I don't remember if your argument against Plested in your email to me was as developed as it is here, but either way, reading through your section on the terms used for "Incarnation" above, I'm struck by how tight your argument actually is here. Plested has done a great service. His critique has helped you strengthen your argument. Please consider putting these responses into a journal article.
As you may recall, I believe your work and insight is both invigorating and capable of opening up the Christian imaginary to much more daring and speculatively enriching forms of thought and poetic making. I felt an immediate resonance with my own sensibility in something like the following: “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.” There is a surplus to Being that cannot be exhausted. The epektasis of discovery into the future that is God entails the entire divinized cosmos. Identity is intrinsically narrative, wondrous, infinitely enlarged by grace. And yet, perhaps I am just stuck in my old ways, I still find problematic your assertion that “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.” I am not so much against your warning about abstraction, I agree there, but the claim of no intelligible relation does not make sense to me. I don’t see Person as radically separate from analogia entis in the manner that you assert. Nonetheless, whether I am correct or not on that point, the reading of Incarnation as radically founding Creation is both thrilling and certainly tied to an understanding of the eschatological as ultimately the only fundamental truth of reality.
Thanks for the comments, Brian. Your question calls for a clarification, perhaps, though it in truth opens upon a far more complex discussion. When I say that "on the level of nature" or definitional abstraction, the two have no intelligible relation, it's perhaps better to say that to the degree that they are intelligibly related in themselves, we are not yet talking about the real, living, triune God, and conversely to the degree that we do not see any intelligible relation between them, we are either making a merely abstract negation (in a sort of modern atheistic way) or, as I am, saying that their deeper and actual relation as one and mutually-interpenetrating in Christ is their true intelligibility. In other words, I do not regard analogy as incoherent in itself. Nor do I regard it as entirely wrong even in light of the beginning and end of the God-world relation in Christ. But I do regard analogy as inadequate to the latter, and therefore find it odd if one proscribes saying so. My diagnosis of analogy has always been "yes, but more," not simply, "Nein!" in Barth's manner. This has often been missed by even the more sympathetic critics.
On the exegetical question, which I realize you didn't directly dispute, it's clear that Maximus was willing to say what I wrote, and that it also shocked his interlocutors. Here's an exchange recorded in his Dispute with Pyrrhus:
“PYRRHUS: There is nothing, then, which the natures and natural properties have in common [κοινόν]?
MAXIMUS: Nothing, save only the hypostasis of these same natures. For, just in this way a hypostasis was the very same, unconfusedly, of these same natural properties [Ὥσπερ γὰρ ὑπόστασις ἦν ὁ αὐτὸς ἀσυγχύτως τῶν αὐτῶν φυσικῶν].
PYRRHUS: What? Do the Fathers, whose doctrines constitute the law, the rule, the glory, and the pride of the Church, do they not speak of the ‘common’? ‘For it is one thing,’ he says, ‘that comes from the common glory, and another that comes from the humiliation [τὸ τῆς ὕβρεως].’”
MAXIMUS: The holy Fathers said this in reference to the mode of the exchange [Τῷ τῆς ἀντιδόσεως τρόπῳ]. As is clear from the previous, the exchange does not concern one, but two unequal things. According to the exchange [κατ’ ἐπαλλαγὴν], the natural attributes in each part of Christ become attributes of the other [τὰ φυσικῶς ἑκατέρῳ μέρει τοῦ Χριστοῦ προσόντα] according to the ineffable union, without making one part into the other in each’s natural principle [κατὰ τὸν φυσικὸν λόγον], as in a mutation or confused mixture. If therefore you speak of the ‘common’ will in the mode of exchange, then you speak not of one will but of two.” (DP 28-31; PG 91, 296c-297a; Farrell significantly modified)
Crucial here is that Maximus does not deny commonality at all, but insists rather that the very event and reality of the God-man is the only intelligible way they become common without entailing the surreptitious or open annihilation or diminution of either term--what I call in my book "indifference" (which implies nothing psychological, since it's a medieval scholastic term of art). And that is what I also insist: that if our assertion of commonality between, say, the created and uncreated, remains abstract, it is but a hint at something far more grandly true. And if this greater truth--the whole mystery--has been revealed, then we mustn't remain on the level of abstraction. God more than anything is the least abstract, since God is the Three and God is actual love. So there is nothing inconsistent in saying that while divinity and humanity *as such* have nothing in common, they are in fact one in and as the God who is himself no mere abstraction, no abstract relation, no mere analogy.
Thanks, Jordan. That is clarifying. I like the "yes, but more" approach. And while I cannot enter into the scholastic details of specialists, I favor your boldness. Taking Maximus at his word is provocative. I think your argument shows that it is also illuminating. The evasive use of metaphor to preclude identity between Incarnation and Creation ultimately resists the full force of the gospel, which alone genuinely explicates a specifically Christological realism.
Jordan,
I don't remember if your argument against Plested in your email to me was as developed as it is here, but either way, reading through your section on the terms used for "Incarnation" above, I'm struck by how tight your argument actually is here. Plested has done a great service. His critique has helped you strengthen your argument. Please consider putting these responses into a journal article.
Thanks for this, Max. I just saw this comment (for some reason).
your work and honesty to critism is always appriacted
Jordan,
As you may recall, I believe your work and insight is both invigorating and capable of opening up the Christian imaginary to much more daring and speculatively enriching forms of thought and poetic making. I felt an immediate resonance with my own sensibility in something like the following: “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.” There is a surplus to Being that cannot be exhausted. The epektasis of discovery into the future that is God entails the entire divinized cosmos. Identity is intrinsically narrative, wondrous, infinitely enlarged by grace. And yet, perhaps I am just stuck in my old ways, I still find problematic your assertion that “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.” I am not so much against your warning about abstraction, I agree there, but the claim of no intelligible relation does not make sense to me. I don’t see Person as radically separate from analogia entis in the manner that you assert. Nonetheless, whether I am correct or not on that point, the reading of Incarnation as radically founding Creation is both thrilling and certainly tied to an understanding of the eschatological as ultimately the only fundamental truth of reality.
Thanks for the comments, Brian. Your question calls for a clarification, perhaps, though it in truth opens upon a far more complex discussion. When I say that "on the level of nature" or definitional abstraction, the two have no intelligible relation, it's perhaps better to say that to the degree that they are intelligibly related in themselves, we are not yet talking about the real, living, triune God, and conversely to the degree that we do not see any intelligible relation between them, we are either making a merely abstract negation (in a sort of modern atheistic way) or, as I am, saying that their deeper and actual relation as one and mutually-interpenetrating in Christ is their true intelligibility. In other words, I do not regard analogy as incoherent in itself. Nor do I regard it as entirely wrong even in light of the beginning and end of the God-world relation in Christ. But I do regard analogy as inadequate to the latter, and therefore find it odd if one proscribes saying so. My diagnosis of analogy has always been "yes, but more," not simply, "Nein!" in Barth's manner. This has often been missed by even the more sympathetic critics.
On the exegetical question, which I realize you didn't directly dispute, it's clear that Maximus was willing to say what I wrote, and that it also shocked his interlocutors. Here's an exchange recorded in his Dispute with Pyrrhus:
“PYRRHUS: There is nothing, then, which the natures and natural properties have in common [κοινόν]?
MAXIMUS: Nothing, save only the hypostasis of these same natures. For, just in this way a hypostasis was the very same, unconfusedly, of these same natural properties [Ὥσπερ γὰρ ὑπόστασις ἦν ὁ αὐτὸς ἀσυγχύτως τῶν αὐτῶν φυσικῶν].
PYRRHUS: What? Do the Fathers, whose doctrines constitute the law, the rule, the glory, and the pride of the Church, do they not speak of the ‘common’? ‘For it is one thing,’ he says, ‘that comes from the common glory, and another that comes from the humiliation [τὸ τῆς ὕβρεως].’”
MAXIMUS: The holy Fathers said this in reference to the mode of the exchange [Τῷ τῆς ἀντιδόσεως τρόπῳ]. As is clear from the previous, the exchange does not concern one, but two unequal things. According to the exchange [κατ’ ἐπαλλαγὴν], the natural attributes in each part of Christ become attributes of the other [τὰ φυσικῶς ἑκατέρῳ μέρει τοῦ Χριστοῦ προσόντα] according to the ineffable union, without making one part into the other in each’s natural principle [κατὰ τὸν φυσικὸν λόγον], as in a mutation or confused mixture. If therefore you speak of the ‘common’ will in the mode of exchange, then you speak not of one will but of two.” (DP 28-31; PG 91, 296c-297a; Farrell significantly modified)
Crucial here is that Maximus does not deny commonality at all, but insists rather that the very event and reality of the God-man is the only intelligible way they become common without entailing the surreptitious or open annihilation or diminution of either term--what I call in my book "indifference" (which implies nothing psychological, since it's a medieval scholastic term of art). And that is what I also insist: that if our assertion of commonality between, say, the created and uncreated, remains abstract, it is but a hint at something far more grandly true. And if this greater truth--the whole mystery--has been revealed, then we mustn't remain on the level of abstraction. God more than anything is the least abstract, since God is the Three and God is actual love. So there is nothing inconsistent in saying that while divinity and humanity *as such* have nothing in common, they are in fact one in and as the God who is himself no mere abstraction, no abstract relation, no mere analogy.
Thanks, Jordan. That is clarifying. I like the "yes, but more" approach. And while I cannot enter into the scholastic details of specialists, I favor your boldness. Taking Maximus at his word is provocative. I think your argument shows that it is also illuminating. The evasive use of metaphor to preclude identity between Incarnation and Creation ultimately resists the full force of the gospel, which alone genuinely explicates a specifically Christological realism.