Reply to My Critics: Some Others

Having replied at considerable length to the two most substantive critical reviews—those of Plested and Bieler—I turn here to a smattering of others, a few of which are quite good, several of which are short. I treat each selectively, for two reasons. For one thing, my two previous replies addressed some criticisms that recur in these shorter ones. For another, brief reviews, even if critical, shouldn’t be overly scrutinized. They mean mainly to flag points of potential divergence or fruitful development, that is, to give the prospective reader other vantages by which to assess the book. So I select here only questions or criticisms as yet unaddressed and that merit some response, whether it’s because they betray a critical misunderstanding or because they might lead to developments in understanding (or both). In no particular order:

Anne M. Carpenter

Carpenter’s review is one of the short ones. So instead of replying to the odd critiques that comprise its second half—again these, like some of Plested’s, would have been better addressed to the press editors—I want to extract one potential critique well worth the time.

Carpenter raises the prima facie plausible worry that seeking after a “whole” might commend a sort of theological or epistemic colonialism. She notices my mention of Marion’s saturated phenomenon to “hold in place Maximus’s epistemic and metaphysical claims,” but then cautions that “Marion’s notion relies on a different ‘whole,’ which is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Gestalt (wholeness, form; material intelligibility). This Gestalt is always fragmentary.” Focusing on the fragmentary makes Carpenter “suspicious of completeness, system, ‘the whole.’” Then a chain of associations in rapid succession: “I [Carpenter] am concerned about how The Whole Mystery of Christ understands understanding, and that understanding understands finite essences. I wonder if, for Maximus or for Wood, anything can or even should escape the panoptic eye of the incarnation. I wonder what this means for Christian supersessionism; I wonder what that means for Maximus’s anti-Judaism, which the text never mentions.”

I will indeed mention that last and sadly unoriginal blot, anti-Judaism, in the introduction and annotations to the English translation of Maximus’s Letters I’m currently producing, to be published next year. That is the place to do it, since there (esp. in Ep 14) one reads some rather troubling (again, sadly common) remarks about the Jewish people, occasioned apparently by a bitter rivalry that spilled over into violence during the Arab invasions of North Africa then well underway. I didn’t mention it in the book for the simple reason that I don’t think that legacy of Maximus’s thought should be taken up in modern theology today. I’d say the same of Von Balthasar’s own frequent invocation of “the oriental mind,” as I assume Carpenter would agree. What I do find compelling in Maximus for modern theology today is what the book commends across its 337 pages.

Carpenter worries about “the whole” in an abstract way and opposes to it another abstraction, no less totalizing: the Gestalt is “always” fragmentary. So total is this rule, Carpenter makes it a condition of and restriction upon the Incarnation itself: “Its [the Gestalt’s] fragmentariness includes the ‘whole’ that is Christ.” But how exactly is Christ a “whole”? Carpenter doesn’t say. I attempt to when treating Maximus on Christ as the hypostatic whole, the “whole” composite Christ, who, not just according to Maximus but according to Constantinople II (can. 4), is himself the union “according to synthesis” that alone makes the uncreated and created really one while cancelling neither. This “whole” is he who “is all things and is in all things” (Col 3.11), who can be known, as Maximus says, only “by experience” and not by merely discursive knowing (see QThal 60.5–6; and sec. 3.2), who suffers in all who suffer in exact proportion to their suffering (Myst. 24, quoted on 139f.), whose way of being “the whole” God-world relation proves so radically kenotic in God’s ecstatic love that it bends time itself around the Incarnation, subordinating the supposed absoluteness of sequence (upon which abstractions about “the fragment” mostly depend) such that we who are by nature created and thus subject to process will, in our end, co-operate in our own beginning (Ch.4)!

In other words, Carpenter’s Balthasarian opposition between “the fragment” and “the whole” is itself an abstract opposition. It therefore unwittingly conceals its own pretensions for the whole by claiming to know the abstract notion of what “being the whole” must always mean, with the corollary that Christ himself must “always” appear according to the opposition of fragment vs. whole. This is a questionable philosophical axiom. As Gillian Rose argued against the “postmodern” suspicion of “the System,” such an abstract suspicion often cloaks its own “exceeding moment” as a “strategic way” that thinking must begin—say, as “always fragmentary” in the abstract—only to evade a critical view of its own aspirations: “The legal title of the beached System,” she writes, “is made to signal the immodest, u-topian fragment, which by virtue of such attention becomes more focused and better known than any laborious, comprehensive thinking.”¹ The fragmentary, or particularity as such, easily becomes a diversion from the innate aspiration of the human spirit to know the whole truth even as it’s still doing just that. The most radically uncoercive epistemic attitude is not to presume to know the conditions of what “being the whole” of the God-world relation must mean apart from the act itself (and person). And it was for this specific reason I invoked Marion.

But I also think it’s a questionable Christological axiom. How could he who is the whole of his two “parts” (Maximus’s language for “natures”) such that this “synthesis” synthesizes only as his person, the entailment being that the truth of the whole is no more abstractable than any person is—how could this whole be subject to a generic logic of part and whole? Few things are more totalizing than the absolutization of “the fragment.” If Christ is whole in every fragment, and if every fragment’s truth is Christ, then it violates and objectifies the fragment itself to restrict the scope and type of its knowability to its logical status as “fragment” in the more comprehensive system of part-whole logic.² Its predicate as fragment is not its final truth, what it is as the whole. The whole is Christ, and Christ is no mere idea. Hence he is whole wholly without violence. He becomes what he loves, of which he is the whole truth. This is not just the whole; it is the whole mystery of Christ. Neither Maximus nor I would want anything to fall under the “panoptic eye of the incarnation,” because the Incarnation is not a panopticon. I rather prefer Maximus’s own image: that whole whose comprehensive gaze is the world’s metaphysical logic, God’s “judgment [=creation of fragments, of multiplicity] and providence [=actualization of the whole, of identity],” is the suffering God, “for the ‘eyes’ of the Word are judgment and providence, through which, even in His suffering for us, He conducts His universal oversight.”³

Torstein Tollefsen

By any measure Tollefsen has been a critical figure in the ongoing revival of Maximus’s thought. I once had the happy chance of thanking him personally for opening the field of Maximus studies to more properly philosophical themes. And, as the quantity of citations and (I hope) the quality of engagement with his work throughout my book attest, I do not fancy myself a lonely meteorite in Maximian skies. Hence I wish to begin my reply to Tollefsen with an acknowledgement of indebtedness. He (like Plested) might not perceive it in this instance, but there’s really no contradiction between the fact that a study advances beyond and depends upon earlier work. Quite the contrary. Honest disagreement clarifies possibilities. Negation requires the negated if it’s to carry any positive sense at all. So there’s no reason for anxiety that novelty entails lack of gratitude.

Tollefsen recommends the book “as an alternative interpretation to those already in circulation” (526). But he raises three problems in curt succession.

First, my concept of hypostasis as indifferent to the nature(s) it is, is for Tollefsen not “philosophically sound.” He offers no reason for the judgement. I wrote enough on the topic in the reply to Bieler, so I’ll say only this: if a nature is not in principle indifferent to the principle of the hypostasis it is, then Chalcedon’s distinction in principle between Christ’s one hypostasis and his two natures is philosophically, logically, and Christologically incoherent.

Second, Tollefsen rejects my claim that Maximus’s logoi are not divine ideas à la Neoplatonism. He thinks my “treatment of the logoi does not take into consideration that the term is used extensively for doctrines of divine ideas in philosophers before Maximus.” And “in general,” writes Tollefsen, I “ignore that Maximus stands in a philosophical tradition” (526). The claim that I ignore the philosophical tradition is astonishing. I pass over it in silence. More crucial is that Tollefsen ignores a basic fact Von Balthasar pointed out a century ago, which is that while indeed many of Maximus’s philosophical and theological predecessors equated logoi to “ideas,” “forms,” “paradigms,” “archetypes,” and the like, Maximus never does. Chapter 2 engages extensively the texts of and scholarship around the Stoics, Plotinus, Proclus, Dionysius, and John of Scythopolis exactly to highlight the contrast Tollefsen ignores. As I note in the book, I regard Tollefsen’s own attempt to equate Maximus’s logoi with Aristotle’s “first energeia” as philosophically unsound.⁴ Mere attentiveness to the philosophical tradition does not guarantee philosophical soundness or exegetical cogency when it comes to a thinker of Maximus’s depth. Such attentiveness might well even distort one’s view. But these are abstractions; only attentiveness to the details of an argument, exegetical or philosophical, matters, and here we meet the details of neither sort.

Finally, my idea that the world’s hypostasis is the Son’s own risks making Maximus “into a pantheist,” even though Tollefsen concedes that I try “applying [my] conceptual tools carefully, even if not always with the philosophical keenness this reader would desire” (526–7). We’re never told what that might mean.

Andrew Summerson

Fr. Andrew Summerson is a charitable interlocutor whose primary concerns match his clerical vocation. That is—and his own work on Maximus bear this out⁵—he seems wary of any “speculative” reading of Maximus’s theology, at least if it’s divorced from praxis, the rigors of and preparation wrought by askesis and the sacramental life. I must say from the outset that this seems like question-begging. For one thing, I don’t deny Summerson’s concern and flag it explicitly in the book (271 n.3). And yet, as I also flagged in the opening salvo (xiv–xv), I don’t accept that a greater living unity precludes responses to specific inquiries, as Maximus’s own writings illustrate. Where is the long meditation on the divine liturgy in Maximus’s Ambiguum 7? Why doesn’t Maximus talk very much about the askesis in Epp 12–15, which are occupied almost entirely with highly technical Christological parlay, sometimes even punctuated by highly “rarified” philosophical analyses of key concepts? It begs the question to fault a work abstractly for not including all vital elements of the whole if one does not attempt to explain how the neglected elements make a decisive difference in the actual thesis at hand.

Summerson raises two main objections around “method.” The first is that making Amb 7.22 the book’s central passage amounts to “a rarefication of a phrase into an axiom” that “risks assertion rather than argument.” “Wood’s thesis,” Summerson continues, rhetorically short-circuits “contrary considerations through the repetition of a thesis that Maximus, in his marvelously speculative manner, may or may not have held on to as tightly as Wood’s presentation.” In other words, I have made Amb 7.22 into an “axiom” that is then imposed on the rest of Maximus’s corpus, and my “repetition” of this passage performs a bewitching incantation against all who might break the spell of seeing the whole through this little part.

But an axiom doesn’t need to proved; it is rather that by which all else is proved. Summerson’s assertion here fails to consider that Amb 7.22 functions not as the book’s axiom but as its organizing epigraph. The rest of the book then seeks to prove the way I take this very passage. Were it an axiom, why would I need to prove it by building an exegetical case on the whole of Maximus’s corpus, connecting it to fundamental themes in his theology, or considering whether and how this emerging view resolves actual aporias in his writings? Summerson’s own repetition of “axiom” here short-circuits considering this passage as such an organizing epigraph. And this explains the role a summary of the book’s basic argument plays in this review: it has none.⁶

Summerson’s second methodological objection is that, as a work of “historical theology,” the latter (theology) surreptitiously veils itself in the former (history), so that, for instance, my ongoing systematic bout with two-tiered Thomism is suspiciously hidden from the reader’s innocent gaze. “Wood’s systematic theology in historical dress blinds the reader to the time machine he puts us through.” Whither does that time machine transport us? Hard to say. Summerson seems to mean that it transports us to…the present. Thomists, after all and despite one’s wishes, yet walk among us. But Summerson’s more bizarre claim here is that of cloaking and concealment. He doesn’t mention that already in the Introduction I discuss a number of 20th-century French Neo-Thomists who produced an extensive body of scholarship that, I argue there, have obscured what I sought to illuminate (See the section entitled, “Minimizing Maximus: The Tendency to Subject Maximus to Thomas Aquinas,” 9–10). He doesn’t mention that I think two-tiered Thomists “blush” not simply because Maximus has a more intellectually satisfying account than they do (he does), but because his account accounts for their own concerns (105ff.). He doesn’t mention the explicitly systematic remarks with which the book concludes (197–204).

Summerson’s main concern is rather that this study is not the one he would like to read: “The Thomistic metaphysics [Wood] wishes to subvert deserve to be laid out at least as clearly as the treatment of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology and Neoplatonic causality [Wood] attempts elsewhere, lest we begin to question the narrator to lead us to truth that his systematic method intends.” There’s really no secret as to why the book contains far more on Neo-Chalcedonian Christology and Neoplatonic causality than it does on Thomistic metaphysics: Maximus was not a Thomist, while he was intimately familiar with and perfective of the other two traditions. This is a book animated by systematic questions and interests, none of which requires divination to make out. As I said from the start: “That this question [about God’s relation to the world] motivates the study does not mean the study can resolve it. But it might make a start” (xiv). Odd to fault a start for not being the end.

Jason Eslicker & Samuel Korb

Both Jason Eslicker and Samuel Korb offer substantive reviews, each equipped with patient summaries and probing questions. I wish to end my series of replies with them, since they make a natural segue to the final installment wherein I will play my own critic.

Eslicker represents one trend in contemporary study of patristic Christology, which, since Christopher Beeley’s arrival, has found its center at Duke. Hence he concludes his review with a line of critical questions or objections that moves from worry at my passing link between Maximus and Hegel (an old worry indeed), to the familiar charge that I conceive “hypostasis” to be “reducible to a kind of supposit that magically reconciles two otherwise irreconcilable natures in symmetrical (unmixed) and confused union,” to the recommendation of “another tradition of Christology” that corrects this dialectical framing in its emphasis on “the primary divine identity of the Incarnate Lord, the asymmetry of his person.” As key figures of this tradition Eslicker names Gregory of Nazianzus and Cyril of Alexandria in the patristic era and Sergius Bulgakov with Robert Jenson in more recent times.

It is odd to name Bulgakov and Jenson as modern representatives of a mere Cyrilline Christology. Long known is that Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, while fundamentally committed to Cyril’s emphasis on Christ the single subject, is also a self-consciously creative extension of his thought after Chalcedon’s formula. Jenson is among the only modern theologians to have explicitly claimed the label “Neo-Chalcedonian” for himself, and Bulgakov called for an explicitly Neo-Chalcedonian era to come.⁷ But the more critical issue with Eslicker here is he thinks it odd that anyone would admit that, in principle, God is not not-God, the uncreated is not the created, the eternal is not the temporal. This seems like blindness to one’s own absolute starting-point. For Eslicker this is the “divine identity” he goes on to emphasize. Why would there have been any debate, much less centuries upon centuries of it, if it were a matter of common sense that God can be born of a human woman, can grow, get hungry, and die a bloody death on the cross? It’s laudable to emphasize the single-subject identity of Christ, the Son of God. But it undermines the cause to pretend that an identity of the person magically dissipates all perennial concerns about how such an identity can make what is by nature not-God, God. And why number Christ’s two natures if they are basically the same qua nature? If they are not the same qua nature, then why object when one says divinity is not humanity by nature? The unfortunate trend of stopping short of Chalcedon, or of imagining Chalcedon to be some sort of resolution to these questions—the very thing Jenson rails against in the essay cited—blinds many to the inadequacy of merely reprising pre-Chalcedonian Christologies, as if that suffices to resolve the real tensions Chalcedon merely brought to the fore. Nothing, and certainly not an “asymmetry of the person” (what is such a thing?), can substitute for moving through and beyond Chalcedon.

Korb, who offers the best summary to date,⁸ raises two worthy lines of question at the end of his review. The first concerns the exact status or character of our current world, which is not yet deified. Korb notes that I present two options for what “creation” means, “its true being in its deification, or its counterfeit being as ‘sheer finitude’” (4). There must be something between these two poles, and it’s just here that Korb senses that “the underlying reality of a non-deified world feels somewhat underdetermined” (5). Korb sees that I do not think that this world is ever in fact merely one or the other pole. If it were “already” deification, then there would be little need for any progression at all (and indeed “deification” would seem more like a work of some wicked demiurge, given the state of this world). If it were entirely “sheer finitude,” then this world would not be a work of the good God at all (and indeed it would probably be properly unintelligible—what, after all, is mere sheer finitude?).

But then Korb says: “‘Incarnation’ can certainly not do the trick, since this non-deified world is not hypostasized in God” (5). There I demur. One of the admittedly paradoxical upshots of Ch. 4 is that even sin mimics the very logic of Incarnation, such that sin entails “false incarnations,” and these rest on totally illusory phantasia that we give our own selves to hypostasize, to make real. Now, this world is certainly in process and the process itself is afflicted by myriad false incarnations that (only ever partially) instantiate illusions, react and reenforce other illusions, and that together comprise a kind of Johannine kosmos against and for which Christ came. The most astonishing possibility that Ch. 4 considers, then, is that the Son of God enhypostasizes even our own false incarnations, our individual and collective false worlds, precisely to overcome them through us and for our salvation, our deification, our true creation.

“But the Lord set forth the manifest might of His transcendent power, having hypostasized an unchanging beginning in the nature of the contrary realities by which He Himself experienced. For by giving our nature impassibility through His Passion, relief through His sufferings, and eternal life through His death, He restored our nature, renewing its habitual dispositions by means of what was negated in His own flesh, and through His own Incarnation granting it that grace which transcends nature, by which I mean deification.”⁹

Christ negates in his flesh precisely what he accepts—enhypostasizes—into his flesh. A profound mystery indeed! He is willing to enhypostasize the very rejection of his hypostasis; to become in himself, in his singular and perpetual Passion, the very conditions of his own suffering and death, precisely so that, as the Lamb slaughtered since before this world’s foundation, he might become the foundation even of this world on its way to destruction and redemption, death and resurrection. Christ “takes into himself the sufferings of each one,” so that “until the end of time,” he “always suffers mystically through goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering” (Myst. 24). Two things are true: [1] the world as we know it is never just one pole or the other, for even beneath its most devastated portions there lie logoi of the true creation, perceptible even now with eyes of faith; [2] but even the devastated portions are enhypostasized by the Son so that he might trample down death by death in all things and thus become in and all things (Col 3.11). Nor does this imbue fallen creation with permanent valor, any more than Christ’s “becoming sin and a curse for us” permanently valorizes sin and the curse. Rather this kenotic act destroys them, through them, in his very flesh. He dies with all, that all might live. And he does it daily, that we might too.

Korb’s final question concerns nature and grace. He rightly senses that many will not find my construal of Maximus’s view of their relation adequate, since I still posit that grace is “innate” even if not natural to all creation. That is, grace on this view still names “a constitutive of the human being which must be present for a human being to be present at all,” all of which reintroduces “the vexed question of grace’s gratuity” (5). To the first part, I say yes: since Jesus Christ is the human being (Amb 41), the eternal will of God as beginning and end of all creation (QThal 60), where Christ is not, the human being is not. But Christ, human and divine, is a person, so that his immanent presence in all creation cannot rightly be called a merely natural or formal presence in all creation. That point is critical because the worry over “grace’s gratuity” does not often distinguish sufficiently between the sort of necessity that’s problematic here. Usually, I mean, such an objection moves from the observation that divinity is not by nature “completed” by or “dependent” upon anything outside of it, especially us, to the swift conclusion that God must not be really related or in any sense bond to us, lest we chain the transcendent to the merely immanent, the necessary to the merely contingent, and so on. But what is required for a formal completion of a nature does not suffice to state what is required for an actual completion of a nature, i.e. for an enhypostasized nature—a person. For a person is not merely a nature, no matter what kind. So I see no contradiction in affirming grace’s “innate” mode in all creation and that such grace does not formally complete nature as such. But if one still discerns something concerning here, then one must realize that the concern is no longer formal, since a formal completion of nature by grace is not in view. So what is it? I can only think that it is the concern that God loves us too much, as it were; that his own love, which he is, has somehow restricted some other aspect of his being, say, his aseity or impassibility. To this I say: the God who is love would be illicitly bound indeed were he unbounded from love’s own native debts (Rom 13.10). Exactly because grace’s ubiquitous, innate presence is the Word’s own personal presence, it is true both that grace does not need nature to be grace and that grace never fails to carry out love’s debts, which is to say that God remains ever faithful to himself as he makes all things into the Body of Christ.

1. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society, 5. Here she names key critics of “the System” and their preferred absolute starting point: “contingency (Pannenberg), finitude (Taminiaux), non-identity (Adorno), difference (Derrida), l’Autre/Autrui (Levinas), pain (Blanchot), death (Rosenzweig).” I think Von Balthasar’s Gestalt fits nicely into this list.

2. One suspects that the Balthasarian view as Carpenter employs it rests on an implicit assumption that Christ is not the “whole” of the God-world relation, although the Word, in at least logical separation from Christ, is. If so, the Incarnation is per se extrinsic to the world’s truth (except as it happens to disclose the Word who might not have been incarnate, or might not have created, etc.). In other words, the absolutization of “the fragment” as such might be a corollary of an unintentional Nestorianism.

3. QThal 53.2; quoted at 185 (cf. the whole of 4.2).

4. At 220, n.50, on Tollfesen’s Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought: “Despite Tollefsen’s assurances (e.g. 101), I cannot see how this position either horn of the following dilemma: (1) either the Aristotelian first/second act does really describe God’s act of bringing creatures into participation in God’s own activity, but then we have something like an unactualized potency in the essential power of the simple God—which seems absurd; (2) or God’s act of creation…is not unqualifiedly Aristotelian exactly because it implies no inner perfection of the divine power as such, but then we remain with the Neoplatonic doctrine of double activity—which renders the technical application of the Aristotelian first/second act unnecessary and even inappropriate here.”

5. Andrew J. Summerson, Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

6. This is problematic since, as with Bieler’s review (which Summerson cites), it gives the impression that I proceed apace with minimal grounding in the actual texts of Maximus. For instance, Summerson asserts: “Wood’s key claim shifts the incarnation as the telos to the archē that explains the origin of all things and creation itself.” But that isn’t simply my claim. It is Maximus’s own, and it appears in one of the best known writings in Maximus’s corpus: “And this is because it is for the sake of Christ—that is, for the whole mystery of Christ—that all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning [archē] and end [telos] in Christ” (QThal 60.4; CCSG 22, 75–7). I follow Maximus by not prioritizing either archē or telos over the other, since Christ is both. Hence I treat the beginning (Ch.2) and end (Ch.3) and then the whole (Ch.4). Summerson misses this. But even if I had merely shifted the emphasis from end to beginning, Summerson would need to explain why Maximus himself called the event of the historical Incarnation the archē of the all the ages and the creatures within those ages. From this review alone, one wouldn’t even suspect Maximus ever said such a thing and might easily imagine it one of my own fancies.

7. Robert Jenson, “Jesus in the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 8.3 (1999): 314–15.

8. But see too the comprehensive, two-part summary by Joseph Reigle.

9. QThal 61.6; quoted and discussed at 183–4.