St. Maximus's "Letter on Love" (Ep 2)

A New Translation

Now and again I plan to post versions of pieces that are forthcoming elsewhere. These will begin behind a paywall, for a variety of reasons, although they might later emerge from their subscription sanctuary. They’re in near-final form, even as “drafts.” What follows here, for instance, is my near-final draft of only the second-ever English translation of Maximus’s famous Letter 2, “On Love” (Andrew Louth did the first in his anthology back in the 90’s). As many of you know, I am slowly but steadily completing the first-ever English translation of Maximus’s Letters—about 49 of them—for CUAP’s Fathers of the Church series (those gorgeous, often blue volumes).

The translation itself is in near-final form. I’ve removed the notes that will accompany it in the forthcoming FOTC volume. Except I had to include the first note, which I print here by way of preface. It emanates from Maximus’s “first editor,” as Louth had it, François Combefis, whose Greek text of Maximus’s letters appears in the still vital, even if somewhat outdated, Patrologia Graeca overseen and produced by J.P. Migne. There Combefis writes the following in his first annotation of this letter (my translation from his Latin; PG 91, 393—4D):

In this letter on love, truly Maximus acts maximally [vere maximum agit Maximus], and I know not whether anyone could write with a more divine and greater emphasis on love, the mystery of which the holy man has most wondrously disclosed not only here but scattered in other places as well. Whoever should deeply imbibe this letter with his or her soul will find that the purpose in its precept and law is especially of God, nothing less than the purpose of the entire dispensation and mystery of Christ: that we might be one with God and with one another, and in turn that we might care for and be cared for by others.

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Letter 2

To John the Chamberlain, on Love

2.1. By grace you who are God-kept cleave to the holy love of God and neighbor, and you cultivate it by suitable means. Already I learned by being present with you, and no less when absent—indeed, perhaps even more than when I was present—that you experience those things proper to divine love, both what they are and are said to be, so that you too might possess this divine reality which is beyond circumscription and limitless in virtue. For you do good not only to those present but also and eagerly to those absent, even those separated by great spatial distances. Constantly I learn of the magnitude of your bestowal of such love from those who pass by here, and especially from your own honorable letters. Hence I fashion for myself, as in a mirror, the form of divine grace that befits you. All this delights and makes me rejoice, of course, and so I give thanks for you to God, the giver of good things, and I never cease to cry out with the holy apostle, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed you with every spiritual blessing among the heavens.” I know with utter certitude that your holy soul is unbreakably bound together with my own wretched soul, in Spirit and through love, possessing the law of grace as a bond of friendship by which you embrace me invisibly, so that you might make my own sin-induced disgrace vanish in light of your own beautiful things. There is nothing more Godlike, nothing more mysterious, nothing mightier to elevate human beings to deification than divine love. For love is able to become pregnant with all the beautiful things that the word [logos] of truth relates in the form of virtue, while it is alien and unrelated to anything taken into the form of wickedness. For love is the fullness of the law and the prophets. These latter are succeeded by the mystery of love, which makes us into gods out of human beings and reduces all the individual commandments to the universal principle [logos]. By this principle all are uniformly circumscribed according to good pleasure, and out of this principle all give themselves in a multitude of ways according to the economy.

2.2. Which form of good things, after all, does love lack? Does it lack faith, that first foundation of pious realities which assures us that God exists and that divine things can be—indeed far more assuredly than when an eye, attending to the appearances of sensible things, produces an opinion of these things in those who perceive? Does it lack hope, which makes subsist in itself the truly subsistent good and indeed grasps it far more securely than a hand that physically grasps the densest material thing? For does not love offer delight in those things in which we have believed and for which we have hoped, capable through itself of making present the realities to come, according to our disposition? Does love lack humility, the first, sure foothold of the virtues by which we come to know ourselves and lance the empty tumor of arrogance? Does it lack mildness, by which we resist both censures and approbations, and, as if poised on a central axis between opposing evils—I mean glory and ignominy—stay all perturbation? Does it lack gentleness, which, even as we suffer, maintains us unbent towards those who work wickedness, becoming in no way hostile in disposition? Does it lack mercy, by which we willingly appropriate others’ calamities as our own and do not bear the neglect of kinship or familial solidarity? Does it lack that temperance and endurance, or longsuffering and kindness, or peace and joy by which we easily assuage anger and concupiscence along with their caustic zeal and intense burning? To speak simply and summarily, love is the telos of all good things, the very summit of good things on the way to God, the cause of every good, leading and drawing forward, as a faithful and infallible and reliable guide, those who walk in it.

2.3. Faith is the sure footing of those things that come after it—I mean hope and love—securely establishing what is true. Hope is the might of the extremes—I mean faith and love—illuminating through itself what is both trustworthy and desirable, teaching us that the course towards that very reality < which is trustworthy and desirable > must be made through itself. But love is the fulfillment of these two; the whole of it embraces the whole of that ultimate object of longing, grants rest to these two from their movement towards that object, and makes accessible through itself, even in the present, the enjoyment of that which we believe and for whose arrival we hope. Love alone, to speak properly, presents the human being as being in the creator’s image, since it subjects what lies within our power to reason [logos] rather than bend reason to what lies within our power, and it persuades our dispositive judgment [gnomē] to walk according to nature, in no way vying against the principle [logos] of nature. In accordance with this principle everyone and everything can possess, with God and with one another, a single nature, as it were, and thus a single dispositive judgment along with one object of will, having no interval whatsoever between God and each other. This occurs when we, by the law of grace through which we renew the law of nature in our dispositive judgment, choose the ultimate foundation. After all, it is impossible for those who are not first united with God in harmony to agree with one another in dispositive judgment.

2.4. Since, from our origins, the deceitful devil duped the human being by means of a stratagem knavishly devised through self-love, by the seduction of pleasure, he thus divided us from God and from one another in our dispositive judgment. Diverting us from the straight path and in this way partitioning nature, he carved us up into a multitude of opinions and phantasms. And he established a law in time: both the discovery of and means for every wicked deed, making use of our own powers for this purpose and implanting within all an evil support for the perdurance of wickedness, namely the irreconcilability of our dispositive judgments. Hence he thoroughly prevailed upon the human being to turn from his natural movement, to move his appetite from what is permissible to what is impermissible, and to hypostasize in himself the three great and ancient evils, which, to put it simply, are the begetters of every vice: I mean ignorance, self-love, and tyranny, which depend upon and constitute each other. From ignorance of God comes self-love, and from self-love comes tyranny against one’s neighbor. Nor would any account deny that the way we misuse our own powers—reason, desire, and the incensive power—is what hypostasizes such evils. For reason, instead of being ignorant of God, ought to be moved most singularly towards God in seeking him through knowledge. It should also be driven through desire, purified of the passion of self-love, towards a profound longing for God alone. And through the incensive power, separated from tyranny, it ought to strive for the attainment of God alone. Fashioning love out of these things, that love for which these things exist, that divine and blessed love—this at once unites the one who loves God to God and manifests that one as being God.

2.5. But since these things, through the human being’s will and the devil’s deceit, befell the human being in a wicked manner, God, who made nature, also wisely healed that nature when it had become debilitated by vice. In view of his love for us, “he emptied himself, having assumed the form of a slave,” uniting this same nature to himself without change and according to hypostasis. So entirely did he become human after our manner and from us and for us, that he seemed to unbelievers not to be God. And yet so entirely was he God that he enjoined himself upon believers as the ineffable and true Word of piety, so that he might demolish the works of the devil and, having rendered nature back its powers undefiled, so that he might renew the power of love which joins us anew with him and human beings with one another, this love which is the great antagonist to self-love. Self-love is and is known to be the principal sin, the devil’s first-begotten and the mother of the passions that trailed in its wake. He who has shown himself worthy of God through love slays self-love along with the whole horde of vices, since the latter possesses no other basis or cause for its existence than self-love. For such a person no longer knows arrogance, the distinctive mark of any vague notion that opposes God, a composite and bizarre wickedness. Nor does this person know glory, which destabilizes and casts down from itself those engorged with it. This person dissipates envy, which itself principally and justly dissipates those who possess it, by making his own through voluntary affection those who share the same nature. He utterly uproots anger, bloodlust, wrath, deceit, hypocrisy, posturing, vengeance, greed, and indeed everything by which the single human being is divided. For, by extracting self-love, which is, as I said, the origin and mother of wicked deeds, we extract with it everything that customarily comes from and after it.

2.6. When self-love is no more, absolutely no form or trace of vice can subsist in any way. Now in turn all of virtue’s forms are introduced, forms that fulfill love’s power, a power that joins together those things that have been divided and fashions once more the human being into one principle and mode. Love’s power levels out and equalizes all the inequity and difference of dispositive judgment among all things, and indeed suitably incites one towards that laudable inequity according to which each person’s inclination is to draw the neighbor to oneself, to esteem him more than oneself to the very degree that, formerly, one was eager to excel beyond and cast aside that same neighbor. For love’s sake a person voluntarily liberates himself from himself by separating himself from the reasonings [logoi] and properties he privately understands in his own dispositive judgment. Such a person has been joined together into that single simplicity and identity according to which it is completely impossible for anyone to separate anything from what is common. Here instead each is in each and all in all, or rather all have become established as one in God and in one another, mighty to manifest through themselves, in both nature and dispositive judgment, the one most singular principle [logos] of being. In this, God is perceived by the intellect: in him, as cause and maker, all things are contemplated together and are drawn up into being, while the principle [logos] of the being of beings naturally maintains itself unmixed and undefiled through the entire span of our attentiveness. Through our sober eagerness and < practice > of virtues with their accompanying labors, this principle is purified from the passions that rebel against it.

2.7. This is perhaps what the great Abraham achieved when he restored himself to the principle of nature, or the principle [logos] to himself. Through this he was given back to God and he received God again—let it be said in both ways, because in both the truth is contemplated. He was made worthy to see God as human and to welcome him through love of humankind as very much at home with the perfect natural principle. He was elevated to this condition after he had forsaken the distinctiveness of things partitioned up and divided, no longer regarding another human being as other to himself, but instead regarding the one as all and all as the one. Such a principle is obviously not that of dispositive judgment, about which there is discord and dissension to the point that this principle remains irreconcilable with nature. Rather, this is the principle of nature, and by attending carefully to the way this most singular principle persists without deviation around nature, we come to know God entirely manifest together with this principle. Thus God deems it good to be made manifest by appropriating his own creatures to himself, since it is not possible for the creation to know God as he is from himself.

2.8. This is because, to say it otherwise, so long as creation had not become the same and simple but remained divided into several parts in its dispositive judgment, it was not possible for it to be joined through likeness to that which is simple and the same. Creation needed first, through love of humankind, to join its dispositive judgment to nature, and after it was no longer moved primarily towards any other principle of those things that come after God, it showed forth in both nature and dispositive judgment the one peaceable and unperturbed principle [logos]. According to this principle, nature remains uncut and undivided in those who have received such a charism, cleaved no more by the discordant dispositive judgments of the many. For no longer do some become this and others that, thus partitioning nature, but rather the same ones persist towards the same things without regard for one’s own dispositive judgment, in view of the very degree to which partitioned things have been partitioned. Instead, they regard what is naturally one, common, and undivided in all things, in view of the degree to which partitioned things have been reconciled so that none of the things divided is brought against itself. And so, God is made manifest in those who possess < this principle >. And through his love of humankind, he receives form in the distinctive property of each one’s virtue, accepting to be named after this property. For love’s most perfect work, the far horizon of its activity, is to prepare those realities love itself unites to become fitted, through mutual exchange, to each other’s characteristics and appellations. As the human being is made God, God bears the name of and appears as human, on account of the single, undeviating intention and movement of both in their object of will. This we find with Abraham and the rest of the saints. And this is likely what was spoken in God’s person: “I was likened by the hand of the prophets.” Out of his great love for humankind, God’s form is likened to each one, from the virtue that exists in each one through praxis. For the “hand” of every just person is his virtuous praxis, in and through which God receives his likeness to human beings.

2.9. Love is therefore an immense good, preeminent and exceptional among all goods. In the one who possesses it, love unites through itself God and human beings. Love prepares the maker of human beings to be manifest as human because the one deified is, as far as possible for a human being, indistinguishable from God in the good. Such a thing is actualized, I think, by loving the Lord God from one’s whole heart and soul and power, and by loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Love is, to express it as if delineated by a definition, the immanent and universal relation towards the preeminent good together with the whole of providence over the whole of our natural kind. Beyond this relation exists nothing more sublime that might elevate the person who loves God, since it surpasses all other modes of piety. This is what we know and call love. We do not separately assign one sort of love for God and another for neighbor. Rather, there is a single and same and whole love, which is both owed to God and is what binds human beings to one another. For the activity and clear proof of perfect love for God is a genuine disposition in voluntary affection for one’s neighbor. “For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen,” says the divine apostle, “cannot love the God he has not seen.” This is the way of truth after which the Word of God names himself, the way that delivers those who travel by it, purified of every sort of passion, to God the Father. This is the door through which one can enter the Holy of Holies and is made worthy of becoming a spectator of that unapproachable beauty of the holy and regal Trinity. This is the true vine in which the one who has firmly rooted himself is deemed worthy of becoming a participant in divine quality. For the sake of such love, all the teachings of the law, the prophets, and the gospels are and are proclaimed, so that those who have received the desire for ineffable goods might confirm this longing in all these ways. Insofar as we honor the image molded out of our longing for he who molded it, to that very same degree the principle [logos] of nature requites and becomes present to the molder. This principle lays down equality of honor as a law, excising from nature every apparent, preconceived inequality regarding each, and encompasses all things in itself according to a single power of identity.

2.10. For the sake of love, the very maker of nature—such an act and even its utterance truly makes one tremble!—clothes himself with our own nature, uniting it to himself immutably and hypostatically, so that he might firmly establish what is prone to being carried away and join it to himself, which then reintegrates our nature into itself such that it possesses nothing in its dispositive judgment which differs from God or from itself. Thus he establishes himself as the manifest and all-glorious way of love, which is truly divine and deifying and leads us to God. Let us say too that love is God, and that from our origins this love has been covered over by the thickets of self-love. And having prefigured it in himself by his passions on our behalf, he graciously cleared away the obstacles for everyone. Through his own disciples he cast aside the stones that obstructed the way, just as he himself predicted through the prophets when he said: “And cast aside the stones from the way.” So intensely did he wish to persuade us in a suitable way to cleave to him and to one another, that he himself, through himself, showed himself the first to do so by accepting to undergo passion for our sake. For the sake of love, every last one of the saints has resisted sin, discerned no rationale [logos] in this present life, and endured a multitude of forms and manners of death, so that they might be gathered to themselves and away from this world to God, and that they might unite in themselves the fragments of nature. This is the true and immaculate theosophy of the faithful, whose telos is the good and the true, since indeed the love of humankind is good and the love of God through faith is true. These are the marks of love: it unites human beings to God and to one another, and for this reason possesses an infallible perseverance in good things.

2.11. You, blessed one, who has become a most genuine lover of this divine and happy way, fight the good fight until you arrive at the telos, having masterfully wielded those things by which you come to the far horizon of love’s passage: love of humankind, brotherly and sisterly love, hospitable love of the foreigner, love of the poor, suffering in solidarity, almsgiving, humility, mildness, gentleness, patience, freedom from anger, longsuffering, perseverance, kindness, clemency, affection, and peace towards all. From and through such things the grace of love is fashioned, leading the one deified to the God who fashioned the human being. “For love,” says the divine apostle, or rather the Christ who spoke these things through him, “is longsuffering, love is kind, it is not envious, it does not boast, it is not swollen with pride, it does not act indecently, it does not seek its own interests, it is not easily provoked, it does not dwell upon evil, nor does it delight in injustice, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, patiently endures all things. Love never fails,” because it possesses God alone infallibly and unchangeably.

2.12. Love effects the completion of the human being who lives by it, such that it commends you yourself when it says through the prophet Jeremiah: “To you I say: this is the way of my ordinances and the law that exists into the ages. All who lay hold of it will attain life but those who forsake it will die. Take it up, my child, and journey by the splendor of its light stretched out before you. Do not give your glory to another, nor your profits to a strange nation. You are blessed because you know the things that please your God. You learned where there is prudence, where strength, where understanding, where there is longevity and life. Where there is light for the eyes and peace—there you set foot upon the way, and you glimpsed me from afar. For this reason, I will love you with an eternal and affectionate love, I will have mercy on you unto pity, I will edify you and you will be edified. And you will go forth with an assembly of the cheerful, since you stood firm upon the ways, and you contemplated and asked after the Lord’s eternal tributaries, you beheld where the good way lies, you walked by that way and discovered sanctity for your soul.”

2.13. Again love speaks through Isaiah: “I am the Lord your God. I have shown you how to find the way of justice, the way you should walk in justice, and you heard my commandments.” Therefore, “your peace has become like a river, and your justice like the waves of the sea.” And now I myself, exulting in your own good things, will dare to speak together with God in reprising the words of the great Jeremiah: You are blessed, “since you removed the robe of your sorrow and affliction”—by which I mean “the ancient human being, who was corrupted by the lusts of deceit.” “And you put on the comeliness of glory from God unto eternity”—by which I mean “the newly-born human being, who, in Spirit” and according to Christ, “is created according to the image of the creator.” “And you wrapped yourself with the cloak of justice from God, you crowned yourself with the miter of eternal glory,” that is, you were adorned with the mode of the virtues and with the unperturbable principle [logos] of wisdom. Therefore, “God will display your brilliance to everything under heaven, and he will call you by your name, Peace of justice and Glory of godliness.”

2.14. As for me, I possess nothing more than these words to display the unmanifest disposition in your soul. For I lack anything worthy of your own good things that I could offer to God or to you. All I can do is wonder at your power, welcome your accomplishments, and relish in those things by which you propitiate God through good works. I praise your virtue, and through virtue I hymn God; for such virtue unites you to God. And so it seems to me to be one and the same thing to praise you together with virtue and to hymn the God who has gifted you the brilliance of virtue. While virtue deifies you in God by grace, by a removal of distinctively human characteristics, it makes God become human by condescension, by an assumption, as far as possible for a human being, of divine properties.