 329 n.15). Second, Bieler’s point about the grammatical subject is misleading. He ignores the several circumstantial clauses that together make Maximus’s point about showing “the enhypostasized” rather than the hypostasis. Here’s the fuller passage in my forthcoming translation: “For the true hypostatic union of the parts, each coming together with the other in a synthesis of a determinate whole, according to their simultaneous conjunction for the generation of a determinate whole, and including, along with the common, the property that distinguishes each from its essential commonality—< in this union each part > manifests an enhypostasized reality but not the hypostasis. For the enhypostasized does not exist in itself and separately, < as if > separated from things of the same kind or separated from whatever coexists with it in a union for the generation of a determinate whole, which whole is proper to the hypostasis. For that which exists in itself and separately is a hypostasis.” Contra Bieler, Maximus’s overall point here is not that an individual property itself suffices to show that an essence is “enhypostasized” rather than its own hypostasis. After all, “the enhypostasized” is exactly an innovation beyond the philosophers’ definition of “an essence with characteristics.” In several philosophical systems a defining characteristic or a “bundle of characteristics” did suffice to “manifest the hypostasis,” i.e. to define the hypostasis merely as an individual instance—an essence individuated, say, by specific matter (which is itself a bundle of characteristics or qualities). Maximus means precisely to distinguish his view from that one. And the way he does so is by placing the identification of this “property” in the context of “hypostatic union” described as the “coming together” of the parts “in a synthesis of a determinate whole.” So even my own grammatical subject from 2018 (the communication of idioms) isn’t really off the mark. Finally, Bieler offers the circular claim that just because Maximus says the hypostasis alone subsists “in itself,” this “does not mean that formal content does not originally belong to hypostasis, because the hypostasis is only separate subsistence of a nature!” That might work for Boethius and Aquinas, but it’s hardly sufficient for Maximus’s account of hypostasis, here and all throughout his work. And, of course, formal content always “belongs” originally to a hypostasis. The question is rather exactly how. Cf. 1.2.1.

33. As I say at 240 n.140, Maximus sees this view through to the end: even Christ’s divinity is anhypostatos in itself and is “enhypostasized” in Christ (and the Three); cf. Opusc 13.7, PG 91, 148C and Ep 15, PG 91, 557D (which Bieler cites without mentioning this detail). To my knowledge, the only other text that makes this same move is the anonymous De sectis VII.2, PG 86, 1241B (formerly attributed to a single Leontius).

34. Maximus, Amb 17.3.

35. Maximus, Amb 17.5; cf. my note on hypostasis and to hypokeimonon at 329 n.16.

36. Maximus, Amb 17.6, slightly modified.

37. Maximus, Amb 37.8, PG 91, 1296c-d, slightly modified.

38. Those who seek a tidy synthesis of Neo-Chalcedonian and Thomist Christologies (and thus metaphysics) will need to address a fundamental difference between them: while the former think a nature never exists in itself (still less that it grounds supposits/hypostases), the latter conceive nature in just the opposite way. Hence Michael Gorman’s ingenious attempt to answer a question he never finds directly addressed in Aquinas, namely the question of why Christ’s human nature does not ground its own supposit (i.e. Nestorianism). Gorman’s answer is that since Aquinas likely thinks Christ’s human nature is individuated “prior to” its union with the Word’s person, then that individuated human nature “could have existed apart from the union, in which case it, that particular human nature, could have grounded a supposit” (83). Though I hadn’t yet read Gorman, I targeted just such a presupposition at 1.1.2. See Michael Gorman, Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Ch.4.

39. John Zizioulas, “Person and Nature in the Theology of St. Maximus the Confessor,” 85–113.

40. See the long note at 327–8 n.14, where one reads: “Again, this is not to say that one cannot both adhere to analogy and affirm this [peculiar hypostatic identity] of Christ. The point rather is that these are not the same logics. Restricting the God-world relation to analogy, to a proportion of ‘one toward another,’ simply assumes from the outset the impossibility of conceiving that relation according to Christo-logic, to ‘one toward another only because these are more fundamentally the very same one.’” Bieler doesn’t mention this statement of the critique of analogy, and already the framing of his reply manifests his own false either-or.

41. Maximus, Ep 13, PG 91, 517C.

42. Maximus, Ep 15, PG 91, 553D–556A.

43. Maximus, Ep 15, PG 91, 556CD–557A: “Or better: one and the same hypostasis of the Word exists both now and before. ‘Before’ in an uncaused manner, simply and without composition. And ‘after’ according to cause, becoming unchangeably yet truly composed in the assumption of intellectual and ensouled flesh. In all this he is determined by and distinguished from the extremes—I mean his Father and Mother—so that he might be united with himself to the degree that he possesses no difference. That is why there can be absolutely no destruction (apogenesis) of the hypostatic identity of his parts such that the generation (genesis) of their mutual difference within him dissolves the hypostatic union into a personal duality. This sort of generation proves incapable of preserving the reciprocal and personal identity of the parts, since it divides that identity into a duality of persons < by conceiving > the difference as a hypostatic difference.”