Reply to My Critics: Marcus Plested

In his review for Heythrop Journal, Marcus Plested raises four main objections to my book. Below I summarize and respond to each.

[1] Plested takes issue with the rhetorical framing of the argument. He begins straightaway with the claim that the “book proclaims its own significance in no uncertain terms.” His evidence for this is not anything written in the book itself but rather an audacious claim found in the promotional summary paragraph printed on the back cover. He might have inquired as to whether I wrote all or some of that summary (I didn’t). Perhaps, though, I should have requested the press to temper the claim. Rookie mistake, that, on the order of writing sentence fragments.¹ But Plested’s more pertinent worry concerns the book’s wish to take Maximus at his word, that is, to read his more challenging statements “literally.” Plested himself appears to take this very rhetoric in a woodenly literal way, since he judges that this framing elides “the obvious hermeneutical questions” raised “by such an apparently confident retrieval of the exact and literal meaning of a text written some 1400 years ago.” Apparently Plested understands my insistence on reading Maximus “literally” as a claim to conjure, with the confidence of a roadside soothsayer and the method of a 19^th-century positivist, the author’s intended meaning. But since that’s a claim I deny at some length in the opening pages of the book (xv–xvii), I need only refer the reader to them.

Another option would have been to consider the two reasons offered explicitly in the book for its own use of “literal.” First, “literal” is a response to several other scholars who have claimed that Maximus’s more daring formulations are “metaphorical.” Scholars have used this term pretty clearly to deny that Maximus means, for instance, that the Word’s Incarnation in the deified is of the same sort or quality or logic or degree as the historical Incarnation. I document their views in the Introduction. Plested seems to agree with them. But if they can call Maximus’s formulations “metaphorical,” why can’t I call my counter-reading “literal”? These are relative terms, after all (I note this at 223, n.70). Second and more crucially, in the main text I define “literal” to mean “in the technical sense of Christology proper, that is, according to the very logic of the Incarnate Word” (xv). What is that logic? That’s the purpose of mapping out Maximus’s “Christo-Logic” in the first chapter, which Plested mentions but never attempts to summarize. Granted, hermeneutical issues can be complex. And yet one should at least attend to the actual use of a word if one wishes to criticize its putative rhetorical connotation, especially when insinuating a lack of intellectual virtue on the author’s part.

[2] Plested thinks I misunderstand and perhaps (unintentionally?) mislead the reader about the meaning of Amb 7.22, the book’s main epigraph. I rendered it: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation [ἐνσωματώσεως] be actualized always and in all things.” Plested raises two problems with my translation and use of this passage. First, he asserts a rigid conceptual distinction between ἐνσαρκώσις, “incarnation,” and the term Maximus uses here, ἐνσωματώσις, “embodiment.” The mere observation that these are different Greek terms is for Plested nearly enough to undermine my whole thesis, since he thinks saying “that the Logos is embodied in the creation is not the same as saying he is enfleshed (incarnate) in it.” Plested’s second point is that it is “tendentious” for me to use a capital “I” in my rendering, “Incarnation,” since the Greeks didn’t use capital letters the way we do.

Plested’s observations mislead on both counts. They certainly fall short of a cogent exegetical argument for his bare assertion that the “mystery” of the Word’s “embodiment” in Amb 7.22 is somehow of a different order (or logic) than his historical Incarnation. We can dispatch with his second observation fairly quickly. For one thing, it’s simply untrue that, as Plested implies, it’s somehow peculiar or cause for concern if a scholar capitalizes a key term in his or her translation of a Church Father. To take a somewhat random example, just last month I read through Brian Daley’s little volume, On Death and Eternal Life, which contains seven texts and English translations of Gregory of Nyssa. Especially in Gregory’s treatise, In Illud, Daley routinely translates σῶμα as “Body” with a capital “B.”² I suspect this is to signal what Joseph Lienhard called the “moral-mystical sense” the term bears in that work, and crucially so for Gregory’s entire argument.³ Now perhaps Plested or another scholar would take issue with Daley’s rendering (though surely no one would imply Daley is unaware of the habits of late Byzantine Greek orthography). All well and good, only that would require an exegetical argument against his translation, not a perfunctory observation supposed to settle the matter. Plested seems to gesture at such an argument in his other critical observation about the two different Greek terms, but, as we’ll now see, that turns out to be more misleading than the other observation.

Plested’s conceptual distinction could inaugurate an interesting discussion about various nuances or aspects of the one mystery of Christ, as John Behr once intimated to me. But his claim here that embodiment and enfleshment/incarnation are “not the same” is specious, whether one considers more carefully this very passage or, more responsibly, Maximus’s whole corpus.

In Amb 7.22, Plested’s rigid distinction not only proves absent; it is contradicted by what immediately precedes: “And by this beautiful exchange, it renders God man by reason of the divinization of man [διἀ τὴν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου θέωσιν], and man God by reason of the Incarnation of God [διὰ τὴν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐνανθρώπησιν]. For the Logos of God, very God, wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of His Incarnation [ἐνσωματώσεως].” Absent in Plested’s observations about Greek terms is that the more common and unambiguous term in Maximus for “Incarnation” is ἐνανθρώπησις.⁴ But notice that the final statement in our text causally or logically refers back to the claim just before this one (that’s the sense of “For,” γὰρ), which is that the work and process of human deification—the “beautiful exchange”—renders “God man” and “man God” in view of “the Incarnation of God” (Constas’s capitalization!). Plested’s observation is misleading, then, because it ignores that a term clearly designating the historical Incarnation (in the first claim) is itself further explained by and dependent upon the divine will to become “embodied” always and in all things (in the second claim). Why does Plested focus on just two Greek terms, one of which isn’t in this text at all, rather than the two that are? Far from undermining the argument, Plested’s note further confirms the original reading of this passage and its central importance. A second major problem in this passage for Plested’s terminological objection is that he glides over another key term in Amb 7.22: “mystery.” As I note in the book, “mystery” is almost systematically a designation for the historical Incarnation in Maximus (I give about fifteen texts at 223 n.77 and 247 n.5). So if the claim is that the Word wills to actualize the “mystery” of the Word’s “Incarnation” always and in all things, what are Plested’s exegetical grounds for interpreting the “mystery” here in his own idiosyncratic way?

But the fatal flaw in Plested’s objection is that Maximus does equate the very terms Plested presumes must be kept absolutely distinct, and in fact reverses their referents on several occasions. Here we mustn’t remain content with a rudimentary Greek lesson. Rather, we must attend to Maximus’s whole corpus. I first consider three examples of Maximus designating the historical Incarnation as the Word’s “embodiment” (which Plested reserves solely for the Word’s universal or cosmic embodiment). Then I consider that Maximus sometimes calls deification, the perfection of the Word’s universal or cosmic embodiment, “enfleshment” or “Incarnation” (which Plested reserves solely for the Word’s historical incarnation).

In Amb 42.25, Maximus opposes two contrary theses regarding the soul’s generation in relation to its body. He does so on distinctly christological grounds. Both the Origenist “preexistence” of souls and the Aristotelian “postexistence” of souls prove false because Christ, the beginning and end of all creation, was conceived in Mary’s womb with the fullness of his human nature such that his own body and soul were at all and were in simultaneous relation in his single act of becoming human. “I espouse the principle of coexistence,” he writes,

“rejecting each of the other views that are at variance both with each other and with the middle position, to which I adhere, having for my argument’s advocate and unerring teacher the very same Creator of nature, in the mystery of His embodiment, who truly became man, [τῷ καθ᾽ἑαυτὸν μυστηρίῳ τῆς ἐνσωματώσεως] and who confirmed in Himself that His human nature subsists in its full perfection simultaneously with its coming into being at the moment of its creation….”

Make of the argument what you will, but it’s indisputable that Maximus’s whole case here rests on what obtained in the historical Incarnation, which he here designates by two key terms also used in Amb 7.22, “mystery” and “embodiment.”

CT 1.66, a rather famous passage, reads:

“The mystery of the embodiment of the Word [Το τῆς ἐνσωματώσεως τοῦ Λόγου μυστήριον] contains the power of the entirety of both the figures and types in Scripture, also the science of creatures that appear and of those that are thought. And the one who has come to know the mystery of the cross and tomb, comes to know the logoi of the aforementioned creatures; and one who has been initiated into the ineffable power of the resurrection comes to know the purpose toward which God initially established all things.”

No one disputes that the “mystery of the embodiment of the Word” here refers to the historical Incarnation. Cross, tomb, Resurrection—are these not historical? And after all, Maximus holds to the fairly common patristic view that the event of the Incarnation in history reveals the hermeneutical key to scripture and the metaphysical key to the cosmos, both of which are unified and identified in and as the Word (e.g. Amb 10.32–4). So again we find Maximus using key terms found in Amb 7.22 to describe the historical Incarnation.⁵

Finally, in QThal 22 Maximus addresses the question of why the Apostle Paul appears to affirm both that the “coming ages” lie in the future (Eph 2.7) and yet “the ends of the ages have come upon us” (1 Cor 10.11). The heart of Maximus’s reply is that there are two kinds of “ages,” one referred to the Incarnation of God and another to the deification of humanity and indeed all creation (though he’s careful to note that these are not strictly sequential ages). Hence Paul,

“seeing that the end of the ages intended for God to become man had come about through the very Incarnation of the Word of God [δι᾽αὐτῆς τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ λόγου σαρκώσεως], says: ‘The end of the ages have come upon us’—not simply ‘the ages’ as we ordinarily understand them, but clearly those which, intended for the actualization of the mystery of embodiment [οὐχ ἁπλῶς παρ’ ἡμῶν νοουμένων τῶν αἰώνων, ἀλλὰ τῶν, ἐπ’ ἐνεργείᾳ δηλονότι τοῦ τῆςἐνσωματώσεως μυστηρίου], have reached their proper limit according to the purpose of God.”⁶

Here Maximus equates the “incarnation” with “the actualization of the mystery of embodiment,” the latter of which repeats three key words from Amb 7.22 (“actualization,” “mystery,” and “embodiment”). This text, which I discussed in the book’s climax (190–1), presents us with exactly the equation of terms that Plested’s misleading observation presumed impossible.

Matters only worsen for Plested’s case if we seek the other way his distinction would prove false. If, I mean, ἐνσαρκώσις (and cognates), which Plested says would be admirably translated as “Incarnation,” were found to designate not just the historical Incarnation but the final condition of the deified, then this too would refute Plested’s main point. Really, though, a full refutation of either my book’s argument or Plested’s critique would need to explain why Maximus constantly relates Christ’s historical body and the eschatological Body of Christ, particularly the way he relates them perichoretically and as the same Word’s embodiment, as I discuss at many places in the book.⁷ But one passage should suffice. In Exp. orat. Dom. 4, Maximus flatly states: “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved [διὰ τῶν σωζομένων σαρκούμενος].” Does “becoming incarnate” here not count as “an admirable way of rendering” σαρκούμενος just because it contradicts Plested’s conceptual distinction? If so, one apparently needs to go beyond the terms themselves since, in Maximus’s writings, at least, they do not bend to Plested’s terminological restrictions. But then that would mean Plested’s own observation was inadequate from the outset.

Plested does attempt to treat one other text, the famous Amb 33, where Maximus interprets Gregory of Nazianzus’s “the Word becomes thick” as referring to three instances: the Word does so in the historical Incarnation, in the logoi of created beings, and in language (“words and syllables”). This need not detain us because Plested neglects my own treatment of it in the book (56–7), claims I “leave aside the third ‘thickening’ altogether” without mentioning the essay I wrote on the theme (and cited in the book at 247 n.10), and tries something like a reductio ad absurdum with the remark that, “Following his own Christo-logic one would, presumably, have to end up claiming that the Logos’s embodiments in words…is also ‘Incarnation’ (with a capital ‘I’).” Or, one could read what Maximus himself writes in CT 2.60, which begins, “The Word of God is not only called flesh when he has become incarnate [σεσάρκωται],” and ends, “For the Word becomes flesh through every single written word” (Ὁ γὰρ Λόγος δι’ ἐκάστου τῶνἀναγεγραμμένων ῥημάτων γίνεται σάρξ).⁸

[3] But Plested sees “the fatal flaw” on the level of philosophical or systematic theology (as I suspected many would at 10–14). While I “ably show that for Maximus, God is the world,” I go wrong “in the more novel part” of my argument that for Maximus, “the world is God.” “The propositions are not, in fact, reversible,” Plested rightly notes. I say rightly, because I agree that, on their face and without any prior determination, “God is the world” is not the same as “the world is God.” But that’s not really my argument, which depends from the outset on the distinction in “Christo-logic” between the logic of hypostasis and that of nature/essence, and then their newly conceived relation in light of the actual event of Incarnation. Briefly stated, I don’t claim that “divinity is humanity” or that “the uncreated is the created.” In fact, as Plested appears to sense just after this point (when he agrees that I am “no vulgar pantheist”), if we remain on the level of nature as such, which is necessarily abstract, then I would even claim no intelligible relation between the two.⁹

But here again Plested’s critique ignores Maximus’s own texts and distinctive theological vision. As I discuss variously throughout the book (esp. at 100–3), Maximus’s most distinctive claim is what scholars have long called the “tantum-quantum principle.” It says that we, and all creation with us, will become God “to the same degree” that God became human—which is to say, on the level of hypostasis, wholly (see 3.4 and 5). Now either this claim shouldn’t be taken “literally” or else the Incarnation itself did not follow the logic of this principle. Consider that second possibility. What if, in other words, we took Plested’s framework and applied it to Christ himself? “The Word is human,” but that would not mean that “the human is the Word.” Is this true of the Incarnate Word? We have two options. If “Word” means simply “divinity” as such, then we’re back at my first reply to this critique: never do I (or Maximus) say that divinity as such is humanity as such. But if “Word” here means the person of the Word, it is quite wrong, at least on Maximus’s terms, to deny that “the human is the Word.” As I document at great length (esp. 1.2-4), one of Maximus’s signature christological theses is that a proper discrimination between the logic of hypostasis and that of nature means that we must insist that Christ’s two natures are, as him, “identical,” and thus to one another.¹⁰ This is not natural or essential identity. But then that does not imply something less than actual or hypostatic identity (in the exact form of perichoresis), since it is an entailment of Maximus’s christological metaphysics that neither a thing’s “nature” nor its “essence” describes all that it actually is or can be.

If therefore in Maximus’s Christology “the Word is human/created” and “the human/created is the Word” are simultaneously true and mutually re-enforcing, then Plested’s asymmetrical argument proves beside the point: it simply neglects everything distinctive about the christological metaphysics I tried to present. But if we do take such distinctives seriously, and then take Maximus’s tantum-quantum principle seriously too, then in Christ it is not at all absurd to affirm both of Plested’s statements at once. Indeed, that’s one way of articulating the book’s basic burden. If we wish to ground all this in texts once more, as I do, I might ask how otherwise to read Maximus’s bold claim that “Jesus my God and Savior…is completed through me who am saved.”¹¹ If Christ is God, and Christ is me, but I, being a mere creature, am not also Christ, then this statement is rather imprecise at best, and likely worse. The book catalogs many more such statements, but that’s enough for now on this point.

[4] After some remarks about sentence fragments, conversational style, thorough endnotes, and other issues better addressed to the press editors, Plested eventually makes one last objection. It is that Chapter 4 of the book, which aims to disrupt our easy assumptions about what “creation” actually means—particularly in light of Maximus’s view that creation finds its true origin and end in Christ rather than in some arbitrary point of a chronological series (the numerically first of that series, say)—offers a “disappointing conclusion.” The chapter supposedly argues that “the creation in which we live, and indeed the whole of human history, is rendered thereby both illusory and pointless.” “I very much doubt,” says Plested, “that Maximus’s theological vision is really quite as acosmic and ahistorical as that.”

Yet again one wonders what Plested makes of actual texts that say, for instance, that Adam fell “at the very moment of his becoming,”¹² or that “parasitic evils” that take their substance from our own person or life are “not generated by God” (and yet one experiences them),¹³ so that the sinful soul becomes “the demiurge of evil,” or that the first and last things—who are Christ, after all—alone “are the same and truly exist,” rendering all that is false and wicked of no memory in the end, and so forth.¹⁴ But this would require a serious engagement with the many texts that comprise the chapter’s content (esp. at 4.2), whereas Plested opts instead for an easy caricature. Here’s a glimpse of the real picture the chapter paints:

“The great paradox of this world is that it is not yet the world. I do not mean Maximus was an absolute dualist, of course. Adam’s campaign to establish himself and his ignorant fantasies as the world’s true, primordial beginning is, in the end, entirely vain. That is good news. It means that there yet lay in the very depths of our deception the deepest truth of all things, the logoi who are the Logos. But because the Word who gestates within us can be born only through our own freedom, our spiritual birth, and since we instead fall headlong into bodily birth and corruption and have, in a word, become mad with mere finitude and bad infinity—we have become creators of this phenomenal world. It is not true creation. Creation eagerly awaits and groans for the children of God to be born and thereby to liberate being from nonbeing.” (173)

A paradox is not a contradiction, and “not yet” is not “not at all.” That should go some ways towards clearing up Plested’s confusion.

Plested’s review ends by taking issue with yet another feature of the book’s back cover—David Hart’s judgment that the book departs from prior scholarship in its desire not to tame Maximus’s “exorbitant genius.” Plested should heartily agree, since he both criticizes the book for overweening self-importance and praises it because it “is spot-on in not wanting to shy away from some of Maximus’s grander and more perplexing claims” (thus admitting that rather radical claims do crop up in Maximus after all). Instead, he reveals what I suspect often underwrites these sorts of review, that is, a kind of latent anxiety that perhaps the Fathers might generate far more radical or daring or, as I prefer, divine potency for human speculation than we might care to admit. For Plested, “exorbitance” in theological genius is not “the quality one most seeks to find in a Church Father.” Whereas I don’t presume to know what I’ll find in a Church Father, except that, if indeed their words bear any divine authority or inspiration, one would think that their potency would be as infinitely rich and revelatory as their proper content is, God. That, at least, is how Maximus himself approached his own authorities.¹⁵ I am certainly no perfect imitator. But that doesn’t mean Maximus himself isn’t worthy of imitation.

1. Rather than the back cover or online promotional site, Plested might have allowed what I wrote in the book’s Introduction to help him characterize my ambitions: “Mostly I can but promise further exploration of what the results presented here might mean for Maximus studies in particular and Christian theology in general. In many ways this book’s main success, if it enjoys any success, would be to clear the exegetical ground for Maximus’s more arresting insights to emerge for careful scrutiny modern theologians” (17). It doesn’t seem impossible for a reviewer to notice this, as is evident in the exemplary (yet not uncritical) review by Samuel Korb in Pro ecclesia.

2. E.g. Gregory of Nyssa, On Death and Eternal Life. Translation and Introduction by Brian E. Daley (Yonkers, NY: SVS, 2022), 78 = In Illud 12: “Christ is the one who builds himself, by means of those who are constantly being added to the community of faith. And he will only then cease building himself, when the growth and perfecting of his Body comes to its proper measure, and nothing remains to be added to that Body by the builder….”

3. Joseph T. Lienhard, “The Exegesis of 1 Cor 15, 24–28 from Marcellus of Ancyra to Theodoret of Cyrus,” Vigiliae Christianae 37 (19843): 349.

4. Maximus, Amb 7.37 (which is linked with the “mystery” of Eph 3.9); Ep 12, PG 91, 468D and 473C (“mystery of his Inhumanization”); Ep 15, PG 91, 553BC, passim.

5. I discuss this text at 58–9 of the book.

6. Maximus, QThal 22.3, CCSG 7, 137.

7. Esp. at 1.4 and 3.3. Other relevant texts include: Amb 10.34, 31.9–10, 42.17 (this one argues from the reality of the Lord’s body in his historical Incarnation to the reality of all bodies in the eschaton, since “our Lord Himself, the God of all, is now and will be forever embodied [μετὰ σώματοςεἶναι νῦν τε καὶ εἰς ἀεί]; QThal 40.8 (which explicitly equates the Word’s birth from Mary with his birth from the faith within our own souls: Christ “becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied [σωματούμενος] through the practice of the virtues”; passim.

8. Maximus, CT 2.60, PG 90, 1152, Salés 146–7.

9. See 1.4, 2.2, and 3.2.

10. Maximus, Ep 15, PG 91, 556BC: “he displayed himself in every way as possessing invariably the absolute oneness of his own hypostasis: he remained one in the supreme, personal, and reciprocal identity of his own parts.”

11. Maximus, Myst. 5.

12. Maximus, QThal 59.12, 61.2; Amb 42.7; see 4.1.2. I’ll also discuss this a bit more in my reply to Jonathan Bieler.

13. Maximus, QThal 51.19.

14. Maximus, Amb 71.5.

15. Maximus, Amb. ad Ioh., prol., PG 91, 1065A, and QThal 1.2.8, both discussed at xvi–xvii. I note in passing Plested’s odd presumption to be able to judge that “exorbitant,” an adjective, is inherently negative in the way he finds is the case in his dictionary entry for “exorbitance,” a noun. Whether exorbitant is good or bad depends on the noun it modifies. God’s “exorbitant love” seems like a rather good thing, as I hope Plested and I might agree.