To See into the Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and his Predecessors (Monotheismes et Philosophie) [Bilingual ed.] 9782503548937, 2503548938

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TO SEE INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS: THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE IN MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR AND HIS PREDECESSORS

MONOTHÉISMES ET PHILOSOPHIE Collection dirigée par Carlos Lévy

TO SEE INTO THE LIFE OF THINGS: THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE IN MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR AND HIS PREDECESSORS

Joshua Lollar

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© 2013 – Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2013/0095/114 ISBN 978-2-503-54893-7 Printed on acid-free paper

For Joseph

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction I. The Terms of this Study ....................................................................................13 II. Status Quaestionis i. The Ambigua to John in Modern Scholarship ...................................... 16 ii. The Contemplation of Nature in Modern Maximus Scholarship....... 18 III. Method and Argument i. Philosophy or Theology? ........................................................................24 ii. The Ambigua to John–Genre ..............................................................30 iii. Gregory the Theologian as Authority ................................................. 33 iv. Structure of the Ambigua to John ........................................................34 IV. The Game of Philosophy ................................................................................35 Part I: Maximus’ Philosophical and Patristic Foundations .......................41 Chapter 2: The Contemplation of Nature in Greek Philosophy Introduction .............................................................................................................43 I. Parmenides: Nature and the Guidance of the Soul .....................................45 II. Heraclitus: Nature and Language..................................................................53 III. Plato: Nature and Love ...................................................................................58 IV. Aristotle: Nature and Virtue .........................................................................72 V. The Stoics: Nature and Life .............................................................................78 VI. Plotinus: Nature and Contemplation..........................................................85 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................99 Chapter 3: The Contemplation of Nature in the Greek Fathers Introduction ...........................................................................................................101

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I. The Alexandrians i. Clement of Alexandria a. Philosophy and Christianity ............................................................... 102 b. Cosmos and Temple .............................................................................. 106 c. Christ the Priest of Creation ............................................................... 107 ii. Origen a. In the Savior God Created ....................................................................111 b. The Three-fold Wisdom .......................................................................112 c. The Possibility of Knowledge and the Myth of the Cosmic Fall .113 II. The Cappadocians ......................................................................................... 120 i. Basil of Caesarea: Water is Water ....................................................... 121 ii. Gregory Nazianzen: Nature and Theological Initiation ..................127 iii. Gregory of Nyssa: The Scope of Natural Contemplation .................. 132 III. Evagrius of Pontus ........................................................................................ 137 i. From Asceticism to Nature ..................................................................139 ii. Nature ................................................................................................143 iii. Christ and Nature ............................................................................ 152 IV. Dionysius the Areopagite .............................................................................154 i. The World as the Manifestation of God.............................................. 155 ii. The Name Above Every Name .......................................................... 157 Conclusion .............................................................................................................159 Conclusion to Part I .................................................................................................161 Part II: The Contemplation of Nature in the Ambigua to John.............167 Introduction ..............................................................................................................169 Chapter 4: Pathos–“What is the Wisdom Concerning Me?” Introduction: Ambigua 6–8 and the Ambiguity of Human Existence ....171 I. Ambiguum 6 i. This is my body?................................................................................... 173 ii. Rationalization of Obscurity ............................................................. 176 iii. The Ascetic and the Contemplative .................................................. 178 II. Ambiguum 7 i. The Question of Origenism ................................................................. 179 ii. Nature and Passibility ....................................................................... 181

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iii. Partaking of God as the Substance of Virtue..................................... 185 iv. Soul and Body .................................................................................... 193 III. Ambiguum 8: Training in Disorder ...........................................................198 Chapter 5: Ethos–Praxis and the Contemplation of Nature Introduction: The Coherence of the Philosophical Life ............................. 203 I. Ambiguum 10: Virtue and Nature i. Praxis and Contemplation ..................................................................206 ii. Rationalizing the Practical Life .........................................................209 iii. Images of Dispassion.......................................................................... 211 II. The Soul i. The Soul and Nature in Aristotle and the Commentators ................. 215 ii. Maximus on the Motions of the Soul ................................................. 218 iii. The Passivity of the Soul ...................................................................223 iv. Soul as Mediator between God and Matter ......................................227 III. Dispassion and Contemplation ................................................................. 229 IV. The Contemplation of Nature ................................................................... 234 i. “οὐσία is the teacher of theology” ................................................................235 ii. “The Heavens Declare the Glory of God”: Providence and Judgment ............................................................................. 236 iii. Creating the World in the Mind ............................................................ 240 iv. Nature and Scripture ................................................................................ 246 v. Transcending Nature ..................................................................................250 Chapter 6: Cosmos–God and the World Introduction ...........................................................................................................253 I. God and the World i. The World as the Self-Multiplication of the One God ........................254 ii. Transfiguration: The Word as Type and Symbol of Himself ............. 255 iii. The Burning Bush: The Divine Fire in the Essence of Things .........262 II. The World and Eternity i. Maximus Against the Eternity of the World ......................................263 ii. Proclus and Philoponus on the Eternity of the World........................271 iii. Love as Divine Motion......................................................................280 iv. The Univocity of Being Incomprehensible .........................................285 III. God and the Language of the World i. The Problem of God and the Language of the World .........................286

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ii. Christ, Concept, Language ................................................................288 a. Ambiguum 23: Activity and Passivity ............................................... 289 b. Ambiguum 24: Subject and Action ....................................................291 c. Ambiguum 25: Subject, Predication, and Nature ........................... 293 d. Ambiguum 26: The Concepts of Essence and Activity ................ 293 e. Ambiguum 30: Names and the Divine.............................................. 295 Chapter 7: Logos–Christ and the Renewal of Nature Introduction .......................................................................................................... 297 I. The Contemplation of Nature and the Economy of Salvation .............. 297 i. The Beginning is Like the End............................................................298 ii. The Transgression of Adam................................................................302 iii. The Renewal of Nature .....................................................................306 II. Christ and the Contemplation of Nature ..................................................317 i. The Year of the Lord............................................................................ 317 ii. One Christ, Many Participants .........................................................320 iii. “The Word Becomes the Substance in the Entirety of Things” ......... 321 iv. Knowledge of Nature in the Desert....................................................322 v. The Passion of Christ and the Knowledge of Nature..........................323 Conclusion to Part II ...............................................................................................329 Epilogue ......................................................................................................................331 Appendix: Overview of the Structure of the Ambigua to John................................................................................................333 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 341 Index ..........................................................................................................................................353

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study of the contemplation of nature in Maximus the Confessor began as a doctoral dissertation in the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame. I wish to express my profound thanks to my director, Brian Daley, who saw me through my research and writing with enthusiastic support; to Cyril O’Regan and Stephen Gersh for their insightful and expert comments; to Gretchen Reydams-Schils for her friendly support of my work; to the General Editor and Publishing Manager of Monothéismes et Philosophie, Carlos Lévy and Johan Van der Beke; finally to my wife Kristine and our children Elizabeth, Justus, Constance, and Solomon, who have given me so much joy during the research, writing, and revision of this work. Note on the text of the Ambigua

As I note in the Introduction below, there is not yet a published critical edition of the Greek text of the Ambigua to John. However, Professor Carl Laga is preparing one for Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca and has been extremely gracious to share portions of his manuscript with me. Thus, while all citations of the Ambigua to John make reference to the text as printed in Patrologia Graeca, I have made use of Prof. Laga’s Greek text for the Prologue and Ambigua 6-10 (I-V). I shall be publishing a full translation of this edition with Corpus Christianorum in Translation.

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION I. The Terms of this Study The present work is a study of the contemplation of nature–θεωρία φυσική–in Maximus the Confessor and his predecessors. It is a study, specifically, of Maximus’ Ambigua to John, his collection of speculative chapters of commentary on various difficult passages from Gregory the Theologian, and I argue that the various questions raised in the Ambigua have the exploration of the meaning and scope of θεωρία φυσική as their foundational concern. The term θεωρία, “contemplation,” as Maximus uses it, refers to a number of different but related phenomena. Ears accustomed to the Aristotelian understanding of philosophy will hear in θεωρία that mode of philosophical endeavor that is other than πρᾶξις, the life of study and reflection as opposed to moral and political action. This understanding is present in Maximus though we shall see how he will attempt to bring contemplation and practical action into unity with one another. θεωρία can refer to the speculative and somewhat open-ended interpretation of Scripture, the natural world, or the writings of the fathers, in short, to the activity of a philosopher or scholar. It may also take on a narrower meaning and refer to the intellect’s encounter with true being as the prelude to the ultimate encounter with the God beyond intellect and being. The term φύσις, usually rendered as “nature,” likewise has a polyvalent meaning for Maximus. It may mean the “essence” of a thing and in this case is roughly equivalent to οὐσία. It may also be taken in its more etymological sense (φύω meaning to cause to spring forth or grow, as in a plant–φυτόν) and refer to a thing precisely as something that has “come into being.” Third, and related

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to this second meaning, φύσις as “nature” may be taken to refer to the cosmos as a whole, as the whole of what has come into being. Taken together, the phrase θεωρία φυσική refers to the systematic study but also to the more devotional apprehension of the things of the world and of the world as a whole. It is directed particularly to the knowledge of the world in its generation, growth, change, and movement and seeks to account for the coherence underlying the instability of natural phenomena. Of course, this definition is merely provisional; the entire study before you is devoted to explaining what the contemplation of nature means and it means substantially more than has been said in the first two sentences of this paragraph. Nevertheless, it is necessary to establish a basic starting point. The phrase “knowledge of the world” requires a bit of clarification as well. For Maximus, the “world” as κόσμος refers, as it does for ancient Greeks generally, to the universe as an ordered whole (κοσμέω: “to arrange, set in order, adorn”), but this order, which is the manifestation of the principles and purposes (λόγοι) of the divine mind, has come to manifestation as creation (κτίσις) and so is nearly always thought of by Maximus in terms of its finitude and dependence upon divine reality. Moreover, my analysis of the notion of “world” or “creation” in Maximus will often take one aspect of the world–the human being–as synecdoche for the whole, and this is justified by the close affinity Maximus’ understanding of the doctrine of creation has with his vision of the incarnation of Christ. As he says in his interpretation of the Israelite tabernacle (Ex 25.8-9), “the tent of testimony is the mysterious economy of the incarnation of the Word of God,” but it is also “the image of the whole creation, both intellectual and sensual…the image of sensual nature alone…of human nature alone…and also of soul alone,”1 and more famously, “the Word of God who is God wishes for the mystery of His embodiment to be actualized always and in everything.”2 Just what Maximus means by this will be explained in detail through the course of this study. Suffice it to say here that world, humanity, and incarnate Christ, as well as Scripture, are inseparably linked in Maximus’ thought and form the nexus of his reflections on the contemplation of nature.

1 2

Ambiguorum liber 61, Patrologia Graeca Cursus Completus 91.1385C13-1388A6. Amb. 7, 1084C14-D2.

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With the term “knowledge” in the phrase, “knowledge of the world,” I intend the thinking and description of phenomena as they appear in the world as well as the reflection upon the conditions of the possibility and the dynamics of this thought and description. As the present work argues, the dynamics of contemplating nature cannot, for Maximus, be understood without a deep consideration of the place of the human being in the world as an embodied creature bounded by space and time, a situation which, for Maximus, entails a practice of spiritual/ascetical life in preparation for, and as part of, the apprehension of the truth of the world. Thus, the study is entitled, “To See into the Life of Things,” in reference to a line from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” The poet writes: that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten’d: –that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.3

If the world initially gives itself as unintelligible, and Maximus thinks it does, and yet if it contains a quieting power of harmony, and Maximus thinks it does, then the direction of our questioning about the world turns to the eye made blurry by the mystery, and observes it as it is clarified and comes, at the end of a struggle, to the beginning of vision in which it is granted “to see into the life of things.”

3 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797–1800 ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 117.

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II. Status Quaestionis i. The Ambigua to John in Modern Scholarship Because there is not yet available a critical edition of the Ambigua to John, this study is based upon the edition of F. Öhler (1857), which was reprinted in 1860 in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (PG 91.1061-1417).4 The first and only major study devoted specifically to the Ambigua to John as a whole is Polycarp Sherwood’s The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenism,5 where the title Earlier Ambigua refers to the Ambigua to John. This foundational work gives a brief historical background to the text, brief summaries of each of the individual chapters, and a thorough analysis of Maximus’ “refutation of Origenism,” focusing especially on Ambiguum 7, though referring to other Ambigua as well. Sherwood himself acknowledges that the refutation of Origenism is by no means the central concern of the Ambigua to John, or even of Ambiguum 7, and his own work is, among other things, a response to the first edition of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Kosmische Liturgie: Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbildes (1941), which, Sherwood, asserts, made too much of a so-called “Origenist crisis” in the thought of Maximus. Von Balthasar revised the presentation of his position in light of this criticism in the second edition of Kosmische Liturgie, published in 1961, changing the subtitle to Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners in accordance with the altered presentation of his position vis-à-vis Origenism. Nevertheless, the Ambigua to John are often incorporated into studies of Maximus precisely in the terms of the refutation of Origenism, and the need of a thorough analysis of the whole work, which Sherwood noted in his own study, has gone largely unmet, though we shall now note a few works that have taken steps in this direction. Since Sherwood, there have been three major publications in the Western world relating to the whole of the Ambigua to John. First, Eduard Jeauneau published a critical edition of John Scot Eriugena’s Latin translation of the Ambigua to John in 1988, and in addition to providing a helpful critical apparatus, the edition is based upon Latin manuscripts that are older than the earliest Greek manuscripts of the Ambigua, making Eriugena an important early

4

See “Note on the Text of the Ambigua” in the Preface above. Polycarp Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenism (Roma: Herder, 1955). 5

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witness to the text, especially in light of the present lack of a published critical edition of the Greek text.6 Second, a complete French translation of the text by Emmanuel Ponsoye was published in 1994 with a topical introduction by JeanClaude Larchet and a French translation of Dumitru Staniloae’s commentary (originally published in Romanian in 1983).7 Finally, Claudio Moreschini published an Italian translation of the Ambigua in 2003 with a thorough introduction to the doctrinal content of the text and erudite notes to the translation.8 We should also note two publications of translations in English relevant to the study of the Ambigua to John. Andrew Louth published translations of Ambigua 10, 41, and 71 in 19969 and Paul Blowers and Robert Wilken published translations of Ambigua 7, 8, and 42 (portions) in 2003.10 The Ambigua to John have, of course, been studied in other contexts than the refutation of Origenism. Pascal Mueller-Jourdan gives an extended exposition of the concepts of space and time in Ambiguum 10 as grounding for his philosophical interpretation of the Mystagogia.11 Jean-Claude Larchet makes extensive use of a number of the Ambigua in his study of deification.12 The teaching of the five-fold division of reality and their unification in Christ in Ambiguum 41 plays a prominent role in Lars Thunberg’s Microcosm and Mediator, originally his 1965 doctoral dissertation, published in a second edition with revisions in 1995.13 On the whole, studies addressing the Ambigua to John do so selectively and as a part of a wider project of examining a particular theme in Maximus’ thought, though the introductions to the translations of Ponsoye and especially Moreschini do treat the text more synthetically.

6 Eduard Jeauneau, Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem, CCSG 18 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988). 7 Emmanuel Ponsoye et al., Ambigua. Introduction par Jean-Claude Larchet; avant-propos, traduction et notes par Emmanuel Ponsoye; commentaire par Dumitru Staniloae (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Ancre, 1994). 8 Claudio Moreschini, Ambigua: Problemi Metafisici e Teologici su Testi di Gregorio di Nazianzo e Dionigi Areopagita (Milan: Bompiani, 2003). 9 Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London/New York: Routledge, 1996). 10 Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: ST. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). 11 Pascal Mueller-Jourdan, Typologie spatio-temporelle de l’ecclesia byzantine: la Mystagogie de Maxime le Confesseur dans la culture philosophique de l’antiquité tardive (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 12 Jean-Claude Larchet, La divinization de l’ homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur (Paris: Cerf, 1996). 13 Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Chicago: Open Court, 1995).

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ii. The Contemplation of Nature in Modern Maximus Scholarship With respect to the topic of the contemplation of nature, scholars have long been aware of the importance of the cosmos in Maximus’ thought. Indeed, ever since the publication of the first edition of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Kosmische Liturgie, the cosmic framework for interpreting Maximus has been well established amongst modern scholars. The major studies that would follow by Sherwood,14 Völker,15 Thunberg,16 Riou,17 and Heinzer,18 which are devoted, respectively, to Maximus’ relationship to Origensim, his teaching on the spiritual life, his anthropology, his ecclesiology, and his Christology, all include sections on Maximus’ understanding of the created world as it informs their respective topics of enquiry. We should also mention: Louth’s general introduction to his aforementioned translation of a selection of Maximus’ texts in which he describes Maximus’ theology as “cosmic theology;”19 the aforementioned volume of translations with introduction prepared by Blowers and Wilken, entitled On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, which gives an overview of various approaches to the “cosmic scope of Maximus’ theology”;20 and Adam Cooper’s study of the body in Maximus’ thought, which includes a chapter on the body and the cosmos that, in fact, reads what he acknowledges to be a “cosmological treatise,” Ambiguum 7, as a treatise on the body.21 There have been a few studies devoted more specifically to expounding Maximus’ understanding of the cosmos in philosophical terms. Stephen Gersh’s From Iamblichus to Eriugena folds Maximus into its wider discussion of the development of certain philosophical themes within the Neoplatonic tradi-

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The Earlier Ambigua. Walther Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965). 16 Microcosm and Mediator. 17 Alain Riou, Le Monde et L’Église selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1973). 18 Felix Heinzer, Gottes Sohn als Mensch: Die Struktur des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus Confessor (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1980). 19 Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 63. 20 Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 18-21. 21 Cooper, The Body in St. Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15

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tion.22 Eric Perl’s Methexis23 and Torstein Tollefsen’s Christocentric Cosmology24 are both explicitly philosophical treatments of Maximus’ understanding of being and the cosmos, and are concerned to explicate the metaphysical implications of Maximus’ understanding of creation. Perl focuses on the metaphysics of participation, especially in relation to the Neoplatonic tradition, and Tollefsen argues that for Maximus, Christ is the center precisely of created being, insofar as He is the point of communion between created and uncreated. He then goes on to unfold the metaphysical content of this idea. With respect to the contemplation of nature as a specific aspect of the spiritual life (as opposed to the content of Maximus’ cosmology), nearly every major synthetic interpretation of Maximus’ thought has given some form of analysis. Indeed, the concept occurs so frequently in the writings of the Confessor that one would be quite surprised if a synthetic study were to omit it. The basic contours of Maximus’ understanding of natural contemplation have been clear since the writing of one of the earliest modern systematic accounts of Maximus’ thought, Sergei Leontevich Epifanovich’s Prepodobnyi Maksim Ispovednik i vizantiiskoe bogoslovie (The Venerable Maximus the Confessor and Byzantine Theology), originally published in 1915.25 According to Epifanovich, contemplation “is not some sort of philosophical exercise; it is a gift of illumination by grace, a gift that is only received after the attainment of dispassion, and that opens itself up, like all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, only in proportion to spiritual perfection.”26 So from the very beginning, Maximus’ contemplation of beings is inseparable from divine grace. This is because, in the words of Epifanovich, “the task of the acts of contemplation, to whatever region they might refer, is one and the same: thoroughly to seek out the divine ideas (λόγοι) of the Logos, to seek everywhere, where He has shown Himself in them, i.e. in nature, in humanity, in Scripture, in the Church, for everything–nature, Scripture, the Church–represents in itself the mysterious embodiments of the

22 Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978). 23 Eric Perl, “Methexis: Creation, Incarnation, Deification in Saint Maximus the Confessor” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1991). 24 Torstein Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 25 С.Л. Епифанович, Преподобный Максим Исповедник и Византийское Богословие (Москва: Мартис, 1996 [1915]). 26 Епифанович, Преподобный Максим, 128.

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Logos.”27 To search for the meaning and nature of things is, ultimately, to search for the very Logos of God, and the acquisition of the logoi, and therefore of the Logos, comes only as a divine gift. Epifanovich also notes the close link between the level of ascetical practice and that of contemplation, asserting that contemplation “never breaks with” practical philosophy but rather takes support from it and itself helps to “extinguish the passions,” so that both stages of human perfection mutually reinforce one another.28 As contemplation grows stronger it moves from “‘natural contemplation,’ φυσικὴ θεωρία (in the narrow sense) of the world of sensation” to the intellectual realm and the acquisition of γνῶσις, which pertains first to the moral realm and then to the highest stage of “‘unforgettable knowledge’ (ἄληστος γνῶσις)” and “undistracted prayer,” both of which, again, come as gifts and together “prepare for the act of ‘mystical theology’ that transcends thought,” and culminate in “ineffable knowing of the Divinity in unfathomable union with God.”29 In Epifanovich’s brief treatment, we see many familiar Maximian themes, which later scholars would go on to expound in various ways. In the next major comprehensive study of Maximus’ thought, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Kosmische Liturgie, Von Balthasar places his brief discussion of the contemplation of nature not in the chapter dealing with the cosmos but in the final chapter, which deals with the spiritual practice of Christian life as Maximus understood it. Von Balthasar understands Maximus’ θεωρία φυσική to be the mark of transition from the law of the Old Covenant to the spirit of the New,30 “the midpoint between sign and truth.”31 He places the image of “feeding” on the spiritual contemplation of nature at the center of his exposition of natural contemplation, explaining that, as a being who is immersed “in the natural world that surrounds him,” the human being feeds on the intellectual reality that has been placed within things just as he feeds on the physical reality of the world for bodily nourishment.32 In this way material reality is spiritualized in the act of human contemplation and thus the whole cosmos partakes of the transformative movement of salvation. We may take this as the way in which the truth of the cosmos, which has its fulfillment in the union of 27 28 29 30 31 32

Епифанович, Преподобный Максим, 131. Епифанович, Преподобный Максим, 128-129. Епифанович, Преподобный Максим, 129-131. Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy trans. Brian Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 302. Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 300, quoting Ad Thal. 35. Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 303. See Chapter 7 below, 317ff., for an elaboration of this theme.

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created and uncreated in Christ, is realized in the being of each person who undertakes the contemplation and spiritualization of nature in a “religious act… through which [man] collaborates in achieving his own share in the redemption of all creation.”33 Lars Thunberg likewise includes the contemplation of nature in his discussion of the mediating role of human being in the cosmos. He begins his account with a brief description of natural contemplation in Evagrius–whose influence on Maximus in this regard is well established–in order to discern precisely how Maximus’ own account relates to the Evagrian conception and to what extent Maximus departs from the Evagrian model he inherited. According to Thunberg, the stages of Evagrian contemplation effect a reversal of his Origenist account of the fall, whereby the mind ascends from corporeal and incorporeal reality (the lower stages of contemplation) to “its original state of being” in knowledge of the Trinity.34 Natural contemplation plays an essential role in Evagrius’ understanding of spiritual development. In fact, “Evagrius would hardly accept a union with God without natural contemplation…for which the vita practica is merely a preparation and of which union with God is a natural outcome.”35 This, as is asserted by Epifanovich as well,36 is in sharp contrast to Maximus, who articulates two routes to union with God: the way of the contemplative ascetic who progresses through asceticism and natural contemplation to the ultimate union with God, and the way of the layman, whose “deification…takes place through love…on the pure basis of the vita practica” alone.37 Maximus is able to articulate two different approaches to perfection because, according to Thunberg, the rational faculties play a major role in the practice of virtue for Maximus38 so that obedience to the commandments of Christ “involves a communication with the Logos through the λόγοι of these commandments and the incarnation of Christ in the virtues.” This participation in the Logos through the logoi recapitulates the activity of natural contemplation so that one who is not ac-

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Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 306. Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 345-346. 35 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 349. 36 Епифанович, Преподобный Максим, 127: “Such is the way of the ascetic, who, not having the inclination to concentrate upon contemplation, brings rest to himself in the highest mystical states of love when he passes beyond practical philosophy.” 37 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 348-349. 38 See the discussion in Chapter 5 below, 209ff. 34

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tively engaged specifically in contemplation nevertheless reaps the same fruit by virtue of the life of praxis.39 On the other side, Maximus makes a “very sharp distinction between contemplation in general and the stage of θεολογία,” so that, in contrast to Evagrius, natural contemplation is not regarded as a very close, and therefore necessary, precursor to theology. It is conceivable for Maximus that a person may draw near to union with God, which is the content of theology, through the acquisition of love in the exercise of the virtues and without passing through the stage of the contemplation of nature. These points, then, set Maximus off from Evagrius. With respect to Maximus’ positive teaching on natural contemplation40 (which, in Thunberg’s analysis, is still largely determined by how it differs from Evagrius), Thunberg notes that it is connected to the contemplation of Scripture, that it is a “gift of grace to fallen man,” and that it ultimately “takes place in the Spirit.” It leads the human mind to the knowledge of God as Cause of the universe, but “no more than that.” Thunberg discerns Dionysian influence on Maximus’ hierarchical concept of created beings, which are secured in their differentiation by the will of God, a concept that again, he argues, leads Maximus away from the particularly Evagrian mode of contemplation. The mind proceeds through this differentiation of created reality–discerning the logoi of created things–towards the unified knowledge of God as the cause of all, who is revealed as “the Logos Creator.” By its revelation of the logoi to the mind, the Logos leads it beyond all sensuality to “the intelligible representations of divine things.” This does not, however, imply the disparagement of the material world nor, on the other side, does it minimize the inherent rationality of the stage that comes before contemplation, the stage of ascetical praxis and the exercise of virtue. Thunberg sees this as yet another non-Evagrian element in Maximus. The vita practica is, in fact, bound closely to the life of contemplation, not simply as a preparatory stage, but, in a way reminiscent of the Stoics, as a recapitulation of the principles of creation on the level of praxis, for “the vita practica” represents “the right way to live in accordance with the principles of that [sensible] world.”41

39 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 352: “[Maximus] clearly makes the vita practica and the vita contemplativa into parallel phenomena, particularly since he relates them to a ‘theology’ which is above both, and yet is said to keep all together.” 40 The following summary is based on Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 349-352. 41 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 352. On the providential differentiation of beings vis-à-vis Evagrius, see Chapter 5 below, 237-240. On the Stoics and “living in agreement with nature,” see Chapter 2 below, 78-85.

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Finally, Thunberg discusses the symbolic nature of Maximus’ understanding of natural contemplation, another point in which Maximus appropriates Dionysius at the expense of Evagrius.42 As opposed to Evagrius’ ontologically focused conception of contemplation–i.e. the mind must return to its primordial state of nakedness before the Monad and so leave all natural contemplation behind, implicated as it is in materiality and perception–Maximus understands that the natural world exists in a symbolic, not merely a derivative, relationship to the Divine. This has the two-fold result of both limiting the scope of natural contemplation with respect to the practice of virtue, since natural contemplation is the means of discerning through symbols the Cause of all things “and nothing more,” on the one hand, but on the other, solidifies natural contemplation in its own integrity, since “the very limitation of ‘natural contemplation’ has a symbolic function which leads the mind on to the divine realities.”43 The most thorough account of Maximus’ understanding of the contemplation of nature thus far is to be found in Walther Völker’s Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens. Though much of what he says may be found in earlier studies, he synthesizes material from all of Maximus’ major works–the Ambigua, Questions to Thallasius, Two-Hundred Chapters on Knowledge, FourHundred Chapters on Love, Mystagogy–and fills in with more concrete detail the basic outlines that were established by earlier scholarship. He shows how Maximus relates to the tradition, and in particular how he often brings the thinking of the early Alexandrians Philo, Clement, and Origen, the Cappadocians (primarily Gregory of Nyssa), and Evagrius into line with Dionysius the Areopagite with respect to the topics of the visible world and its relation to the invisible, the motion of the world and its relation to the cause of motion, the connection between the logoi of beings and the Logos of God, and the multiplicity of the logoi in relation to the unity of the Logos.44 Völker interprets the concept of “analogy” as playing a leading role in Maximus’ understanding of the contemplation of nature.45 He also discerns the intellectual drive from multiplicity to simplicity as lying at the heart of the

42

Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 353-354. Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 354. 44 Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens: visible/invisible: 301; motion: 303; Logos and logoi: 305; multiplicity: 312-314. 45 Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 299, 301, etc. 43

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contemplation of nature,46 whose fruit is the result both of exacting spiritual labor and freely given divine grace.47 Therefore, though knowledge of beings is not the mechanical result of ascetical labor and thought, it is inseparable from this labor.48 Völker also raises the question, which we have just observed in Thunberg, of the necessity of the pursuit of natural contemplation in the spiritual life. Völker notes that for Von Balthasar natural contemplation “becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.”49 Epifanovich and Thunberg, as we have seen, take the opposite view.50 For his part, Völker considers φυσική θεωρία as “a necessary stage preliminary to the appearance of God”51 and therefore as playing an essential role in Maximus’ understanding of the spiritual life as a whole.52 III. Method and Argument i. Philosophy or Theology? All of the works mentioned thus far give thorough–and sometimes competing–descriptions of the content of Maximus’ thought as it relates overtly to the natural world so that the outline of the intellectual background and appropriate topics and texts for study are clear, and the repetition of what has already been said–though perhaps with different examples and a different arrangement of concepts–would most certainly be useless. Now that much of the material for the study of natural contemplation in Maximus has been identified, what remains to be done–and what this study seeks to do–is to learn not simply what Maximus thought, as that may be determined in the words he wrote, but how he thought. As Eric Voegelin put it in his study of the intellectual history of political order: “What philosophy is need not be ascertained by talking about philosophy discursively; it can, and must, be determined by entering into the 46 47 48 49

Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 311. Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 309-310. Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 315 Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 314 n.5; Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy,

61. 50 Völker gives Sherwood as an example of someone who does not think natural contemplation is required for the attainment of theosis according to Maximus; Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 315. See Sherwood, The Ascetic Life, Four Centuries on Charity (New York: The Newman Press, 1955), 88. 51 Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 296. 52 Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 315.

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speculative process in which the thinker explicates his experience of order (emphasis in the original).”53 This study will have as its aim to enter into Maximus’ speculative process as he determines the process of contemplating the order (and disorder) of the natural world. The question immediately arises, is this philosophy or theology? But it must be understood from the outset that φιλοσοφία as “devotion to wisdom” is, for Maximus, nothing other than φιλοθεΐα; the love of wisdom is the love of the Divine, the love of God.54 Thus, on the one hand, the delimitation of a theological from a strictly philosophical methodology is not applicable to Maximus. For example, a typical way of distinguishing between philosophy and theology would be to assert that theology is founded upon the Church’s tradition of the study of the revelation of Scripture, whereas philosophy is founded upon the exercise of human reason as it reflects upon itself and the world. For Maximus, however, Scripture and the world are two manifestations of the same reality, of the wise providence and goodness of God, ultimately of God Himself. The human mind itself, as we shall see at length below, is in its present state bound within the order of the cosmos even as it strains to rise to what it thinks must be beyond that order. This is not to say that theology is not related to meditation upon Scripture for Maximus; far from it. It is to say, however, that theology is also related to meditation upon the world. Likewise, philosophy as the practice of asceticism, the knowledge of beings, and union with the Divine is mediated through both the cosmic order and the revelation of Scripture. On the other hand, it is clear in the Ambigua to John that the categories of human thought that obtain in the world do not obtain with respect to God, at least when Maximus is speaking within apophatic theology of the Divinity “beyond being.” However, he will also say that the essence of the world itself is ineffable and unknowable. Thus, the relationship of kataphatic and apophatic theology is not at all mechanical, let alone that between philosophy and theology, and this is indicative of the need for a subtle articulation of the relationship between human being and the

53 Eric Voegelin, Order and History II: The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 170 54 Amb. 37, PG 91.1296B11-12: φιλοσοφία, ταὐτὸν δέ ἐστιν εἰπεῖν φιλοθεΐα. Jean-Luc Marion’s remarks regarding Augustine are appropriate for Maximus as well: “En bonne logique, aimer la sagesse ne peut vouloir dire pour un Chrétien qu’aimer Dieu: ‘…verus philosophus est amotor Dei (De Civitate Dei VIII.1.34.230).’ Bref, la philosophie ne s’accomplit que dans l’amour de Dieu…”: Au Lieu de Soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 23.

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world of which it is a part, between God and the world, and between God and human being in the world. I argue that, for Maximus, the name for these relationships is precisely “Christ.” Maximus’ three well-known stages of spiritual development–the practical or ascetical life, the contemplation of nature, and mystical theology–are mentioned throughout the Ambigua to John as governing specific, if not perfectly discrete, domains of human life so that, while a typically modern division between philosophy and theology is irrelevant to Maximus, there yet remains a distinction between ethics, the contemplation of nature, and mystical theology. But these three are so thoroughly implicated in one another–and we shall indeed devote considerable space to how Maximus articulates their coherence– that any attempt to define what Maximus is doing as either exclusively philosophy or theology is inevitably frustrated from the start. While there is a clear hierarchy that leads from the ethical through the natural to the theological in Maximus, he tends to give a “mixed transmission (τὴν μικτὴν παράδοσιν)” of the various aspects of philosophy in a way reminiscent of some of the Stoics.55

Maximus is a philosopher in the broad sense of one who gives instruction in virtue, the knowledge of the world, and the Divine. He is also a philosopher in the narrower sense of one who presents rational and conceptual arguments that may be evaluated on strictly logical grounds. He is a theologian as one who discourses about God and interprets Scripture, but the Greek fathers are as likely to call this “philosophy” as “theology,”56 so again the distinction must be qualified. In light of this, my own approach will seek to allow Maximus’ way of speaking to guide the formation of categories for interpretation. This demands careful attention to Maximus’ language in the Ambigua. He begins the first chapter of the Ambigua to John with a brief reflection upon how he will proceed in his interpretation of Gregory: “In order that the enigma of what has been said may become entirely clear to us, let us examine the words of the blessed one themselves just as they are.”57 The same could be said of our approach here. Indeed, Maximus’ process of clarifying Gregory is often the process of developing in an extremely speculative way that which is only a potentiality in Gregory’s language, for Gregory “is a theologian who speaks in an

55 Cf. Diogenes Laertes VII.39-41, A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26B. 56 Cf. Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 27.3, 76.1: τὸ περὶ θεοῦ φιλοσοφεῖν. 57 Amb. 6, 1065C9-11.

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extremely dense way and has a prolific mind...He requires the one who wishes to unfold his meaning, even if he commands the heights of rhetoric and philosophy, to address many issues.”58 Again, I would make a similar claim for reading Maximus, and just as Maximus often, through the rigorous analysis of the specificities of Gregory’s use of language, draws Gregory’s words beyond themselves and into a new synthesis, so too does my reading of Maximus take what I argue is an orientation towards nature and contemplation that is innate to Maximus’ way of thinking and use it to (re-)organize his own expression for the sake of “unfolding his meaning.” I seek to draw Maximus’s language (λόγος) beyond itself and into a meaning (νοῦς) that it enables but does not always express directly. It is my analysis of the philosophers and Christian fathers before Maximus that makes this possible, at least if my reading is to be a justifiable elaboration of the tradition that Maximus represents. As such, the study is composed of two parts. Part I gives an analysis of the contemplation of nature in the Greek philosophical and Greek patristic traditions before Maximus and Part II presents my interpretation of natural contemplation in Maximus’ Ambigua to John. The purpose of Part I is to enter into the intellectual realm of the Greek philosophical and patristic understandings of the order and dynamics of nature as these are discernible from Parmenides to Plotinus and from Clement of Alexandria to Dionysius the Areopagite and in so doing to provide a sort of “deep structure” within which to ground my reading of Maximus’ Ambigua to John. Because θεωρία φυσική was a well-established tradition of thought that brought with it a particular set of assumptions, it is essential to set Maximus within the context of the ancient Greek philosophical and patristic traditions. With respect to Greek philosophy, this inquiry into what would come to be called περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία will not result in a summary of the various theories of the nature of the universe for which we have evidence from the ancient Greek world: the cosmogonies and theogonies of Hesiod (and implied in Homer), opinions about what the fundamental substance is (earth, air, fire, water, the boundless), accounts of the combination of contraries, and so on. These all will be mentioned as they arise, for they are the material, as it were, of ancient Greek thinking about nature. My aim, rather, is to give an account of the different ways of thinking about nature that arose in the ancient Greek world and

58

Amb. Prol, 1065A4-8.

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of how these ways reflect the Greek philosophical understanding of the best form of human life. Voegelin’s notion of “entering into the speculative process in which the thinker explicates his experience of order” is here fully in effect. Chapter 2, “The Contemplation of Nature in Greek Philosophy,” studies the ways in which the major early Greek thinkers–Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus–conceived of the unity of philosophy with particular reference to the place of nature and natural philosophy within it. It must be emphasized from the outset that this is not an encyclopedic and historical account of natural philosophy in the ancient schools. It is rather specifically oriented towards my reading of Maximus and establishes philosophical issues that are important for understanding the Ambigua, specifically the question of the relationship between praxis and contemplation and of the coherence of philosophy more generally. Throughout the course of the chapter, and particularly in the conclusion to Part I, I indicate precisely how my reading of the ancient philosophical tradition points towards Maximus; the work it is called upon to do is to make Maximus understandable as representative of one way the ancient philosophical tradition might be interpreted. My reading in general owes not a little of its orientation to the work of Pierre Hadot and to the early Heidegger, primarily the early lectures on Aristotle and Being and Time. From Hadot I take the mode of questioning the ancient tradition with respect to the relationship and tension between forms of discourse and forms of life, or in the language of the present work, between the theoretical and the practical aspects of philosophy. Maximus’ general insistence, I argue, upon the inseparability of praxis and contemplation leads me to give this theme the leading role in my reading of the antecedent tradition and this draws me close to Hadot. My relationship to Heidegger is rather similar in that I am intent upon disclosing in a concrete way how Maximus describes the structure of human experience of nature in the world. The practical concern of affectivity will be shown as the ground for Maximus’ thinking about nature and being; this will come out most strongly in Chapter 4, but because this is precisely the foundation of my reading of Maximus, it is essential for the work as a whole. On this basis, I approach the antecedent tradition with the same orientation. My reading is an eclectic one, as Hellenistic as it is Platonic, but this is very much the shape of philosophy inherited by Maximus and is therefore justified historically. The third chapter, “Christ and the Contemplation of Nature in the Greek Fathers,” is, on the surface at least, a bit less distant from Maximus’ direct con-

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cerns in the Ambigua; he cites many of the figures treated–Clement and Origen of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, Evagrius of Pontus, and Dionysius the Areopagite–either explicitly or implicitly, and their Christological orientation of natural philosophy is decisive for what Maximus does in the Ambigua. In particular, I read the earlier fathers as founders of the notion of “Christian philosophy,” which was the formation of the human being in the image of Christ, with particular reference to how this is related to knowledge of the world. In this the Alexandrians give a particular shape to the ancient philosophical tradition in an encounter with Biblical imagery that would be decisive for the later fathers, and this shape informs my reading of the philosophers in Chapter 2. I depart, however, from some of the more standard ways of accounting for the development of patristic theology, and Christology in particular. It is often noted that the earlier cosmological focus of Christology in the apologists and other pre-Nicene theologians gave way to a more soteriological emphasis in later fathers, or at least that soteriology became much more prominent later than in the pre-Nicene centuries. So, for example, Grillmeier sees a foregrounding of “cosmological, noetic, and moral aspects” of the “Logos doctrine” in Christianity’s early encounter with Hellenism, but this, while a necessary stage of communication to the intellectual culture of the second and third centuries, also prepared the way for Arian subordinationism and pointed to the need to clarify the distinction between “the procession of the Logos and the creation of the world” on the one hand and “the creation and redemption of man,” on the other.59 My reading of Maximus will, in fact, show how he describes the economy of salvation in the terms of the contemplation of nature; in other words, I do not draw a strong distinction between cosmology and soteriology in Maximus, and so my reading of the Greek fathers before him will tend to emphasize the cosmic element of their Christologies–or, I should say, the Christological focus of their contemplation of nature. The contemplation of nature is concerned, in the Greek fathers treated here, with the basic question of the relationship between God and the world and so it was quite natural for their contemplation of Christ, in whom the Creator and the created are united, to 59 Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition Vol.1, trans. John Bowden (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975), 110. The point is noted in J. Rebecca Lyman, Christology and Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. See also J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), 138-149, 153-161, 165-174, 178-188. In these passages Kelly notes a significant downplaying (from the perspective of some later formulations) of the soteriological aspects of Christology in the apostolic fathers, the apologists, and Clement of Alexandria.

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be articulated as a sort of “natural philosophy,” and this, as we shall in Maximus, is by no means outside of the concern for soteriology. Part II gives an exegetical analysis of the Ambigua to John that seeks to organize the various aspects of Maximus’ thought in the text around what he says about the contemplation of nature. My interpretation of the Ambigua is organized into four chapters, which draw upon and extend the themes developed in Part I. In particular, I develop the basic themes of human passibility, the coherence of philosophy and the centrality of nature in this coherence, God and the world, and Christ and the renewal of nature and its contemplation. These four chapters correspond roughly to the basic divisions of the Ambigua I outline below in this Introduction. I give a more detailed overview of these chapters as introduction to Part II where, the pre-Maximian material having been established, it will be more useful to the reader. ii. The Ambigua to John–Genre It should be emphasized that this study of natural contemplation in Maximus is specifically an interpretation of the Ambigua to John. Nearly all of Maximus’ works are relevant, in general terms, to the topic. However, my research began as a search for some sort of inner coherence in the Ambigua, and I have concluded that the notion of the contemplation of nature provides a way for articulating that coherence. It is important at the outset, however, before coming to their content, to give an account of the literary nature of the Ambigua. Sherwood dates the composition of the Ambigua to John to the years 628630, when Maximus was residing in North Africa.60 Maximus writes in the prefatory letter to the Ambigua that the text is based upon discussions he had at the monastery of Cyzicus with an Archbishop John and his monks: “Therefore, when I received your honorable epistle ordering me to send you a written report of our discussion concerning each of the chapters of the orations of St. Gregory the Theologian that were perplexing to us, over which we labored when we were together…”61 Generally speaking,62 the Ambigua to John belong,

60 Polycarp Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor (Roma: Herder, 1952), 31. 61 Amb. Prol. 1064B6-10. 62 These general remarks on the nature of erotapokriseis are based on the introduction to my translation and study of Maximus’ Ambigua ad Thomam: Joshua Lollar, The Ambigua to Thomas, Second Letter to

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like Maximus’ Questions to Thalassius and Questions and Doubts, to the genre of erotapokriseis, or “Questions and Responses.” A difficulty (ἀπορία) from a traditional text, or simply a traditional difficulty, is posed, and then an answer resolving, or at least clarifying, the question is given. This genre of intellectual discourse, which followed in the mode of the Alexandrian commentators on Aristotle of the 5th and 6th centuries, was well established in Maximus’ day, both in the philosophical schools and amongst Christian theologians, though it appears to have been more popular amongst the Christians.63 The appeal of this mode of posing ἀπορίαι is founded on both philosophical and pedagogical grounds. The notion of ἀπορία–perplexity, difficulty– is a significant part of the Greek philosophical tradition from Socrates onwards: “Do you suppose that he would have tried to seek or to learn that which he ignorantly thought he already knew, before, having been brought before his lack of knowledge, he fell into perplexity (εἰς ἀπορίαν) and only then desired to know?”64 It is precisely the state of ἀπορία that provokes the quest for understanding. Aristotle also began many of his demonstrations with an ἀπορία as the occasion for his enquiry. As he writes in Metaphysics III at the beginning of his catalogue of opinions concerning the nature of what is: It is necessary first, with a view to the understanding we are seeking, that we lay out the difficulties (ἀπορῆσαι) which must be approached first…For those who wish to find a way forward (τοῖς εὐπορῆσαι βουλομένοις) it is useful to make one’s way through the difficulties thoroughly. For the subsequent way forward is a release from the previous difficulties: to untie the knot is not possible for those who are ignorant of it. But, the difficulty in our thinking shows that there is a knot in this matter. In its difficulties, our thinking resembles those who are bound, for it is impossible in both cases to make an advance forward. Thus, it is

Thomas (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2010), 17-20; I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to use this material here. 63 For a thorough discussion of the genre, see Heinrich Dörrie and Hermann Dörries, “Erotapokriseis” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt, Band VI ed. T. Klauser (Stuttgarr: Anton Hiersemann, 1966), 342-370 (Maximus at 359-361). See also Brian Daley, “Boethius’ Theological Tracts and Early Byzantine Scholasticism,” Medieval Studies 46 (1984), 158-191, especially 163-176, and Klaus Öhler, “Aristotle in Byzantium,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 5:2 (1964), 133-146. Earlier pagan examples of the genre would be Porphyry’s Homeric Questions (Ὁμηρικὰ ζητήματα): Quaestionum homericarum Libri I, ed. A.R. Sodano (Napoli: Giannini & Figli, 1970); Aristotle’s own fragmentary Ἀπορήματα Ὁμηρικά; or Plutarch’s Platonic Questions (Πλατωνικὰ ζητήματα): Plutarch’s Moralia XIII, Part I, ed. and trans. Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 64 Plato, Meno 84c.

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necessary first to have studied all of the difficulties, both because of what has just been said, and because those who enquire without first making their way through the difficulties are like those who are ignorant of the way they should go. In addition, one would not know it if ever that which is sought has been found. To such a one, the end is not clear, but it is clear to one who has already faced the difficulties.65

The way forward is occasioned by what appears to be an obstacle to progress. The ἀπορία provokes the philosophical desire to know and then the dialectical nature of the process of questioning and answering allows for the development of a multifaceted treatment of the difficulty, in which a diversity of issues may be gathered around a central problem. In general, collections of erotapokriseis were arranged in no particular order, and the collections themselves present an artificial sense of unity, since in many cases, particular questions and answers were conceived and written independently of each other, though there would often be a certain coherence with respect to subject matter. Amongst Christian authors, where the genre was especially common in exercises of Scriptural interpretation, a certain order and coherence of collections of erotapokriseis can be discerned and was due to the dependence of the questions on the structure of the scriptural narrative, but even here we find examples of apparently random collections of questions and answers.66 While Maximus’ collection of erotapokriseis that have come to be called the Ambigua (Ἄπορα) to John do generally fit the description of the genre just given, there are certain features of the Ambigua that cause it to diverge from the typical pattern. Unlike most sets of erotapokriseis–including Maximus’ own Questions to Thalassius and Questions and Doubts–which have an explicitly stated question at the head of each section, the chapters of the Ambigua to John often simply present a quotation from Gregory the Theologian and then proceed with an explanation, though some do point to an initial, usually terminological, question. We could say, then, that one aspect of the teaching of the text is its demand that the reader determine dialectically with Maximus himself what the problems are, though we may assume that the initial recipients of the 65 Metaphysics III.1.995a24-b2. Translation modified from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard Peter McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) and Aristotle: The Metaphysics Books I-IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1933]). 66 See Gustave Bardy, “La littérature patristique des Quaestiones et responsiones sur l’Écriture sainte,” Revue Biblique 41 (1932), 210-236, 341-369, 515-537; and 42 (1933), 328-352.

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Ambigua, Archbishop John and his monks at Cyzicus, would have been aware of the issues at play in the quotations, since it appears to have been their own questions, at least in part, that Maximus was addressing. We can be equally sure, however, that the process of rethinking and writing down the various questions and answers led Maximus further in his speculations and afforded him the opportunity to clarify certain aspects of his thought beyond the initial discussions in Cyzicus. More significantly, as I shall show in more detail below, I argue that Maximus’ Ambigua to John exhibit a more precise focus than would have been typical of collections of erotapokriseis since he is using the difficulties in Gregory as an occasion to articulate his own vision of Christian spiritual philosophy and of the role of the contemplation of nature within it. iii. Gregory the Theologian as Authority In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Gregory Nazianzen has been know as “the Theologian” since the Council of Chalcedon (451)67 and is one of only three expounders of the faith to be known by that title, the other two being the Evangelist John the Theologian and the 10th and early 11th century monk and abbot St. Symeon the New Theologian. His views on the possibilities and limits of theological speculation became controversial in the 6th century Origenist crisis, as we shall see below.68 In the later Byzantine world, he was, for some, at least, the supreme exemplar of thought and style69 and the Byzantine hymnographic tradition has incorporated many lines from his orations into its liturgical poetry. By at least the 9th century, complete illuminated editions of Gregory’s orations were in existence, and the reading of his festal orations became a part of the liturgical celebration of the feasts.70 Reading and interpreting Gregory became central to the intellectual life of the Byzantine world, and Maximus’ Ambigua are an early witness to this phenomenon.

67

Paul Gallay, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 27-31 (Discours Théologique) (Paris: Cerf, 1978), 7n.2. Cf. Caroline Μacé, “Gregory of Nazianzus as authoritative voice of Orthodoxy in the sixth century,” Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2006), 27-34. See Chapter 4 below, 180-181; Chapter 5 below, 209. 69 So Michael Psellos (11th c.): “This great father surpasses Demosthenes in political thought, and Plato in philosophy; rather, he surpasses Demosthenes in ideas, and Plato in the power of his verbal expression, and so is superior to them both in these respects,” Opusculum Theologicum 19: Paul Gautier, Michaelis Pselli Theologica I, 75.90-93, cited in Brian Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. 70 George Galavaris, The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 4. 68

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iv. Structure of the Ambigua to John My analysis of the Ambigua to John does not proceed in a directly linear fashion through the text; the text itself is hardly linear. The Ambigua are a sprawling, repetitive, complicated collection of short and long speculative essays, some of which read like notes for a handbook, that raise nearly as many questions as they answer. It is clear that Maximus has what we might call a “system” upon which his various and manifold interpretations of Gregory, Scripture, and other authorities rests, such that the characterization concerning Plotinus, that his writings present “an extremely unsystematic presentation of a systematic philosophy,” 71 is equally applicable to Maximus’ Ambigua to John. As such, a reading of the Ambigua cannot simply be a linear analysis of the unfolding of an argument. Maximus presents no such linear argument and any unfolding is ultimately the product of the reader. However, if our task is to enter Maximus’ “speculative process,” then there is no better way to do this than to enter fully into the throws of his most speculative work. The truly philological disposition focuses on what has been said with as much historical, intellectual, and linguistic rigor as it can muster, yet it also seeks to extend the import of what has been well said beyond its original articulation so that the inner spirit and structure of a great thinker’s thought might become apparent. Despite the unsystematic presentation of the Ambigua as a whole, there is, I argue, a general, if vague, sense of coherence within the overall architecture of its collection of chapters and the organization of my own analysis of the work does, in fact, follow the basic groupings of chapters we are able to discern in the text.72 We may divide the Ambigua into 5 major sections and a conclusion: 1.) Ambigua 6–873 give an initial account of the relationship between soul and body and a foundational analysis of the passibility of human nature; 2.) Ambigua 9–22 are chapters that deal with theoretical issues concerning the nature of philosophy: the nature of language (Amb. 9, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22), the relationship between praxis and contemplation (Amb. 10), and the nature of the soul (Amb. 10, 15, 19); 3.) Ambigua 23–30 are concerned with questions pertaining to the use of language with respect to the relationship between God and the world (Amb. 23), that of the Father and Son (Amb. 24-28), and the titles that 71

A.H. Armstrong, Plotinus I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), viii. I give a complete overview of the structure of the Ambigua to John in an appendix to this text. It shows in greater detail the relationship of the individual Ambigua and sets of Ambigua to one another. 73 Ambigua 1-5 constitute an independent work, the Ambigua to Thomas. 72

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are given to the Son (Amb. 30); 4.) Ambigua 31–44 speak of the various aspects of the economy of salvation as the renewal of nature and the contemplation of nature in Christ; 5.) Ambigua 45–68 give Scriptural examples of responses to the coming of the Word and the renewal of nature in Christ; Conclusion.) Ambiguum 71,74 which I shall discuss at the end of this introduction, serves as a sort of epilogue to the collection of Ambigua and places all of Maximus’ speculation about the cosmos within the domain of “play” in relation to the intellectual reality that lies behind cosmic appearances. It thus returns to a central theme of the first section (Amb. 6–8), that of the instability of the world as a school for the soul, and in this way completes the cycle of Maximus’ reflections. I would emphasize that this scheme is very general and is intended simply to mark certain basic divisions in the collection of chapters. Maximus circles around many of the same themes through the course of the Ambigua, speaking of human passibility, the nature of praxis and contemplation, the interpretation of Scripture, and the economy of salvation across the divisions of the broad sections I have identified here, and there are most definitely a number of chapters that have no significant relationship to the ones around them and could have more naturally been placed elsewhere: they have been placed where they are simply because the quotation they are explaining comes next in the sequence of the oration Maximus happens to be interpreting. Nevertheless, this organization of the chapters into a few large groups does emerge from the study of the Ambigua as a whole, and it indicates the basic scope of Maximus’ concerns in the Ambigua. IV. The Game of Philosophy I would like to conclude this introduction with a word on the scope of Maximus’ natural speculations in the Ambigua to John. It should be clear by now that my priority in reading the Ambigua and the ancient sources generally is not to extract a physical or metaphysical system from them but rather to uncover how they conceive of the contemplation of nature within the wider context of the philosophical life. This is not to say that the systems are unimportant; I shall refer to many elements of the various systems through the course

74 Amb. 69 makes a pedestrian point about the difference between a complete and incomplete sentence, and Amb. 70 makes a general remark about Gregory’s use of rhetoric in his exhortation to virtue. Amb. 70 is not entirely unrelated to Amb. 71 with its emphasis on the Word’s adaptation to the diverse members of His “audience” for their instruction.

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of this study. It is to say, however, that the systems are not decisive for the reality of philosophy and I take my lead in this from Maximus himself, specifically from the concluding chapter of his Ambigua, which, I think, serves as a sort of epilogue to the collection as a whole. In his oration On the Love of the Poor, which is the first oration of Gregory’s that Maximus interprets in the Ambigua, Gregory speaks of being “played with among visible things (παίζεσθαι ἡμᾶς ἐν τοῖς ὁρωμένοις).” 75 As we shall see in Chapter 4, Gregory takes this as an indication that God allows for the disorder of the present world so that the human beings who experience it may be led to seek the changeless realm of divine reality rather than being devoted to the world of change and corruption. Maximus begins the Ambigua to John with a long meditation on human passibility and the experience of the instability of the world. His reflections then carry him into many realms of ascetical, natural, and theological inquiry. In Ambiguum 71, the last chapter of his text, however, in a retrospective summary of what he has observed and tried to say, Maximus calls it all a game, a child’s activity in comparison to the realities that will be known in the age to come. Ambiguum 71 takes its beginning from a line from Gregory’s poetry: “For the exalted Word plays in all kinds of forms, judging His world as He wishes, this way and that.” 76 He begins by identifying the “play” of the Word with the incarnation and explains that when words like play, game (παίζειν, παίγνιον), weakness, or foolishness are used of God they should be taken to indicate God’s superlative possession of precisely their opposite as conceived in human terms, since “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Cor 1.25). To attribute foolishness and weakness to God is to “imply an excess of wisdom and power,” so that for Gregory to speak of God as “playing” is really to attribute to God an excess of “mindfulness” or “understanding” (φρόνησις), which are the opposite of play.77 So, the first way we may speak of the “play” of the Word of God is in terms of the incarnation of God as human in which God enters into the world in a way that defies the conventions of natural understanding. This interpretation, Maximus tells us, is “a sort of digression (παρεκβατικῶς)…a way of setting a paradigm for our study of the proposed difficulty (ὡς προθεωρίαν 75 76 77

G.Naz., Or. 14.20; quoted by Maximus at Amb. 7, 1093A15 Carmina Moralia II, Precepts to Virgins 589-590 (PG 37.624A13-625A1). Amb. 71, 1409A8-C9.

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παραδειγματικὴν τοῦ προτεθέντος ἀπόρου).” 78 He devotes the rest of Ambiguum 71 to a consideration of the world itself as the “play” or “game” of God but the initial “digression” is significant. We shall be concerned with the relationship between nature and Christ in Maximus’ Ambigua and here Maximus shows that the incarnation of Christ is the paradigm for thinking about the world in general and precisely the world of change: perhaps the screen of intermediary realities, which is an equal distance from the extremes, is called the ‘play’ of God by the great teacher because the intermediaries have a flowing and easily changed state, or, to put it more appropriately, because they possess a stable flow.79

Maximus explains a bit further on that by “intermediary realities (τὰ μέσα)” he means “the multitude of visible things that now encompasses humanity, or in which humanity finds itself,” whereas “the extremes (τὰ ἄκρα)” refer to the substance of what does not appear (ὑπόστασιν τῶν μὴ φαινομένων; cf. Heb 11.1) and will without fail encompass humanity, which have rightly and truly been made and come into being according to the ineffable and primordial purpose and logos of divine goodness.80

Maximus makes a distinction between what is real and enduring in creation, that which is invisible, and that which changes, the visible world with which human beings are concerned in this age. The “play” of God refers to the changing visible reality in contrast to the “real” aspect of creation. Maximus brings forward a text from Dionysius the Areopagite as a contribution to understanding Gregory’s meaning. He quotes a passage from the Divine Names where Dionysius writes, the Cause of all Himself has gone out of Himself through an excess of erotic goodness in His beautiful and benevolent love for all things, which is His provision for everything that exists. It is as though He were charmed by goodness, affection, and love, and were drawn down from His transcendence removed from all things and into all things but in accordance with His ecstatic and transcendent power of not being removed from Himself.81

78

Amb. 71, 1412A4-5. Amb. 71, 1412B7-12. 80 Amb. 71, 1412C7-9. 81 Ps.Dion.Areo. De Divinis Nominibus IV.13, 159.9-14; Coprus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990). 79

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The notion of God being “charmed (θέλγεται)” and “going out of himself” corresponds to Gregory’s use of the term “play” in reference to God. But what do these terms mean? Maximus uses the image of parents raising and training children to explain Gregory’s statement: parents who condescend to their children to help them overcome their slowness seem to engage in childish, indulgent play, such as playing with nuts and indulging them with dice, or presenting multi-colored flowers to them, and clothes dyed with many colors that are engaging for the senses. They divert their attention or amaze them since children do not yet have any other work. After a little while, the parents hand the children over to the schools and thereby impart to them a complete education and activities proper to them.82

In a similar way, the God over all brings us as children in His care into a state of amazement or even diversion through the factual aspect of the nature of created phenomena when we see and come to know them. Then He introduces the study of the more spiritual logoi that are within them, and finally leads us to a more mystical knowledge of Himself through theology, as far as this is possible. This last stage of knowledge is absolutely pure of all multiplicity and synthesis in form, quality, shape, and quantity–which are many and abundant in the preparatory teachings–and thus fulfills the highest level of contemplation. This is what the Godbearing Gregory refers to as ‘playing,’ and what the God-bearing Dionysius calls ‘being charmed’ and ‘going out of oneself.’83

Maximus’ mention of “the factual aspect of the nature of created phenomena (ἱστοριώδους τῶν φαινομένων κτισμάτων φύσεως)” recalls the traditional name of natural philosophy as περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία so that giving a coherent, factbased account of nature becomes, in Maximus, a game God allows human beings to play in order to teach them greater things through the principles they learn while experiencing nature. When that which truly exists (τὰ κυρίως καὶ ἀληθῶς ὄντα) comes to manifestation in the age to come, however, the reality of nature as we experience it now will appear as “playthings,” for when the arrangement of present and visible reality is compared with the truth of divine and prototypical reality, it will not be considered really to exist at all by those who are worthy to contain the fullness of the beauty of the divine 82 83

Amb. 71, 1413B9-C7. Amb. 71, 1413C7-D7.

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blossoming (as far as this is possible), just as no one thinks that a toy (παίγνιον) is real when compared to an actual, truly existing thing.84

The disciplined contemplation of nature, then, is a sort of game we play in order to begin to learn the principles of what we shall encounter when we reach the maturity of the future age. It is not disconnected from that reality; it is, after all, the Word Himself who “plays” in visible things so that the games are filled with divine wisdom. Indeed, despite the talk of play, Maximus is far from dismissive of the natural order. As we shall see, his various refutations of “Origenist” positions derive their impetus from his deep sense of the integrity of the world and the depth of its beauty as well as his rationally grounded understanding of the nature of being and symbol. The “play of the Word” is not to be taken to imply that the world and our thinking about it do not matter any more than the contemplation of the incarnate Christ Himself should be so taken. Indeed, we find this notion of “serious play” before Maximus in Plato’s Laws, where the Athenian stranger tells Clinias, we should keep our seriousness for serious things, and not waste it on trifles, and that, while God is the real goal of all beneficent serious endeavor, man, as we said before, has been constructed as a toy (παίγνιον) for God, and this is, in fact, the finest thing about him. All of us, then, men and women alike, must fall in with our role and spend life in making our play as perfect as possible.85

Plotinus also speaks of play and refers to his speculations about nature and contemplation in Ennead III.8, On Nature, Contemplation, and the One, as “playing” (παίζοντες; we shall study this and related Plotinian treatises at the end of chapter 2 below). This is the spirit in which we should take Maximus’ notion of play as well. It is a serious matter to consider the nature of the world, which comes to us as an “economy of phenomena (τῆς τῶν φαινομένων οἰκονομίας),”86 but what we say as compared to the reality itself is still a game. For Maximus this is a recognition that our accounts of the natural flux of the cosmos are always provisional and intended to lead us beyond themselves and the reality they describe to the logoi that give this reality its identity, make

84

Amb. 71, 1416A3-10. Plato, Laws 7.803c, trans. A.E. Taylor, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 86 Amb. 42, 1348D14. 85

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its articulation possible, and constitute its divine origin and destination. Maximus’ Ambigua, with their tangled sentences of speculation, themselves a reflection of the instability and confusion of the world, are intended to drive thought toward the divine stability that is the world’s final end but which it does not yet enjoy. Let the present account be taken in the same way, as an εἰκὸς λόγος of what Maximus may have seen in the life of things.

PART I MAXIMUS’ PHILOSOPHICAL AND PATRISTIC FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 2 THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY Introduction The Greeks are often credited with “discovering nature” and so being the first in the Western tradition to seek to give a rational account of the universe.1 Socrates refers to the intellectual activity of his youth–the investigation of the causes of what exists, the arising and nourishment of living creatures, the relations between the human senses and the elements, i.e. the modes of inquiry we have come to associate with those Greek thinkers whom we consider to be “pre-Socratic”–as περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία, an organized account of one’s observations and experiences of “nature.”2 Plato refers to the phrase as though it named an established and technical mode of inquiry, and indeed many of the works of the first Greek scientists and philosophers are referred to as Περὶ Φύσεως, though it is unclear just when this title was affixed to the works in question.3 Regardless of the historical answer to this question, the birth of Greek science and philosophy is marked by the question of accounting for the world and its various phenomena in a way that was not reduced to (though not totally independent from) the imaginative structure of myth. 1 To give but one example, see Werner Jaeger’s chapter entitled “Philosophical Speculation: The Discovery of the World Order” in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 1945): “…it was an innovation in the very principles of thought when the Ionians, assimilating and elaborating the empirical knowledge of celestial phenomena which they got from the Orient, used that knowledge independently to help them discover the origin and nature of the universe; and when they subjected the myths dealing with the real and visible world, the myths of creation, to theoretical and causal inquiry. That is the true origin of scientific thought. That is the historical achievement of the Greeks,” 156. 2 Phaedo 96a.6-8 ff. 3 See Gerard Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 11-35, for a convenient summary.

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It has long been observed that this desire to give an account of the cosmos as cosmos was bound, in our earliest sources, to questions of the organization of human life and activity, what came to be referred to as πολιτεία or τὰ ἠθικά.4 Indeed, my reading of the sources here will seek to uncover the foundations of this orientation and possibility. We shall see through the course of the analysis that within the diversity and disparity in the early history of Greek thought there is a central intuition that binds it together as a tradition and gives its cosmic speculation its essentially human focus. The intuition simply stated is that the purpose of intellectual activity as the disciplined activity of thought is to draw the thinker into union with What Is, the object of thought, or as Parmenides will say, to come to the realization that “thinking and being are the same.” It has been asserted that this intuition arose from the fact that the “discovery of the order of nature” coincided for the Greeks with the discovery and articulation of the order of the soul5 so that on the final analysis “cosmology” was inseparable from “psychology” (taken as the awareness and articulation of consciousness). The study of the Greek notion of contemplation, therefore, inevitably draws us to the nature of the one who contemplates and reveals this one as inseparable from that which is contemplated. But what is the relationship between the thought of being and the contemplation of nature? As our analysis unfolds, we shall observe how the various thinkers navigate what I shall identify presently as the basic distinction between being and nature in Parmenides, seeing how different notions of the philosophical life developed in response to this basic question. This interpretation of the foundational figures of the Greek philosophical tradition will explore the various ways in which the contemplation of nature manifested itself, showing thereby how the two basic modes of philosophical life–praxis and contemplation–were related to one another. We begin this account not with Hesiod, whose mythical account of the cosmos had clear practical aims,6 and not with the Milesians–Thales, who famously predicted a total eclipse of the sun, and his successors Anaximander and Anaximenes–who are regarded as the first true “natural scientists,” but with 4 By, for example, Léon Robin, Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit, trans. M.R. Dobie (New York: Knopf, 1928), 17-70; Eric Voegelin, Order and History II: The World of the Polis, 165-170; Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 21. 5 Voegelin, The World of the Polis, 168-169. 6 Robin, Greek Thought, 19-20.

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Parmenides and Heraclitus, the two figures who truly inaugurate the tradition of reflecting upon the very possibility of knowledge of the cosmos itself.7 They were not, however, or at least have not been universally regarded as, φυσικοί –“natural philosophers”–by the tradition. Because of his denial of motion and change, Parmenides was excluded from the company of φυσικοί by Aristotle, for whom physics was, by definition, the study of that which Parmenides claimed to be impossible and unthinkable.8 His work has, nevertheless, come down to us under the title Περὶ φύσεως. Heraclitus’ collection of sayings, which was likewise known among some of the ancients, and is known today in its fragmentary form, as Περὶ φύσεως, was also known in antiquity as Μούσαι (“The Muses”), and even ἀκριβὲς οἰάκισμα πρὸς σταθμὴν βίου (“precise governance for the measuring of life”), for it was claimed by at least one reader that the book is more properly to be understood, not as Περὶ φύσεως, but as Περὶ πολιτείας (“On government;” Plato’s Republic is traditionally referred to as Πολιτεία), a discourse in which the physical concepts serve as examples (ἐν παραδείγματος εἴδει) of the right ordering of human life.9 Despite the fact that Parmenides and Heraclitus appear to have been the early Greek thinkers least interested in “nature” per se, they were undoubtedly the most attentive to the theoretical concerns underlying the contemplation of nature so that it is precisely they who give us the beginnings of a conceptualization of the θεωρία in θεωρία φυσική, and as I shall show, this theorizing is bound for both of them, in their own ways, to the question of the right ordering of human life. It is on this basis that we begin with them. I. Parmenides: Nature and the Guidance of the Soul According to Hegel, it was Parmenides10 who “began philosophy proper.”11 Hegel grants Parmenides this honorary place because, in his estimation, it is in 7 Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1934). 8 Aristotle, Physics 184b25: “To investigate if what is (τὸ ὄν) is one and without motion is not to investigate about nature (οὐ περὶ φύσεώς ἐστι σκοπεῖν). 9 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX.12, 15. 10 Eric Perl introduces his study of Maximus with a discussion of Parmenides, against whom he sets the Platonic doctrine of participation in relief, asserting that the Parmenidean “eternal, homogeneous” one, in striving for absolute intelligibility and unity ultimately collapses into utter unintelligibility and dualism in that a “polar opposition between Being and seeming” necessarily arises as a consequence of Parmenides’ monist account: See Methexis, 13-18. My reading of Parmenides here has an entirely different purpose. 11 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 254.

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Parmenides that “an advance into the region of the ideal is observable” for the first time, and so, as the beginning of what he would take as culminating in his own thought, Hegel places Parmenides at the beginning of the history of philosophy as its founding father. An analysis of this trajectory is certainly not our concern here, and while it may be going a bit too far to say that all of Plato is “footnotes to Parmenides of Elea,”12 it is beyond question that of all the early Greek thinkers, Parmenides, in the way he posed the questions of thinking, being, change, and identity, is the most significant and radical. Plato himself acknowledges this in a sort of back-handed way in the Theaetetus, where Socrates says, “Let all the sages be gathered together in a row–with the exception of Parmenides,” referring to the sages who held the thesis that “nothing ever is, but is always only becoming,” for Parmenides stood as a man apart by denying this.13 We begin with Parmenides, then, even though accounts of pre-Platonic philosophy typically consider Heraclitus before Parmenides, because of his radical perspective. The extreme and elusive language of Parmenides’ poem has elicited amongst modern philosophers and scholars many different accounts of what the poem is about. Questions arise, in particular, with respect to the meaning and scope of the entire second part of the poem, the cosmology of the so-called “way of opinion.” Heidegger tried to think the Greek concept of truth (ἀλήθεια) along with Parmenides in a 1942-43 lecture course.14 With respect to the context of early Greek cosmology, Mourelatos has suggested that Parmenides does not really give a cosmology at all, “still one more guess about the nature or reality of things.” Rather, Parmenides asks, in effect, “What exactly is it for something to be the nature or the reality of things?”15 Others have similarly taken the poem of Parmenides as essentially a methodological text: “Parmenides’ starting point is the possibility, not exactly of rational thought, but of scientific research;”16 “It is in Parmenides that the method of the search for what a thing is itself becomes a philosophical issue as much as the question of the cor-

12

David Gallop, Parmenides of Elea (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 3. See Theaetetus 152e1-9. 14 As Hans George Gadamer reports, his teacher ultimately acknowledged that “his thesis that Parmenides had to some extent anticipated his own philosophy (with respect to the overcoming of metaphysics) could not be maintained,” The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 1998), 111. 15 Alexander Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 134. 16 Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (Boston: Routledge, 1982), 163. 13

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rect understanding of what there is.”17 It is this cluster of ideas that is of primary concern for us. For Parmenides, the discourse περὶ φύσεως as the discourse of coming forth and passing away, of the interaction of contraries, etc. is ultimately a necessary threshold over which one must pass on the way to the singularity of truth. Thus the images (εἰκόνες) of the proem and of the second half of the poem, the Way of Seeming/Opinion (Δόξα), form a foundational “εἰκὸς λόγος” (fr. 8) that must be overcome, but not before it is traversed. The question of method, μέθοδος, as the question of the right path (ὅδος, cf. fr. 2) to take leads Parmenides to give an account of the intellect’s journey to itself as that which thinks being; hence, the focus of this analysis is on the conditions, according to Parmenides, of contemplation. However, Parmenides does use the word φύσις (“nature” and derivatives) in his poem, and before we come to the heart of the matter, it will be instructive to observe how φύσις is at work in Parmenides in order to see to what extent, or in what mode, Parmenides may appropriately stand at the head of our inquiry into the contemplation of nature in Greek thought, not only, as we have seen, on the side of contemplation, but also on the side of the concept of nature as such. Parmenides uses the noun form, φύσις, at 10.1,10.5, and 16.3. He uses a verbal form at 8.10 (φῦν), 10.6, and 19.1 (ἔφυ in both of these latter). Immediately we see the ambiguity of these usages, for all but one occur in the second part of the poem (Δόξα), which the goddess who guides Parmenides has said is not worthy of true commitment (ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής, Fr. 1.30). In Parmenides’ usage, φύσις belongs to the discourse of generation, mixture, the interplay of opposites, in short, the realm of seeming and ultimately of non-being, which cannot be thought as such. Fragment 10 provides three instances of φύσις, so we shall begin by observing it in full: You will come to know (εἴσηι) the ethereal nature (φύσιν), all of the signs in the air and the invisible works of the pure light of the undefiled sun, and from what place they have come forth into being (ὁππόθεν ἐξεγένοντο), and you will learn the wandering works of the round-eyed moon and its nature (φύσιν). You will see (εἰδήσεις) heaven holding fast on both sides and whence it has arisen (ἔφυ), and that guiding Necessity has bound it to hold the limits of the stars.

17 Patricia Curd, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 47.

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Accounting for such astronomical phenomena was of primary importance to the first Greek φυσικοί, and Parmenides captures here something of the scope of their inquiry. However, these realities are precisely unreal according to the strictures of the first part of the Poem, Ἀλήθεια, which recounts the only way that thought can progress. φύσις is not, properly speaking, something to be known. Fragment 19 states: Thus, these things have arisen (ἔφυ) for you according to belief and now are, and afterwards they will come to completion from this point by being nourished. Men have established a name for each of them as a distinguishing mark.

In this case, the notion of φύσις is used within a context outside of true being (I shall argue a reason for this below) as fr. 19 draws φύσις as “arising” or “growth” into a direct relation to δόξα: “according to belief.” Even the one usage that occurs in the way of truth at 8.10 casts doubt upon the possibility of discerning the nature of things: For what birth would you seek out for [what is]? From what place would it grow, and to what end? I will permit you neither to say nor to think, ‘from what is not.’ For ‘it is not’ can be neither said nor thought. What necessity awakened it, starting from what it is, to come forth (φῦν) either later or earlier? Thus, it must either be entirely or not at all. (fr. 8.6-10)

Comparing this to the passages above confirms the intuition that φύσις has no real place in what is, and thus cannot be thought. In its primordial sense of “arising into being,” φύσις does not obtain in the way of truth. In this sense, what is has no nature, no arising; what is has being. Thus, the pathway of the way of truth leads not to φύσις but to τὸ ἐόν, that which is. For Parmenides, this journey to ἐόν is the journey of and to νοῦς, “intellect,” “true understanding.” It is often asserted that before Parmenides, and to a certain extent in Parmenides himself, νοῦς and its derivatives refer to the fundamental realization by the mind both of the presence of something (a situation, an object), on the one hand, and of its essential nature, on the other.18 18 W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. II (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 17-18: “The verb translated think of (noein) could not, in and before [Parmenides’] time, convey the notion of imaging something non-existent, for it connoted primarily an act of immediate recognition”; Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, p. 103: “We usually render the word ‘noein’ in translation as ‘thinking’; however, we should not forget that the primary meaning of the word is not to become absorbed in oneself, nor reflection, but, on the contrary, pure openness for everything. In regard to nous, it is not, first of all, a question of one asking oneself what is seen to be there in each case but of observing that there is something

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νοῦς refers to perception as understanding. This notion persists in Parmenides to a certain extent and is what underlies the famous fragment 3: …τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι: “…thinking and being are the same,” as well as the more fully expressed passage in fragment 8: ταὐτὸν δ᾽ εστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἔστι νόημα/ οὐ γὰρ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος…/ εὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν: “Thinking and that for the sake of which thought is are the same. For you will not find thinking without what is” (8.34-36). Thinking is bound to reality in a fundamental sense. There is no thinking without what is. However, Parmenides (and, as we shall see, Heraclitus) appears to be the first to assert in a systematic way that human beings can and do try to fix νοῦς on “what is not” and thus can and do fall into absolute error.19 Parmenides is warned to “bar your thinking (νόημα) from this way of inquiry” (i.e. ascribing being to what is not; 7.2), the implication being that thinking (νόημα) may indeed seek this way. Similarly, in fragment 6, the goddess denies Parmenides the way of non-being: For I bar you from this first way of inquiry, indeed from the way which twoheaded mortals who know nothing make for themselves, for lack of means in their hearts guides their wandering minds (πλακτὸν νόον), the dull and blind who are carried about astonished, a race without discernment, for whom coming to be and non-being are considered to be the same and not the same, whose path turns back on itself.

The mind that takes the path of duality is πλακτὸν νόον, a phrase that, to ancient Greek ears, would have sounded paradoxical. And yet, Parmenides clearly wishes to express the desolation of turning the mind away from reality and so falling into error. It is appropriate, then, that Parmenides should have adopted the poetic trope of a journey to the divine realm and the proem (fragment 1) may rightly be seen as “the key to the whole.”20 Indeed, the assertion that the proem is incidental to the thought contained in Parmenides’ poem21 misses the specificities of the imagery, for it is these specificities–in the midst of the stock images of

there.” See also Kurt von Fritz, “ΝΟΥΣ, ΝΟΕΙΝ, and their Derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy (Excluding Anaxagoras): Part I. The Beginnings to Parmenides,” Classical Philology (40:4) 1945, 223-242. 19 See von Fritz, “ΝΟΥΣ, ΝΟΕΙΝ, and their Derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy,” 237 ff. 20 John Burnet, Greek Philosophy Part I: Thales to Plato (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 65, though Burnet spells this out differently than I do here. 21 Barnes, for his part, sees the interpretation of the “long allegorical prologue” as “of little philosophical importance,” The Presocratic Philosophers, 156.

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maidens, goddesses, pathways to light, and so on–that reveal the coherence of the poem, and therefore of Parmenides’ thought as a whole. The longest fragment we have, fragment 8, begins with a characterization of the “signs” of reality, of what is: There is only still left the account of this way: that it is. On this way there are many signs: what is is ungenerated and indestructible, for it is perfectly sound,22 unmoved, and endless. It never was and never will be, since the all is altogether in the present, one, continuous. For what birth would you seek out for it? From what place would it grow, and to what end? I will permit you neither to say nor to think, ‘from what is not.’ For ‘it is not’ can be neither said nor thought. (8.1-8)

That which is proper for thought is “ungenerated, indestructible, unmoved, endless.” It has no chronology; “it never was and never will be, since the all is altogether in the present.” It only is, and only it is. Further on we learn: It is not divided since everything is alike. It is not more in one place and less in another, which would militate against its cohesion, but is entirely full of being. In this way it is entirely coherent, for being draws near to being. (8.22-25)

The goal of the journey is the attainment of the intuition of this unitary reality, seen all at once in the present. When νοῦς is truly itself it is aligned with τὸ ἐόν in its utter simplicity and unity. The beginning of the poem, however, is characterized by duality, by transition, and by motion in ways that evoke what will come in the second part of the poem, which itself gives an orderly but untrustworthy account of reality that is based upon mortal opinion: The mares who carry me as far as spirit would reach were sending me, from the time when the deities were leading me to walk upon the famous way, which carries the knowing man everywhere (unharmed). I was being born along there, for the mares straining to draw the chariot were carrying me there, and the maidens led the way. The axle blazing in the axle-box sent forth a cry like the sound of a pipe from the hole in the axle-box (for it was pressed hard on both sides by both wheels whirling), when the maiden daughters of the Sun were hastening to escort me, leaving behind the habitations of night for the light, pushing back the veils on their heads with their hands.

22 οὐλομελές; some ancient sources have οὖλον μουνογενές, or μοῦνον μουνογενές: “a whole of one kind,” “alone of one kind.”

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The gates of the paths of Night and Day are there, and there is a lintel on either side, and a stone threshold. They are ethereal, filled with great doors. Muchavenging Justice holds their alternating bolts. The maidens spoke gently, discretely with soft words to persuade Her, that She would swiftly thrust open the fastened lock for them. They made a wide chasm of the doors to fly open, and the brazen hinges fit together with bolts and pins to pivot in their sockets, each in their turn. There indeed the maidens led the chariot and the horses straight through them on the path that was laid there. (1.1-21)

From the first line we see that Parmenides’ inquiry is driven by θυμός: “The mares who carry me as far as spirit (θυμός) should reach.” It is θυμός, the affective center of spiritual power for the early Greeks, that impels Parmenides on the journey to the real and this element would remain as a permanent part of intellectual life in Greek thought. Parmenides perceives that it is θυμός that drives him on, yet he also senses himself as being drawn along, as being carried by something that is beyond his own internal drive. The horse-drawn chariot as a symbol for the soul would, of course, become a stock image for later thinkers, but it is the affectivity of the image, the sense of being drawn along by a force one’s own but beyond oneself, that would provide the substance of philosophical praxis for the later schools of philosophical therapeutics.23 To come to the specifics of the poetic imagery, the chariot has its “axle blazing in the axle-box,” which “sent forth a cry like the sound of a pipe from the hole in the axle-box (for it was pressed hard on both sides [ἐπείγετο… ἀμφοτέρωθεν] by both wheels whirling).” This passage evokes the image of “heaven holding fast on both sides (ἀμφὶς ἔχοντα)” (10.5), as though the ringing from the friction of the axle and the wheels emanated from the interactions of the “two forms” (8.53) that constitute mortal thinking on supposed cosmic contrarieties. The young man Parmenides is met, as he leaves “behind the habitations of night for the light”–another fundamental duality that will appear later in fragment 9–by young maidens: the κοῦρος and the κοῦραι come together in a confluence of the basic and generative duality of male and female (fragments 12, 17, 18). He comes to “the gates of the paths of Night and Day” with “a lintel on either side” (ἀμφὶς ἔχει, again recalling the ἀμφὶς ἔχοντα of heaven in 10.5). The doors that form the gateway for the paths of night and day are hung on “alter23 See, for example, the descriptions in Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

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nating bolts” (κληῖδας ἀμοιβούς), fastening hinges that “pivot in their sockets, each in their turn (ἀμοιβαδὸν εἰλίξασαι)” in order to open the way to the goddess who will teach him. He passes through alternating dualities, symbolized by the doors and hinges, the inner and the outer, and comes to perhaps the foundational duality of all dualities, the difference between divine and human, immortal and mortal, when he finally comes face to face with the goddess. And as the goddess begins her instruction, she explains that the κοῦρος shall have to learn two ways, “both the peaceful heart of well-turning Truth and the opinions of mortals, to which no true commitment should be given” (1.28-30), where, as I have argued, it is nature and not being that holds sway. The initial reason given for this twofold instruction is contained in one of the more difficult phrases of the poem to understand and translate. Parmenides must be taught the mortal way of thinking ὡς τὰ δοκοῦντα χρῆν δοκίμως εἶναι διὰ παντὸς πάντα περῶντα

A literal translation would read “since it was necessary that the things that appear and entirely pervade all things be acceptable.”24 Despite the distinction between being and seeming that forms the heart of the critique of mortal opinions,25 Parmenides will be shown the way of opinion that is based upon seeming since it is necessary that appearances be accepted initially as a preliminary stage to the knowledge of being to come later, knowledge that will entail the total rejection of the conclusions that would follow from investing appearances of duality and change with being. We have in the proem, then, an indication of why Parmenides included a fairly standard natural cosmology, which the rigor of his logic rejects, as a part of the teaching from the goddess. It is necessary to pass through a false but seemingly acceptable account of reality if one is finally to overcome error. As the goddess says at the end of fragment 8, “I declare to you the whole order as something likely (ἐοικότα), so that no mortal way of thinking should ever overtake you” (8.60-61). A plausible–and false–account is given and it is the denial

24 See Jaap Mansfeld, Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschliche Welt (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964), 156-162, and Leonardo Tarán, Parmenides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 202-216 for different accounts of the possible translations of this passage. 25 See Fragment 7: “neither let conventional wisdom force you along the way of much-experience, to use an unseeing eye and ringing ear and tongue, but judge with reason the much-contested refutation that flows forth from me.”

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of it that moves Parmenides to the unity of νοῦς and τὸ ἐόν and steels him against falling into error and away from reality. It is within this context, then, that we are to understand Parmenides’ notion, to speak in a later idiom, of the “contemplation of nature.” The natural, the realm of arising into being, of the mixture of opposites, of decay, is ultimately the realm of misleading appearances whose dualities must be overcome for the understanding of reality, what is, to be attained. This understanding is itself the awareness that being and νοῦς are bound together so that to see what truly is is to see it as an undifferentiated and timeless unity. The poem of Parmenides, then, is an attempt to situate an account of the natural world, which arises from empirical observations of motion, change, the alternating interactions of opposites–all of which, for Parmenides, are illusory and fundamentally incoherent–within the human quest to encounter reality as νοεῖν τοῦ ἐόντος: the thinking of what is. It is a call to free oneself of the delusions that arise from unthinking reliance upon the senses and to commit oneself to that alone which is worthy of true commitment, the way of truth. II. Heraclitus: Nature and Language If Parmenides’ discourse seeks after νοῦς and τὸ ἐόν, in Heraclitus it is λόγος that forms the center of gravity for thought. I have claimed that Heraclitus has not necessarily been regarded as, strictly speaking, a φυσικός; we should observe, however, that Aristotle classifies Heraclitus along with other φυσικοί in his rendition of the various theories concerning the substance that underlies all of reality, mentioning that Heraclitus considers fire to be the first principle.26 It should also be said that Heraclitus’ phrase, φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (fr. 123), a phrase which came to be understood as “nature loves to hide itself,” played a role in inscribing the search for the hidden nature of things in the Western intellectual tradition. This idea of the search for the “nature” or meaning of reality, whatever Heraclitus originally meant by the phrase φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ,27 is appropriately addressed to Heraclitus’ use of the word λόγος, so our 26 Aristotle, Metaphysica 984a7-8, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Volume I, ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1924]). 27 Pierre Hadot argues that the phrase φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ originally meant something like “what is born (φύσις) tends (φιλεῖ) to disappear (κρύπτεσθαι),” in consonance with the typical dialectic of Heraclitus’ thought, and only later took on the more familiar meaning of “nature loves to hide,” The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006) 7-14. The book traces the effect this idea of “nature’s veil” has had on the history of Western thought.

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reflections here will focus on this multivalent term. We shall see that in Heraclitus λόγος as “cosmic principle” and λόγος as speech–specifically Heraclitus’ speech–come to permeate each other as inseparable realities. The meaning of nearly every fragment of Heraclitus is in dispute; his ancient epithet “the Obscure,” “the Dark One” (ὁ σκοτεινός) was not given for nothing. Aristotle famously observed that one often is unsure of whether a certain word of his text goes with the one before it or the one after, 28 an indication, perhaps, of an intentional obscurity on the part of Heraclitus. There are, however, certain habits of thought, certain characteristic pathways that mark the sayings of Heraclitus: the co-inherence of opposites, the all-pervasive quality of λόγος, the ultimate unity of all things. Our task, however, is not to identify these and attempt to flesh out a cosmology based upon them. Rather, our task is to discern what it means for Heraclitus to understand the λόγος, how Heraclitus is looking at the phenomena such that he would say ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή: “the way up and the way down is one and the same” (fr. 60); or εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν: “we are and we are not” (fr. 49a); more precisely, what is it for Heraclitus to think and give an account of the world, to be as one awake rather than as one asleep (fr. 1)? What is the form of life of the one who speaks “with understanding” (ξὺν νόωι, fr. 114)? Heraclitus tells us “extreme erudition (πολυμαθίη) does not teach one how to obtain understanding (νόον ἔχειν οὐ διδάσκει, fr. 40).” He is after something more than the learning available to him from “Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Hecateus,” men of wide learning, Heraclitus would say, but not of understanding. We have seen how the ancients understood the scope of Heraclitus’ work in different ways: as pertaining to nature, as pertaining to the right conduct of life, as pertaining to the government of the polis, though these certainly are not to be cleanly separated from each other. Amongst modern scholars, Klaus Held has given an account of Heraclites (and Parmenides) from within the discipline of phenomenology in which he argues that the polemic against “the many” and their lack of understanding, which appears in a number of fragments, is of central concern to Heraclitus’ thought as a whole and is his way of marking the transition from pre- or non-philosophical life to properly philosophical

28 Aristotle, Ars Rhetorica 1407b14-18, Aristotelis Ars Rhetorica, ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), referring to Heraklitus fr. 1.

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thought.29 Earlier, and on a simpler level, the great editor of the Presocratics, Hermann Diels, saw the grounding of Herclitus’ work in his statement, “I searched myself” (fr. 101), so that Heraclitus’ thinking, on this view, would have pertained fundamentally to his knowledge of himself. It is this awareness of oneself as possessed of a mind and a speech that are open to the cosmos in a conscious way that will serve as the framework for my reading of Heraclitus. Moreover, the mind will be shown to have the same structure as the world it thinks and thus to be inseparable from it.30 Fragment 1, which our source, Sextus Empiricus, claims is the beginning (ἐναρχόμενος) of Heraclitus’ book “On nature,” establishes the framework for our inquiry: Human beings do not comprehend the logos that always is (τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι),31 either before they have heard about it or once they have heard about it. For although all things come to be according to this logos, they are like to those who have no experience (of it), even when they experience such words and deeds as I describe by distinguishing each thing according to nature and explaining how it is (κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει). But everyone else is unaware of what they do when they are awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep.

There are many phrases in this passage that are of importance and have been the subject of intense scrutiny amongst scholars: all things come to be according to the logos (whatever it is); Heraclitus describes his activity as “distinguishing each thing according to nature and explaining how it is,” which sounds like the beginning of a statement of method. However, we begin with the subject of the first clause, the ἄνθρωποι ἀξύνετοι, the “uncomprehending human beings,” who are “like to those who have no experience, even when they experience” and are

29 Klaus Held, Heraklit, Parmenides und der Anfang von Philosophie und Wissenschaft: ein phänomenologische Besinnung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 127-132. 30 Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: an Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 21: Heraclitus’ “central insight” is the “identity of structure between the inner, personal world of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe.” 31 See Geoffrey Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 34-40, for a discussion of the various ways this phrase has been translated. For his part, Kirk takes the ἀεί (“always”) as modifying ἀξύνετοι (“do not comprehend”) rather than ἐόντος (“is”). Kahn discerns a deliberate and poetic sense of ambiguity in the phrase (and in the fragments generally) and thus translates, “Although this account (logos) holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard…”: The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 97.

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“unaware of what they do when they are awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep.” The way things are is not understood by human beings, even though that which defines reality, the logos, is ξυνός, “common,” or “accessible to all”: “…it is necessary to follow what is common (τῷ ξυνῷ)”– clearly a play with ἀξύνετοι and ξὺν νόωι, “with understanding.”32 Although the logos is common (τοῦ λόγου δ᾽ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ), the multitude live (ζώουσιν οἱ πόλλοι) as though they have their own private way of thinking (ἰδίαν φρόνησιν)” (fr. 2). The nature of reality is such that it is accessible to human understanding and human understanding is directed towards and open to the structure or arrangement (κόσμος) of reality. Nevertheless, human beings are capable of estranging themselves from what is common to them and the cosmos, and are therefore like those who sleep, unmindful of their present state and forgetful of what they do. “Those who speak with understanding (ξὺν νόωι λέγοντας),” by contrast, who “rely upon what is the common property of all” (fr. 114), are those who, like Heraclitus, can say, “I have searched myself” (ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν, fr. 101), have attended to the logos, and understand that “all is one”: “attending…to the logos, it is wise (σοφόν) to confess (ὁμολογεῖν) that all is one (ἕν πάντα εἶναι)” (fr. 50). Attention to the logos brings the simultaneous understanding of self and cosmos, that is, the confession (ὁμο-λογεῖν, saying the same thing, being the same as the λόγος) that “all is one,” and in particular that oneself is one with the cosmos. This confession is called “wise” by Heraclitus, which, for him, indicates that it is bound up with the very practical concerns of discerning everything one encounters. “Wisdom is one thing: knowing how to determine how all things are driven through all things (ἕν τὸ σοφόν· ἐπίστασθαι γνώμην, ὅκη κυβερνᾶται33 πάντα διὰ πάντων)” (fr. 41). Again, this comes through λόγος, which we may now try to translate. Its basic meaning is, of course, “word,” something spoken, and there are those who deny that Heraclitus’ use of it goes much further than this.34 But, to say that 32

See Kirk, Cosmic Fragments, 57-58, for discussion of the state of the text at this point. Following Kirk’s emendation, Cosmic Fragments, 386-389. He writes, in relation to wisdom, “The use of the word σοφόν emphasizes once again that the apprehension of the Logos, and the perception that all things are really one, is not a philosophical luxury but a pragmatical necessity for men. They themselves are connected with their surroundings, and their relations with those surroundings are obviously improved if this connexion is understood…in its human application, [the word σοφόν] always seems to apply to an intellectual and practical accord between men and their environment,” Cosmic Fragments, 71. 34 E.g. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, “Most scholars have found in ‘logos’ a technical term, and they have striven to discover a metaphysical sense for it. These strivings are vain…The noun logos picks up, 33

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logos “only” means word or account, as though this were trivial, is to miss something essential. In fr. 93, Heraclitus sets λέγει (the verbal form of λόγος) against κρύπτει (to hide, obscure, cover over): “The master whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks directly nor obscures, but rather gives a sign (οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει).” Speaking is the opposite of hiding, the word is the opposite of the crypt. λόγος, then, as that according to which all things come to be, and as that which directs all things, can best be understood as that which uncovers the order of the cosmos and is itself identical with this order; it is that which is uncovered. In this way the λόγος that is Heraclitus’ discourse and the λόγος as that according to which all things take place achieve a confluence so that Heraclitus’ speech has its origin in and is reflective of the “λόγος that always is.” If one is to be a σοφός, one must come to this articulation and hear in it the declaration that “all is one.” And yet, the multitude disregard this articulation, which is common and accessible to all, and follow their own private way of thinking, which locks them up in themselves as those who are asleep and closes to them the reality of the world. Just as “thinking is common to all (ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν)” (fr. 113), so the possibility–and the reality for Heraclitus–of a lack of thinking is common to all. It is this duality–apprehension of the ξυνὸς λόγος or adherence to ἴδια φρόνησις–that underlies Heraclitus’ understanding of what it means to be wise, to know how things hold together. The σοφός perceives unity as grounding all duality, and duality as grounding all unity: “Living and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age are all the same in us, for when one changes, it becomes the other, and when that other changes it becomes the first again (τάδε γὰρ μεταπεσόντα ἐκεῖνα ἐστι κἀκεῖνα μεταπεσόντα ταῦτα)” (fr. 88). The σοφός knows that the all-pervading flux of the cosmos is its abiding preservation: “in its changing it is at rest” (μεταβάλλον ἀναπαύεται)” (fr. 84a). The σοφός also knows therefore that the flux of his own existence is his stability, since he knows the structure of the universe to be the structure of his own being. This explains the poetics of Heraclitus’ often perplexing sayings. To “speak and perform the truth by understanding reality according to nature

in an ordinary and metaphysically unexciting way, the verb legei (he says); it is wasted labour to seek Heraclitus’ secret in the sense of logos,” 59, referring to fr. 1. See also Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. I, 419-424, for a discussion of the use of the word λόγος in ancient Greek in relation to Heraclitus.

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(ἀληθέα λέγειν καἰ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας)” (fr. 112)35 entails speaking and acting in a way that conforms to the tension and unity of opposites at the heart of the universe’s structure. It is to allow the multiple meanings of words free play in one’s discourse and the ambiguities to generate a proliferated meaning that flows like the cosmos itself. In Heraclitus, then, we also have a call to knowledge of the nature of reality, what he calls λόγος, by way of a quest for oneself as one who thinks and speaks from within the natural order, which one seeks to understand and articulate. Taken together, Parmenides and Heraclitus introduce a profound awareness of just what is at stake in thinking and giving an account of reality. Though they are often conveniently pitted against each other as representing the poles of early Greek thinking–πάντα ῥεῖ as opposed to the impossibility of change–they are one in their insistence that the human being come to see what is as a unity, and that this understanding lead the human being to a commitment to the truth. III. Plato: Nature and Love Socrates’ account of his conversion away from the περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία tradition, away from the direct investigation of τὰ ὄντα, and toward “concepts,” or “accounts” (λόγοι) for the discernment of “the truth of beings” (τῶν ὄντων τὴν ἀλήθειαν)36 was noted at the beginning of this investigation. While this may constitute a turning away from so-called “presocratic” physics, we can see that Socrates’ awareness of himself as a thinker in a particular relation to beings follows in the general train of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ thought. That is, in his intellectualization of the quest for the fundamental and changeless principle[s] of what is, Socrates took a step that was prepared for by Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ meditations on the nature of human knowledge. Plato’s depiction of Socrates is very much informed by the challenges and possibilities for thought that were put forth by the two earlier masters. Indeed, the dynamics surrounding the coincidence of the search for the order of the universe and the ordering of human life, which we have seen in the deeper structure of the texts of Parmenides and Heraclitus, comes to the surface in Plato’s Timaeus (and

35 The authenticity of the fragment is disputed. See Kirk, Cosmic Fragments, 390-391. Kahn accepts it: Art and Thought, 119-120. In any case, even Kirk acknowledges that the fragment does not contain anything Heraclitus does not say elsewhere in one form or another. 36 Phaedo 99e.

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elsewhere in the dialogues). In many ways, Plato’s thought here may be seen as a response to Parmenides’ expression of his understanding of being. Timaeus’ εἰκὸς λόγος (“likely account”)37 answers to Parmenides’ goddess, who said, “I declare to you the whole order as something likely;” Timaeus, too, delivers his λόγος in a poetic, even religious, mode. Awareness of this disposition of the speaker is crucial for our understanding of what Plato thinks of the nature of discourse on nature and, more particularly, how he conceives of the φυσικός. The Timaeus is a sort of anomaly in the Platonic corpus, though, ironically perhaps, it is the single dialogue that asserted the most influence on later thinkers, especially in the Latin middle ages, where it was the only text of Plato readily available in translation. Save for the opening, and very brief, discussion between Socrates, Critias, and Timaeus, and Critias’ own story about Solon in Egypt, the major part of the “dialogue” is not a dialogue at all, but a sustained and impressive speech in which the character of Timaeus synthesizes the bulk of “pre-socratic” cosmological and medical knowledge in response to a request that he explain the origin of the universe and of human beings as the foundation for contemplating the ideal city Socrates had produced by means of his own dialogical discourse in the Republic. The content of the Timaeus, with its extensive and detailed descriptions of physical processes and their mathematical order, is also unique in Plato’s works, though is presumably related to the kind of intellectual life Socrates sought to lead as a young man. Given its singularity and its focus on natural philosophy and cosmology, a determination of the status of the Timaeus within the thought of Plato as a whole will yield an understanding of Plato’s contribution to, even determination of, the ancient culture of contemplating nature. A number of perspectives might be, and have been, brought to bear on the study of the Timaeus. Amongst ancient philosophers, study of the Timaeus helped shape both Platonists (including Aristotle) and Stoics and this melding of ideas in turn exerted significant influence on the articulation of later forms of Platonism and Christianity.38 Indeed, some Christian theologians and thinkers have seen the Timaeus as a reflection of the Biblical account of creation, even as evidence that Plato read Moses.39 As the only text of Plato readily available in translation to the

37

Timaeus 28b. See Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). 39 E.g. Justin, Apology I.59-60. 38

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Latin West, it played an important role in the Platonism of the school of Chartes and also gave Dante material for the Commedia. Amongst modern scholars, questions of the nature and scope of the discourse contained in the Timaeus have tended to come to the fore. The question is reminiscent of the questions put to Parmenides: What is the Timaeus, and therefore “Platonic cosmology” in general, about? Cornford represents a classic view, which holds that Plato intends to base his conception of human life, both for the individual and for society, on the inexpugnable foundation of the order of the universe. True morality…is an order and harmony of the soul; and the soul itself is a counterpart, in miniature, of the soul of the world, which has an everlasting order and harmony of its own, instituted by reason. This order was revealed to every soul before its birth (41E); and it is revealed now in the visible architecture of the heavens.40

That which grounds the life of philosophy, both for the individual and for the polis, is reflected in, indeed founded upon, the order of the cosmos. We might say with David Sedley that “what the Timaeus does is frequently to say the same things which Plato also says elsewhere, but to say them φυσικῶς, i.e. from the point of view of physics.”41 Hadot adds a distinctly religious tone to this: “The realm of phusis is a divine realm that escapes all precise understanding on the part of man. Only the poiêsis of human language can attempt to imitate divine poiêsis.” Timaeus’ account is a “religious offering, which is, at the same time, play in response to divine play.”42 The act of giving the cosmic discourse is a “spiritual exercise” in imitation of the divine fashioner of the cosmos: Timaeus becomes the Demiurge and his discourse is designed to “engender in us the greatness of soul that makes us live with a universal perspective.” It is ultimately a work of ψυχαγωγία, the guidance or leading of the soul to its proper place.43 A serious challenge to the view of the coherence of Socrates’ particular practice of philosophy and the cosmic account of the Timaeus–indeed, of the 40

Francis Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 6. David Sedley, “‘Becoming like god’ in the Timaeus and Aristotle,” in Interpreting the TimaeusCritias, Proceedings of the IV Symposium Platonicum, ed. T. Calvo and L. Brisson (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1997), 337. 42 Pierre Hadot, “Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon,” in Études de Philosophie Ancienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 277 43 Hadot, “Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon,” p. 293-297. 41

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status of Timaeus’ account of the formation of the cosmos as a grounding for human life in general (cf. Cornford’s comments above)–has been made by Catherine Zuckert. Basing her reading on the dramatic trajectory and coherence of the dialogues rather than on a speculative notion of Plato’s development through early, middle, and late phases, she argues that Timaeus (along with Parmenides, the Eleatic stranger, the Athenian stranger, and Socrates) is being put forth as representative of a possible form of philosophic life, but one which, as compared to Socrates, is unable to give a satisfactory account of the fundamental human realities of love and personal/political need. While Timaeus does set out to show how the ordered motion of the cosmos is designed to bring human souls into harmony when they contemplate it, Plato, as author, shows him failing to account for the foundational human experience of love for others.44 On this reading the Timaeus presents no settled account of Plato’s cosmology, but rather functions to throw in relief Socrates’ particular genius, his quest for self-knowledge and the caring–if direct and confrontational–guidance of others to their own self-knowledge. Is the Timaeus a straight-forward account of Plato’s cosmology, which provides the physical foundation for his philosophy as whole? Is it a deliberate exercise in futility designed to show contrasting views of the philosophic life? Or is it a more playful falsehood intended to amuse the soul and celebrate the beauty of the cosmos? What place does the contemplation of the cosmos have in Plato’s vision of philosophy? Is Socrates’ abandonment of the περὶ φύσεως tradition a decisive one for his (or Plato’s) vision of the best form of human life? As Zuckert’s analysis indicates, the problematics of these questions revolve around eros, for it is eros that dominates Socratic practice but appears to be a fairly insignificant aspect of the discourse of Timaeus. I have mentioned that the style of the Timaeus–its monologic discourse–is anomalous in the Platonic corpus. This is not entirely accurate, and it is significant that it is precisely the erotic dialogues, Symposium and Phaedrus, that also present long speeches with little or no dialogical interruption (though Diotima’s understanding of the nature of love is presented in the Symposium as a dialogue with Socrates). Indeed, 44 “On the basis of its cosmic paradigm, Timaeus is not able to give an adequate account of human desire and thus of the origins of political association. Rather than provide an explanation of the cosmological foundations of Socratic politics or philosophy, in the Timaeus Plato dramatizes the disjunction between the principles on the basis of which Timaeus claims that this is the best possible world and the only things Socrates ever claimed to know–ta erotica”: Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers–The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 422.

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despite the apparent minimization of eros in the discourse of Timaeus, I argue that we can observe at the depths of its structure profound affinities with the erotic thought found elsewhere in Plato, and particularly in the Symposium and Phaedrus. The perspective that holds up the Timaeus as the physical foundation for Plato’s vision of the philosophical life would certainly seem to be born out by a sort of “programmatic” reflection by Timaeus near the end of his first account of the generation of the cosmos, that according to νοῦς. To this point Timaeus has distinguished what really is (τὸ ὄν) from what comes to be and passes away (τὸ γιγνόμενον), describing the latter as an image of the former (27d-28b); he has discerned the mystery of temporality in relation to the verb “to be” (37d38b), in which time, which has come to be along with the rotations of the heavens, is fashioned as a “moving image of eternity,” eternity being the realm of true being; he has described the fashioning of the body and soul of the universe in their well-ordered proportions in imitation of the god who fashions them. Timaeus then pauses to reflect upon the nature of his own contemplation. Referring to the material elements of the formation of the universe that constitute the stuff of sensation, he says:45 All of these things are among the accessory causes (τῶν συναιτίων), which the god used in the service of his bringing to completion as far as possible the most excellent form. But these are considered by most people not as the accessory causes of all things but as the very causes themselves, since they make things cool, hot, compressed, dispersed, and produce other similar effects. They do not, however, have the capacity for any sort of reason (λόγον) or intelligence (νοῦν) with respect to anything. We must say that soul is the only reality among beings to which the possession of intelligence belongs–it is invisible, whereas fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as visible bodies–so that it is necessary for the lover of understanding (νοῦ) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to pursue the causes of intelligent nature (τῆς ἔμφρονος φύσεως) as first, and those that are moved by others, as well as those that move others of necessity as second. We must do the same. We must distinguish the two kinds of cause we have mentioned: those with intelligence that are fashioners of beautiful and good things, and those that, bereft of understanding, always produce something random and without order… 45 Plato’s text in Burnet, Platonis Opera. I have referred to and freely adapted the translations of Donald J. Zeyl and Francis Cornford for Timaeus and those of Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff for Symposium and Phaedrus. Cornford’s translation is found in Plato’s Cosmology; The translations of Zeyl, Nehamas, and Woodruff are found in Plato: The Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

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Timaeus has moved the primary causal considerations away from the material elements that had given the first physicists the foundations for their cosmological thought. It is rather reason, intelligence, and knowledge that are the focus of cosmic explanation in the first part of Timaeus’ account, and as we shall see, it is intellect (νοῦς) that forms the bond between the universe and human being. Timaeus continues: The next topic to be spoken about must be their (the eyes’) greatest beneficial work, on account of which the god has given them to us. According to my account, sight has become the cause of the greatest benefit for us since no word of this present discourse about the universe (τοῦ παντός) could ever have been uttered if we did not see the stars, the sun, and heaven. But now, day and night, months and the cycles of years, equinoxes and solstices have brought forth number and the concept of time, and have provided a way of inquiry into the nature of the universe. From these we have procured a kind of philosophy given by the gods, and there is no greater good that has come, or ever will come, to the mortal race than this. I declare that this is the greatest good that belongs to the eyes... The god invented vision to be given to us so that by beholding the cycles of intellect in heaven we might apply them to the rotations in our own mental processes– for there is a kinship between these two, though one is well-ordered and the other disordered. When we have become thoroughly acquainted with them and have come to participate in the correct articulation of things according to nature by imitating the perfectly unwavering cycles of the god, we shall set aright the wanderings of our own.46

Here Timaeus gives the clearest statement of the scope of cosmic reflection: we behold and chart the intelligently ordered revolutions and proportions of the universe so as to give our own intellectual motions an ordered pattern to follow, just as the Fashioner (Demiurge) itself patterned these motions upon the intelligible and unchanging forms of true being. The “perceptible god” (θεὸς αἰσθητός; 92c) that is the universe is the paradigm for the structuring of human intellectual life (see also 90c-d), for it demonstrates the “persuasion” (πείθειν; 48a) brought to bear upon “necessity” (see the second part of Timaeus’ account)–the natural forces at work in the cosmos–at the beginning of the universe.

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Timaeus 46d-47c.

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All of this reflection begins with the perception of the beautiful and it is this that links it with the heart of Plato’s presentation of the practice of Socratic philosophy in its devotion to τὰ ἐρωτικά, “the things of love.” It is precisely the determination of καλόν that allows Timaeus to make the fundamental claim concerning the nature of the paradigm for the realm of becoming: that it always is. When the Demiurge looks to what is eternal and changeless “then everything that is brought to completion is necessarily beautiful.”47 Timaeus reasons that, since the cosmos is “the most beautiful thing that has ever come into existence (κάλλιστος τῶν γεγονότων)” and the Demiurge is “the best of causes” then the changeable cosmos must be founded paradigmatically upon what truly is.48 This notion that the cosmos is ὁ κάλλιστος τῶν γεγονότων reveals that the Platonic (or “Timaean”) φυσικός is indeed ἐραστής, but his beloved is the cosmos itself: “the lover of understanding and knowledge” pursues the causes that give intelligibility to the cosmos. And by beginning his account with the “body” of the world, even though the soul is more excellent and venerable than the body, Timaeus recapitulates the erotic ascent of the Symposium, which begins with devotion to beautiful bodies and then proceeds to more excellent things.49 There is also a profound affinity between the discernment, in the description of the cosmos according to “necessity” in the Timaeus, of χώρα, the space that is intermediate between being and becoming, on the one hand, and Diotima’s description in the Symposium of the generation of love as something in between knowledge and ignorance, the beautiful and the ugly, gods and mortals, good and bad, on the other. This is a further indication of the erotic disposition of the φυσικός towards the cosmos. To demonstrate this, we turn briefly to the Symposium’s account of the nature of love. We shall

47

Tim. 28ab. Tim. 29a . 49 Symposium 210aff; Stanley Rosen draws the eros of the Symposium together with the cosmic thought of the Timaeus in a different mode: “By its denial of immortality to the human psyche, the teaching of the Symposium agrees with the cosmology of the Timaeus”: Plato’s Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 230. Rosen refers here to a passage in the Symposium where Diotima corrects Socrates’ assumption that Love desires beauty. She says, “‘What Love wants is not beauty, as you think it is.’ ‘Well, what is it then?’ ‘Reproduction (γεννήσεως) and birth in beauty…Now, why reproduction? It’s because reproduction goes on forever; it is what mortals have in place of immortality’” (206e). The birth of Eros, for Rosen, “is the counterpart in the Symposium to Timaeus’ likely myth about the genesis of psyche,” 231, and as he goes on to say more generally, “The cosmos altogether both is and is not. It is erotic, and therefore daimonic…,” 253. On this account, because of its transience, the cosmos continually presses toward being, and then releases into non-being, thereby manifesting an “erotic” mode. 48

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then return to the Timaeus and read it within the erotic horizon established by the Symposium. In the Symposium we find the uncovering of the erotic tertium quid–Love itself–an intermediary between the poles of a conventional duality. Socrates begins the recounting of his dialogue with Diotima by noting that his own refutation of Agathon’s position that Love is a great god and belongs to beautiful things is based upon a similar refutation Diotima gave of Socrates’ own previous position, which was very similar to Agathon’s. By leading Agathon to acknowledge that love is the desire for something one does not have, he brings him to the conclusion that love, by its own nature, lacks beauty and the good, which are its proper objects. From here he picks up the dialogue with Diotima. In response to the realization that love cannot be beautiful, Socrates asks if it is ugly and bad. Here he shows himself to be bound by a binary notion of oppositions, which, as Diotima will show, fails to disclose the nature of love. She introduces him to the notion of τι μεταξύ, “something in between” understanding and ignorance, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, gods and mortals.50 Eros is precisely that which is in between these polar oppositions. Love is a daimon, neither mortal nor immortal, the child of Poros (“Way,” “Means”) and Penia (“Poverty”), conceived on Aphrodite’s birthday. With such parents, continues Diotima, Eros is poor, homeless, shriveled up, but also clever in his pursuit of the beautiful and good, indeed a lover of wisdom, a φιλόσοφος. Likewise, Love is between mortality and immortality, never completely bereft of resources, but never able to possess anything. Love is between wisdom and ignorance, in love with the beauty of wisdom but never in possession of it. So, the nature of love is to be τι μεταξύ, something in between. She goes on in the dialectic to show what and how the lover loves. “The lover of beautiful things loves. What does he love (ἐρᾷ ὁ ἐρῶν τῶν καλῶν · τί ἐρᾷ)?”51 Socrates initially responds that possession is what is desired when the lover loves. However, Diotima pushes him further, asking what the lover will have when he acquires possession of the beautiful things. Socrates cannot answer, so Diotima changes the terms from beautiful things to good things, and Socrates responds that when the lover acquires good things he has happiness (εὐδαιμονία), which, as an end in itself, puts a stop to this line of questioning. Next, the dialectic

50 51

Symposium 202a. Sym. 204d.

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reveals that, even though the terms of love are only used in a specific instance– presumably in the case of love between people–they actually properly refer to everyone insofar as everyone “desires to have good things forever,”52 and it is precisely the good that everyone loves, with their love consisting in the desire to possess the good forever: ὁ ἔρως τοῦ τὸ ἀγαθὸν αὑτῷ εἶναι ἀεί)53 This, then, is the what of love. Diotima defines the how of love, what lovers do in their pursuit, as τόκος ἐν καλῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα καὶ κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν, “giving birth in beauty, whether in body or in soul.”54 It is this birth-giving, this begetting (γέννησις), that is the true desire of love, and not beauty itself. This is because it is in begetting that mortals are able to overcome their own demise and attain immortality. Only in this way can a mortal, as mortal, possess the good forever. In this discussion, mortality is not primarily referred to death as the separation of the soul from the body. Rather, on Diotima’s account, self-identity is undermined every day by the flux of our bodies and of our souls in both their affective and epistemological facets. Thus, by reproducing and bringing something into being to replace that which is passing away, “the mortal shares in immortality” (θνητὸν ἀθανασίας μετέχει).”55 The “zeal” (σπουδή) for reproduction, which is the zeal for immortality, is love. To prove her point to an incredulous Socrates, Diotima adduces examples of those who would go to great lengths, even to the point of death, for the sake of glory and honor. She argues that they did so because they believed the memory of their virtue would endure forever, and this, despite their willingness to die, proves their love of immortality.56 She goes on in her description to mention those who are “pregnant in body,” whose hope for immortality lies in their biological progeny, and those who are “pregnant in soul,” whose hope is in the begetting of wisdom and virtue, whether poetic or political. The progress of rightly ordered erotic ascent, then, is as follows: The one in pursuit begins with attention to beautiful bodies when he is young. He finds one specific beautiful body “where he begets beautiful thoughts” (λόγους καλούς). The lover should not remain with this one particular body, however, and should come to under-

52 53 54 55 56

Sym. 205e Sym. 206a. Sym. 206b. Sym. 208b. Sym. 208e: τοῦ γὰρ ἀθανάτου ἐρῶσιν.

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stand that the beauty in all bodies is of the same form, and thus, since his goal is formal beauty (τὸ ἐπ εἴδει καλόν), he must transcend his attachment to this individual beautiful body and come to love all beautiful bodies. The lover then must come to realize that the beauty of the soul is more honorable than the beauty of the body, so that he is content to beget beautiful thoughts with a person who is beautiful in soul, even if not in body. The object of contemplation and production here is the beauty of deeds and laws, the vision of which causes the lover to disregard bodily beauty all together. From this point the lover moves further to different types of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) in which he sees beauty in its unity across the various kinds of knowledge, and here he begets the most beautiful thoughts and concepts (διανοήματα). At this stage, where the unified beauty of knowledge is perceived, the lover is close to the perception of that which is beautiful in its nature (τι τὴν φύσιν καλόν). This natural beauty always is (ἀεὶ ὄν) and does not come to be or pass away (211a). Second, it is absolutely beautiful; its beauty does not waver with changing perceptions or relations. It is not bodily and does not show itself in any one particular thing, but is rather “itself, according to itself, with itself, always one in form (αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μεθ᾽ αὑτοῦ μονοειδὲς ἀεὶ ὄν).” All other individual beautiful things participate (μετέχοντα) in the form such that when they come to be and pass away, the form itself does not change at all. By progressing in this way, the lover comes to know what the beautiful itself is (γνῷ αὐτὸ τελευτῶν ὅ ἔστι καλόν), and, by transcending all images (εἶδωλα) of beauty, the lover, gazing at beauty itself, gives birth to true immortal virtue and thus attains true immortality. Returning now to the beginning of the Timaeus, Plato’s φυσικός initiates his account of the structuring of the cosmos by making a distinction between that which is (τὸ ὄν) and that which becomes (τὸ γιγνόμενον). τὸ ὄν is changeless and is grasped by understanding with reason (νοήσει μετὰ λόγου), whereas τὸ γιγνόμενον comes to be and passes away and is grasped by opinion with unreasoning sensation (δόξῃ μετ᾽ αἰσθήσεως ἀλόγου). The notion of image and model follows immediately upon this distinction when Timaeus states that whenever a craftsman (δημιουργός) looks to what is changeless and reproduces its form (ἰδέαν) and potentiality (δύναμιν), the result is beautiful (καλόν). However, when the model is something that has come to be, then the result is without beauty. This sets the stage for the first question to be asked concerning the cosmos: has it always been or has it come into being, is it τὸ ὄν or τὸ γιγνόμενον? From the sensuous nature of the cosmos, Timaeus concludes that it must have come into being, since, as he has just said, sensuous reality is grasped by opinion,

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and opinion pertains to τὸ γιγνόμενον. This gives rise to the next question of whether the cosmos is modeled on changeless or changeable reality. From the fact of the beauty of the cosmos, Timaeus reasons that it must have as its paradigm that which is changeless and is to be understood reasonably by mindful reflection (λογῷ καὶ φρονήσει), and from these observations Timaeus concludes that the cosmos is an image (εἰκῶν) of something. Timaeus next addresses the question of causality–αἰτία. Why did the Fashioner of the cosmos make it in the first place? The cause is two-fold. First, the Fashioner is good, and as good, he is absolutely free of jealousy (φθόνος). Second, this means “he wants all things to become as much like him as possible.”57 Assimilation, approximation to an archetype (γενέσθαι παραπλήσια) lies at the heart of the causality of the cosmos. Indeed, this notion of fashioning the other in the beautiful recalls the erotics of the Phaedrus, where the lover shapes the beloved in the form of their god, and renders here the Demiurge itself as the primordial ἐραστής.58 Timaeus goes on to specify this likeness when he asks what living thing the sensuous cosmos resembles. He has already claimed that, because the fashioning god is good, what he does must be the best, and since it is better to be endowed with intelligence than not, he implanted intelligence (νοῦς) in the soul of the cosmos, and put the intelligent soul in the body of the cosmos. Here, Timaeus adduces the proposition that for a likeness to be beautiful–which our cosmos clearly is–it must resemble a whole, not a part of a whole. Therefore, the visible cosmos does not resemble one of the intellectual beings residing in the intellectual world, but the intellectual realm as a whole. The intellectual Living Thing contains all intellectual living things within it. Likewise, for the sake of likeness, the fashioning god has made the visible world as one single thing, a unified living being. All visible things within it are akin to it by nature (κατὰ φύσιν συγγενῆ). A corollary to the comprehensiveness of the world is the fact of its uniqueness (μονογενής). A multitude of worlds would imply a multiplicity of archetypal intelligible worlds. A duality in the intellectual realm would lead to the need of a third in which the two would partially cohere. But this would lead to the conclusion that the visible world would have to be in the likeness of this

57 58

Tim. 29e. See Phaedrus 252d-e.

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third comprehensive world, since it has been established that the beauty of the image depends upon its resemblance to a whole. Given this premise, likeness between image and archetype cannot include multiplicity. The intellectual world is unique and so is its likeness, the visible world. In the formation of the world’s soul, the Demiurge mixed a compound intermediate between changeless being and becoming. Likewise, it made a mixture of the Same (κατὰ ταὐτά) and one of the Other (ἕτερος) “in between” (ἐν μέσῳ) their respective indivisible and divisible, bodily parts. From these three intermediary mixtures, he made another uniform mixture: of being, sameness, and otherness. It should be noted, however, that this mixture is itself a mixture of mixtures, of concocted entities that are themselves intermediate between the changeless and the changeable, the indivisible and the divisible, the intelligible and the corporeal. The World Soul, then, which is the condition of intelligibility in the cosmos (30b), is presented as a mediating reality. This aspect of the likely account gives a physical framework for understanding the generation of true opinion in the realm of sensation (τὸ αἰσθητόν), and understanding (νοῦς) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) in the rational realm (τὸ λογιστικόν), so that soul is able to encounter both those things that come to be (τὰ γιγνόμενα), and those which remain changeless and self-identical (τὰ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχοντα ἀεί). In order to bring the generated universe into a complete likeness of the eternal Living Being, the Demiurge must endow it with a likeness of eternity. Eternity itself cannot be bestowed upon that which is brought into being, so the Demiurge fashions time as “an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity, which abides in unity (μένοντος αἰῶνος ἐν ἑνὶ κατ᾽ ἀριθμὸν ἰοῦσαν αἰώνιον εἰκόνα).”59 The description of the fashioning of time here is significant. Time is not eternity, since it measures the coming to be and passing away of fluctuating reality. Yet it is “an eternal image of eternity.” How does time achieve its “imitation of the eternal nature (τὴν τῆς διαιωνίας μίμησιν φύσεως)”? Timaeus describes the placement of the celestial bodies in the orbits of the “Different,” which progress through their orbits and culminate in the completion of “one perfect year,” when all of the planets revolving in the circle of the Different have completed their cycles together according to the measure of the circle of the Same. The complete cycle of the diverse movements of the planets is the moving image of eternity. Because the planets return to the their starting

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Tim. 37d.

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points, we can say they are similar to that which “is,” but not fully things that “are,” because they proceed in perpetual motion. The eternal Living Being has being for all eternity (πάντα αἰῶνα ἐστιν ὄν), while its image “has been, is, and will be throughout all time” (διὰ τέλους τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον γεγονώς τε καὶ ὢν καὶ ἐσόμενος).60 This initial train of thought raises numerous questions. Indeed, each distinction demands further reflection. First, how does one come to the position of discerning the difference between τὸ ὄν and τὸ γιγνόμενον? Second, why should a copy of something changeable lack beauty? Third, and related to the second, how does one determine whether or not something is beautiful so as to determine the quality of its model and cause? Indeed, as Timaeus says later in his discourse, when he has shifted perspective from νοῦς to ἀνάγκη (“necessity”), our typical dream-like state (recall Heraclitus 1) makes us incapable of making the distinction between being and becoming, paradigm and image. We are unable to make the distinction precisely because we fail to recognize the fact that the image is not itself the “thing itself” for which it has come to be (οὐδ᾽ αὐτὸ τοῦτο ἐφ᾽ ᾧ γέγονεν ἑαυτῆς ἐστιν).61 It is within this context that Timaeus introduces a new element to his account of the cosmos to address, from a physical point of view, the questions raised by the need to distinguish between ideal and copy, being and becoming. He begins by observing the inherent instability of the four elements: water condenses and turns into earth, then dissolves and turns into air, which subsequently burns as fire when ignited. The cycle continues in reverse order so that fire eventually becomes water again. The consequence of this is that nothing that becomes should be referred to definitively as “this” (τοῦτο) but only as “such a kind of thing” (τὸ τοιοῦτον, rendered by Cornford as “what is of such and such a quality”).62 The point here is that objects in the sensuous world have no changeless substrate to which one could refer; rather, they are a collection of qualities that can be reconfigured as something else, hence, Timaeus’ need for a third kind of thing in his account. The demonstrative “this” properly refers not to an object that comes to be and passes away, but to that in which and from which it comes to be and passes away. He gives as an example the molding of gold into every possible shape. When asked “What is it?” the correct 60 61 62

Tim. 38c. Tim. 52c. Tim. 49d. See Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 179.

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response would be, “gold,” not the name of whatever shape it happens to have been given at the moment of the asking, since the shapes change continuously. He extends the analogy to the receptacle of becoming and goes further to say that it remains wholly itself, and does not in itself take on any of the characteristics of the “imitations” (μιμήματα) of eternal beings with the result that it is able to take on any impression of what enters it. The receptacle is a “third kind,” but it is linked to both being and becoming in a way that is difficult to see. On the one hand, it gives support for the appearance of images. On the other, “it partakes of the noetic in a most perplexing way” (μεταλαμβάνον δὲ ἀπορῶτατα πῃ τοῦ νοητοῦ). Indeed, “space” (χῶρα), as he will name it, is everexisting, changeless in itself, and apprehended by “bastard reasoning” (λογισμῷ νόθῳ) without the senses. Timaeus compares our perception of it to a dream. Before he makes this final definition, however, Timaeus asks the question of whether or not there are things in themselves: “Is there fire in itself (πῦρ αὐτὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ)?”63 The direction of Timaeus’ answer to this question is significant, and it follows the contours of his earlier demonstration concerning whether or not the world came to be or has always been, and further, whether it is a copy of what has come to be or of what has always been. There, he reasoned from the (assumed) fact of the beauty of the world to the conclusion that it is a copy of the eternal. Here again, he reasons up, as it were, from the experienced fact of the difference between understanding and opinion to the conclusion that there must be the corresponding objects of super-sensory things in themselves, and sensory images of them. But even this distinction has a prior foundation. We know that there is a difference between understanding and true opinion because we acquire them differently–the one through teaching, the other through persuasion–and we can have one without the other. Understanding always comes “with a true account” (μεθ᾽ ἀληθοῦς λόγου) and is “unmoved by persuasion” (ἀκίνητον πειθοῖ ). True belief, on the other hand, is without an account (ἄλογον) altogether and is moved by persuasion (μεταπειστόν). So, at the end of this line of reasoning, we come to the fundamental distinction between discourse that is persuasive and discourse that is true. But what kind of discourse pertains to the receptacle, space? It is not known by intellect but by a “bastard reasoning,” yet it partakes of the intellectual realm. It is itself indestructible and unchanging, yet it receives into itself that which comes to be and passes away.

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Tim. 51b.

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As such, it fills the same place as the daemon Eros in the Symposium, or we should say, it is the space that Eros opens to the erotic φυσικός. Plato produces in the natural discourse of the Timaeus what he achieves through the erotic dialectic of the Symposium: the mediation of love. We see, then, a certain coherence on the deeper level of Plato’s texts between the cosmic reflection contained in the Timaeus and the philosophy of eros as found in the Symposium and Phaedrus. The thought is not the same, and indeed, the initial object of eros–a human being or the cosmos–is decisive for the form of life one encounters in these two respective modes of philosophy, i.e. the Socratic and the “pre-Socratic.” Nevertheless, it is my contention that Plato has provided a continuity of eros between the natural philosophy of the Timaeus and the ἐρωτικά of the Symposium and Phaedrus and the general terms of this connection did not go unnoticed by the later philosophical tradition. 64 IV. Aristotle: Nature and Virtue In Aristotle we come to a whole new level of systematization, and the worked-out articulation of many of his physical theories would prove to be determinative in setting the range of physical inquiry for the succeeding generations of philosophers, though the subject of his reflection comes to him from the thinkers who preceded him. Indeed, his twenty years as a member of Plato’s academy had a decisive influence on the framework of his own teaching, especially with respect to the more speculative and abstract researches of his physical, metaphysical, and cosmological theorizing, and while the Timaeus in particular seems to come under attack at a number of points in Aristotle’s thought, the debates vis-à-vis Platonism reflected in Aristotle’s texts do appear to be of the in-house variety.65 Indeed, Aristotle may be taken as representative of one of the styles of philosophy (to follow Zuckert) put forth by Plato, that of the

64 For a description of an erotic cosmology in the later Platonic and Stoic traditions, see C.J. de Vogel, “Amor quo caelum regitur,” Vivarium 1 (1963), 2-34. The author focuses on Cleanthes, Proclus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Boethius. 65 Thus Jaeger, “…his works on physics and cosmology are essentially discussions within the Academy,” Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, trans. Richard Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 308, though it was precisely Jaeger who advanced the influential thesis that Aristotle began as a Platonist and ended as an anti-Platonist.

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natural philosopher, all of whose thought tends to spring from the basic concept of φύσις.66 Therefore, while the well-known “concreteness” of Aristotle’s thinking is a significant difference from Plato, at least according to the evidence of their texts, the role of contemplation in general and of the contemplation of nature in particular remains for Aristotle within the world of Platonic thinking.67 As such, my analysis here is closely related to my reading of Plato. This is not to say that Aristotle adds nothing to Plato or that his orientation is simply identical. It is obviously not, and the opinion of Aristotle’s Neoplatonic commentator Simplicius is to the point: In every case [Aristotle] does not wish to cut himself off from nature and so he even speculates on the things above nature according to its relation to nature, just as, conversely, the divine Plato, according to the Pythagorean practice, examines natural things according as they participate in those things above nature.68

We shall observe below how this orientation of Aristotle affects the character of the Aristotelian φυσικός. In general, as he shows in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, the life of θεωρία is the highest form of human life according to Aristotle.69 Aristotle has as his object in the lectures of the Nicomachean Ethics the discernment of the τέλος of human life, that towards which all human activity is directed and which is itself not directed towards any further end. This, by the general consensus of both the common and the refined, is εὐδαιμωνία, happiness or blessedness, which is generally identified as “living well” or “doing well”.70 Opinions differ as to what constitutes this living and doing well, but for Aristotle, it is

66 “Even the concepts of being-in-the-πόλις have their foundation in concepts of nature. Aristotle saw that and shifted the weight of his work primarily onto the examination of φύσις as being. From there, he attained the ground for the study of being as such,” Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 161. 67 Lloyd Gerson argues for the basic soundness and philosophical fruitfulness of the Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle in harmony with Plato: Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially, for our purposes, 1-23, 101-120; for contemplation and assimilation to the Divine as the final end of human life in both Plato and Aristotle see, again, Sedley, “‘Becoming like god’ in the Timaeus and Aristotle.” 68 Simplicius, In categoria 6, cited in Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists, 6. 69 Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea, ed. I. Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890). I have referred to and freely adapted the translations found in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) for all of the texts in this section. 70 Eth. Nic. I.4, 1095a14-20.

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the activity, according to the highest virtue, of the best thing in us. This best thing in us is νοῦς, which is either divine itself, or at least the most divine thing in us, and activity in accordance with the proper virtue of νοῦς–an activity which is θεωρετική–would be the most perfect happiness. Not only is νοῦς the best thing in us, and the objects of νοῦς the best objects, it is also the case that intellectual contemplation is the activity we can maintain with the most consistency. Its pleasures are the most pure and enduring. It is also the most self-sufficient of the virtues, for the brave and just person needs others with whom and for whom to exercise virtue, while the philosopher, the one who exercises contemplation, can do so alone, and is therefore never cut off from this happiness. It, more than the practical virtues, is loved for its own sake, since it only results in contemplation, whereas the other virtues provide something to us in addition to their activity. Also, since “happiness is thought to depend upon leisure,” and the practical virtues are, in general, un-leisurely (involving as they do war, city politics, etc.), and are directed towards something other than themselves, namely the securing of happiness for rulers and citizens, contemplation, which has no end but itself and is engaged in leisure, must be regarded as the supreme happiness for the human being.71 In fact, as he goes on to say, this life is beyond human. It is the Divine, and not the human, in us that leads us to such a life. To live according to the intellect is to strain beyond our own mortality towards immortality. This best part of a human being, the νοῦς, is, nevertheless, what man most properly is. What is proper for each thing is best and pleasantest for each thing. This is the intellectual life for man, since life according to the intellect is “more than anything else, man.” Paradoxically, then, that which is most human is a divine form of life. The gods, he says, do not conduct business and engage in other actions that require practical virtue, and yet they are the most blessed of all. So, the highest happiness must be an imitation of this intellectual life separate from the other political and practical virtues.72 This definition of happiness in terms of teleology introduces a problem for the overall coherence of Aristotle’s vision of philosophy, namely, are the non-contemplative virtues really goods in themselves?73 According to the stric-

71

Eth. Nic. X.7, 1177a12-1177b26. Eth. Nic. X.7, 1177b26-1178a8. 73 This issue is summarized by Gabriel Richardson-Lear, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-46. 72

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tures of how Aristotle defines the τέλος of human life as that which is chosen for its own sake alone, which he defines as the happiness of contemplation, the question arises as to how the moral virtues fit into the happy life. In other words, can Aristotle give a rigorous account of ethics as a part of his understanding of the goal of human life? On the one hand, we must note that Aristotle admitted the limitations of ethical theorizing, acknowledging that it is not capable of the kind of precision that other discourses of philosophy can attain.74 Nevertheless, the question is a real one and while it is not our purpose here to offer a solution on Aristotelian grounds, we should note the question of the coherence between virtuous action (praxis) and contemplation, for it is a crucial theme in Maximus’ Ambigua. For the moment, we grant Aristotle that contemplation is the goal of human existence in that it is constitutive of the highest, most enduring form of pleasure for human being and it is indeed pleasure that “seems most intimately to inhabit our nature” (μαλιστὰ γὰρ δοκεῖ συνῳκειῶσθαι τῷ γένει ἡμῶν).75 It is ultimately this enquiry into pleasure that leads Aristotle to the conclusion that man’s highest potential is to live like a god in contemplation, and it is within this grand ethical scheme whose focus is contemplation that we must enquire into the works in which Aristotle carries out, or describes the carrying-out, of the contemplation of nature. How is the Aristotelian φυσικός oriented toward the nature that is contemplated? On the most basic level, the study of nature, whether as a whole (ἠ ὅλη φύσις),76 or in terms of the nature of individual things (τὰ φύσει ὄντα), refers for Aristotle to the discernment of the principles of motion and rest–i.e. change and stability–immanent to a being, a system, or the universe. That is, something exists “naturally” if, like an animal, a plant, or one of the four elements, it contains its own cause of change within itself and does not, like a house, receive it from without.77 Because the nature of a thing is two-fold (ἡ φύσις διχῶς), encompassing both its form and its matter,78 Aristotle asks whether the φυσικός must come to know both form and matter or only one of the two. He reasons

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Eth. Nic. I.3, 1094b. Eth. Nic. X.1, 1172a19-20. 76 De motu animalium 699a25, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium: Text with Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays, ed. and trans. Martha Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 77 Physica B.1, 192b8-32, Aristotle’s Physics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary, ed. W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960 [1936]). 78 Phys. B.2, 194a12-13. 75

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that the φυσικός must know the form “to a certain degree” (μέχρι του), to the point at which he understands the full and complete development of its coming to be, τινὸς ἕνεκα, as λόγος and τέλος.79 This constitutes the basic structure of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Natural knowledge gives an account of something in terms of its coming to be. Thus, the Aristotelian φυσικός examines realities not in terms of what is eternal in them or of what truly existing forms they reflect or in which they participate. Rather, the things of the world come before the φυσικός as temporal realities conditioned by purposive change and it is the principles of this purposive change that the φυσικός seeks to know. The world of the Aristotelian φυσικός itself, however, is eternal, and Aristotle’s reasons for asserting this are significant for our understanding of his conception of natural philosophy. We begin with the assertion of the eternality of the very principle of nature: motion and its corollary, time.80 In Physics VIII.1, Aristotle addresses first the question of whether or not there was a beginning to motion, concluding that it is impossible for us to think a “first motion” of things that have come into being before which there was only rest because, 1.) motion out of rest requires an antecedent and causative motion, and 2.) the thing at rest itself must have had a cause of its rest, i.e. something that puts a stop to its motion, since rest presupposes the privation of motion.81 Motion is eternal if it exists at all on this account. Next Aristotle considers time, making the basic observation that talk of a “before” or “after” with respect to motion implies time, and that time in its turn, as “the number of motion,” implies the existence of motion. Therefore, if Aristotle can demonstrate the eternal existence of time, then he has demonstrated de facto the eternal existence of motion and thus of the world. Apart from the fact (as Aristotle reports it) that all previous philosophers, with the notable exception of Plato (on, we should note, a literal interpretation of the Timaeus), have denied that time has a beginning, Aristotle asserts the argument that “we cannot grasp time except as an instant (οὐδὲν γὰρ ἔστι λαβεῖν ἐν τῷ χρόνῳ παρὰ τὸ νῦν),” and because the instant, “the now (τὸ νῦν),” can only be thought as the point at which past time ends and future time begins, it follows that time can only be thought as eternally existing. “Since the instant,” he con-

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See Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 143. See the brief discussion in Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 276-283. 81 Phys. VIII.1, 251a16-27. 80

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cludes, “is both a beginning (ἀρχή) and an end (τελευτή), it is necessary that there always be time on both sides of it.”82 The Aristotelian φυσικός thinks wholly within the horizon of the present moment, which leads to the conclusion that the motion of the cosmos extends in both directions with neither beginning nor end. Beginning and end concentrate on the “mid-point” (μεσότης) that is “the now,” whereas both sides of the now extend indefinitely forever. We see in this structure of realities and world a powerful fusion of temporality and immediacy on the one hand, and the eternal realm of the ultimate on the other, and this is characteristic of Aristotle’s approach to nature. We can see this fusion clearly in his works on animals. The beginning of the De partibus animalium has been pointed to as particularly indicative of how Aristotle understands the dynamics of natural contemplation.83 “Things constituted by nature” (τῶν οὐσιῶν ὅσαι φύσει συνεστᾶσι), whether “ungenerated, imperishable, and eternal” (heavenly phenomena) or “participating in generation and corruption” (earthly realities), are a source of pleasure for the philosopher in contemplation (κατὰ θεωρίαν) when “the fashioning nature (ἡ δημιουργήσασα φύσις) provides exceedingly profound pleasures to those who are able to discover causes and are philosophical by nature.”84 He goes on: There is something wonderful in all natural realities. As Heraclitus is supposed to have said to the foreigners who wanted to find him: when they came upon him warming himself at the oven in the kitchen they stopped, but Heraclitus told them to enter in full confidence, for gods were there as well. Thus, we must approach the inquiry of all living things without shame, for there is something natural and beautiful in all of them.85

The contemplation of natural phenomena is directed towards the pleasure the mind takes from observing the beautiful arrangement of things in their causal chains and in their own inner coherence and this discipline of study applies to both the “lower” realm of beings that undergo generation and decay and to the “higher” realm of the divine heavens. In fact, as he tells us in De motu animalium, these two realms are ultimately linked by the same dynamic of cosmic

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Phys. VIII.1, 251b10-28. See Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 140-161; Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 82-85. 84 De partibus animalium. 645a8-10, Aristotelis De partibus animamlium libri quattor, ed. Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1829). 85 De part. an. 645a16-23. 83

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motion, so that the animal is both a component of the cosmic action of motion that rests ultimately on the unmoved mover and is also itself a recapitulation, writ small, of this process since its motion presupposes points of motionlessness around which and against which its motion can proceed; Aristotle gives the example of limbs pivoting around a motionless joint. 86 In this way Aristotle provides a continuity of natural philosophy that reaches from the lowest components of the cosmos all the way up to the highest realities in the eternal heavens and it is this that draws the intensity of desire and pleasure into every aspect of natural contemplation. V. The Stoics: Nature and Life We observe amongst the Stoics a fusion of the various elements of philosophy which have been moving together so far in our enquiry–nature, politics, ethics, the Divine–but which have not so clearly melded into each other. In the Stoic concept of cosmic divine reason, we see theology, cosmology, and ethics speaking at the same time, or at least trying to do so. I noted the “mixed transmission” of the different parts of philosophy amongst some of the Stoics in the Introduction to this work and it is indeed the Stoics who are the most consistent representatives of the theme we have been tracing in this chapter, that is, the place of the contemplation of nature within the philosophic life. For the sake of coherence, I shall use the Cleanthean Hymn to Zeus87 as a lodestone for this analysis of the Stoic conception of the contemplation of nature, for it provides us a tightly expressed précis of Stoic doctrine in a form that expresses the unity of philosophy on the Stoic model. According to Johan Thom, in his edition of Cleanthes’ Hymn, the hymn falls into a traditional 3-part structure for cultic poetry, consisting of 1.) Invocation (lines 1–6); 2.) Argument (lines 7–31); and 3.) Prayer (lines 32–39). Within this structure, he notes that the invocation and prayer sections form an inclusio, wherein themes of praise of Zeus and his governance and the role of human beings mirror one another. In the argument itself, there is a basic chiastic structure if we take the first section, which treats the governance of Zeus, as contrasting the third section, which describes human resistance to the natu-

86

De motu an. 698a-700a25; see Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium, 121-142. Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus: Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. Johan Thom (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2005); Stoic texts other than Cleanthes’ Hymn are taken from Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers. 87

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ral order. This leaves the middle section, lines 18–21, where Cleanthes describes Zeus as bringing order out of chaos and harmonizing the evil into one all encompassing good, as the structural and conceptual heart of the hymn. It is also the most problematic from the Stoic philosophical point of view, since the notion of actual human recalcitrance in the face of the fixed universal or common law (κοινὸς νόμος) raises questions as to the nature of Stoic determinism and cosmic coherence, and of natural contemplation more generally. Stoic “theology” was a subset of the general science of physics, since “the object of Stoic theology was the governing principle of the cosmos, insofar as this could also be labeled ‘god.’”88 However, Cleanthes seems to have considered theology as a discrete discipline itself, since, as Diogenes Laertius reports, he, like other successors to Zeno, composed a treatise περὶ θεῶν. Indeed, as we shall see, the address to Zeus in the Hymn is very theistic in content and raises questions with respect to the technicalities of the Stoic cosmology. The first lines of the invocation addresses Zeus as “most glorious among the immortals, many named, eternal ruler of all,” as “the founder of nature who governs all things with law.” Most of these names are traditional epithets of Zeus from the poetic tradition, but the notions of Zeus as “founder of nature” (φύσεως ἀρχηγέ), and as the one who “rules all things with law” (νόμου μέτα πάντα κυβερνῶν) certainly establish the Stoic mode under which Zeus will be identified and praised. Even the title “many named” should, in light of the standard Stoic definition of god given by Diogenes Laertius, where he mentions that god “pervades all things” and is “called by many names,” be taken in this particularly Stoic way.89 Cleanthes then affirms the kinship of humanity to the Divine, saying “We alone are a race sprung from you” (ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γένος ἐσμὲν… /μοῦνοι),90 referring to the fact that, compared with all the other mortal creatures on earth, humans are rational. Cleanthes then starts the argument section of the hymn, writing, This whole ordered universe (κόσμος), which spins about the earth, Obeys you in whatever way you lead it, and it is willingly ruled by you.

88 Keimpre Algra, “Stoic Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics ed. Brad Inwood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 153. 89 DL VII.147; Long and Sedley, 54A. 90 The text is contested here, but the portion of the line I have quoted, at least its sense, is fairly well established.

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Zeus is endowed with his traditional “fiery thunderbolt/ by whose strike all works of nature [are guided].”91 It is with this thunderbolt that Zeus “direct[s] universal reason (κοινὸν λόγον), which permeates (φοιτᾷ) all things, being mingled (μειγνύμενος) with great and small lights.” This is the content of Zeus’ rule and forms the most distinctively Stoic element of the cosmology of the Hymn. In Diogenus Laertius’ report of the Stoic notion of “life in agreement with nature,” he summarizes the Stoic view that this life consists of refraining “from every action forbidden by the law common to all things (ὁ νόμος ὁ κοινός), which is the right reason (ὁ ὀρθὸς λόγος) pervading all things (διὰ πάντων ἐρχόμενος), and is identical with Zeus.”92 The governing principle of the cosmos, which in various contexts could be referred to as “fire, governing principle (ἡγεμονικόν), spirit, God, intellect (νοῦς), seed (σπέρμα), ἕξις, or intensifying motion (τονικὴ κίνησις),”93 fills it with rationality. It is a “power which pervades” (πεφοίτηκεν) the universe, giving it form and structure.94 Likewise, on the report of Alexander of Aphrodisias, “they say that god is mixed with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world.”95 In other passages we see that god and the world itself appear to be co-terminus: “Zeno says that the whole world and heaven are the substance (οὐσίαν) of god, and likewise Chrysippus…and Posidonius.”96 Cicero reports the position of Chryssipus, who says divine power resides in reason and in the mind and intellect of universal nature. He says that god is the world itself, and the universal persuasiveness of its mind; also that he is the world’s own commanding-faculty, since he is located in intellect and reason; that he is the common nature of things, universal and all-embracing; also the force of fate and the necessity of future events. In addition he is fire; and the ether…also things in a natural state of flux and mobility, like water, air, earth, sun, moon and stars; and the all-embracing whole; and even those men who have attained immortality.97

91

The bracketed phrase is a conjecture noted by Thom. DL VII.87ff.; Long and Sedley, 63C. 93 Michael White, “Stoic Natural Philosophy (Physics and Cosmology),” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics ed. Brad Inwood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136. 94 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, 9.75-76; Long and Sedley, 44C. 95 Long and Sedley, 45H. 96 DL VII.148; Long and Sedley, 43A. 97 Cicero, On the nature of the gods; Long and Sedley, 54B. 92

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We observe, then, a range of Stoic expression with respect to god and world. On the one hand, god, or the cosmic principle of rationality, may be taken as filling the world, infusing it “from the outside,” as it were, in a total mixture of bodies. However, the notion of a rational principle separate from the world would seem to run contrary to Stoic teaching of cosmic monism and coherence. Thus, god is simply identified with the world. This dialectic may be attributed to Stoic notions of the cosmic cycle and conflagration. In his Contra Celsum, Origen notes, “the god of the Stoics has the whole of substance as its controlling principle, whenever there is the conflagration.”98 And Plutarch, quoting Chryssipus, reports, “When the world is fiery through and through, it is directly both its own soul and commandingfaculty.”99 Thus, at the conflagration, everything is consumed by god the fire of rationality and so, on the one hand, everything is identical with god as fire, but on the other, the other elements of the cosmos–water, air, earth–are distinguished from it in that they will come to be precipitated once again at the onset of the new cosmic cycle. When this takes place, god is more appropriately said to “pervade” the cosmos as the infused governing rational principle. To return to the Hymn, Cleanthes continues with the related idea of the providence and determined will of God: “Nothing is done on earth without you, spirit,/ neither in the divine etherial sphere, nor in the sea/ except such things as the wicked do in their own ignorance” (15–17). Here we have an indication of what has been called “soft determinism,”100 i.e. a notion of the fixedness of cosmic causality that nevertheless makes room for human agency–“what is up to us” (τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν)–on the ethical level. Before we approach this question directly, we should attend to the most basic expression of the Stoic conception of the goal of life. Virtue is the only good on the Stoic view and so its acquisition is the goal of life. Underlying this is the notion that the end of life is “living in agreement with nature” (ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν). This concept has had a certain history of development with respect to its exact expression. Stobaeus reports that Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, originally said simply that the end of life was “to live in agreement” (τὸ ὁμολογουμένως ζῆν), which Stobaeus takes to mean “living in accordance with one concordant reason, since those who live in conflict are 98

Origen, Contra Celsum IV.14; cited by White , “Stoic Natural Philosophy,” 134. Long and Sedley, 46F. 100 White, “Stoic Natural Philosophy,” 144. 99

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unhappy.” Zeno’s successors, however, sought to fill out the statement: Cleanthes added the phrase “with nature,” and Chrysippus augmented it further, saying that the end of life is “living in accordance with experience of what happens by nature” (ζῆν κατ᾽ ἐμπειρίαν τῶν φύσει συμβαινόντων).101 Diogenes Laertius specifies that this living in agreement with nature is “the virtuous life” (VII.87), since “virtue is the goal towards which nature guides us.”102 Diogenes cites the Chrysippian version of the phrase, and then goes on to explain why this is the goal of life: for our individual natures are parts of the nature of the whole universe (μέρη γάρ εἰσιν αἱ ἡμέτεραι φύσεις τῆς τοῦ ὅλου). And this is why the end may be defined as life in accordance with nature, or, in other words, in accordance with our own human nature as well as that of the universe, a life in which we refrain from every action forbidden by the law common to all things, that is to say, the right reason (ὁ ὀρθὸς λόγος) which pervades all things, and is identical with Zeus, this lord and ruler of all that is.

In these variations on the theme of “living in agreement,” we see the coherence of ethics and natural philosophy (which is also theology) in Stoic thought. The ethical subject, as fully involved in the nature of the cosmos, finds its end in conformity to the rationality inherent in the cosmos, identified with Zeus here. However, it is one thing to assert that human beings are a part of nature and thus are bound by its laws, and quite another to exhort humans to live in accordance with nature. The question immediately arises: if nature and the cosmos are bound by ineluctable laws of causality and fate, is there any moral agency and responsibility to exhort? Or, to put the question in the terms of the Hymn to Zeus, how is it that there are certain things that fall outside of Zeus’ all-encompassing providence, and why supplicate him for help in attaining conformity to his understanding, if all things were already directed by him? This would seem to place certain realities outside of the unified horizon of the world. The Stoics attempted to preserve a compatibilist point of view with respect to this question, i.e. a view that rendered notions of human responsibility as compatible with “a general physical and teleological determinism.”103 Though

101

Long and Sedley, 63B. DL VII.87; Long and Sedley, 63C. 103 Dorothea Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics ed. Brad Inwood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192. Much of the following discussion of causality relies 102

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the sources are conflicting (and sometimes hostile) in their accounts, it seems that the basic Stoic strategy for preserving a notion of human moral autonomy within the context of cosmic determinism was to make a distinction in the notion of causality with respect to human action between an “antecedent,” or “external” cause and a “principal,” or “internal cause.” Before explaining the dynamics of this distinction, we must first note that the notion of Stoic causality itself does not describe a simple, linear progression of cause and effect. Rather, something is a cause only if it is corporeal and actively involved in the production of a certain state. The effect is an incorporeal predication of the affected body, and thus cannot, in turn, act as a cause on something else. To refer to an example from Sextus Empiricus in explanation of the distinction, fire (a body) acts as a cause on wood (a body) of the predicate, “being burned” (an incorporeal).104 Fate, then, is not a chain of cause and effect, but a collection of causes (bodies) acting upon one another, expressing an interlocking web rather than a chain. It is within this conception of causality that the Stoic distinction between external and internal causes of human behavior seeks to account for human autonomy within a causally determined universe. The Stoics affirmed that human action is a part of the web of causality in the universe, and they maintained that identical inner and outer conditions would produce identical actions, with any variation indicating some difference, however slight, in circumstances. Given the fixity of one’s inner state at any given moment, critics of the Stoics would argue that an external stimulus would elicit an automatic response so that human autonomy would be compromised. In response to this critique, as Cicero reports, the Stoics gave the example of a “rolling cylinder” or “spinning top” to illustrate the workings of external and internal causality: “But then he resorts to his cylinder and his spinning top: these cannot start moving without an impulse; but once this has been received, he holds, for the rest it is through their own nature that the cylinder rolls and the top spins around.”105 The goal of the example is to maintain the reality of both the external and the internal cause so that the action, while (pre-)determined, admits of an autonomous status of the object. So, in the case of the cylinder, it requires something external to it to move it (someone or something pushing it, for example), but the subseupon this essay. 104 Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” 189. 105 Cicero, De fato 42; cited in Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” 193.

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quent motion is due to the nature of the cylinder itself, i.e. it rolls in virtue of its own shape. Now, if we transpose the principles of this example to the human realm, keeping in mind that the point of the example is to emphasis the determinative status of the inner nature of the object, we see how the Stoics thought themselves able to hold together cosmic determinism and human moral responsibility. In the case of the cylinder, the motivating force, as Cicero explains, does not grant the cylinder the ability to roll; it simply provides it with the necessary energy. An identical push applied to a cube would produce a different result. Roundness and “rollability” are internal to the nature of the cylinder. In the case of human beings, the power of assent is internal to our nature. Thus, as Cicero continues, quoting Chrysippus, “a visible object makes an impression and seals, as it were, its image in the mind, but assent will be in our power.”106 The corollary in human nature to the cylinder’s roundness and ability to perpetuate its own movement for a time once it has received a motivating force is the ability to receive sensory impressions and either assent or withhold assent. Within this model, the Stoics held that given the same external stimuli and the same inner disposition, an individual will always give assent in the same way and yet were able, they thought, to preserve the reality of moral exhortation and striving. Does this preserve human autonomy in a way that makes Cleanthes’ Hymn coherent? Can the deeds of the wicked really be done “without” Zeus? If so, how, and if not, how can they meaningfully be called wicked and be hoped to change? It seems that our actions are determined by our internal makeup– who we are–and this, it seems, is not up to us. To approach this question, Dorothea Frede reminds us that we must bear in mind the nature of the cosmic rational principle, identified with Zeus. This principle is “immersed in nature,” and is nature itself.107 As we noted above, the discourse of theology coincides with natural philosophy. It is thus not an external power directing things from afar, but is rather itself the principle of cosmic activity. Thus, a person’s actions are not “pre-ordained” by a transcendent being who chooses the way things will be. Rather, the divine permeates all things and thus brings things about according to its own principle, which is rational and

106 107

Cicero, On fate 43; cited in Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” 195. Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” 201-202.

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determined. In light of this, Frede argues that the treatment of humans as autonomous arises out of human ignorance of the complex web of cosmic causality, knowledge of which would make the rationality of the universe transparent to us. As it is, we do not have such knowledge, but through the practice of philosophy and through experience, we can come to a deeper understanding of the ways of nature, and so learn to live “in agreement.” Cleanthes provides a slightly different focus to this, which is a function, in part, of the genre of the Hymn. Zeus is able “to order that which is disordered” and to bring good and evil into one, “so that there comes to be an ever existing rational order of all things” (εἰς ἕν πάντα συνήρμοκας ἐσθλὰ κακοῖσιν / ὥσθ᾽ ἕνα γίγνεσθαι πάντων λόγον αἰὲν ἐόντα), in confirmation of the general Stoic notion that the universe is unified and must be as it is because, as rationally ordered, it could not be better. Though the wicked fight against this order by their desires and actions, seeking glory or wealth at the expense of conformity to reason, the Hymn’s concluding supplication is motivated by the possibility that these wicked ones may be brought out of their ignorance to a way of thinking and willing (γνώμη) conformable to the universal law. As Cleanthes puts it, “Grant them to obtain/ the understanding (γνώμη) on which you rely when you order all things with justice” (34-35). The goal here is to come to a knowledge of the just order of the cosmos, with the outcome that those who acquire this understanding and obey “god’s universal law” (θεοῦ κοινὸν νόμον; 24) “will have a good life with understanding.” Indeed, to understand the world of nature as the immanent elaboration of god is to live in agreement with it and virtue itself becomes the answer to the problem of how the philosophical life as praxis and contemplation holds together. In the monistic universe of the Stoics, the knowledge of contemplation just is virtue. VI. Plotinus: Nature and Contemplation In Plotinus we observe a decisive synthesis and expression of many of the strands of ancient Greek thinking that we have observed thus far, which culminate in Plotinus’ “playful” expression that “nature possesses contemplation in itself” and in this way produces the world. We thus conclude this survey of Greek philosophical views of the contemplation of nature with the alignment of nature and contemplation in Plotinus, an alignment that will show how Plotinus integrates the contemplation of nature into his philosophy of Intellect and the One. From the opening words of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, one might

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have thought that Plotinus of all men was most uncomfortable in the world: “Plotinus, the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed of being in the body.” 108 Indeed, if Porphyry’s narrative is true, φύσις was a burden to Plotinus, that which bound him to the weight of materiality. In response to a request that he sit for a portrait, Plotinus replies, “Is it not enough to have to carry the image in which nature (φύσις) has encased us, without your requesting me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of the image…?” On the other hand, Plotinus was obviously deeply moved by the beauty and order of the cosmos and argued vigorously against the anti-cosmic speculations of the Gnostics in a series of treatises that we shall analyze below. It is this position between world-denying Gnosticism on the one hand and the materialism of Epicurus or the Stoics on the other, combined with the intensity of his contemplation of God or the One, that sets Plotinus as a crucial philosophical voice alongside or in anticipation of the Christian fathers. His assumption of all practical concerns (πρᾶξις) to the ultimate horizon of contemplation (θεωρία) makes him particularly important as background to how Maximus argues for the unity of the philosophic life. To return to the beginning of our inquiry, the ambivalence, even mistrust, of natural things hangs as a threatening cloud over the thought of Parmenides: When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the whole of the world, one ceases to be a scientist, an investigator into any of the world’s parts. One’s sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the everlasting deceitfulness of sensation. Henceforward truth shall live only in the palest, most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs.109

This ambivalence is nascent in Plato, basically absent in Aristotle, and incompatible with the monism of the Stoics. In Plotinus, this ambivalence comes forward in the two different aspects under which he views the world. “In contrast to [the Gnostics],” writes Bréhier, “he makes the most of the beauty of the world, of Providence, and to such an extent that one wonders how his praise, which seems to be made without any reservation, is compatible with his descrip-

108 Vita Plotinii I.1-2, Plotini Opera, ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); I use and freely modify A. H. Armstrong’s translation throughout. 109 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 1962), 79.

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tion of the world as the land of exile and the habitation of evil.”110 There is the obvious, if derivative, beauty of the material world of the treatise On beauty;111 there is also matter as shadow obscuring the beauty of true form.112 “The nature of the all,” writes Plotinus, “is a god if it is reckoned as the soul separated [from the body], whereas the rest is a great daemon, says Plato, and what happens in it is daemonic.”113 The world in its bare materiality is a daemon–like Eros in the Symposium–the object of “a sort of bastard reasoning,” half-way between knowledge and opinion. It can, and often does, lead one away from intellectual truth, but as endowed with soul, it is a god, a divine reality leading one on to the true reality of the forms. The Plotinian φυσικός finds himself within a beautiful and harmonious world, but this beauty and harmony is observable in a material substrate that is not “really real” (ὄντως ὄν); φύσις itself, as the lower part of Soul, is what produces material objects and so is immersed in the realm of the not-really-real. Any philosophical account of such a concept is therefore surrounded by difficulties. Despite the apparent uncertainty of Plotinian “physics,” Porphyry discerned in 18 of the 54 treatises of Plotinus doctrines that are largely concerned with what Porphyry considered to be natural philosophy (τὰ φυσικά) and grouped them together as the second and third enneads.114 Plotinus does make a brief, but significant, reference to natural philosophy in the short treatise On dialectic (I.3), which Porphyry placed in the first ennead “on ethical issues” (ἠθικωτέρας ὑποθέσεις). Dialectic, as the “method or practice” (μέθοδος ἢ ἐπιτήδευσις) proper to the philosopher, leads the philosopher up to the Good “to which we must find our way” (ἡμᾶς οἷ δεῖ πορευθῆναι ἀνάγει).115 It is within the way of dialectic that the philosopher is enabled to give an account of each thing in accordance with “knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη) and not “opinion” (δόξα), and to attain to silent unity in the realm of intellect beyond that of the senses. It leads to a gaze (βλέπει) that goes beyond “what is called discursive rational

110 Émile Bréhier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, trans. Joseph Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 170. Jonathan Scott Lee is critical of Bréhier’s account of Plotinian physics: “The Practice of Plotinian Physics,” in Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ Enneads, ed. Michael F. Wagner (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 38ff. 111 I.6.1-3. 112 VI.3.8. 113 II.3.9. 114 Vita Plot. 24.37-39. 115 I.3.1.1-2.

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activity” (τὴν λεγομένην λογικὴν πραγματείαν);116 it is philosophy’s “valuable part.” Plotinus goes on, however, to speak of the other parts of philosophy: “[Philosophy] also engages in the contemplation of nature (περὶ φύσεως θεωρεῖ) with the assistance of dialectic, just as other arts make use of arithmetic, though philosophy stands nearer to dialectic when it contemplates nature” (I.3.6.2-5). The contemplation of nature is related to dialectic in that it makes distinctions concerning earthly phenomena in the realm of generation and corruption in a contemplation that has as its natural consequence the ascent to the contemplation of the forms of true being and ultimately the silent vision of unity. As we shall see, Plotinus will reject any discursiveness in the formation of the world by nature and this will have consequences for how he relates knowledge of the natural world to the non-discursive contemplation of the One. Plotinus gives a meditation on the vital dynamic of the ascent to Intellect and ultimately the One in the treatise On Nature and Contemplation and the One (III.8). This is the first of a series of four treatises that, Porphyry tells us, were written in succession (numbers 30-33 in the chronological order) but which he separated (as III.8, V.8, V.5, and II.9) to fit his organizational scheme for the Enneads. The sequence of texts, which culminates in his critique of Gnosticism, gives a full, if at times only suggestive, picture of how Plotinus regards the material cosmos within the context of his philosophy. This section will treat the thought contained in this series of treatises as constitutive of a unified flow of argument and although Porphyry did not place the second and third parts (V.8 and V.5) in the books of the Enneads devoted to τὰ φυσικά, their contents obviously pertained to the theme in Plotinus’ own mind. The treatise On Nature and Contemplation and the One (III.8) gives a brief but clear exposition of Plotinus’ vision of the contemplative ascent from nature to soul and finally to intellect. Plotinus has in his mind the all-encompassing reality of contemplation (θεωρία) and gives in III.8 an account of how contemplation is present at the various levels of reality, beginning with “the earth itself, trees, and plants in general,” which are the products of φύσις. What Plotinus wants ultimately to say is that “nature is contemplation” in fulfillment of the idea that all things are the result of and for the sake of contemplation. Moreover, his aim is to transcend the structure of a subject regarding an external object to the place where nature and contemplator are one in contemplation

116

I.3.4.

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itself.117 This is, of course, a summary of what we find in Aristotle, and indeed the whole treatise, as we shall see, in addition to answering the Timaeus, should be read with reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ, where the apex of being is thought thinking itself. Because nature participates in soul, which in turn derives from intellect, the whole of what exists is thought; it is not so much that nature is an object of contemplation as that it, along with everything, is one in contemplation. It is clear that nature does not possess (οὐκ ἔχει) contemplation in the same way that a being endowed with reason and the ability to form mental images does. Nevertheless, Plotinus will show in what way nature has “contemplation within itself, and makes what it makes by contemplation,”118 and in so doing provides the basis upon which natural contemplation, as the realization of unity out of multiplicity, may be actualized. Plotinus’ mind immediately–and Porphyry has told us that Plotinus wrote his works straight out, with no revisions–excludes the notion of mechanistic shaping or force (ὠθισμός, μοχλεία) from nature’s productivity. Nature’s “craftsmanship” (δημιουργία), then, is not analogous to the procuring and shaping of materials by “wax-workers” (κηροπλάσται).119 Despite the rejection of the analogy between nature and human craftsmanship, there is nevertheless for Plotinus a fundamental similarity between the plastic arts and the productivity of nature on which those who seek to compare the two should concentrate. Just as artisans require some “unmoved” reality within themselves from which to fashion their works–a formal basis for their productivity–so too does nature require an unmoved “producing power” (τὴν δύναμιν τὴν ποιοῦσαν) to give coherence to ever-changing matter. This power of nature is defined by Plotinus as the λόγος, translated by Armstrong here as “forming principle;”120 indeed nature is a form and principle and is not composed of matter but rather makes matter what it is: “For it is not fire that must come forth in order for matter to become fire, but the forming principle.”121 From this Plotinus reasons that it is these principles that produce (τοὺς λόγους εἶναι τοὺς ποιοῦντας) plants and animals, “and nature is a forming principle, which makes another principle as its offspring, thereby giving something to the underlying reality while remaining identical 117 118 119

Cf. III.8.6. III.8.1.22-24. III.8.2.6; this is the term used by Plato in reference to the fashioner of the human body, Timaeus

74c. 120 121

III.8.2.28-29. III.8.2.25-27.

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to itself (δόντα μέν τι τῷ ὑποκειμένῳ, μένοντα δ᾽ αὐτόν).”122 This second principle is what exists in reference to the “visible shape” and is itself unable to produce more principles that in turn could confer outward form on matter. This is something of a demythologization of the Timaeus, where the Demiurge entrusts the work of material creation to lower deities, and serves to maintain nature in its immateriality and yet provide an explanation for how it confers form on matter. Plotinus goes on, then, to draw nature into the realm of contemplation. He begins by asserting, “if [nature] remains [unmoved] when it produces, remains within itself, and is a forming principle, then it must itself be contemplation.”123 Plotinus is thinking within the distinction between activity and contemplation, πρᾶξις καὶ θεωρία, which sees that which remains stable in itself as contemplation, as distinct from that which actively moves. Nature, therefore, produces “natural things” as a result of “contemplation” insofar as it is “not action, but λόγος”:124 “the final aspect (ὁ ἔσχατος) of every λόγος comes from contemplation and is itself contemplation in that it is contemplated.”125 Prior to contemplation in this structure is Soul, which is “above” nature. In this way, nature is, for Plotinus, bound to soul in the λόγος that is in them both in different ways. Plotinus will elaborate this relationship further on in the series of treatises. At this stage Plotinus must still give an account of how (πῶς) nature can be understood to be contemplation. It does not have contemplation in the sense of existing as a reasoning (ἐκ λόγου) or examining (τὸ σκοπεῖσθαι) being. Nature is, however, life (ζωή), λόγος, and productive power (δύναμις ποιοῦσα). It is what it is by making: “it makes by being contemplation, contemplated, and λόγος.”126 Nature’s making, then, is contemplation. It is a productive (ποιεῖ), abiding contemplation (μενούσης θεωρίας) that “does not actively do anything other than make by being contemplation” (οὐκ ἄλλο τι πραξάσης, ἀλλὰ τῷ εἶναι θεωρία ποιησάσης).127 We are still at the level of the expression of Plotinus’ idea. To go further, Plotinus, still in the spirit of “play” with which he began the treatise, gives over the discourse to Nature herself, to whom he poses the question of

122 123 124 125 126 127

III.8.2.27-29. III.8.3.2-3. III.8.3.6. III.8.3.7-8. III.8.3.19-20. III.8.3.22-23.

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why (τίνος ἕνεκα) she makes anything. The response is significant and turns the discussion in a new direction: You ought not to ask, but to understand in silence, you, too, just as I am silent and not in the habit of talking. Understand what, then? That what comes into being is what I see in my silence, an object of contemplation which comes to be naturally, and that I, originating from this sort of contemplation have a contemplative nature. And my act of contemplation makes what it contemplates, as the geometers draw their figures while they contemplate. But I do not draw, but as I contemplate, the lines which bound bodies come to be as if they fell from my contemplation. What happens to me is what happens to my mother and the beings that generated me, for they, too, derive from contemplation, and it is no action of theirs which brings about my birth; they are greater rational principles, and as they contemplate themselves I come to be.128

Plotinus explains this speech by asserting that nature, as offspring of a higher and stronger soul, maintains itself in vision and repose and does not go out of itself to acquire and produce. It has a kind of “consciousness and self-perception” (τῇ συνέσει καὶ συναισθήσει), which is, however, different from other beings in the way that the perception of someone asleep is different from that of someone who is awake. Nevertheless, “[nature] is at rest in contemplation of the vision of itself, a vision which comes to it from its abiding in and with itself and being itself a vision.”129 Its vision is somewhat unclear, since it is the “image (εἴδωλον) of a different contemplation,” of a contemplation that pertains to the higher realities of the higher soul. The weakness of nature, that is, its status as an image of a higher contemplation, is revealed by the fact that it brings the contents of its contemplation into being by making them, just as “men, too, when their power of contemplation weakens, make action a shadow of contemplation and reasoning.”130 Their intellect fails to see the vision (τὸ θέαμα) and so they want to produce a visible manifestation of it, for themselves and for others. The result of the production of an object is either due to weakness on the part of the one trying to contemplate (as has just been described) or is simply a natural consequence, if the one who has made something had already seen a superior object of contemplation before producing the lower image.

128 129 130

III.8.4.3-14. III.8.4.25-27. III.8.4.31-32.

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The result of this exercise of playful thinking has been to draw contemplation and nature into unity so that the two terms of “the contemplation of nature” become one. The next stage is for the “wise man” to become one, or be understood as one, with this contemplative nature, and Plotinus goes on to describe this through the sequence of treatises. He writes in III.8.6, The truly dedicated person (ὁ σπουδαῖος) has, therefore, already finished reasoning when he makes manifest to another what he has in himself, while in relation to himself he is vision. For he is already toward what is one and what is silent, not only concerning things outside himself, but also of what relates to himself, and everything is within him.131

This powerful passage comes at the end of a section of the treatise in which Plotinus contrasts the “active man” to the soul in contemplation according to the same dynamic we have just observed with respect to the desire to see physically what one fails to contemplate intellectually. In the course of this discussion, Plotinus asserts the unity of knower and known by the process of the soul’s assimilation to the object of its perception. Because the soul is not “completely full”132 it still regards and makes utterances (προφέρει) about its objects as objects, as other than itself. Its level of contemplation and silence is greater than that of nature because it is fuller than nature, although it has room to progress towards greater unity. In the σπουδαῖος, who is pursuing intellectual vision, the two are directed towards unity and the σπουδαῖος thus begins to realize the Parmenidean insight that “thinking and being are the same.”133 With Plotinus, then, we come again to the beginning of our question of the place of natural contemplation in ancient Greek thought. The fundamental insight that the one who thinks is one with the world of what is thought–or at least, that the realization of this unity is the purpose of philosophy–has manifested itself in different ways from Parmenides to Plotinus, but the intuition is a thread that binds all of our thinkers together in one way or another, and is the key to understanding how they understand θεωρία φυσική, which is to say, how the world of coming to be and passing away–φύσις–relates to being. To elaborate on this question, Plotinus refers to “this beautiful universe (ὁ καλὸς οὗτος κόσμος)” as the “shadow and image (σκία καὶ εἰκών)”134 of the 131 132 133 134

III.8.6.37-40. III.8.6.26. III.8.8.8. III.8.11.29-30.

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beautiful intellect, whose content is being. The Plotinian ascent to intellect and the contemplation of the One thus begin with the perception of the beauty of the physical world, which leads one to wonder about its maker. The same disposition of wonder is repeated as contemplation ascends from the world to nature and soul and finally to intellect where intellect is “full (κόρος)” of the One. Plotinus continues with this theme of the cosmos as image of intellect in the next section of the four-part treatise, On Intelligible Beauty (V.8). It should be remembered that his thinking here is directed ultimately against the Gnostics, who rejected any participation of the physical world in the Good; Plotinus therefore sought to demonstrate how nature is related to intellect as an image to its archetype. He begins with our perception of beauty in the world and argues that this beauty derives not from its matter but from its form (εἶδος). It is, after all, the form–and not the matter–that we receive into ourselves in sensation.135 The source of the beauty we see in bodies is a “λόγος in nature,” which is “the archetype of bodily beauty (κάλλους ἀρχέτυπος τοῦ ἐν σώματι).” The λόγος in Nature, which is more beautiful than the beauty of bodies, derives from the λόγος of Soul, and the primary principle of all beauty is Intellect. The sensual world as product of nature thus derives its beauty ultimately from the intellectual. Plotinus introduces the concept of wisdom as the content of the ceaseless contemplation of Intellect. The wisdom of Intellect is “not acquired by reasonings (λογισμοῖς)” but is wisdom itself.136 This wisdom “possesses with it and has made what really is (τὰ ὄντα)” and “is itself what really is, which have come to be along with it so that both are one and substance there [in Intellect] is wisdom.”137 We do not understand this reality of wisdom because “we think that the branches of knowledge (τὰς ἐπιστήμας) are made up of theorems (θεωρήματα) and a collection of propositions (συμφόρησιν προτάσεων).”138 Being on the level of Intellect, which is to say being in the true sense, is non-discursive and non-deliberative.139 Wisdom, which is its content, is thus not discovered through a train of syllogisms. But then Plotinus goes on to say that

135 136 137 138 139

Cf. V.8.2. V.8.4.36-40. V.8.4.45-48. V.8.4.48-50. V.8.6.7-9.

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knowledge in the material world of nature (ἐν ταῖς ἐνταῦθα ἐπιστήμαις) is not characterized by theorems and propositions either.140 In this sense the natural world “manifests the non-discursiveness (τὴν οὐ διέξοδον)” of the intellectual world, like the hieroglyphs that adorn the Egyptian temples: it communicates without letters, words, and propositions, which are only utilized after the fact.141 Visible beauty, which derives from form and ultimately from the beauty of Intellect, “exists before research and before reasoning (πρὸ ζητήσεως καὶ πρὸ λογισμοῦ).” The universe (τὸ πᾶν) is not the result of deliberation and planning (ἐπίνοια) on the part of the one who made it (ὁ ποιητής). It is not constructed by force with “pulleys” and “levers.” There is rather an immediate, or Soul-mediated, imaging forth of intellectual reality so that even matter “is something of a final form (εἶδός τι ἔσχατον),” so close is the archetypal intellectual reality to its manifestation as the natural world. Because of this, Plotinus can say that “the whole universe is form and all things are forms for the archetype is form.”142 Continuing the theme of the manifestation of non-discursiveness in the natural world, Plotinus argues, You can explain the reason why the earth is in the middle, and round, and why the ecliptic slants as it does; but it is not because you can do this that things are so There [on the level of intellectual reality]; they were not planned like this because it was necessary for them to be like this, but because things There are disposed as they are, the things here are beautifully disposed: as if the conclusion was there before the syllogism which showed the cause, and did not follow from the premises.143

The order of the world, its form in Intellect, exists “before logical sequence (πρὸ ἀκολουθίας) and planning (πρὸ ἐπινοίας)”144 and it is for this reason that

Plotinus has asserted that the world makes known its fundamentally nondiscursive, non-propositional source: true knowledge, even here below, is not composed of “theorems and a collection of propositions.” Those who behold the beauty of the world may not be aware of this and may not

140 141 142 143 144

V.8.4.50-51. V.8.6.1-7. V.8.7.23-24. V.8.7.36-41. V.8.7.42-43.

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know that the world is beautiful because of its paradigm, the intellectual beauty,145 but this is in fact the case. What is it, then, to think about the world, to “take it in thought (λάβωμεν τῇ διανοίᾳ)”? Plotinus gives a description of a contemplative progression from this natural universe to the intellectual beauty that is its ultimate form in which we gather all of the parts of the cosmos together into one as far as we can, so that when any one part appears first, for instance the outside heavenly sphere, the apparition of the sun and, with it, the other heavenly bodies follows immediately, and the earth and sea and all the living creatures are seen.146

Plotinus gathers all of these things within an imaginary “transparent sphere” so that they may be thought of all at once. He then introduces another imaginary sphere and instructs us to remove “mass (τὸν ὄγκον),” “place (τοὺς τόπους),” and “the mental image of matter (τὸ τῆς ὕλης φάντασμα)” in order to clear the way for the emergence of the divine and unified intellectual reality that defines the cosmos in its beauty.147 It is the bodily element that limits the cosmos;

its generative and destructive powers–“fire and other bodies”–are themselves subject to generation and destruction, whereas the power of the intellectual realm is all “being (τὸ εἶναι)” and “being beautiful (τὸ καλὸν εἶναι).”148 Indeed, the substance of intellectual reality is identical with its beauty, whereas the beauty of the natural world is an “acquired image of beauty” (ἐπακτοῦ εἰδώλου καλοῦ) proportional to its participation in the beauty of form. The reality (οὐσία) of the natural world depends upon its (participation in) beauty: “it has more reality insofar as it is beautiful” (μᾶλλον γὰρ οὐσία ᾗ καλή).149 The result of this contemplation is to make the substance (οὐσία) of the cosmos to depend upon intellectual beauty: any reality that may be discerned in the product of nature comes from its participation in intellectual beauty. The second phase of this contemplation proceeds to describe how intellectual beauty comes to reside in/as the one who contemplates. Plotinus follows the account of Plato’s Phaedrus, where human souls have an affinity with certain gods and 145 146 147 148 149

V.8.8.13-15. V.8.9.2-6. V.8.9.10-24. V.8.9.36-37. V.8.9.43-47.

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so, driven by eros, pursue the same ideal visions as they do. One who is a συνεραστής (“co-lover”) of Zeus, the most venerable of the gods who sees the whole of beauty, is able, in a comprehensive vision of beauty itself, to contain beauty within himself, although, as Plotinus says, such a person usually still regards it as something external to himself, “but one must transport what one sees into oneself, and look at it as one and look at it as oneself (ὡς ἓν καὶ ὡς αὑτόν).”150 This overcoming of the duality between subject and object results ultimately in the unification of the self, where the individual no longer sees himself as an image of intelligible beauty but rather comes to be “in beauty” by “becoming beauty”: “If he sees [beauty] as something different, he is not yet in beauty, but he is in it most perfectly when he becomes it (γενόμενος δὲ αὐτὸ οὕτω μάλιστα ἐν καλῷ).”151 Thus sensation must be put aside, for it entails the persistence of duality in the experience of the beauty of the world, which comes from the intellectual beauty, as other than oneself and this duality is a barrier to the philosophical advancement advocated by Plotinus. In this way the ethical question of the self is drawn into the contemplative concern for the attainment of a unified knowledge of reality. The natural world, in virtue of its participation in intellectual beauty, is thus fully integrated into Plotinus’ system of philosophy, even though it is not “real” in itself in Plotinus’ sense of the word. To return to the context of Plotinus’ thinking here, his polemic against the Gnostics, the natural world is not the result of “the fall of Soul (τὴν ψυχὴν…σφαλεῖσαν),” not the product of Soul’s “declination (νεῦσις)” away from intellectual reality but precisely of its “inclination towards it (νεύει ἐκεῖ),” for it is as images of intellectual reality that Soul (as Nature) fashions material things.152 The mistake of the Gnostics is that they expect the natural world to be the same (τὸν αὐτόν) as the intellectual world rather than what it is, an image of it, indeed the most beautiful image possible.153 The Gnostics, according to Plotinus, introduce a profound disjunction between the natural world and its paradigm, saying that they will be released to a “new earth,” which is actually the λόγος of this earth, and that this earth is to be rejected as the product of evil. To Plotinus’ way of thinking about the relationship between image and archetype or paradigm, this notion is incoher-

150 151 152 153

V.8.10.40-41. V.8.11.20-21. II.9.4.1-11. II.9.4.24-32.

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ent: “why do they feel the need to be there in the archetype of the universe which they hate?”154 In addition to pointing to an inconsistency in the Gnostics, this line of thinking, in combination with the denial that the world is the result of the “declination” of Soul, illustrates the direction in which one should take Plotinus’ notion of the world as image of intellectual reality. It is image precisely as inclining towards the intellectual, not as falling away from the intellectual. Another mistake the Gnostics make, one that is important for our study of Maximus, is that they attribute the dynamics of their own soul–specifically its struggle in relation to the body–to the universal Soul as though the universal Soul were bound by the material world (its body) like our souls are bound to our bodies. On the contrary, the Soul of the universe is not affected by the bodily aspect of the cosmos. Individual things in the universe affect one another when they move; some are destroyed by the natural movement of another thing when they do not exist in accordance with that natural movement, while others that do persist. This constant motion of both harmony and destruction does not apply, however, to universal soul, which supervenes all motion and so does not run into any conflict in the universe.155 The point here is that the conclusions one might draw from the observation of individual bodies with respect to conflicting motions and the tension between body and soul cannot be attributed to the universe as a whole, which is fundamentally stable and coherent.156 In this sense, the idea of man as “microcosm” does not exactly apply. The Gnostic stance towards the world–revulsion and hatred–has, according to Plotinus, noxious ethical consequences and we shall conclude our analysis with his warnings about the morality implied by Gnostic cosmology. In general terms, the Gnostic claim to live in accordance with the true meaning (λόγος) of the natural universe while still within it would imply, for Plotinus, that the natural universe must make its foundations in intellectual reality known in some way. Plotinus asks rhetorically, “If this universe is such that it is possible to possess wisdom in it and to live according to [the intellectual reality] there while we are here, then how does it not bear witness to its dependence (ἐξηρτῆσθαι) upon what exists there?”157 This reiterates the point we observed

154 155 156 157

II.9.5.23-27. II.9.7.27-39. II.9.8.10-16. II.9.8.43-46

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earlier, that the derivative status of the natural world draws it towards the intellectual, not away from it so that, in the context of the question of how one is to live, Plotinus would affirm that the very possibility of a wisely conducted life implies a continuity between the natural world and intellectual reality. Plotinus also gives a caution regarding the natural consequences of a world-denying cosmology such as the Gnostics professed. Their doctrines of the evil origins of the material world as well as their particular teachings about the origins and cure of disease (through evil spirits and incantations) will very naturally lead people not only to despise the world, its maker, and the providence that attends to it but also to live lives that are not directed towards virtue.158 Contempt for the world and rejection of universal providence leaves only pleasure as the pursuit of human life. On the other hand, belief in the special election of the Gnostics by God and what we might call a fideistc conception of deity–which Plotinus summarizes with the phrase, “Look to God (βλέπε πρὸς θεόν)”–results in complete indifference to ethical praxis, evidenced by the fact that, according to Plotinus, the Gnostics did not produce any treatises on virtue.159 Plotinus is thus very aware of the ethical implications of one’s understanding of the natural world and he adduces the moral implications of Gnosticism as evidence against their doctrines. In this set of treatises we see Plotinus’ concern to explain how it is that our encounter with that which is not really real leads eventually to the realm of intellect and the contemplation of the One, how nature is bound to contemplation and even becomes contemplation in its participation in beauty. We have seen particularly how the human being achieves the unity of transcending the duality of subject and object by moving beyond the perception of beauty outside of himself by becoming beauty himself. Nature for Plotinus is below the level of being but is transparent to the beauty of being in virtue of its order and harmony so that the contemplation of nature, whose formation did not proceed by planning and discursiveness, leads one beyond nature to the intuition of being and to the non-discursiveness of the One beyond being.

158 159

Cf. II.9.15. II.9.15.27-40.

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Conclusion I have elaborated here the primordial orientations in the early history of Greek thinking about nature; later thinkers and scholastics–the Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias (who was active before Plotinus), Iamblichus, Proclus, the Alexandrian commentators (some of whom were Christian)–were extremely important as mediators of the tradition to the world of late antiquity, and indeed as thinkers in their own right. These figures represented the culture of philosophical and intellectual life in the later empire and exerted a certain, if perhaps indirect, influence on the development of Christian thought and practice in general.160 It is not clear what Maximus knew directly, though the content of his texts indicates a very broad knowledge of the philosophical issues of the ancient tradition and while most of these issues can be distilled from the writings of the Greek fathers who were active during the centuries before Maximus, he clearly had some knowledge of at least the philosophical manuals and possibly other texts in use in the Byzantine schools; I shall examine a few of these as they become relevant in subsequent chapters. In any case, my aim in this chapter has not been to trace direct historical influences on Maximus but rather to provide a reading of the philosophical inheritance that Maximus received, a reading designed specifically to clarify what is at issue in my reading of Maximus’ Ambigua. As such, my focus has been on the thinkers whom these later philosophers and scholars studied and commented since it was they who established the primordial orientations to the question of nature. We turn now to Maximus’ forbearers amongst the Christians to complete our introductory reflections on the role of natural contemplation in ancient thought. In various ways, these thinkers will direct the inheritance of philosophy, and natural philosophy in particular, to their contemplation of Christ so that patristic Christology may be seen as the discourse in which Christian theologians and philosophers elaborated their philosophies of nature.

160 See Ed Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Chapter 3 THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE IN THE GREEK FATHERS Introduction As heirs of Greek philosophical culture, the fathers of the church inherited a whole world of cosmic reflection from the Greeks, and much of the language and thought of the Greek philosophers remained essentially unchanged amongst the philosophically educated teachers of the church who used them. Within the realm of the contemplation of nature, however, the introduction of two most Christian ideas–1.) the creation of a finite universe and man in the image of God and 2.) the idea of the incarnate Christ–focused Greek philosophy’s approach to the world into a clear vision of the absolute centrality of human nature in the cosmos. As Gregory of Nyssa would indicate in On the Making of Man, the human being was brought into the world last of all as both that which gazes upon creation and that which rules it, as knower and as voice of the power of the Creator.1 Human being, as the meeting place of flesh and spirit, was the summation of creation for the Greek fathers and the incarnate Christ, as the unity of creation and Creator, became for them the center of the contemplation of nature. What is referred to as “patristic Christology” was the fathers’ way of, among other things, addressing the questions that had been a part of the tradition of natural contemplation.2

1

De hominis opificio II, PG 44.132D2-133B17. This indicates, I think, a continuity within the apparent shift in intellectual concerns among Greek theologians following in the tradition of Clement and Origen from the questions of body and cosmos in fourth century (and earlier) speculation to a more technical and specific concentration on doctrinal Christology in the sixth (and later): “if…the theological focus of the fourth-century Origenist controversy was 2

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This chapter will present the founders of the tradition of Christian natural contemplation–Clement and Origen of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, Evagrius of Pontus, and finally Dionysius the Areopagite–and will bring forward what is distinctive in the thought of each. No one figure will be treated exhaustively, though Evagrius will receive a more thorough analysis, for he is the single most important figure standing behind Maximus’ own conception of natural contemplation. Given the synthetic nature of Evagrius’ work and his importance for Maximus’ monastic milieu, this more thorough account is both justified and necessary. Clement and Origen set forth the initial link between cosmos, Scripture, and Christ; the Cappadocians develop the moral and theological implications of this Scriptural contemplation of nature; Evagrius gives a systematic account of the intellect and its intuition of the world; and Dionysius provides Maximus with a way of talking about God and the world in terms of the divine names. This reading indicates the crucial importance of the issues that characterize θεωρία φυσική, which have been articulated in the previous chapter, within the articulation of patristic Christology, which is, as I will show, the fathers’ primary articulation of natural philosophy. I. The Alexandrians i. Clement of Alexandria a. Philosophy and Christianity The intellectual foundations of Christian philosophies of nature were laid by the great Alexandrians Clement and Origen. Clement is, in fact, the natural figure with whom to make our transition from the Greek non-Christian philosophers to our discussion of the Greek Christian fathers as much of his literary activity was devoted to defining the role of Greek philosophy in the Christian life of gnostic perfection.3 Learning, which includes the standard Greek pedagogy of music, geometry, grammar, etc., as well as philosophy proper–the really the body…our sources for the sixth-century controversy suggest that the center of debate had significantly shifted: what was really at stake in the struggle seems to have been Christology”; Brian Daley, “What Did ‘Origenism’ Mean in the Sixth Century?,” in Origeniana Sexta, ed. Gilles Dorival and Alain Le Boulluec (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995), 629. 3 The question of the positive status of the cosmological and natural reflections in the Stromateis has been raised by Salvatore Lilla, Clement of Alexandria: A Study of Christian Platonism and Gnosticism, (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), 189, who argues that Clement intended his full cosmology to be spelled out in another work. This view has been challenged by Andrew Itter, Esoteric Teaching in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 144ff. The author claims that the unsystem-

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practice of the virtues, natural contemplation, and dialectic–is for Clement preparatory to the reception of divine knowledge, which he defines as the goal of the Christian life. He cautions in Book I of the Stromateis against those who reject all learning and philosophy, including “the contemplation of nature (τὴν φυσικὴν θεωρίαν),” and demand “bare faith alone (μόνην ψιλὴν τὴν πίστιν).” Such people, writes Clement, are like those who demand the fruit of the vine without allowing for its cultivation. Rather, just as a husbandman makes use of various agricultural tools–“the pruning- knife, the pick-axe, and the other instruments of farming”–so too must one who desires knowledge make use of the learning available to humanity. Similarly, the best doctor makes use of a wide range of learning (ὁ ποικιλωτέρων μαθημάτων ἁψάμενος) in order to heal in the best possible way. It is in this way that the wise seeker of wisdom should “bring everything to bear for the sake of attaining the truth (τὸν πάντα ἐπὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἀναφέροντα).”4 In general, then, Clement has a very positive view of the role of learning and philosophy in the Christian life. Philosophy was given to the Greeks by God just as the law was given to Israel, in both cases as nourishment in preparation for Christ,5 and, as Clement never tires of saying, the truth of Greek philosophy is literally dependent upon Scripture.6 Greek philosophy is also true insofar as it follows “the natural order of things (τὴν φυσικὴν ἀκολουθίαν).” 7 Just as philosophy was “necessary to teach the Greeks righteousness,” Greek learning continues to play a positive role in the life of the Christian seeking perfection (as we have just seen in the examples of the farmer and physician) since it is “conducive to piety (χρησίμη πρὸς θεοσέβειαν).”8 This theme is commonly noted in the scholarly literature on Clement.9 Within this general af-

atic and allusive presentation of physical theories is a part of Clement’s design, that it is for the gnostic to discern in his presentation the fullness of his teaching. 4 Strom. I.9.43.1-4, Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates-Stromate I, ed. Marcel Caster (Paris: Cerf, 1951); translations throughout this section are modified from ANF volume 2. 5 See Strom. VI.11.94.2-5, Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates-Stromate VI, ed. Patrick Descourtieux (Paris: Cerf, 1999), where Clement understands the five loaves and two fish of the feeding of the fivethousand to refer to the five books of the Mosaic law and to the two parts of Greek learning (the cycle of studies and philosophy), respectively. 6 See, for example, Strom. V.14, Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates-Stromate V.1, ed. Alain le Boulluec (Paris: Cerf, 1981). 7 Strom. I.13.57.4. 8 Strom. I.5.28.1. 9 Eugène De Faye, Clément d’Alexandrie: Étude sur les rapports du Christianisme et de la Philosophie Grecque au IIe Siècle (Frankfurt: Miverva, 1967), 174-200; Lilla, Clement of Alexandria, 9-59; Eric Osborn,

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firmation of the role of learning, however, Clement sounds a note of caution to balance the caution against dismissing philosophy as unnecessary, for, while philosophy is a necessary cultivation of human powers for the reception of truth, it is not the truth itself and “philosophers are children unless they have been made men by Christ.”10 Philosophy is preparation for the true and “kingly teaching” but cannot itself give the strength to fulfill the commandments of the Lord.11 It is a “co-worker (συνεργόν)” and “joint-cause (συναίτιον)” of true understanding but is not itself its cause and is in need of divine wisdom to produce its effects in the mind. It plays the role of staircase to knowledge’s upper room, the role of grammarian to the wisdom of the true philosopher, the role of the senses to the understanding of the mind. It is even sauce and dessert to the main-course of the truth of faith.12 Clement’s views on this question, like his views on so many other questions, are not expressed systematically. He is holding together, at least on the surface of his Stromateis, the conviction on the one hand that the teaching of Christ is “sufficient unto itself (αὐτοτελής)” and in need of no supplement from Greek learning or from anywhere else13–indeed, the Greeks “know nothing more than this world”14 –and on the other, what is to him, at least, the obviously positive role that Greek learning has played on Greek culture and can play in the life of the Christian, both ethically and with respect to knowledge of the world and ultimately of God. The key to understanding the dynamics of this dialectic may be found precisely in our present concern to discern the role of natural contemplation in Greek patristic thought, for it is speculation about the cosmos and its practical consequences that form the link between Greek speculation and Scripture, which are, according to Clement, the two-fold training given to humanity in preparation for the teaching of Christ, though as we’ve noted, they represent two expressions of one revelation. We turn, then, from these general considerations of the role of philosophy in Clement’s ideal for the Christian pursuit of divine wisdom and gnosis and focus specifically on his understanding of the place of θεωρία φυσική in this quest.

Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 198-206. 10 Strom. I.11.53.2. 11 Strom. I.16.80.5-6. 12 Strom. I.20.99.1-110.2. 13 Strom. I.20.100.1. 14 Strom. VI.7.56.1.

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Clement identifies Greek thinking about nature with the origins of Greek writing, reporting that “Alcmaeon was the first to put together a physical discourse (φυσικὸν λόγον συνέταξεν)…and Anaxagoras was the first to publish a written book (διὰ γραφῆς ἐκδοῦναι βιβλίον).”15 Historical questions aside,16 the point here is that Clement perceives a relationship between the origins of writing in Greece (which came late, as compared to the so-called “barbarians”) and the contemplation of nature, so that Greek philosophy as an exercise in writing is fundamentally directed towards the contemplation of the cosmos, which, according to Clement, is all the Greeks actually know. This connection between φύσις and γραφή, between world and scripture, would come to play a crucial role in the thought of Origen and his intellectual progeny, Maximus, as we shall see, being not least among them. In Clement’s reading of the Christian Scriptures, he finds Solomon to be an exemplar of natural contemplation. After quoting passages from the book of Proverbs that relate to the acquisition and practice of wisdom, Clement quotes from the Wisdom of Solomon, “For he hath given me to unerring knowledge of things that exist, to know the constitution of the world (σύστασιν τοῦ κόσμου)” (Wis 7.17). Clement comments, “this is what [Solomon] means by natural contemplation, which concerns all beings in the world of sensation (ἐν τούτοις ἅπασι τὴν φυσικὴν ἐμπεριείληφε θεωρίαν τὴν κατὰ τὸν αἰσθητὸν κόσμον ἁπάντων τῶν γεγονότων).” The goal of Christian philosophy (barbarian philosophy, as Clement calls it) is to make one’s way, “with an upright way of life (μετὰ ὀρθῆς πολιτείας ἀσκηθεῖσα) through wisdom, the artificer of all things (διὰ τῆς πάντων τεχνίτιδος σοφίας), to the Ruler of all (ἐπὶ τὸν ἡγεμόνα τοῦ πάντος).”17 This brief passage presents the threefold occupation of the Christian philosopher, whose encounter with God is exercised on the levels of ethics (ὀρθῆς πολιτείας), nature (τῆς πάντων τεχνίτιδος σοφίας), and discourse about the one God over all (τὸν ἡγεμόνα τοῦ πάντος).18 However, while Solomon gives us this succinct outline of Christian philosophy, it is in Moses that Clement 15

Strom. I.16.78.3-4. Alcmaeon’s dates are unclear, but his book is thought to have been written in the decades after 500: Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy Vol. 1, 358. In any case, Clement seems to ignore the primacy of Anaximander. 17 Strom. II.2.5.1-3, Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates-Stromate II, ed. Cl. Mondésert (Paris: Cerf, 1954). 18 The three-fold structure is defined here as ἐθικῶς, φυσικῶς, λογικῶς. On this division, see Pierre Hadot, “Les Divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité,” in Etudes de Philosophie Ancienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 125-158. 16

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finds the truly paradigmatic philosopher, and so it is to Moses that we shall look to find the clearest example of the Clementine φυσικός. b. Cosmos and Temple Moses, we are told, learned astronomy (τὴν τῶν οὐρανίων ἐπιστήμην) in Egypt,19 and much of this learning stands behind his teachings about nature. Clement divides “Mosaic philosophy (ἡ κατὰ Μωυσέα φιλοσοφία)” into four parts and assigns them to the three traditional levels of philosophical learning: 1.) history and 2.) law, which he assigns to ethics; 3.) sacred rites (τὸ ἱερουργικόν), which, he says, belong to the contemplation of nature (ὅ ἐστιν ἤδη τῆς φυσικῆς θεωρίας); and 4.) theology, or mystic initiation and vision (ἐποπτεία).20 Our primary interest here is with the identification of τὸ ἱερουργικόν with natural contemplation and it is this identification that provides the key to Clement’s particular genius within the ancient culture of natural speculation. It is as a director of temple rites and sacrifices that Moses teaches about nature and we shall therefore gain insight into Clement’s understanding of the dynamics of natural contemplation by an analysis of his symbolic interpretation of the temple in Stromateis V. The temple, its implements, and the vestments of the priest are all taken by Clement to symbolize the entire cosmos. We should be aware at the outset that this symbolic interpretation comes within the context of a consideration of the obscurity and enigmatic character of the expression of divine realities, both amongst the pagans, and here amongst the Hebrews: Eqyptians, Hebrews, and Greeks had all veiled their sacred mysteries to preserve them from those who had not yet undergone purification.21 Clement chooses the commandments regarding the construction of the tabernacle as the paradigmatic case of a veiled presentation (ἐπίκρυψις) of mysteries, drawn to this, no doubt, by the veils of the tabernacle themselves. In general terms, the tabernacle and its implements represent the cosmos, the nature of whose elements (ἡ τῶν στοιχείων φύσις) contains divine revelation. He begins with a symbolic justification for his own symbolic interpretation of τὸ ἱερουργικόν. The seven enclosures about the temple and the priest’s robe with its various symbols representing phenomena (τῶν πρὸς τὰ φαινόμενα συμβόλων) “hint at the agreement (συνθήκην) that extends from heaven to 19 20 21

Strom. I.23.153.3. Strom. I.28.176.1-2. Strom. V.4.19.1-5.31.5.

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earth,” indicating the significance of what appears on earth for the comprehension of heavenly reality. Indeed, the four components of the covering (τὸ κάλυμμα) and the curtain (παραπέτασμα) in the tabernacle–the three colors blue, purple and scarlet, along with the linen material–represent the four elements and indicate that “the nature of the elements contains the revelation of God.”22 The altar of incense, which stood between the covering and the curtain (Ex 30.6), is “the symbol of the earth set in the middle of this universe.” The place between the “inner curtain,” which marked off the holy of holies, and the outer court where all the Hebrews were permitted to be was, according to tradition (as Clement reports it), “the exact mid-point (τὸ μεσαίτατον) between heaven and earth,” though some considered it to be “the symbol of the intellectual and sensual universe.”23 In this case, the screen that covered the entrance of the tabernacle was hung on the five pillars (Ex 26.36-37) of the senses, and marked the threshold over which one had to pass to approach the knowledge of God.24 So Clement inscribes the contemplation of nature in his account of the structure of the tabernacle as cosmos and thus draws the world and the mind’s intuition of the world into the sacred realm of the rites of worship. c. Christ the Priest of Creation It is at this point that Clement introduces the incarnation of the Son of God explicitly. The question of nature for Clement is bound to his understanding of Christ, the Son of God, who is “the teacher of all things that have come into being (ὁ τῶν γενητῶν ἁπάντων διδάσκαλος).”25 Philosophy for Clement is “inquiry concerning truth and the nature of beings (τῆς τῶν ὄντων φύσεως)” and he identifies this truth with Christ, who said, “I am the truth” (Jn 14.6).26 From the very beginning, then, the contemplation of nature for Clement has as its aim the discernment of Christ, the Son and Word of God, as the principle of all generated things; or to put it the other way round, contemplation of Christ is not different from the contemplation of nature, which is its content: The teaching that is consistent (ἀκόλουθος) with Christ considers the Fashioner to be God (τὸν δημιουργόν ἐκθειάζει), recognizes providence in particular events,

22 23 24 25 26

Strom. V.6.32.2-3. Strom. V.6.33.1-2. Strom. V.6.33.3-6. Strom. VI.7.58.1. Strom. I.5.32.4.

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knows that the nature of the elements is changeable and generated, and teaches the way of life that is directed to the power that assimilates us to God and teaches us to prefer the economy as the guiding principle (ἡγεμονικόν) of all learning (παιδεία).27

These basic aspects of nature–the fashioning and providence of the world, the nature of the elements–are the content of the teaching of Christ and are bound inseparably to “the way of life that is directed to the power that assimilates us to God (εἰς δύναμιν ἐξομοιωτικὴν τῷ θεῷ).” Clement here is echoing the ideals of Plato and Aristotle, which we observed in Chapter 2. We are “like the Lord (ὡς ὁ κύριος),” not in “essence” or “nature,” but in coming to partake of infinity and in coming to know beings in contemplation (τὴν τῶν ὄντων θεωρίαν ἐγνωκέναι).28 To return to the imagery of the tabernacle, in response to those who only have access to what their senses reveal to them, who remain on the outside of the curtain hung on five pillars, “The Son is said to be the face (πρόσωπον) of the Father, for by becoming a bearer of flesh (σαρκοφόρος) to the five senses, the Word is the one who discloses the Fatherly character (ὁ τοῦ πατρῴου μηνυτής ἰδιώματος).”29 The incarnate Word is the outer veil of the tabernacle, which conceals “the priestly service (ἱερατικὴ διακονία)” that goes on within. The world of the senses is one with the flesh of the Word as the liminal place before the knowledge of God, at once a revelation and a screen. The Son and Word also takes on the role of high priest. The veil over the entrance to the holy of holies, wherein the high priest entered alone once a year, is hung on four pillars, which stand for the “four ancient covenants” (of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses),30 as well as for the sacred tetragrammaton.31 Into this “intellectual world” beyond all sensation “the Lord entered alone through His sufferings, and came into the knowledge of the ineffable by withdrawing beyond ‘every name’ (Phil 2.9) that is made known by the sound of the voice.”32 As high priest who enters the holy of holies of intellectual reality, the Word passes through the tabernacle of the physical cosmos with its seven-branched 27

Strom. I.11.52.3. Strom. II.17.77.4. 29 Strom. V.6.34.1. 30 Alain Le Boulluec, Clément d’Alexandrie: Les Stromates-Stromate V.2: Commentaire (Paris: Cerf, 2009), 140. 31 Clement notes that the Greek word for “God” (θεός) also has four letters: Strom. V.6.34.6. 32 Strom. V.6.34.7. 28

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candle stand (the seven planets) to the south of the altar of incense (the earth) and its table of show-bread (the nourishing north wind) to the north. While the holy of holies is the intellectual realm, and while the things related about the ark of the covenant “disclose (μηνύει) the realities of the intellectual world,” the cherubim that adorn the lid of the ark and whose name means “much knowledge (ἐπίγνωσιν πολλήν)”33 indicate either “the two bears” (Ursa major and Ursa minor) or the two hemispheres; their total of twelve wings (six belonging to each of the two) stand for the procession of time through the twelve signs of the zodiac, and therefore “indicate the sensual cosmos” (τὸν αἰσθητὸν κόσμον δηλοῖ).”34 The intellectual cosmos is, therefore, not utterly separate from the sensual for, according to the images of Clement’s interpretation of the structure of the tabernacle, the center of the holy of holies–the ark of the covenant–contains upon it symbols that point to the world of sensation. The stars occupied a privileged place in ancient cosmology as the perfect union of sensation and intelligence and Clement here places this union, the συνθηκή of heaven and earth, which is the meaning of τὸ ἱερουργικόν, in the most sacred place of the tabernacle beyond every name. As high priest, the Word takes on the priest’s robe, which is said “to prophecy the incarnation (τὴν κατὰ σάρκα οἰκονομία) by which [the Word] was seen to be in closer proximity (προσεχέστερον) to the world.”35 This robe is also a “symbol of the sensual world.” Its stones represent the seven planets36 and its three hundred and sixty bells represent the days of a year, “the acceptable year of the Lord” (Is 61.2), which “proclaims the great manifestation (ἐπιφάνειαν) of the Savior.”37 The two stones set on the shoulders (Ex 28.12) and the five (as Clement interprets it) set on the breast indicate the spirits of the planets that aided (συνεργοῦντας) in the creation of the world, where the shoulders are the agents of work and the breast, “the seat of the heart and soul,” is the rational authority that governs generation.38 This governance, which ultimately refers to the Savior as “head of the Church” (Eph 5.23), is also symbolized by the gold 33

Philo uses the same etymology in his Life of Moses II.97: Le Boulluec, Commentaire, 146. Strom. V.6.35.5-7. 35 Strom. V.6.39.2. 36 Cf. Ex 28.17-20, though Clement seems to take certain liberties with the text in order to arrive at the number seven: Le Boulluec, Commentaire, 152. 37 Maximus will similarly interpret this passage from Isaiah in terms of the economy of the Incarnation; see Chapter 7 below, 317-320. 38 Strom. V.6.37.1-4. Le Boulluec, Commentaire, 154, points to the Stoic notions at work in this conception of the rational authority of heart and soul. 34

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miter (Ex 28.36-37) placed on the head of the priest. Similarly, the ephod symbolizes the work of creation and its λογίον (the breast-piece for the urim and thumim), which Clement connects to the Λόγος, the principle of creation, is the symbol of heaven, which the Λόγος Himself made. The two emeralds of the priest’s ephod represent the sun and moon, which are “nature’s co-workers (τοὺς συνεργοὺς τῆς φύσεως).”39 In all of this, the natural world of creation is bound to the economy of the incarnation through the creative Word who takes on flesh as His high-priestly robe and enters the cosmos/tabernacle to approach the “knowledge of the ineffable.” However, Clement also makes reference to the “putting off ” of holy garments, which the high priest performs after entering the holy place before the ark of the covenant (Lev 16.4, 23-24). Here, Clement reasons that in order to put on the linen garments to enter the holy of holies, the priest must take off his holy robe, which, as he has shown, is “the universe and that which is created in the universe” and has been declared holy by being called “good” in the beginning.40 This refers, for Clement, first of all to the “Levite and gnostic,” who is able to distinguish sensual from intellectual reality and has put off lower realities to enter upon “the intellectual passageway” by being purified by the Word, who has Himself performed this “putting off” and “putting on” by “descending to sensation (κατιὼν εἰς αἴσθησιν).”41 Clement is here referring to the Word’s κένωσις in becoming human (cf. Phil 2.6-7), an act symbolized by the removal of the linen robe that is proper to the holy of holies and the putting on of the priest’s robe, which is the universe. The gnostic reverses this, in effect, by removing the cosmic robe, purifying the flesh, and putting on the linen garments of the holy of holies. This reciprocal movement recapitulates the teaching of Paul that “though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich” (2 Cor 8.9). Clement presents us, then, with a mode of symbolism that brings divine truth through two lenses of refraction. The mystery that is enigmatically presented by the Scriptural account of the tabernacle and its sacred rites is, in fact, the mystery of the cosmos and its elements, and these, in turn disclose the divine wisdom, a disclosure that culminates with the incarnation, in which the Word comes “closer to the world.” The one temple ordered by Moses was meant to 39 40 41

Strom. V.6.38.2-3. Strom. V.6.39.3. Strom. V.6.40.1-3.

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represent the oneness of God as well as the uniqueness of the world (μονογενῆ κόσμον). The “only-begotten world” is, characteristically for Clement, both a reference to the last lines of the Timaeus, where the Demiurge’s creation is referred to as μονογενῆς,42 and to the Gospel of John (1.14, 3.16), which refers to Christ with the same word. By taking on the natural world as a priestly garment, the Word of God, its Creator, becomes the world of contemplation for the gnostic, whose mind has been elevated by the study of the things of this world in music, geometry, and astronomy43 and then passes through and beyond the bodily reality–taking off what the Word has put on–in order “to hear the Word Himself, who grants fuller understanding (πλείονα τὸν νοῦν) through Scripture.”44 With this conjunction of Christ/Word, Scripture, and World, we now turn to Origen, Clement’s great successor in Alexandria,45 who drew the enigmatically expressed teachings of Clement into a coherent system and practice of Christian philosophy. ii. Origen a. In the Savior God Created Clement, who had noted Solomon as a teacher of natural contemplation, had presented Moses as the paradigmatic philosopher and had divided the books of Moses into historical, ethical, physical, and mystical categories. Origen, too, looks to Moses’ book of Genesis for knowledge of the natural world and from the very beginning binds the world to Christ: ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth’ (Gen 1.1). What is the beginning of all things if not our Lord and ‘Savior of all’ (I Tim 4.10), Jesus Christ, ‘the first born of all creation’ (Col 1.15)? For it is in this beginning, that is, in His Word, that ‘God made heaven and earth,’ just as the Evangelist John has also said at the beginning of his Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with

42

Timaeus 92c. Strom. VI.10.80.2-4, 11.90.3-4. 44 Strom. V.6.40.1. 45 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI.6, reports the traditional succession of the school of Alexandria from Pantaenus to Clement and then to Origen: Eusebius Ecclesiastical History Books 6-10, trans. J.E.L. Oulton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932). The status of the catechetical school of Alexandria is quite uncertain. See Osborn, Clement of Alexandria, 19-24 for a brief summary of the debate. See also Watts, City and School, 164n.116: “…the ‘Catechetical School’ was not an institution in any formal sense. Its head was probably a prominent Christian intellectual who, like a poet laureate, was given the title to reward his teaching and missionary work with the expectation that he would continue to serve as the official intellectual voice of the city’s Christian community. If the head of the ‘Catechetical School’ is so understood, it is likely that Eusebius is correct in suggesting that Origen was given this title.” 43

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God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and nothing was made without Him’ (Jn 1.1-3).46

All thought of the natural world is bound to Christ so that all metaphysical questions are subservient to this fundamental orientation: “It is not speaking here of any sort of temporal beginning; rather it says heaven and earth as well as all things that have been made were made ‘in the beginning,’ that is in the Savior.”47 Origen here places the foundational question of natural philosophy, the origin of the world, already within the context of the economy of salvation: it is precisely the “Savior” who is the “beginning.” b. The Three-fold Wisdom So, Origen follows Clement in focusing his attention on Christ the incarnate Word in his reflections upon the natural world and while he looks quite naturally to Moses for knowledge of the world, for Origen, it is actually Solomon who presents the clearest example of the progression of the philosophic life and this progress is captured most fully for him in the Song of Songs. Origen interprets the eroticism of the Song as the process of the mind’s (or Church’s) spiritual ascent and union with the Word (or Christ) and situates this within the same basic threefold scheme of philosophical progress of ethics, physics, and contemplation (or logic) we have been tracing, identifying these three stages with Solomon’s three books of wisdom: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.48 Origen follows Clement in asserting the temporal primacy of Hebrew wisdom in comparison to Greek philosophy and claims that the threefold division of philosophy amongst the Greeks originally derives from Solomon’s division.49 Proverbs teaches the way of morality, giving aphoristic rules for living. Ecclesiastes teaches the nature of reality and in so doing begins to provoke longing for the eternal by acquainting the soul with the vanity of temporal

46 Origen, Homilae in Genesim I.1.1-9, Origène: Homélies sur la Genèseed, ed. Louis Doutreleau (Paris: Cerf, 1976). 47 Origen, Hom. in Gen. I.1.9-12. This non-temporal account of the beginning of Genesis is not a specifically Christian interpretation, as it goes back at least to Philo. See the note to Ronald Heine’s translation of the Homelies: Origen: Homelies on Genesis and Exodus (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 47. 48 For the use of this classification in Origen and other authors, see Sandro Leanza, “La classificazione dei libri salomonici e i suoi riflessi sulla questione dei rapporti tra Bibbia e sceinze profane, da Origene agli scrittori medioevali,” Augustinianum (1974), 651-666. 49 In canticum canticorum. Origène: Commentaire sur le Cantique des Cantiques II, ed. Luc Bresard and Henri Crouzel (Paris: Cerf, 1992).

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things. Once the soul has passed through this purification, having its love for the eternal Word of God provoked, it is ready to begin to learn to contemplate the divine in the Song of Songs. c. The Possibility of Knowledge and the Myth of the Cosmic Fall Before proceeding to the heart of our analysis, we shall note a few generalities concerning Origen’s understanding of the dynamics of the contemplation of nature, many of which derive from the general philosophical culture of his day. According to Origen, God “created all the species of visible things upon earth…and placed in them some teaching and knowledge of things invisible and heavenly, whereby the human mind might mount to spiritual understanding and seek the grounds of things in heaven.”50 Moreover, “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature in contrast to His real substance.” The frailty of the human mind must “understand the Parent of the universe from the beauty of His works and the comeliness of His creatures.”51 Origen, like Clement before him, discerns the same dynamic to be at work in the study of Scripture: “But this relationship [between the visible and the invisible] does not obtain only with creatures; the divine Scripture itself is written with wisdom of a rather similar sort.”52 These observations fit within the general framework of the Platonic universe of discourse wherein sensualities provide images of intellectual realities, which are the true forms of the images. The task of Christian discipline for Origen, then, is to move from the letter of the world–whether in the form of manifest creatures or words and events of Scripture–to its spirit and ultimately to its Creator, who, though He is not “actually all things in which He is now present,” will be all things at the consummation of the world (cf. I Cor 15.28).53 Origen also considers the co-inherence of nature and Scripture on the other side of the possibility of knowledge, teaching that just as there are difficulties in understanding passages of Scripture, there are difficulties in discerning the wisdom in certain aspects of the natural world: why, for example, are there poisonous snakes? In the face of such ambiguities, the task of the contemplative is “to ascribe 50 In cant. 3.13.16, Origen: The Song of Songs-Commentary and Homilies, trans. R.P. Lawson (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 220. 51 De principiis, I.1.6, Origenes Werke V, ed. Paul Koetschau (Leipzig: Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1913), 21.5-9; Origen: On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 52 In cant. 3.13.28, Lawson, 223. 53 De princ. III.6.2, 283.7-12.

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knowledge of these things to God,” trusting that He will reveal the truth of these things later to those of us who consider them in a reverent way now.54 To account for the structure and activity of the present world, Origen constructed the well-known myth of the falling-away of incorporeal souls from contemplation and their subsequent and diverse embodiment by God for instruction and chastisement. The various aspects of this myth–and its peregrinations in the subsequent history of Christian philosophy–are of central importance as background to Maximus’ intellectual formation and to the articulation of his own cosmology. We must therefore give it due attention and ask what, precisely, the myth is addressing. Origen’s translator Rufinus defines the scope of the treatise On First Principles in this way: “in [the books On First Principles] Origen discusses questions on which philosophers, after spending their whole lives in the task, have succeeded in discovering nothing. [He] made it his aim… to turn into a religious direction man’s belief in a Creator and his reasonings about the created world…”55 These “reasonings about the created world (creaturarum rationem)” address the question of the world’s beginning, the diversity of the world’s beings, and its relation to its Cause. We have treated all of these in one way or another in the preceding chapter and Origen has specific things to say about each of them. Our primary concern here, however, is to discern what specifically Origen is trying to explain with his cosmology. There are three fundamental and interrelated problems that face Origen as he gives his account of the nature of the world: 1.) the limitations of the human mind in relation to its natural desire to know; 2.) the apparent lack of desire for knowledge and virtue and the preference for the body amongst human beings; and 3.) the diversity of the world in relation to the unity of God. It is in light of these three problems that we should understand Origen’s cosmic account. At the end of the third chapter of Book 1 of On First Principles, after he has described the work of the Trinity on behalf of creation–the gift of being from the Father, participation in being in Christ, sanctification and wisdom from the Holy Spirit–Origen reflects upon the potential for an ever increasing desire for the blessed life to grow within us, a theme that has become a central 54 See Philocalia II.5, The Philocalia of Origen, ed. Joseph Armitage Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), 39.28-40.8. 55 De princ. Pref.Ruf.3, p. 5.7-11. Marguerite Harl argues that Origen’s On First Principles, the primary source of this account, is not primarily a systematic theology as we would recognize one, but rather an attempt at “physics” or “cosmology,” which expounds the relationship between the Divine and the world: Origène et la Fonction Révélatrice du Verbe Incarné (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1958), 104-106.

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part of modern interpretations of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus.56 Origen, however, also admits of the possibility of satiety (satietas, κόρος) in those who have attained the highest level of spiritual life and a subsequent decline away from the blessing of life with God, though this decline does not happen all at once. Once a person recognizes the lapse, it is possible to regain one’s previous position in the blessed state.57 Origen describes here a common reality of spiritual life, namely the “growing cold” of the fervor for knowledge that besets those who have been engaged in a disciplined philosophical life for a long time. One grows weary and longs to relax one’s attention for a while. This possibility is a problem for Origen because he takes the natural fervor for knowledge–both knowledge of God and of the natural world–to be inherent to the structure of the human mind: eager longing for the reality of things is natural to us and implanted in our souls… the mind burns with unspeakable longing to learn the design of those things which we perceive to have been made by God…our mind cherishes a natural and appropriate longing to know God’s truth and to learn the causes of things.58

There is in addition a natural progression in the mind from intuition of the world to the idea of God the Father and Creator of all, who is beyond the world: “it is possible to gain some notion of Him from our experience of the visible creation (ex occasione visibilium creaturarum) and from the instinctive thoughts of the human mind (ex his, quae humana mens naturaliter sentit).”59 However, despite the natural desire for knowledge in the human mind, the mind finds itself frustrated in its attempts to achieve a settled account of the nature of the world and of God’s providence for it: “in this matter human intelligence is feeble and limited.” “This matter” refers to the question of God’s identity as Creator, Benefactor, and Providence, for these titles seem, for Origen, to imply God’s need for an eternal creation so that He might always be Creator, always bestow goodness on something other than Himself, and always make provision for that other. The alternative would be for God to have become Creator at some point in time, which is absurd for Origen. A sort of Kantian

56 For an overview of the issue, see Paul Blowers, “Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Concept of Perpetual Progress,” Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992), 151-171. 57 De princ. I.3.8, 62.13-63.7. This issue is one of the major interpretive structures for reading Maximus amongst modern scholars and will be addressed in part II of this work. 58 De princ. II.11.4, 186.23-24, 187.9-10, 13-15. 59 De princ. I.3.1, 49.12-13.

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antinomy therefore resides at the heart of the mind’s thinking about the world’s origin and structure: “the soundest arguments on either side oppose and rebut one another, each bending the mind of the thinker into its own direction.”60 Origen settles on a familiar Platonically inspired explanation, that the world has eternally existed as a pre-figuration in the eternal wisdom of God. Origen is able, therefore, to affirm both sides of the antinomy, that God is eternally unchanging as Creator and that the world “is not unbegotten and coeternal with [God].”61 Nevertheless, the limits of the mind with respect to its understanding of the world have been shown and these limits are significant. According to Origen, the mind has an affinity with God in that it is not dependent upon space and time to move and operate62 and so is able to acquire, not only sensory impressions, but also the eternal and incorporeal principles (rationes, λόγοι) that underlie all things. Theoretically, the mind does not need the matter of the external world to conduct its natural activity. The nature of intellect is to intuit intellectual realities. However, the mind cannot exist in the world without the matter of the body: “for we men are animals, formed by a union of body and soul, and thus alone did it become possible for us to live on the earth.”63 And yet it is this body that, while enabling earthly existence, also renders it dull and unenlightened: “Our mind is shut up within bars of flesh and blood and rendered duller and feebler by reason of its association with such material substance,” this even though it is precisely through the body that the mind works in the world.64 It appears that human beings are left in a predicament in which the mind’s nature leads it to seek knowledge of that which it cannot know–the knowledge of things both divine and of the earth–that the reality which gives the mind access to the world is the very thing that obstructs its vision. Once again we are reminded of Kant, who famously opened the preface to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason with these words: “Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as

60 61 62 63 64

De princ. I.4.4, 67.5-6. De princ. I.4.5, 67.17-18. De princ. I.1.6, 21.14-17, 22.4-5. De princ. I.1.6, 22.21-23. De princ. I.1.5, 20.15-17.

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transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”65 Nevertheless, Origen affirms that the desire for knowledge of God and nature has not been given in vain: “we have not received this longing from God on the condition that it should not or could not ever be satisfied.”66 The fulfillment of the longing is a promise for the future, however, so that our studies and contemplation in the present serve as exercises for the reception of true knowledge to come, just as one prepares to paint, says Origen, by first drawing faint outlines on the canvas. The return to Christ will disclose to the one who is prepared “the reasons for all things that happen on earth,” all of the various ordinances of the laws of Moses, the various spiritual powers, “the reason of souls and the meaning of the diversity among animals…and what purpose of the Creator or what indication of His wisdom is concealed in each individual thing.”67 Our current reflection upon these realities, from the grand design of history to the peculiar properties of herbs, is a quest with no immediate results, as is reflected in Origen’s consistent exhortation to his readers to choose for themselves between the various explanations he has given to cosmic phenomena. Plain vision will eventually come, however, to those who are worthy. This theme is related to the second and third problems underlying Origen’s cosmic reflections, the problem of the diversity of beings as manifest in the varying degrees of spiritual aptitude and desire amongst rational creatures; more particularly, the problem of the apparent lack of desire for knowledge and virtue amongst many human beings. If all have been made with a rational soul by the same God and have been given the same desire for knowledge of nature and God, how is it that some fall away? As we have seen, Origen concludes I.3 with the possibility of falling away from the blessed life due to satiety. He goes on in I.4, I.5, and II.9 to give a cosmic explanation of the decline of rational natures from the good that befits them. Because rational natures are created, they have the possibility of change as an inherent part of their nature. God created rational natures with free will, and the degree to which these creatures have moved themselves away from their primordial good state determines the diversity of the present world (II.9.2). Free will is thus the principle of cosmic diversity and because free will lies at the heart of the problem of turning

65 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Avii, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 [1929]). 66 De princ. II.11.4, 187.15-16. 67 Cf. De princ. II.11.5, 188.1-189.8.

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away from the truth of one’s own being, Origen’s cosmic account of the diversity of creatures has a fundamentally practical, or ascetical, consequence. Against the Gnostics of his day, Origen asserted the freedom of each rational creature, and this affirmation, because “the end is like the beginning,” looks both forward and backward. Origen can exhort his Christian students to exert themselves for knowledge and virtue because they are free to change their current state, progress to a higher state, and ultimately return to Christ, in whom all cosmic mysteries will be disclosed. Origen grounds this exhortation in his account of the fall of souls. One’s station is a consequence of the free movement of one’s soul and so change is also within one’s power. When taken together with the world’s relationship to the intellectual realm, this practical outcome of cosmic reflection reveals that while the contemplation of nature is conceived as the second stage–following upon ethics–of philosophical life, it has consequences that inform both the practical and the theological parts of philosophy. A way of accounting, from the standpoint of Maximus, for Origen’s myth of the fall of intellects into multiplicity through satiety and inattention is to say that Origen confuses the ontological with the moral aspects of divine providence and judgment.68 Origen, on this view, (mistakenly) makes a moral issue of the observable diversity of the cosmos; we might also say, conversely, that he grounds his ontology in his experience of the struggle for virtue. Perhaps Hume’s notion of the impossibility of deriving an “ought” from an “is”69 lurks in the background of this interpretation of Origen and from the point of view that begins with the essential separation of these two realms of consideration, Origen is surely guilty as charged. However, as I have been arguing throughout my interpretation of the ancient Greek tradition and now with the Greek fathers of the Christian church, the early tradition is more comprehensible when precisely this division is not allowed an absolute sway over how we read the sources. For Clement and Origen in particular the “is” of the facts of the world are given to instruct human beings in the “ought” of virtue as elementary instruction in the Christian way of life. It could be replied that ethical formation comes first in the philosophical curriculum, at least conceptually, for Clement

68 See Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 36-38; Sherwood, The Ascetic Life, 38-39; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 70-71. Maximus addresses this issue in Amb. 10, 1136A; see Chapter 5 below, 237-240. See also Amb. 71 and my comments in the Introduction above, 35-40. 69 Cf. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature III.1, “Moral Distinctions not derived from Reason,” The Philosophical Works of David Hume Vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), 231-232.

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and Origen so that it would be disingenuous to say that they could derive their ethical doctrines from the nature of the world without the mediation of Scripture, the Church’s teaching, and personal purification and a strong case could be made for this position. However, I would argue that Origen’s notion of ethics is not a matter of defining the axioms of moral theory but rather of returning to the divine Origin of being through the transformation of the passions and as such, his is not a confusion but rather a refusal of an absolute distinction between ontology and praxis. Origen is intent upon accounting for the multiplicity of the universe in a way that refutes “Gnosticism” 70 by preserving the goodness of creation and human moral freedom. His second homily on Jeremiah71 begins with a quotation from the Wisdom of Solomon: “God did not create death, neither does He delight in the destruction of living things. For He created all things in order for them to exist and creatures of the world are preserved (σωτήριοι) and there is no deadly potion in them, neither is the dominion of Hades upon the earth” (Wis 1.13-14). Where then does death or any other failure of created being come from (Origen is reflecting upon the phrase “How have you turned bitter, foreign vine?,” Jer 2.21)? Origen’s response is that the “sweetness” of the soul has been given it by God, but those of us who have bitterness of soul have created it for ourselves; it is rational agency that brings suffering into the world. This is a provisional response to the question of diversity but it must be kept in mind precisely what it is of diversity that Origen is trying to understand, namely, the fact that some people pursue God with desire while others do not. The homily on Jeremiah to which we have referred speaks of cosmic diversity in terms that are not only “moral” in an abstract sense but speak directly to the diverse ways in which souls are healed of sin: Just as certain wounds are cured by emollients and others by oil and others need a bandage and hence are healed…so there are certain sins which foul the soul, and man needs for such sins the lye of the Word, the soap of the Word (Jer 2.22), yet there are some sins which are not cured in this way, for they are not comparable to filth.72

70 Origen mentions Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides as his adversaries in this context: De Princ. II.9.5. 71 Origenes Werke Vol. III, ed. Erich Klostermann (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1901); Origen: Homilies on Jeremiah, Homily on I Kings 28, trans. John Clark Smith (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998). 72 Hom. In Jer. II.2.3, 18.22-29.

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This very pragmatic observation that different souls in different states require different remedies for the evils that afflict them in order to rekindle the love for God is, I argue, the fundamental import of Origen’s myth of pre-cosmic union and fall. Though it is less artfully rendered, Origen’s myth functions for him in the same way as Plato’s myth in the Phaedrus about gods and souls circling the rim of heaven in contemplation of the forms, or the myth of the cave in the Republic. Whether or not Origen took his own myth literally (and few, I think, would accuse Origen of being naively devoted to the literal), the work it does for him is to provide a framework for understanding the nature of human spiritual striving: the central phenomenon of the Christian life is the eros of God and the soul so that the great temptation in the spiritual life is to loose one’s fervor for God and thus “fall away” into a state of frigidity. The experience of life in this world is intended to lead us to return to an ever-deepening desire for God,73 the desire that characterizes the bride of the Song of Songs. To draw such an ethic of transformative eros into the realm of ontology is to extend, in a more overtly ascetical direction, the erotically charged universe we observed in Plato. Origen’s myth functions for him as an εἰκὸς λόγος accounting for the dynamics of Christian life. II. The Cappadocians In addition to the monastic milieu, in which Evagrius was to play a leading conceptual role, an environment in which Origen’s legacy remained particularly strong was that of the fourth century Cappadocians: Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen. The Cappadocians can rightly be called the heirs of Origen’s intellectual legacy. The land of Cappadocia was connected to the master through the missionary efforts of one of his disciples, Gregory the Wonderworker, and it was the compilation of the Philocalia by Basil and Gregory Nazianzen that has preserved many of Origen’s texts in their original Greek. Each of the Cappadocians was shaped by this legacy and, though they shared much the same education and cultural sensibility, their approaches to the contemplation of nature within the tradition of Scriptural philosophy passed down by both Clement and Origen are unique to each of them. Here we shall study Basil’s homilies on the Hexaemeron (six days of creation), Gregory Nazianzen’s second Theological Oration (Oration 28), and Gregory of

73

De Princ. I.III.8.

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Nyssa’s On the Making of Man and his Apology for Basil’s Hexaemeron, all of which provide distinctive appropriations of the contemplation of nature. i. Basil of Caesarea: Water is Water Basil, like Clement, considers Moses to be the great teacher of natural contemplation. When Moses had been banished from Egypt, he spent forty years in Ethiopia “devoted to the contemplation of beings (τῇ θεωρίᾳ τῶν ὄντων ἀποσχολάσας),” on which basis he was found worthy to see God and to give the true account of the nature of the cosmos.74 Basil’s sermons on the Hexaemeron, his homilies on the six days of the Genesis account of creation, present us with a form of natural contemplation that, like Origen’s, focuses on the interpretation of Scripture, but also extends this contemplation to the ecclesial community as a whole.75 The nine homilies76 were given over the course of five days to an audience that appears to have been a mixed group of farmers, artisans, townsfolk, and perhaps a few more highly educated men. Gregory the Theologian remarked that reading the sermons was to experience being placed before the Creator Himself and Basil’s brother Gregory devoted a treatise, which we shall examine below, to answering questions regarding some of Basil’s interpretations of the text of Genesis. Basil most likely gave the sermons when he was bishop of Caesarea,77 and his concerns through the course of the sermons do indeed tend to gather around the moral and ascetical practices of his community. Basil’s aim was not simply “to present a complete cosmology,” 78 but to present a cosmology that would edify the practices of the church,79 and Basil, one of the most learned men of his day, had to find the appropriate register of thought and language to communicate to his Cappadocian flock. 80 Following one of the tendencies we 74 Hexaemeron I.1, 90, Basile de Césarée-Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron, ed. Stanislas Giet (Paris: Cerf, 1968). I have referred to the English translations in Saint Basil, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Agnes Clare Way (Washington D.C.: CUA Press, 1963) and in NPNF, second series, Vol. 8. 75 For an account of Basil’s Hexaemeron in relation to the Greek philosophical tradition see John F. Callahan, “Greek Philosophy and the Cappadocian Cosmology,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1959), 29-57. 76 The authenticity of the tenth and eleventh homilies ascribed to Basil, which are devoted to the making of man, is contested: Basil de Césarée-Sur l’Origine de l’ homme, ed. Alexis Smets and Michel Van Esbroeck (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 13-26. 77 Giet, Basile de Césarée-Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron, 6-7. 78 Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 320. 79 Cf. Hex. VII.6. 80 Ray Van Dam is right to point to the oral (as opposed to the scholarly, textual) context of the sermons and helpfully indicates the many places where Basil seems to make rhetorical adjustments for the sake of

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noted in Origen, Basil employs the contemplation of nature in the service of the practice of Christian life. Most basically, he conceives of the world–again following Origen–as “the school and classroom of divine knowledge for rational souls.”81 His rhetoric, therefore, was directed towards bringing the world before his community in such a way that they could be instructed by it. This communal context for the contemplation of nature leads Basil to a resolute commitment to the concrete experience of the objects of creation as they appear to human perception and a rejection of the search for essences that, he says, had characterized Greek metaphysics before him. Basil begins by drawing a distinction between what he will do in his sermons and what the Greek philosophers were doing in their many treatises περὶ φύσεως, which contradict one another and thus render the whole world of Greek cosmological speculation unstable.82 Basil does not make “an inquiry into the essence of each being” because “getting involved in that is not useful for the building-up of the Church.”83 This orientation is grounded in Basil’s concerns for the moral advancement of the members of his congregation–seeking essences of things will not of itself help someone to keep the commandments–but also in a conviction about the nature of the things in the world themselves. The words of Scripture regarding, for example, the heavens are sufficient, for in comparing them to “smoke” (Is 51.6) and a “curtain” (Is. 40.22) Scriptural language gives an adequate description of their constitution (σύστασις) and form (σχῆμα), indicating that for Basil, the purpose of the discourse about nature is to describe in simple metaphors how the natural world looks to us. This is supported further by Basil’s “method” of contemplating things on the earth: Similarly, let us resolve, with respect to the things on earth, not to busy ourselves with trying to define the earth’s essence, or to wear out our capacity for thinking by seeking out its underlying substance (τὸ ὑποκείμενον); neither let us seek out any nature devoid of all qualities and existing completely unqualified in its own logos (ἄποιον ὑπάρχουσαν τῷ ἑαυτῆς λόγῳ). Rather, let us be well aware that all of the things we see surrounding a particular reality (πάντα τὰ περὶ αὐτὴν θεωρούμενα, αὐτὴν referring to φύσιν) are employed when we give an account of that thing’s being (εἰς τὸν τοῦ εἶναι κατατέτακται λόγον) and complete its essence.

better communication, Becoming Christian-The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 106. 81 Hex. 1.6, 110. 82 Hex. I.2, 92. 83 Hex. I.8, 118-120.

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If you try to remove with reason each reality from the qualities that are inherent to it you will come up with nothing in the end. For if you should set aside, for example, black, cold, weight, thickness, and its qualities pertaining to taste, or anything else like these that we see to pertain to it, then there will no longer be any underlying substance left.84

Things are what they appear to be for Basil; they are their qualities. Moreover, discerning the nature of something is of little value or concern, for what is important is the effect something has in the world. Whether the heat of the sun comes from its nature (ἐκ φύσεως) or from some effect it undergoes (ἐκ πάθους) makes no difference, for in either case the same results are achieved upon the same matter: things are warmed by the sun.85 Basil has been charged with a certain (at least “official”) fideism with respect to these passages,86 but there is something else at work in his attitude towards the contemplation of the nature of the world. It is not that Basil as a bishop wants his flock simply to accept what Scripture says about the world because it says it. Rather, his attitude is nearer to that of Whitman: When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.87

It is precisely the poetic language of Scripture in its description of the heavens that is most accurate and intellectually satisfying88 for Basil because this language draws us closest to the heart of cosmic reality: 1.) that the universe

84

Hex. I.8, 120-122. Hex. III.7, 226. 86 Emmanuel Amand de Mendieta, “The Official Attitude of Basil of Caesarea as a Christian Bishop Towards Greek Philosophy and Science,” in The Orthodox Churches and the West, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 41-42. 87 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold William Blodget (New York: Norton, 1973), 271. 88 Amand de Mendieta, “The Official Attitude of Basil,” 41: “[The ordinary descriptions of the prophet Isaiah] are indeed very simple and indeed poetic, but they are quite insufficient at the intellectual level.” 85

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has been created beautifully by God, who is Himself recognized in its beauty, though infinitely beyond it, and 2.) that the world in its simple observation gives instruction for the conduct of human life. With respect to the first, Basil says at the end of the first homily: For even though we do not know the nature of created beings (τὴν φύσιν ἀγνοοῦμεν τῶν γενομένων), there is such an amazing reality that so completely floods our faculty of sensation (τό γε ὁλοσχερῶς ὑποπῖπτον ἡμῶν τῇ αἰσθήσει τοσοῦτον ἔχει τὸ θαῦμα) that even the most insightful mind can make known only the most insignificant details of the lowest of the beings in the universe, whether in order to be able to give an appropriate account of it or to give the appropriate praise to the Creator.89

The world so overwhelms our perception that the mind is unable to get to the essence or nature of things, to get to the heart of creation. It is rather “the wonder of creation” that “is very readily established” in the mind,90 itself penetrating to the interior of the mind, as it were, rather than the mind penetrating it. The simplest of creatures is able to produce “remembrance of the Creator” in the mind because even “a single bit of grass and herbage suffice to occupy all your thinking with the contemplation of the artistry that has brought them about.”91 The structure of a stalk of grain, which allows it to bear many kernels in a single head, is cause for wonder and adoration of the Creator because of its simple purposiveness and obvious marks of good design. It is not the intricate and super-sensory mathematical proportions of the cosmos that provoke wonder as the beginning of philosophy as the Timaeus has it but rather the bare fact of the utter practicality of the material order, the observable usefulness of the parts of natural things to their own flourishing, and their usefulness to the life of the cosmos, where human beings occupy an exalted place. This is much more profound for Basil–things in their sheer presence and activity–than any discernment of a thing’s “essence” ever could be. The simple fact of the usefulness of cattle and grain for the physical needs of humanity, as well as their availability for our use, are sources of great wonder for Basil. He is mindful of the given arrangement of human life in its basic relationship to nature, which is a relationship of mutual benefit. The earth provides for, and is oriented towards the needs of human beings: “The use of seeds 89 90 91

Hex. I.11, 134-136. Hex. V.2, 284. Hex. V.3, 290.

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is reserved for us”92 and the whole purpose of grain is that human beings might have something to eat. Trees give fruit, wood for shelter and the construction of boats, and provide fuel for fire.93 Yet, despite this thoroughly anthropocentric view of the natural world, Basil insists that human beings are themselves only a portion of creation and must accept their proper place, just like everything else in nature. Seeking to augment one’s own holdings and territories beyond one’s ancestral inheritance, even at the expense of the neighbor is, in fact, a practice unique to human beings.94 Human beings should rather learn from the fish and be content to stay in their own allotted place. This reflection leads us to a consideration of Basil’s moral reading of nature. Human beings, as endowed with reason, are called to exercise authority over all of creation, yet, because of humanity’s proclivity to sin they are also intended to learn from nature. Observation of the fruitfulness of the vine, combined with the remembrance of the parable of the vine in the Gospel, serves to “remind you of your nature” and the fruitfulness of the human soul in its attachment to the Vine who is Christ. Similarly, the rose, which originally had no thorns, now possesses them to teach us that pain and pleasure are bound together as a result of the human corruption of the earth through sin.95 In these cases, and in many others, the natural objects of the world, which are often refracted through the prism of Scripture, are not symbols of other realities, but disclosures of the nature of the cosmos and how human being, especially in its moral facet, is to find its place within it. This is obviously a result of Basil’s concerns as a pastor and ascetic to discern the practical import of both Scripture and the natural world, which again, are inseparable. However, Basil’s insistence upon moral meanings and his well-known rejection of more speculative allegory are also based upon his insistence that the things of the natural world have, as we have indicated, their own essential integrity and do not exist for the sake of symbolizing something else. Even as “moral examples,” the things of the world we’ve mentioned–the fish content in their sea, the vine, the rose with its thorns–really do have these qualities in their own natural way and participate in the natural world on their

92 93 94 95

Hex. V.1, 282. Hex. V.7, 306-308. Hex. VII.3-4, 408-410. Hex. V.6, 304, 300.

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own terms, reflecting the nature of reality in their own being and not pointing away from themselves to something else. This stands in contrast to the style of reading Basil rejects elsewhere in the Hexaemeron, where, for example, he calls into question the allegorical reading of “the waters above the heavens” and “the waters below the heavens” as referring to good and evil spiritual powers. Rather, as he says with a powerful terseness, “Let us understand that ‘water’ is water (τὸ ὕδωρ, ὕδωρ νοήσωμεν).”96 The contemplation of nature for Basil leads to meditation upon the reality of the very being of the things in the world, with no attempt to leap away from the fact of the world itself as a gift. Basil here anticipates Wittgenstein’s “Not how the world is but that it is, this is the mystical.”97 Things themselves–even the blades of grass–are enough to fill the contemplative gaze of the human mind and eye. To go beyond this is to miss creation itself, and therefore the Creator. This, ultimately, is what Gregory meant by saying that Basil’s Hexaemeron brings one into the presence of the Creator Himself, for Basil’s account of the six days brings the world itself and all its creatures before the mind in the fullness of their simple presence to be gazed upon and wondered at as pure gifts of God. I have noted that Basil’s concern in the Hexaemeron was to edify his congregation in an especially moral sense. His thoughts about the world were not, however, divorced from his understanding of theology. In his polemic against Eunomius, Basil asserts the incomprehensibility of the essence of God against the Eunomian claim to know the essence of God the Father to be ἀγέννητος (unbegotten),98 arguing that names (such as ἀγέννητος) name concepts (ἐπίνοιαι), not essences, but that they are not therefore meaningless.99 He then turns, in a move that was characteristic of the Cappadocian polemics against radical Arianism, to a demonstration of the incomprehensibility of the essence of creation, in this case of “the earth beneath our feet.” As he alluded to in the Hexaemeron, no predication based on sensation (αἴσθησις) that we might apply to the created world captures its essence, for each sense is attuned to a specific aspect of creation–sight to color, touch to hardness and softness, hot and cold, 96

Hex. III.9, 236. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44, (London: Routledge and Paul/New York: The Humanites Press, 1961). 98 Cf. Contra Eunomium I.12.1-29, 212-214, Basile de Césarée Contre Eunome Tome I, ed. Bernard Sesboüé, Georges-Matthieu de Durand, and Louis Doutreleau (Paris: Cerf, 1982). 99 Cont. Eun. I.5.130-I.6.57, 180-188. 97

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etc.–and not to its οὐσία.100 He also asserts that discourse (λόγος), by which he means the teaching of Scripture, does not disclose the essence of creation but rather identifies its Maker: This is the sort of thing the one who has reasoned (ὁ διαλεχθείς) with us about creation has taught us: ‘In the beginning God made heaven and earth…’ He thought it sufficient to proclaim the one who made and gave order to creation, whereas he declined to conduct a thorough investigation as to its substance since this would have been vain and useless for those who listen.101

Again, knowledge of the οὐσία of a thing would not benefit the knower since by itself it would not instruct us how to live. In any case, the essence of created things is not knowable and this should give us an indication that its Maker’s essence is all the more unknowable. This, however, Eunomius fails to acknowledge and so we may say that one aspect of the falsehood of the Eunomian position was, in Basil’s view, the result of a failure to understand the meaning of the contemplation of nature. They were fundamentally inattentive to how the world gives itself: not as a bare essence to be known but as thick manifestations of quality and quantity whose very presence makes the Creator present to the mind as well, and this again not as an οὐσία to be grasped but as a presence to be revered. ii. Gregory Nazianzen: Nature and Theological Initiation While Basil extends the practical aspect of Origen’s approach to the contemplation of nature and grounds it upon a vision for the integrity of created things in themselves (though giving indications towards the theological), it is Gregory Nazianzen who extends more obviously the other aspect of Origen’s vision of natural contemplation, the anticipation of theology, in his second Theological Oration (Or. 28). The context for Gregory’s contemplation of nature is, like Basil’s, set by his role as public rhetorician and preacher, though the intellectual register of his Theological Orations is rather higher than in Basil’s Hexaemeron.102 For while Gregory declaims in the mode of a preacher, he takes from Origen the scholarly notion that cosmic speculation can be engaged in

100

Cont. Eun. I.12.30-46, 214-216. Cont. Eun. I.13.1-6, 216. 102 Gregory does, however, employ the poetic images of Scripture in its description of the world in a way that recalls Basil’s use. See e.g. Or. 28.27.11-15, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 27-31, ed. Paul Gallay (Paris: Cerf, 1978). 101

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without the necessity of coming down on a settled position, that many diverse opinions can be held by Christians without detriment to the dogmatic content of the faith. He tells the Eunomian theologians to philosophize for me about the world or worlds (φιλοσόφει μοι περὶ κόσμου ἢ κόσμων), about matter, the soul, good and evil rational natures, about the resurrection, judgment, retribution, and the sufferings of Christ. Discovering something with respect to these things is not without value, and making mistakes poses no threat.103

These themes are all familiar from On First Principles as is the relatively free spirit of enquiry.104 For Gregory, there is room for a natural contemplation that is not directly determinative for the doctrines of theology (or for moral practice). It plays a crucial role, however, in conditioning an orientation towards the mysteries of theology. Gregory does himself “philosophize” about the matters he mentions at the end of Oration 27–in particular about the world, the soul, and rational beings–in his Poemata Arcana, where he appropriates the Greek tradition of rendering cosmology in verse.105 Unsurprisingly, much of what Gregory has to say in these verses operates within the realm established by Origen. By situating himself in this poetic tradition, Gregory lends his cosmic thought the kind of hierophantic disposition towards nature that he assumes in Oration 28.106 Gregory announces that the task of the oration is to “address the concepts of theology (τοῖς τῆς θεολογίας λόγοις),” but more than one-third of it is devoted to contemplation of the natural world and is, in fact, an example of θεωρία φυσική, which, in the mouth of Gregory, serves the interests of his mystical theology. He begins by establishing himself as a new philosophical Moses, evoking the ascent of Mt. Sinai (Ex 19.16 ff) and Moses’ request to see the glory of God (Ex 33.12 ff). The “back of God” (Θεοῦ τὰ ὀπίσθια; Ex 33.23), which is all

103

Or. 27.10.17-22, 96-98. Gallay, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 27-31, 96n.7; Frederick Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 102-103. 105 D. A. Sykes, “The ‘Poemata Arcana’ of St. Gregory Nazianzen,” Journal of Theological Studies 21 (1970), 39-40. The author places Gregory’s poems within the tradition of Greek didactic verse, a tradition which, argues Sykes, Gregory revived and of which he was, in the end, the last representative. 106 I have referred to the translations in NPNF series 2 volume 7, and in On God and Christ-The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, trans. Frederick Williams and Lionel Wickham (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). 104

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Moses (and now Gregory) is allowed to see, is “the grandeur in created things, which have been brought forth by God and are governed by him.”107 Created things are “tokens,” or “indications” (γνωρίσματα) of God; they are all that can be seen of God. Gregory makes the standard confession, against the Eunomians, that human beings cannot know God fully, but like Basil he extends our lack of knowledge to the created world as well: “Not only does ‘the peace of God surpass all understanding’ (Phil 4.7) and comprehension…so also does a rigorous intellectual grasp of creation.”108 After considering the divine in various ways and according to various images, the upward strain of Gregory’s discourse collapses under its own weight, for “something that belongs to our constitution [as embodied] (τι τῶν ἡμετέρων)” always intervenes between our mental faculties and the ideal realities we would seek to apprehend.109 We try to entertain pure concepts such as “spirit/wind, fire, light, love, wisdom,” etc. but we are unable to think about them without reference to some physical reality. “Our mind, therefore, grows weary of transcending bodily realities and of holding converse with realities that are free of bodily nature while, bound to its own weakness, it stares at what is beyond its power.” The mind’s only recourse is to physical realities, which it uses either as idols or as the means by which “to come to an awareness of God through the beauty and comely arrangement of visible things.”110 Gregory follows the flow of “God-given reason (ὁ ἐκ Θεοῦ λόγος)” in its progress through the perception of visible things to the arrangement of their elements and from there to the one who arranged them. Because λόγος comes from God but is also “co-natural with all things (πᾶσι σύμφυτος)” and “our primary law (πρῶτος ἐν ἡμῖν νόμος),” it “leads us from visible things to God,”111 partaking as it does of both. Reason and intellect, he says, will one day return to God their archetype and will then achieve the knowledge of “mixture with its kin (τῷ οἰκείῳ προσμίξῃ).”112 For now, however, “no one has ever found what God is by nature and essence, and no one will.”113 In relation to the world itself,

107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Or. 28.3.12-13. Or. 28.5.2-6. Or. 28.12.31-34. Or. 28.13.28-32. Or. 28.16.22-25. Or. 28.17.6. Or. 28.17.1-2.

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whose elements lead the mind to the recognition of God, the mind is also left in ignorance and mystery. Gregory turns first to the natural constitution of the human being, the “μικρὸς κόσμος,” which is a mixture of mortality and immortality, materiality and immateriality, whose blended identity finds its most poignant mystery in the mind’s connection to the external world through sensuality and speech.114 Gregory’s rhetoric brings these questions before us as questions and does not offer any explanation. He moves to the non-human animals, the plants, the earth itself, the heavenly bodies, and the angelic powers and again poses the question of the source of their diverse forms and activities, of their order and structure.115 Gregory adopts, against his Eunomian adversaries, the voice of God in God’s rebuke of Job for presuming to complain about the arrangement of providence when he could not answer the fundamental cosmic questions of the nature of the natural world all around him. Gregory’s discourse, he says, has as its goal the demonstration that “even the nature of secondary realities is greater than the intellect can grasp,” so how could a human being claim, as did Eunomius, to know the nature of God, who is infinitely beyond what is itself beyond human intellect?116 The mystery of theology includes, for Gregory, the mystery of the world itself and is, in fact, utterly inseparable from it, for it is only “the back-side” of God, the tracks left in creation, that we are ever able to see. For all the rhetoric of bodily weightiness and obscurity and the desire of the mind to get beyond corporeality, the fact is that we never do get away from the body on earth. So, an account of God cannot be given without the world. On the other side, an account of the world cannot be considered to be complete without reference to its divine Cause. A physical and mathematical account of the stars and planets, for example, and the generalization of these empirical observations into laws of nature or “science (ἐπιστήμη)” do not suffice as “comprehension” of the heavenly spheres “in their being (κατάληψις τῶν ὄντων).”117 Rather, as any philosopher would say, an account of their cause is necessary for true knowledge. But in the case of created things in their created being, the account of causality very

114 115 116 117

Or. 28.22. Or. 28.23-31. Or. 28.31.39-42. Or. 28.29.5-14.

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quickly begins to elude the human mind, for it is not enough simply to name “God” as the “first Cause”118 of all that is. Gregory asks for an account of how the sun produces its effects: producing night and day and the change of seasons. He asks why the moon comes at night and changes the way it does, what holds the constellations in place. Expecting no answer, for there is no response that would answer his questions, Gregory, like Basil, turns his auditors from the how and the why to the that of the world, to its sheer unaccountable reality, its givenness as a creation. By asking simple questions, which demand that one gaze at the things in the world and give an account of them without recourse to mathematical or elemental description, that is, without secondary levels of description, Gregory intends to lead his listeners to an imitation of the highest level of created beings, the angelic powers, who are all assigned to watch over a certain part of the cosmos and who constantly hymn God’s majesty.119 The nature of creation, as we saw with Clement, can only be approached in the priestly activity of worship in the temple. God and the world are connected in the praise of rational creatures and, as Gregory has insisted, we are unable to contemplate one without the other. This coming-together of the Divine and the created in natural contemplation is the way of entry to Gregory’s teaching about the incarnate Christ, who is the rock in whom Moses took shelter when God passed by and showed him Himself in created things.120 This direction of the contemplation of nature towards the discourse of theology is not without its counter-balance with respect to praxis, however. Gregory, like Basil, keeps all of these elements together and while Basil’s texts are more overtly ethical in their emphasis than Gregory’s, Gregory makes the issues of practical philosophy a central part of his critique of the Eunomians in his oration Against the Eunomians (Or. 27, the First Theological Oration). He criticizes them as being deficient in ethical philosophy: “They delight in the ‘profane and vain babblings and contradictions of the knowledge falsely socalled’ (I Tim 6.20)…would that they would give some attention to their actions as well (τι καὶ περὶ τὰς πράξεις ἠσχολοῦντο).”121 Their mode of discourse–excessively analytical and showy–destroys “every pious way” so that their discourse

118 119 120 121

Or. 28.31.20. Or. 28.31.26-36. Or. 28.3.6-7. Or. 27.1.5-14.

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is ultimately incompatible with the Christian way of life.122 Whether or not this was true of the Eunomians themselves, Gregory is articulating a vision of “philosophizing about God”123 that integrates praxis, contemplation of nature, and discourse about God. The theologian must be purified by praxis–hospitality, brotherly love, chastity, feeding the poor, psalmody, vigil, prayer, fasting124– before beginning to articulate the mysteries of the faith. Discourse has an effect on those who hear it and cultivates a certain ethos, which, as in the case of the Eunomians, may be foreign to the Christian vision for how to live and this, for Gregory, is the result in part of discourse given by an impure theologian. So Gregory’s contemplation of nature, which leads to the mystery of the ineffable God, is grounded in the practical life of asceticism and virtue, which are the necessary preparation for a true encounter with the world as “the back of God,” an encounter in which the theologian, like Moses, takes refuge in the rock that is Christ, the incarnate Word. iii. Gregory of Nyssa: The Scope of Natural Contemplation Gregory of Nyssa employs Clement’s use of the tabernacle as an image of the relationship between Christ and the world, writing “Moses received preliminary, typological (ἐν τύπῳ) instruction concerning the mystery of the tabernacle that encompasses the universe (τὸ πᾶν). This [tabernacle] would be Christ, ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’” (I Cor 1.24).125 He goes on to say in the same passage that therefore “the same tabernacle,” which he has identified with Christ, is in a sense (τρόπον τινά) both unfashioned (ἀκατάσκευον) and something that has come to be fashioned (κατεσκευασμένην): it is uncreated in its preexistence (τῷ μὲν προϋπάρχειν ἄκτιστον) and has become a creature in accordance with this material order (τῷ δὲ κατὰ τὴν ὑλικὴν ταύτην σύστασιν κτιστὴν γενομένην.”126

122

Or. 27.2. Or. 27.3. 124 Cf. Or. 27.7; for the role of purification and its relation to theological contemplation in Gregory Nazianzen, see Jean Plagnieux, Saint Grégoire de Nazianze Théologien (Paris: Éditions Franciscaines, 1952), 81-111, for the relationship of praxis and contemplation more generally, 141-164; see also Christopher A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford: Oxord University Press, 2008), 65-90. 125 De Vita Moysis II, 91.13-15, Gregorii Nysseni De Vita Moysis, ed. Herbert Musurillo (Leiden: Brill, 1964). 126 Vita Mo., II, 91.17-20. 123

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Gregory is here applying the Alexandrian notion of the preexistence of the λόγοι of creatures in the mind of God to Christ so that the incarnation of Christ becomes the archetype for the process of creation. The universe is, in this way, the image of the incarnate Christ. But what is it for Gregory to contemplate this image itself? Its connection to the mysteries of theology, which led Basil and Gregory Nazianzen to a stance of extreme (at least rhetorical) caution with respect to speculations about the world, would appear to lead Gregory of Nyssa in the opposite direction towards a much more open-ended speculation about cosmic processes. We noted at the beginning of this chapter that the human being was created last of all, according to Gregory of Nyssa, as the one who would both contemplate and rule all of the natural world. In anticipation of Maximus’ well-charted notion of man as mediator of creation and divinity, Gregory sees the human being as one who “enjoys God by means of his more divine nature, and the good things of earth by the senses, which are akin to them.”127 The human mind is suited to

knowledge of the diversity of the world because of its diverse sense faculties, but this in no way threatens the unity of the human being, who is made in the image of the one God. In this way, the human intellect becomes the place where the world is united in its intuition of the world through the senses. A corollary to this observation pertains to Gregory’s understanding of the relationship between mind and matter. In his argument against the eternity of matter, he reasons that material reality is the coalescence of intelligible attributes such as color, weight, texture, and so on, so that all of reality is finally grounded in the immaterial, there being no need for an eternal material substrate for the production of material things. As we have just seen, Basil used a similar line of thinking to turn his congregation away from the vain search for essences. Gregory extends the notion in a positive direction which, in fact, points more directly precisely to the mind’s suitability to understanding the material world through the senses because of its co-naturalness with what the world truly is: intellectual reality. Unlike Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa does not seem at all bothered by the mind’s use of the senses, at least when he is speculating philosophically. He is quite fond of using elaborate biological examples to make his philosophical and rhetorical points and seems genuinely

127

De hom. op. II, PG 44.133B15-17.

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fascinated by the intricacies of the material world, as is evinced by the last chapter of his On the Making of Man, which considers human composition from a medical perspective as supplementary to the Scriptural witness.128 This comes through quite clearly in his Apology for Basil’s Hexaemeron. In this text Gregory defines and defends his brother’s intentions for his sermons and in so doing shows how very different his own approach is. The fact that some have found Basil’s account of the six days lacking–particularly with reference to how there could be the passage of three days before the existence of the sun and stars (which were created on the fourth day) and how the two heavens mentioned in Genesis (Gen 1.1, 8) comport with the three heavens mentioned by St. Paul (II Cor 12.2)–is evidence for Gregory that “there are some people who have not correctly recognized the point (τὸν σκοπόν) of Basil’s work on the six days of creation.”129 Basil was speaking to a diverse congregation made up of some who were familiar with advanced intellectual culture but of many who were not. For this reason, Basil did not begin with an elaborately wrought account of the Biblical narrative but rather he gave a simple exegesis of the words so that the speech set before the audience would be useful to them in their simplicity, although he was somehow able to lift his exegesis to the level of his more advanced auditors by bringing in the rich learning of pagan philosophy (τῆς ἔξω φιλοσοφίας). The result was that he could be understood by the multitude and dazzle the more advanced (ὥστε παρὰ μὲν τῶν πολλῶν νοεῖσθαι, παρὰ δὲ τῶν ὑπερεχόντων θαυμάζεσθαι).130

Basil’s genius, according to Gregory, was his ability to speak about the natural world at many different registers at once and thus his discourse takes on an authority for Gregory that is second only to the Scriptural narrative itself.131 Although Gregory begins by affirming that he teaches nothing other than “Basil’s philosophy of the generation of the cosmos,”132 that his own thoughts on the matter are simply a branch grafted onto and sustained by the life-filled vine of Basil’s teaching,133 he actually carries out his project–and admittedly 128

De hom. op. XXX, PG 44.240C-256C. Apologia in Hexaemeron 3, 8.12-9.10, Gregorii Nysseni In Hexaemeron, opera exegetica in Genesim, Pars I, ed. Hubertus R. Drobner (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 130 In Hex. 4, 10.15-11.2. 131 In Hex. 6, 13.15-16. 132 In Hex. 6, 13.11-14. 133 In Hex. 2, 7.14-8.11. 129

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so–in a spirit that is quite different. Like others before him, he refers to Moses’ ascent of Mt. Sinai as the symbol of the acquisition of knowledge of nature and he encourages his reader to seek such knowledge in “the grace that is in you and search for the Spirit of revelation who manifests the divine depths to you through your prayers.”134 Gregory’s own contemplation of questions regarding, for example, why the sun had to be made at all if the air was already filled with light, why darkness required no divine command for existence whereas light only came forth by the word of God, how the “waters above the heaven” maintain their position upon the convex surface of heaven’s vault, etc., will be given not, like Basil’s, with the weight of dogmatic authority, but rather, as he says, we freely admit that we are giving only our own views on the ideas that are before us as a sort of exercise (ἐγγυμνάζειν μόνον); we are by no means setting down a fully explanatory teaching (διδασκαλίαν ἐξηγητικήν) in what follows. So when I weave together unconventional ideas (ὅσα δοκεῖ μὴ συμβαίνειν ταῖς κοιναῖς ὑπολήψεσι) with the starting points (τὰς ἐνστάσεις) that are available to us from Ηoly Scripture and from what we learned while sitting at the feet of our teacher, let no one question my discourse, for it is not my task to contrive some sort of justification for the obstacles that seem to be at hand, but let me be granted the authority to scrutinize the meaning (τὴν διάνοιαν) of the words in accordance with their own purpose, if somehow it should be possible for me, with the help of God, to put together a coherent and consistent study of the creation of what has come into being in such a way that my speech remains consistent with how [Scripture’s meaning] appears to us (ἐπὶ τῆς ἰδίας ἐμφάσεως).135

This passage is crucial for understanding how Gregory goes about studying the natural world through the mediation of the Genesis narrative. He takes the Scriptural account of creation and Basil’s interpretation of it as his “starting points” but then “weaves together unconventional ideas” with them in order to produce his account. Gregory is taking his lead from the rational problems that are raised by the Genesis account and will introduce somewhat obscure ideas to address the obscure teaching of Scripture. Gregory is obviously much more willing to speculate freely about the created world than was Basil and he justifies himself in this by muting the authoritative status of his interpretations. They are intended as an exercise, as a speculative encounter with the divine teaching of Moses. Because this is his way of keeping his discourse “consistent with how Scripture’s meaning

134 135

In Hex. 5, 13.4-6. In Hex. 6, 13.21-14.12.

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appears,” in accordance with its own purpose (τὸν ἴδιον σκοπόν), the question is, how does Gregory define the purpose of the Scriptural narrative? As is to be expected from what he has just said, Gregory defines this purpose in terms of pedagogy or training. Moses, Gregory tells us, “has composed the book of Genesis as an introduction to divine knowledge and his goal (σκοπός) was to lead those who are enslaved to sensation to that which lies above sensory apprehension through what appears (διὰ τῶν φαινομένων).”136 To illustrate what this means for Gregory’s understanding of the Genesis account of creation, we shall examine how he interprets the very first sentence, “In the beginning (or “in sum,” ἐν κεφαλαίῳ,137 both of which Gregory discusses) God made heaven and earth.” His reading will address the problems that arise with respect to the sequence of creation as well as the question concerning the apparently primordial presence of darkness. The mention of “heaven and earth” refers to the extremes of human perception and thus includes every sensuous thing that resides in heaven, on earth, and in the midst of them. The words ἐν ἀρχῇ (“in the beginning”) or ἐν κεφαλαίῳ (“in sum”) indicate the “suddenness (τὸ ἀθρόον)” of the creation of all things at once: “The collective coming into being of all things is established by the phrase ‘in sum’ whereas the instantaneous and dimensionless generation is shown with the phrase ‘in the beginning.’”138 Because the “first impulse” of God’s will to create results in the “substance (οὐσία)” of each thing being constituted– “heaven, the ether, the stars, fire, air, sea, land, animals, plants”–God sees all things “before their generation” (Sus 35a) and “skillfully fashioning nature,” which “seeks for a sequence in things that have come into being,” arranges the orderly progression of realities from “the essence (τόδε τι) of what is seen in the universe” down through the various qualities that make it manifest.139 It is this dynamic of the sequential and orderly arrangement of things by nature that has led Moses to arrange his account of the instantaneous creation of all things in the form of a narrative after he had “speculated philosophically about natural doctrines (περὶ τῶν φυσικῶν δογμάτων φιλοσοφήσας)…for everything that

136 In Hex. 8, 17.3-6. This does not mean that Moses is not concerned for the arrangement of sensual reality on its own terms; cf. In Hex. 14, 24.11ff. 137 This is the reading in the version of Aquila. 138 In Hex. 8, 17.13-17. 139 In Hex. 9, 18.9-19.8.

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comes to be according to a certain sequence and wisdom is a direct utterance of God (ἄντικρυς φωνή).”140 Before there was light, all of these things were invisible and the “luminous potentiality” that resides in each thing was obscured by the darkness of materiality. When, however, God gave the sign for the generation of the cosmos, “fire sprang forth from every heavy nature and everything was immediately seen in the light.”141 This dynamic of the sequence of creation ultimately describes the progression of the revelation of the divine Logos as the creative power of God, which defines the essence of each thing, to human minds. Gregory says, “the poverty of our nature looks upon what has come to be and is unable to see and praise the logos according to which it comes into being, for praise is appropriate for what is known, not what is unknown.”142 Thus, the illumination of creation by the Word of God is the disclosure of the essence of the λόγος–the meaning and rational principle–of the cosmos so that human beings may offer praise as the conclusion of the contemplation of nature. In this distillation of the knowledge of the world as praise Gregory anticipates both Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus. The speculative study of nature through the mediation of the teaching of Moses provides for the paideia of the soul and this culminates in a knowledge of creation that is none other than the worship of the Creator. Together, the three Cappadocians may be taken to illustrate three basic tendencies in the contemplation of nature, though as I have indicated, these tendencies are present in all three. Basil, through his focus on the simple presence of created things had his congregation’s moral edification and simple devotion to God as his primary concern. Gregory Nazianzen saw in the cosmos a great mystery that pointed to the even greater mystery of theology, while Gregory of Nyssa, especially in his Apology, gave the freest rein to cosmic speculation itself, mediated, of course, by the account of Scripture. III. Evagrius of Pontus Evagrius of Pontus brings these two traditions, the Alexandrian and Cappadocian, together into a synthesis that was to have a lasting effect on the ascetical tradition. As disciple of both Basil and Gregory Nazianzen and ultimately as disciple and master of the Egyptian desert, Evagrius provided all 140 141 142

In Hex. 9, 19.9-12. In Hex. 10, 20.14-17. In Hex. 12, 14-17.

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ascetics and theologians who would come after him a systematic and thoroughly articulated account of the theoretical and practical aspects of the contemplation of nature. As we noted in the Introduction, Lars Thunberg describes Maximus’ understanding of the contemplation of nature largely in terms of how it differs from Evagrius. My orientation here is quite different. The Ambigua to John derive from the intellectual activity of learned monastics and so their orientation towards the necessity of natural contemplation as preparation for theology is much closer to the Evagrian milieu than Thunberg discerns in the thought of Maximus more generally. In any case, when Maximus contemplates the natural world, he is very much a disciple, even if a critical one, of Evagrius, and it is for this reason that I shall give a more thorough account of Evagrius here than I have given for the other patristic figures. In the first chapter of the Praktikos, Evagrius writes, “Christianity is the teaching of Christ our Savior, consisting of the practical, the natural, and the theological,”143 again reiterating the unfolding of the philosophical life that we’ve been tracing. Evagrius goes on to specify the content of the natural and theological stages, identifying them with “the kingdom of the heavens,” and “the kingdom of God,” respectively: “The kingdom of the heavens is dispassion of soul with true knowledge of beings,” and “The kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity coextensive with the structure of the intellect (συμπαρεκτεινομένη τῇ συστάσει τοῦ νοός) and transcending its incorruptibility.”144 Natural contemplation pertains to the knowledge of beings whereas theology pertains to the uncreated Trinity. As they were in the Cappadocians, the three stages of spiritual life are thoroughly united in the thought of Evagrius. He states that natural contemplation is the beginning (ἀρχή) of theology, and that the dispassion and love achieved by the practical life lead into natural knowledge. Indeed, Evagrius’s texts, which initially appear to fall readily into one of the three stages–Foundations and Praktikos for the practical life, Thoughts for natural contemplation, Prayer and Kephalaia Gnostica for the theological life–nevertheless merge into one another. The Praktikos gives indications as to what is beyond the practical life. The text of Thoughts speaks of the “place” of God and the “mental perception of God” at the time of prayer. Prayer claims, in its prologue, to teach all

143 144

Practicus 1, Traite, Pratique ou Le Moine II, ed. Antoine and Claire Guillaumont (Paris: Cerf, 1971). Pract. 2-3.

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three stages, and the Kephalaia Gnostica contain a substantial amount of material describing the dynamics of natural contemplation. As the Gnostikos states, not every “ethical text” in Scripture necessarily provides an ethical contemplation, and likewise for natural philosophy and theology.145 A text that is overtly about nature may provide an ethical teaching, an ethical text a theological one. This indicates how fluid, on Evagrius’ reading, are the stages of spiritual life as they are described in the language of Scripture, and it is to be expected that Evagrius’ texts, which are immersed in that language, should exhibit a similar fluidity. There is, of course, a certain rationality to this fluctuation, since each lower stage is given as the ἀρχή of the one above it. For our present purposes, we should note at the outset that natural contemplation implies in itself both the asceticism and dispassion that make it possible, and the theology that makes it complete. Thus, we shall see that natural contemplation implies both: 1.) dispassion and love, the entry to natural contemplation, and 2.) the movement away from the contemplation of the natural world towards theology. To make this clear, I will begin by clarifying the lineaments of the spiritual life as they pertain to the attainment of impassibility in the Praktikos. I will then move to a study of certain chapters of Evagrius’s Scholia on Ecclesiastes that address natural contemplation. Throughout, the analysis will refer to other Evagrian works as well, primarily On Thoughts and On Prayer, where Evagrius makes explicit some of the principles underlying the movement from asceticism and natural contemplation to theology. i. From Asceticism to Nature In the prologue to the Practikos, Evagrius writes, Child, the fear of God establishes faith, self-mastery establishes this fear, and endurance and hope make self-mastery unwavering. From these dispassion is born, whose offspring is love. Love is the doorway of natural knowledge (γνώσεως φυσικῆς), which is followed by theology and the final blessedness.146

In this short passage, Evagrius gives a summary of the spiritual life. The life of asceticism, which cultivates endurance (ὑπομονή), hope, self-mastery (ἐγκράτεια),

145 Gnosticus 20, Le Gnostique, ou À celui qui est devenu digne de la science, ed. Antoine and Claire Guillaumont (Paris: Cerf, 1989). 146 Pract. Prol.8.

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the fear of God, and faith, and which gives birth to dispassion (ἀπάθεια), has as its culmination the production of love (ἀγάπη). It is this love–“the end (πέρας) of the practical life”–born of dispassion that is the precondition of the knowledge of beings. This knowledge of beings, the end of natural contemplation, becomes, in turn, the “beginning” or “source” (ἀρχή) of theology.147 The three key issues for our purposes here are, 1.) how dispassion gives birth to love, 2.) how love, as the offspring of dispassion, opens the way to natural knowledge, and 3.) what constitutes the “following” of theology upon natural knowledge. In consonance with our general approach to ancient natural contemplation, I shall focus particularly on the intellect and its perceptions of the world as we address these questions. The scope of the Practikos is devoted to the first stage of philosophy, that is, to the practical life of asceticism whose aim is dispassion. As Evagrius teaches in the Foundations (Rerum monachalium rationes), the life of asceticism in its eremetic manifestation, whose initial goal is dispassion, has the acquisition of stillness as its distinctive mark: How comely and beautiful is the asceticism [that is practiced] in stillness…Do you wish to take up the monastic life as it really is, and to run the race for the trophies of stillness? Let thoughts bound to the world go…that is, be free of matter, dispassionate, and free of every passionate desire (ἐπιθυμία).148

The initial move of withdrawal from the cares of the world makes possible, through asceticism, the acquisition of dispassion whose characteristic is stillness. Evagrius identifies this stillness as an indication of dispassion when, in the Practikos, he gives indications of the comportment towards the world characteristic of one who has achieved dispassion. In this state, the intellect “remains still (ἥσυχος) in the face of apparitions during sleep, and when it regards realities (πράγματα) without receiving their impress,”149 having “knowledge which has achieved a separation from sensuous reality (τῆς γνώσεως…χωριζούσης τῶν αἰσθητῶν),” and therefore from the irrational part of the soul.150 The dispas-

147 Pract. 84: “Love is the end of the practical life, theology is the end of knowledge. The beginnings of each are faith and natural contemplation.” 148 Rerum monachalium rationes 2-3, PG 40.1253B12-C7. 149 Pract. 64. 150 Pract. 66.

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sionate soul, which still experiences the things of the world (πάσχουσα τὰ πράγματα), “remains untroubled even by the memories of them.”151 Dispassion is the “mother” of love, which in turn is the doorway to γνῶσις φυσική. When we examine more thoroughly the basic comportment of the dispassionate ascetic traced above, we see that Evagrius describes the migration of spiritual combat to the irascible part of the soul (τὸ θυμικόν) once the mind has begun to pray without distraction.152 As he writes in On Prayer, “Undistracted prayer is the highest intellection of the intellect.”153 Thus, when the intellect begins to function according to its proper mode, the struggle concentrates in θυμός, the site of irascibility, where pure prayer can actually be destroyed.154 The acquisition of love is linked for Evagrius to the control of θυμός: “love is the bridle of irascibility, and Moses, that holy man, calls it symbolically ‘serpantfighter’ in his book of physics.”155 Significantly, Evagrius considers love and anger with reference to natural contemplation (the “book of physics”), for they pertain directly to the acquisition of knowledge of the world. In Pract. 64, quoted in part above, Evagrius continues the description of impassibility: “A proof of impassibility is when the intellect has begun to see its own radiance, when it remains still in the face of apparitions during sleep, and when it regards realities without receiving their impress.” The general mode of mental perception involves the intellect taking on the image of that which it perceives: “one must begin hence from the principle (τοῦ λόγου) that the mind is wont to receive mental perceptions of all sensual realities, and to be stamped according to them by means of the organ of this body. For whatever might be the shape (μορφή) of the reality, the mind necessarily receives its image (εἰκόνα).”156 The mind, then, assumes the image of that which it contemplates. When the intellect begins to see its own radiance, however, this is an indication that it has achieved a separation from sensual things and their impressions. When the intellect achieves dispassion, it is able to remain “unstamped” by the images of sensual things, and is thus able to behold its own intellectual radiance.

151

Pract. 67. Pract. 63. 153 De oratione 35, The Philokalia-The Complete Text Vol. I, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1979). 154 De malignis cogitationibus 5, Sur les Pensées, ed. Paul Gehin, Claire Guillaumont, and Antoine Guillaumont (Paris: Cerf, 1998). 155 Pract. 38; cf. Clement, Stromaties I.28, noted above, 124 n.264. 156 Mal. cog. 25. 152

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The implication is that the stamping of the intellect with the image of sensual reality obscures the intellect’s perception of itself. Here we see a similarity to the obstruction effected by the passions: “When the irascible faculty is disturbed, it blinds the one who sees, and when the concupiscible faculty is moved irrationally (ἀλόγως), it obscures the things seen.”157 With the migration of spiritual combat to θυμός at the attainment of dispassion with respect to the sensual world, disturbance in the θυμός becomes an interruption of the intellect’s activity of knowing. Stillness, separation, and imperturbability, in the midst of this combat, characterize the disposition of the one who has approached love, the doorway of natural knowledge, and is prepared to turn the gaze to nature itself. Evagrius describes this phenomenon in Thoughts 39: Whenever the intellect, having put off the old man, shall put on (ἐνδύσηται) the one born of grace, then it will see its own disposition (κατάστασιν) resembling sapphire or a heavenly color at the time of prayer, which Scripture calls the place of God, which was seen by the ancients upon Mt Sinai.

To note the context of these allusions to Colossians: “Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image (ἐπίγνωσιν κατὰ εἰκόνα) of Him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew...but Christ is all and in all ” (Col 3.9-11). The language of “putting on the one born of grace,” in addition to its allusion to Colossians, also echoes Paul’s language in I Cor 15 of “putting on incorruption” in the resurrection: “Whenever this corruptible shall put on (ἐνδύσηται) incorruption” (I Cor 15.54), and this seems to stand behind Evagrius’ teaching in Thoughts 38, where he writes, “By means of the contemplation of all the ages, Christ raises the rational nature which had been killed by evil.” As we shall see below, the “contemplation of the ages” is a component of natural contemplation for Evagrius. Here we see how it leads to the resurrection of the rational nature. Part of the activity of natural contemplation is the mind’s dispassionate contemplation of created beings and ages, and thus a separation from sensuous impressions. If we translate this structure to the next phrase in Thoughts 38, we observe that “the soul that dies the death of Christ” is raised up by the Father “by means of the knowledge of Him.” Knowledge of

157 Kephalaia Gnostika V.27; Greek fragment printed in Irenée Hausherr, “Nouveaux fragments grecs d’Evagre le Pontique,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 5 (1939), 231.

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God is the means and result of dispassion and separation from the sensuous realm,158 and this could be called “the death of Christ,” since death is precisely separation from the body.159 In Thoughts 40, Evagrius continues his description of the vision of “the place of God” in a way that relates it to the basic progression of the spiritual life: The intellect will not see the place of God in itself unless it shall become higher than all the mental perceptions among realities (ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν). It will not become higher unless it has put off the passions, which bind it with the mental perceptions found among sensuous realities. The passions will be put off through the virtues, bare thoughts (ψιλοὺς λογισμούς) through spiritual contemplation, and this again [will be put off] when that light which forms (τοῦ φωτὸς τοῦ ἐκτυποῦντος) the place of God appears to the intellect at the time of prayer.

Here again we have the three-fold progression of “the doctrine of Christ our Savior”: πρακτική–“the passions will be put off through the virtues; φυσική– “spiritual160 contemplation”; θεολογική–“when that light which forms the place of God at the time of prayer appears to the intellect.” With this basic ascetical foundation in mind, we turn now to the theme of natural contemplation in Evagrius’ Scholia on Ecclesiastes. ii. Nature As we have seen, Origen had identified Ecclesiastes as the book of Solomon devoted specifically to the contemplation of nature161 and Evagrius addresses his Scholia on Ecclesiastes in large part to this theme. In the first scholion, which comments on the title of the Biblical text, Evagrius writes, The church (ἐκκλησία) of pure souls is true knowledge of the ages and worlds and of the judgment and providence in them. The preacher (ἐκκλησιαστής) is Christ the begetter of this knowledge. Or, the preacher is the one who purifies

158 Cf. Institutio ad monachos 2.25: “Just as a physician considers medication for the treatment of an illness, so too the knowledge of God, when it is carefully preserved, teaches the one who partakes of it how it might be guarded and progress to greater things,” Evagrius Ponticus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 159 We shall examine Maximus’ use of the theme of the death and resurrection of Christ and the contemplation of nature in Chapter 6 below, 323-328. 160 The adjective “spiritual” here is set in contrast to “bare thoughts” and refers to contemplation as a conscious activity of devoted intellectual attention as opposed to the experience of the uncontrolled provocation of thoughts. 161 Evagrius makes the same identification in his Scholia in Scholies au Proverbs, ed. Paul Géhin (Paris: Cerf, 1987).

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souls through ethical contemplations and leads them to natural contemplation (τῇ φυσικῇ θεωρίᾳ).162

When we combine this description of the components of natural contemplation with the basic definition observed above–“dispassion of soul with true knowledge of beings”–we see that natural contemplation, whose precondition is dispassion giving birth to love, pertains to the ages and worlds, judgment and providence, and created beings. Evagrius identifies Christ specifically as the “begetter” of this knowledge, so our reading of the Scholia on Ecclesiastes will observe Evagrius’ teaching on these elements, particularly as they relate to theology. In scholion 2, Evagrius identifies a central theme in the relationship between natural contemplation and theology, that of the transformation of illness to health. He writes, commenting on the distinctive proclamation of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity (τὰ πάντα ματαιότης)”: To those who are entering the intellectual church (τὴν νοητὴν ἐκκλησίαν) and who are amazed by the contemplation of things which have come into being (θαυμάζοντας τὴν θεωρίαν τῶν γεγονότων), the Word says, ‘Do not think that this is the final end stored up for you in the promises. For all of these things are vanity of vanities in the face of the knowledge of God Himself. For just as medicines (τὰ φάρμακα) are vain after perfect health, thus also the logoi of the ages and worlds are vain after the knowledge of the Holy Trinity.’

Here Evagrius introduces in a highly compressed form a number of key elements of his understanding of the contemplation of nature, which he will go on to elaborate throughout the scholia. On the fundamental level, we should observe that θεωρία φυσική is precisely θεωρία τῶν γεγονότων, contemplation of things that have come into existence, and thus have change at the very core of their being. From a general Platonic standpoint, there can be no knowledge, properly speaking, of changeable realities due to their inherent fluctuation,163 and this Platonic dynamic applies to Evagrius’ approach to contemplation. One of the results of contemplating changeable reality is the deep awareness of its very instability so that the response to the realm of becoming is inevitably “vanity 162

Scholia in Ecclesiasten 1, Scholies à l’Eccle,siaste, ed. Paul Géhin (Paris: Cerf,1993). Republic VI.508d: “When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and that which is (τὸ ὄν) shine resplendent it apprehends and knows it and appears to be in possession of understanding; but when it is firmly fixed to what is mingled with darkness, that which comes to be (τὸ γιγνόμενον) and is destroyed, it offers opinion and sees dimly, throwing in opinions one after another, and, again, seems not to have possession of understanding.” The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (New York: Putnam, 1930), modified. 163

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of vanities.” As he writes elsewhere, “While sitting in your cell, gather your intellect. Remember the day of death; behold there the dying of the body. Consider the calamity, accept the toil, condemn the vanity (ματαιότης) in this world.”164 This comes within the ascetical considerations of the Foundations, and is linked with the acquisition of detachment and dispassion–the aim of the practical life–which is the disposition of the soul which accompanies, even makes possible, true knowledge of reality in “the kingdom of the heavens.” The achievement of separation from, in the midst of the perception of, sensuous realities (whether discrete beings or existential circumstances), is the beginning of true knowledge, since only then can generated realites be regarded, not as “the final end,” but as passing realities whose purpose is to provide for their own transcendence by driving the intellect beyond themselves to their source. The second element is that of wonder, or amazement (θαυμαζεῖν). The teaching in this scholion, that the appearance of the present reality is not ultimate, is intended for those new initiates who are “amazed by the contemplation” of this created and contingent world. We may take this amazement in at least two ways. It may simply refer to an enthusiastic aesthetic response to the grandeur and beauty of the natural world, one which, in this context, would be seen as passionate and attached and not based on knowledge, at least not final knowledge of the Trinity. Such amazement in response to passing phenomena would only be possible for one who has not attained the Holy Trinity and is unaware of the need to move beyond the φάρμακον, addicted, as it were, to the medication. Amazement may also be taken in another sense, as later in the scholia, where Evagrius writes, “If you see among men both those who are oppressed and those who are treated unjustly in judgment, as well as those who act justly, do not be amazed by what takes place, as though there were no providence.”165 Here amazement pertains to the overwhelming of the soul by what appear to be random and inscrutable circumstances, since there is a failure to perceive the purposes of God in them. Taken in this sense, those who are amazed by the contemplation of things that have come into being, or have come to pass, come undone because they fail to discern the providence of God in the unjust realities of life, and regard them as final in themselves. In either case, the intellect re-

164 Rer. mon. rat. 9, PG 40.1261A-B; cf. Antoine Guillaumont, “Un philosophe au Désert: Évagre le Pontique,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 181 (1972), 35. 165 Schl.Eccl. 38.

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mains ensnared by passionate attachment to dazzling or fearsome phenomena, since it grants them an ultimate status that does not properly belong to them. Third, Evagrius folds his understanding of natural contemplation and its place in the spiritual life into what was the dominant model for Hellenistic philosophical praxis, that of medicine, or therapy:166 “For just as medicines (τὰ φάρμακα) are vain after perfect health, thus also are vain the λόγοι of the ages and worlds after the knowledge of the Holy Trinity.” The λόγοι, or structural and providential principles of reality, are given as medicines to the sick soul. The soul is ill in that it does not have the knowledge of the Trinity. As derived from the Logos and thus intimately related to Him, the λόγοι are designed to habituate the unhealthy intellect to this knowledge: “We practice the virtues in order to achieve contemplation of the λόγοι of created things, and from this we pass to contemplation of the Logos who gives them their being.”167 Because they are the λόγοι precisely of created beings, they are accessible to the created intellect; because they take their structure and being from the Logos of God, they are able to shape the intellect for the reception of the knowledge of God. As we have seen, Evagrius defines “the Kingdom of God” as “knowledge of the Holy Trinity coextensive with the structure of the intellect, and transcending its incorruptibility.” Here we observe the two key elements that pertain to the mind’s ability to pass to that which is beyond, defined by the words “coextensive” and “transcending.” It is proper to the νοῦς to acquire knowledge of created beings and to attain knowledge of the Trinity. Far removed from the anti-Eunomian polemic, Evagrius here departs from the rhetoric of his teachers Basil and Gregory Nazianzen and affirms a “gnostic” (taken in Clement of Alexandria’s sense) goal of Christian life. Through the progress of the spiritual life from asceticism to natural contemplation and theology, the purified intellect, when it is able to see its own radiance, comes to be seen as appropriately suited to its proper end: the kingdom of God as knowledge of the Trinity. However, this knowledge also transcends the intellect, even in its own “incorruptibility.” The λόγοι, therefore, serve a double function. On the one hand, they constitute the subject of the intellect’s proper activity with respect to the world. On the other, they draw the intellect beyond the world toward the Logos, the source of their being, and ultimately to the Holy Trinity. Evagrius has 166 Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 13-48; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 55. 167 De orat. 52.

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asserted that created beings are seen as vain when one attains knowledge of the Trinity. The contemplation of created things has been given to the diseased mind as medicine, medicine, which, once health–i.e., knowledge of the Trinity– has been attained, ceases to be necessary. Evagrius gives a more elaborate description of one element of this contemplative remedy in scholion 15 where he comments on Eccl. 3.10–13, “I saw the business which God gave to the sons of men to be busied with. He has made everything beautiful in its time and he has given the age in their heart...” Evagrius comments: I saw, he says, sensuous realities busying the mind (τὴν διάνοιαν) of man, which God gave to men before [their] purification, that they might be busied in them. He calls their beauty temporal and not eternal, for after purification the pure one does not still consider sensuous realities as merely busying one’s intellect (νοῦν), but as impelling it toward spiritual contemplation.

Here we see the transcending movement of the contemplation of sensuous things. Temporal realities “impel” the intellect to regard them in a spiritual way rather than as merely incidental. Evagrius goes on to explain the distinction: For when the intellect perceives sensibly by means of the senses, it is stamped by sensuous realities, and this is a different activity than when the intellect, engaged in contemplation, discerns the coherence of the λόγοι stored up in sensuous realities.

To regard the world in spiritual contemplation is to see the λόγοι according to which it is structured. Evagrius then reiterates the ascetical foundation upon which his reflections are based, that dispassion prepares the way for true knowledge of the world: This knowledge (γνῶσις) only comes to the pure, but the observation of realities by means of the senses comes to the pure and the impure. Therefore, he says it is a temporal business given by God, for since God foreknew the impassioned soul, He gave it senses and sensuous realities so that, by both being busied with them and by considering them, it might flee the thoughts from the adversaries waiting to bombard it. He also gave them, he says, the ‘age,’ that is, the λόγοι of [this] age. For this is the kingdom of the heavens, which the Lord said we have within us, and which is not found by men since it is hidden by the passions. And so I knew, he says, that it is not the realities that are good, but the λόγοι of the realities, upon which the rational nature naturally rejoices and achieves good. For nothing nourishes and waters the intellect like virtue and the knowledge of God.

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Evagrius teaches here that the realities of the sensual world have been given as a defense against the demonic thoughts that seek to rush into a receptive intellect. The apprehension of created realities serves to keep the intellect occupied with something that is near to God by virtue of its being created by God, whose very “structure” (λόγος) is related to God in His Word (Λόγος). This keeps the intellect from straying further and further away, becoming more and more susceptible to demonic thoughts. This is, however, only a preliminary encounter with the sensual world. It is the level at which the intellect is still passive relative to the world, since it is “stamped” by the impressions of sensuous realities. Once the ascetic has achieved purity through the practical life, the intellect is in a state in which it can acquire knowledge by discerning the principles inherent in sensuous things. The transition from τυποῦται to διατίθεται, from apprehension (ἐπιβαλλῶν) to contemplation (θεωρῶν), is the movement from passive reception to active comprehension. Here, passivity and passion coincide, since it is only the dispassionate intellect that may actively discern the inner principles of sensuous reality and thus acquire the knowledge of God. Evagrius also identifies these contemplations given by God with the “Kingdom of the Heavens,” the realm of “natural knowledge,” which “is within us,”168 and he goes on to link the obscuring of this Kingdom to the passions. The process of the practical life, whose goal is dispassion, then, is the process of penetrating to what has been given within by God: the contemplation of the world is not other than the contemplation of what has been placed within one’s own being. Evagrius refers to the verse we have been considering–“He has given the age in his heart”–elsewhere, in Thoughts 17, where he writes, The Lord has handed over the intellectual perceptions of this age (τὰ νοήματα τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου) as sheep to a good shepherd, for ‘also,’ he says, ‘He has given the age in his heart,’ having yoked the irascible and appetitive faculties to him as a help, so that by means of the irascible he might put to flight the wolf-like perceptions, and by means of the appetitive that he might love the sheep even when he is thrown about by the rains and winds. He has also given a pasture for them, that he might shepherd the sheep, and he has given a place of verdure, and the water of rest, and a psaltery and lyre, and a rod and a staff, that from this flock he might feed and clothe himself, and that he might gather a mountain pasture. For ‘who,’ he says, ‘shepherds a flock and does not partake of its milk?’

168 Evagrius conflates the Lukan saying of Jesus, “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you,” with the Matthean expression, “the Kingdom of the Heavens;” cf. Géhin’s comments, Scholies à l’Ecclésiaste, 85.

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Above, we saw impressions of sensual reality given as a means of warding off other, demonic, thoughts. Once purification is attained, they become the means of spiritual contemplation. Here, mental perceptions of the world are given as a productive flock to be guarded and cared for with the utmost diligence, and which ultimately provide food and clothing to the shepherd. The movement from busy occupation to spiritual contemplation, the intellect’s most satisfying food and drink, is given here under the image of the movement from caring for and guarding sheep to taking nourishment and clothing from them. This is crucial to our understanding of the transition from asceticism to natural contemplation, on the one hand, and from natural contemplation to theology, on the other. The ascetical life of the acquisition of dispassion serves to cultivate an orientation towards the sensual world–specifically the mental perceptions of it–in the pursuit of gnosis. The purified intellect is able to discern this place of mental perceptions, the logoi they indicate, and the Logos to which they lead. In this way the intellect takes nourishment and delight from the contemplation of the created world, a world composed of logoi that are given being by the Logos Himself. To return to the Scholia on Ecclesiastes, we have seen how Evagrius clearly envisions the notion of natural contemplation within the framework of the remedial and therapeutic paideia of the soul. When sense impressions become spiritual in contemplation, they become nutritive for the soul. However, the goal of contemplation in Evagrius, as Ecclesiastes scholion 3 indicates, is to move beyond created things and natural contemplation to the uncreated Trinity. He interprets the phrase, “There is no memory of the first things” (Eccl 1.11), as referring to the separation of the intellect from the intellectual perception of things (νοήματα τῶν πράγματων) and the corresponding “forgetfulness (ἐπιλανθάνεται)” of all created beings by the intellect when it has received the Trinity (ὑποδεξάμενος τὴν ἁγίαν τριάδα). Evagrius is describing the point when the intellect separates itself from the realm of the senses and creation, the realm which on the one hand provides the basis for the intellect’s reception of the Trinity and serves as a house of refuge against the demons, but on the other, is “a house of bondage.”169 As he writes in scholion 35, “the one who is among sensuous things and receives sensations from them is not able to discourse without stumbling about God who is among intellectual things (ἐν τοῖς νοητοῖς) and

169

Schl.Eccl. 33.

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who flees every sensation.” Here, sensuous things, which have been given as medicinal φάρμακα, prove to be narcotics that destabilize the soul through their untimely use. Evagrius refers again to natural contemplation as “the kingdom of the heavens” in scholion 19, which comments on Eccl 3.15: “that which has come to be already is, and whatever is to happen has already happened, and God will seek the one who is pursued (τὸν διωκόμενον).” Evagrius links this verse with Mt 5.10, the beatitude where Jesus promises the kingdom of the heavens to those who are persecuted/pursued (οἱ δεδιωγμένοι) on account of righteousness. He writes, The λόγοι of created beings and of the ages to come are the kingdom of the heavens, and blessed are those who are pursued (μακάριοι οἱ δεδιωγμένοι), since they will know the contemplation of created beings. For God is said to seek (ζητεῖν) the one whom He enlightens with knowledge, and He is said not to seek the one whom He does not enlighten with knowledge. ‘I have strayed like a lost sheep,’ says David, ‘Seek (ζήτησον) Thy servant, since I have not forgotten Thy commandments’ (Ps. 118/119.176). For he himself was pursued (ἦν διωκόμενος): ‘Many are they that pursue (οἱ ἐκδιώκοντες) me and afflict me; I have not turned away from thy testimonies’ (Ps 118/119.157).

Evagrius is here exploiting the usage of the word διωκεῖν, which means both “pursue” and “persecute,” and uses it as a link between Ecclesiastes, the Gospel, and the Psalms. In this way God can be understood as the one who pursues the one who will attain the kingdom of the heavens in natural contemplation, since it is God who grants knowledge to the purified mind. In Thoughts, Evagrius describes this bestowal of knowledge and the varieties of intellectual perception more precisely. He writes, “Some intellectual perceptions (νοήματα) stamp (τυποῖ) and shape (σχηματίζει) our governing faculty (ἡγεμονικόν), and some simply grant knowledge, neither stamping nor shaping the intellect.”170 Evagrius gives John 1.1, “In the beginning was the Word,” as an example of a νόημα that comes to the heart and does not leave an impression on it, and the verse, “taking bread, he broke it” (Mt 26.26), as one that does. John 1.1 confirms the Divinity of the Word (θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος); the last supper reveals the incarnate economy: “this is my body.” The Word, then, comes to the intellect in both ways, stamping it with a form and leaving it unstamped. Eva-

170

Mal. cog. 41.

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grius’ next example allows him to sharpen the distinction and fold his understanding of perception into the practice of the ascetical life: The verse, ‘I saw the Lord seated upon a high and exalted throne’ (Is 6.1), stamps the intellect, except for the phrase, I saw the Lord. The statement seems to stamp the intellect, but what is signified does not stamp it, for he has seen with a prophetic eye the rational nature lifted up on high by means of the conduct of the practical life and receiving in itself the knowledge of God. For God is said to be seated where He will be known, and for this reason the pure intellect is called the throne of God…The mental perception of God will not be found among the mental perceptions that stamp the intellect, but among those which do not. Therefore it is necessary for the one who prays to separate oneself completely from the mental perceptions that stamp the intellect.

The “rational nature” has conducted the practical life and is thus lifted up to receive the knowledge of God. In between is the process of the intellect’s separation from mental perceptions, which stamp the intellect and, as we have seen, it achieves this by dispassion and love. Contemplation of the natural world becomes “spiritual contemplation” when the intellect maintains itself in stillness before creation, untroubled by its appearances and able to discern the λόγοι within. A more subtle description of natural contemplation follows: And you will seek if it pertains to corporeal realities and their λόγοι as it does for incorporeal realities and their λόγοι, and whether the intellect will be stamped in one way when it sees an intellect and then will be disposed differently when it sees its λόγος. In this way we learn how spiritual knowledge removes the intellect from the mental perceptions that stamp it and present it unstamped (ἀτύπωτον) to God, since the mental perception of God is not among those mental perceptions that stamp the intellect–for God is not a body–but among those that do not.

The realities of the world, both bodily and bodiless, along with their λόγοι, serve to instruct the intellect for the achievement of pure perception, perception without mental representation, which is the only kind of perception that pertains to God, whose perception is, in fact, the most proper to the intellect. The journey of the intellect, which began with the quest for dispassion and stillness before the perceptions of the world, passes through the subtle discernment of spiritual realities, including its own nature and radiance, and finally comes before God purified of all mental representation. It is then that it truly becomes “the throne of God,” the place from which God rules in His kingdom.

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iii. Christ and Nature In what we have seen so far, Evagrius describes the exaltation of the intellect through the practical life and its discernment of the inner structure of created things so that it is accustomed to perception without attachment and representation. In such a state it is prepared to receive the knowledge of God, who can neither be grasped nor represented. We conclude now with an articulation of an aspect of Evagrius’s teaching that we have seen indicated but not engaged directly: the place of Christ. Evagrius identifies Christ as the Ecclesiast of Ecclesiastes and as “the begetter” of natural knowledge who purifies the soul and leads it to natural contemplation. It is appropriate then to conclude this analysis of natural contemplation in Evagrius with a summary of his perspective on what I have argued is the central theme of the contemplation of nature for the fathers, the place of Christ in the progress of the spiritual life. Commenting on Eccl 2.14, “The eyes of the wise man are in his head,” Evagrius writes, If ‘Christ is the head of every man’ (I Cor 11.13), and a sage is a man, then Christ is the head of the sage. But Christ is our wisdom, for ‘He was begotten of God as wisdom for us’ (I Cor 1.30). The head, then, is the wisdom of the sage, in which the sage has the eyes of the mind while contemplating the λόγοι of created things in it.171

Here Evagrius brings together Christ, wisdom, and the λόγοι of created things under the consideration of the sage (ὁ σοφός) in contemplation. We referred above to the chapter from Prayer, “We pursue the virtues on account of the λόγοι of created things, and these on account of the Logos who gives being. This one is accustomed to manifest Himself in the state of prayer.”172 Here it is the Logos whο stands at the height of the three-fold philosophical ascent. The λόγοι of created things, which have taken their being from the Logos, return the intellect to Him, and in this way the intellect is initiated into the contemplation of the Trinity in the state of prayer. The next chapter of Prayer specifies the nature of the “state of prayer”: “The state of prayer is the possession of dispassion (ἕξις ἀπαθής), which, with the highest erotic drive (ἔρωτι ἀκροτάτῳ), snatches the wisdom-loving intellect

171 172

Schl.Eccl. 11. De orat. 51 (52 in the Philokalia), PG 79.1177C1-4.

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up to the exalted intellectual realm (εἰς ὕψος νοητόν).”173 This recalls the beginning of our analysis of Evagrius: the acquisition of dispassion as the way toward ἀγάπη and the true knowledge of beings in the kingdom of the heavens. Here we should note two things with respect to the state of prayer. First, if we follow the movement of Evagrius’ thought and hear our earlier formulation–the kingdom of the heavens (natural contemplation) is dispassion of soul together with true knowledge of beings–in conjunction with the affirmation here, that dispassion characterizes the state of prayer, we find that ἀγάπη gives the intellect over to ἔρως which draws it upward to contemplation. Second, Evagrius teaches here that the Logos manifests Himself in the state of prayer. We may bring this together with the manifestation of “the place of God” observed above: “that light which forms the place of God at the time of prayer [and] appears to the intellect.” Again, the intellect comes to this by the putting off of the passions that connect themselves to it by means of the mental representations of sensuous realities. “The place of God,” therefore, is the Word of God, the Logos who gives being and “structure” to the λόγοι of created things. Indeed, in his scholion on Psalm 14.1, “Who will dwell in thy holy mountain?” Evagrius writes, “The holy mountain is the knowledge of Christ, which is the contemplation of what has come into being (θεωρία τῶν γεγονότων).”174 The holy mountain as the “place of God” is identified with the knowledge of Christ as natural contemplation. Christ as the Logos is the end of natural contemplation and beginning of theology for Evagrius, the place where “the Kingdom of the Heavens” is delivered up to the “Kingdom of God,” since the Logos is the source of being and definition of the λόγοι of the created world, and it is precisely in the Logos that “the sage has the eyes of the mind while contemplating the λόγοι of created things.” Maximus argues in the Ambigua against a number of Origenist positions that derive from the speculations of Evagrius and so is rightly regarded as an opponent of Origenism. However, Maximus’ monastic milieu was so thoroughly infused with the thought of Evagrius, whether or not he received his forma-

173

De orat. 52 (53 in the Philokalia), PG 79.1177C6-8. PG 12.1208C. Bunge adduces this passage in “La Montagne Intelligible: De la contemplation indirecte à la connaissance immediate de Dieu dans le traité De Oratione d’Évagre le Pontique,” Studia Monastica 42 (2000), 9. He consciously does not consider the relation between “knowledge of Christ” and “contemplation of beings,” but rather focuses on the image of the mountain, and emphasizes, against Hausherr, the trinitarian nature of Evagrian theological mysticism. 174

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tion in an Origenist monastery as is alleged by the Syriac Vita of the Confessor,175 that it has been essential to give a thorough account of Evagrius’ teaching on the contemplation of nature as background to our study of the Ambigua. Evagrius’ understanding of perception and the relation of the created world to Christ are significant elements of his thought that persist in Maximus’ work even as Maximus refutes the shibboleths of 6th century Evagrian Origenism, the primordial henad and fall of intellects and the pre-existence of the soul. IV. Dionysius the Areopagite The influence of Dionysius the Areopagite, both verbal and conceptual, pervades the Ambigua to John, and though he cites Gregory Nazianzen much more frequently through the course of the text (the Ambigua are explicitly addressed to the resolution of difficulties in the Theologian’s works after all), the voice of the Areopagite is extremely significant, at times decisive. Sherwood numbers a total of sixteen quotations from Dionysius’ works in the Ambigua,176 but the distinctive shape of his thinking and mode of expression extends well beyond these direct citations. For example, Maximus’ argument against the “utility” of evil for the completion of the cosmos in Ambiguum 7 resonates with a similar discussion in Divine Names IV.18-20; the argument in Ambiguum 10 against the possibility of cosmic duality as a source of being echoes Divine Names IV.21. Moreover, Maximus’ notion of the symbolic nature of the hierarchy of beings, his use of affirmation and denial with respect to divine names in theology, his vision of creation as the outpouring and self-multiplication of the Goodness of God, his use of ὑπερούσιον and other distinctively Dionysian terms, and even his style–a sort of ecstatic rationalism–draw his Ambigua very much within the thought-world of the Areopagite, though, as he does with the whole of his patristic inheritance, Maximus makes his own way through these issues and often takes a Dionysian theme in a different direction than Dionysius himself may have taken it.177

175 Sebastian Brock, “An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor,” Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973), 299-346. 176 Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 17. 177 See Ysabel de Andia, Denys l’Aréopagite: Tradition et Métamorphose (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2006), 147-184, for discussion of the differences between Maximus and Dionysius on many of the themes I have mentioned. I think the author draws too sharp of a distinction between the two, particularly with respect to Dionysius’ use of the ὑπερούσιον as opposed to Maximus’ focus on οὐσία in relation to the unknowability of God; it should be born in mind the author is focusing on a narrow range of

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My treatment of Dionysius here will be relatively brief, for I shall be discussing him in a number of places in the chapters on Maximus to follow. To anticipate that discussion will be useful, however, as a way of concluding this survey of patristic notions of the contemplation of the world and of making the transition to Maximus. I shall focus in particular on how Dionysius unites the various aspects of his understanding of the motion of the cosmos in the concept of love, thus completing the trajectory we initiated with our reading of the Timaeus. i. The World as the Manifestation of God Dionysius’ understanding of the cosmos is thoroughly theological; indeed, while the focus of our study so far has been on human knowledge of the world, the way in which Dionysius expresses the nature of divine knowledge of the world provides insight into both his understanding of the structure of the cosmos and of what it means to acquire knowledge of it. He writes, God does not have his own specific knowledge of Himself and a different knowledge that comprehends all existing things in common, for when the Cause of all knows Itself It will hardly be ignorant of what derives from Itself and of which It is the Cause. In this way, God knows beings not by understanding beings but by understanding Himself (Οὐκ ἄρα ὁ θεὸς ἰδίαν ἔχει τὴν ἑαυτοῦ γῶσιν, ἑτέραν δὲ τὴν κοινῇ τὰ ὄντα πάντα συλλαμβάνουσαν. Αὐτὴ γὰρ ἑαυτὴν ἡ πάντων αἰτία γινώσκουσα σχολῇ που τὰ ἀφ᾽ αὑτῆς καὶ ὧν ἐστιν αἰτία ἀγνοήσει. Ταύτῃ γοῦν ὁ θεὸς τὰ ὄντα γινώσκει οὐ τῇ ἐπιστήμῃ τῶν ὄντων, αλλὰ τῇ ἑαυτοῦ).178

This passage expresses on the level of epistemology–albeit “divine epistemology,” to follow Dionysius’ own use of ἐπιστήμη–the basic intuition of Dionysius’ understanding of the nature of the universe, that it is the hierarchical multiplication of God Himself: They say He is in intellects, in souls, in bodies, in heaven, on earth, that in His own self-identity He is at once within the cosmos, the enclosure of the cosmos, beyond the cosmos, beyond heaven and beyond being; He is sun, stars, fire,

Maximus’ texts in the Ambigua (principally Amb. 10, 15-17, and 71) and her account would need to be modified in light of the contents of the larger work. See also Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, for Maximus’ relationship to Dionysius and for the place of both of these thinkers within the development of Neoplatonism. 178 Ps. Dion. Areo. Div. nom. VII.2, 197.10-14.

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water, wind, dew, cloud, cornerstone, and rock. He is all things and not one being among other beings (πάντα τὰ ὄντα καὶ οὐδὲν τῶν ὄντων).179

All things are identified with/as God, but God is not identified with any one thing or as one thing among other things. God’s knowledge of the world is His knowledge of Himself as the Source and diversified content of the world. From the perspective of the creature, God’s self-multiplication as the universe appears as a hierarchy of beings that manifests “the image of divine fecundity (εἰκόνα τῆς θεαρχικῆς ὡραιότητος).”180 Within this hierarchy, material reality is experienced as providing “echoes of intellectual comeliness (ἀπηχήματα τινα τῆς νοερᾶς εὐπρεπείας),” and Dionysius, in a way reminiscent of the Cappadocians, acknowledges the necessity of material images for the human apprehension of intellectual reality, both of which–material and intellectual reality–are ultimately the manifestation of God. The human mode of being (τὴν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς ἀναλογίαν) does not allow “an immediate attainment of intellectual contemplation (ἀμέσως ἐπὶ τὰς νοητὰς ἀνατείνεσθαι θεωρίας)” and therefore “needs something proper to it and co-natural with it to lead it upwards (δεομένην εἰκείων καὶ συμφυῶν ἀναγωγιῶν).”181 These are the “shapes” and “forms” that characterize material reality and we are told that these are, in fact, as appropriate to intellectual reality and ultimately to God Himself as the concepts of “Word,” “Intellect,” “Being,” etc., concepts that are studied in the treatise on The Divine Names. In fact, the more dissimilar images may prove to be more useful in the ascent to intellectual reality and to God Himself since they are less likely to be taken as perfectly adequate to that reality.182 These two foundational themes, the world as the self-multiplication and manifestation of God and the application of images taken from the world as representative of God, form the foundation of Dionysius’ doctrine of divine names. All things exist insofar as the Divine as Cause has brought them into being and is their “Source (ἀρχή), Substance (οὐσία), and Life (ζωή).”183 All things that receive being (τῶν ὄντων ἁπάντων) from God,184 that have been

179

Div. nom. I.6, 119.5-9. De coelesti hierarchia III.2, Corpus Dionysiacum II, ed. Gunter Heil and Adolf Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991), 11.18. 181 Coel. hier. II.2, 11.13-15. 182 Coel. hier. II.3. 183 Div. nom. I.3, 111.12-13. 184 Div. nom. I.7, 120.7. 180

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caused (πάντων τῶν αἰτιατῶν) by God,185 lend their names to the discourse of theology so that the universe itself–intellectual and sensual reality–becomes the name of God and God is said to be “all things” as the Cause of all.186 These names are not finally descriptive of the nature of God: “thought cannot attain the unthinkable One beyond thought, the Good beyond reason cannot be articulated with any speech (πάσαις διανοίαις ἀδιανόητόν ἐστι τὸ ὑπὲρ διάνοιαν ἕν, ἄῤῥητον τε λόγῳ παντὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ λόγον ἀγαθόν).”187 Rather, the divine names derived from the world have their meaning within the liturgical context of praise. God (as Cause and Providence) “is harmoniously hymned and named from all existing things,”188 so that praise (ὑμνεῖται) and naming (ὀνομάζεται) are coextensive linguistic acts intended to carry the human intellect to the divine reality that is the very meaning of the world and is named by the world. ii. The Name Above Every Name Within this context, one name in particular takes on a cosmic significance, the name of Jesus Christ. While Dionysius does not consider this name as analogous to the divine names that come from the effects of the divine Cause,189 there is an important sense in which he is able to name the whole

phenomenon of the world as manifestation of God with the name of “Jesus” in a culmination of the Christ-centered approach to cosmology we have been tracing, and this naming will be extended and developed by Maximus in the Ambigua to John. It is the “Divinity of the Son” that is “the Cause that fulfills all things” and is “the being in the totality of existing things (οὐσία ταῖς ὅλαις οὐσίαις).”190 The Divinity of Jesus, which is the same Divinity as that of the Holy Trinity, is beyond being and nature and Jesus remains what He is in Himself even in the midst of His descent to human nature: Jesus in His simplicity became something complex, the eternal one appeared in time, He who transcends the being of every natural order came to be within our

185

Div. nom. I.5, 117.13. Div. nom. V.8, 187.9-10. 187 Div. nom. I.1, 109.11-13. 188 Div. nom. I.7, 120.7-8. 189 Cf. Dionysius’ Epistle 4, where he says that Jesus is not called a man as the cause of man but as one who truly became human. Maximus devotes the initial argument of the last chapter of his Ambigua to Thomas (Amb. 5) to precisely this point. 190 Div. nom. II.10, 134.7, 12-13. 186

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nature with the foundation of what is properly His own remaining unchanged and unconfused.191

In this way Christ becomes the paradigm of Dionysius’ general understanding of the disclosure of knowledge of intellectual reality to the world. This “most clearly visible aspect of theology (τὸ πάσης θεολογίας ἐκφανέστατον)”192 thus expresses the general process of the generation of beings in which God as divine Peace and Stillness remains in Himself and absolutely united to Himself even as he “proceeds to all things.”193 We see this dynamic in the Celestial Hierarchies as well, where Dionysius speaks of the light that proceeds from the “Father of lights” (Jas 1.17) as the diversifying and unifying procession and return that defines the existence of all things. He identifies this light with Jesus, the “light of the Father.”194 The final Dionysian theme in which we find a significant anticipation of Maximus’ approach to cosmology and nature is the theme of love as the source of cosmic motion and knowledge. Love (ἔρως, ἀγάπη) “moved” God to create the world which He already loved195 and its ecstatic nature is an image for God’s self-outpouring as the world: Ηe who is the Cause of all things comes to be outside of Himself in love through the excess of His erotic goodness in His providence for all things and is charmed, as it were, by goodness, charity, and love and is led down from being removed far above and outside of all things towards being in all things in accordance with his ecstatic power beyond-being precisely to not come to be separated from Himself (αὐτὸς ὁ πάντων αἴτιος τῷ καλῷ καὶ ἀγαθῷ τῶν πάντων ἔρωτι δι᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ἐρωτικῆς ἀγαθότητος ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ γίνεται ταῖς εἰς τὰ ὄντα πάντα προνοίαις καὶ οἷον ἀγαθότητι καὶ ἀγαπήσει καὶ ἔρωτι θέλγεται καὶ ἐκ τοῦ ὑπὲρ πάντα καὶ πάντων ἐξῃρημένου πρὸς τὸ ἐν πᾶσι κατάγεται κατ᾽ ἐκστατικὴν ὑπερούσιον δύναμιν ἀνεκφοίτητον ἑαυτοῦ).196

Because God has the power to remain within Himself He is able to go out of Himself as Himself and impart Himself as the existence of beings. This outpour-

191

Div. nom. I.4, 113.9-12. Div. nom. II.9, 133.5. 193 Div. nom. XI.2, 218.7-13. 194 Coel. hier. I.1-2, 7.3-11. 195 Div. nom. IV.10, 155.17-20. 196 Div. nom. IV.13, 159.9-14. We encountered this passage in the discussion of Amb. 71 in the Introduction, where Maximus refers to it and the notion of being “charmed” (θέλγεται) in his consideration of what Gregory the Theologian means by the Word “playing” in the world, Introduction, 37-40. 192

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ing love then becomes the motivation for the return of all things to their Source. God is named “Beloved” as the end towards which all things move and is called “Love” itself as “the power that moves and lifts all things up to Himself.”197 Maximus gives an interpretation of this very passage from the Divine Names in his Ambiguum 23 and we shall explore this theme in detail in our discussion of God and cosmic motion in Chapter 6. Here we shall conclude by observing that Dionysius once again recapitulates this general notion of the world existing by and as the ecstatic love of God in his understanding of the incarnation of Christ. It is as the one who “loves mankind (ὁ φιλάνθρωπος)” that Jesus who is “beyond being became a being (ὁ ὑπερούσιος οὐσιωμένος).”198 In this way the incarnation of Christ, which is the loving appearance as a being of one who is beyond being, is the clearest expression199 of what the world of being is: the appearance of God. This theme will also come to the fore in our discussion of Maximus. Conclusion In the Greek fathers treated here, we see the appropriation of the culture of natural philosophy to the contemplation of Christ the incarnate Divine Logos and this, I argue, was their way of reconciling the various aspects of philosophy they received from the Hellenic tradition. Their understanding of philosophy, and particularly ancient philosophies of nature, took the thread of ancient thought about the cosmos that was primarily concerned with defining the place of humanity in the cosmos and drew it out all the way to the conclusion that “The God-Man,” as it were, “is the measure of all things.” Maximus will remain in constant interaction with the thought of the earlier Greek fathers throughout his Ambigua to John, appropriating, modifying, and at times refuting the various positions he inherited.

197

Div. nom. IV.15, 160.5-7. Ep. IV, Heil and Ritter, Corpus Dionysiacum II, 160.8-9. 199 Recall the notion that the incarnation is “the most clearly visible aspect of theology,” Div. nom. II.9, 133.5. Eric Perl concludes his study of the philosophy of Dionysius with these words: “The incarnation… is the coming forth of God into manifestness. But this…is what all reality is. This formula [‘Truly coming into being in a manner above being he is made a being (εἰς οὐσίαν ἀληθῶς ἐλθὼν ὑπὲρ οὐσίαν οὐσιώθη; Ep. IV, p. 160.11)] assimilates the incarnation to Dionysius’ Neoplatonic metaphysics, in which God is manifest in and as each and every being, ‘all things in all things,’ and thus could be said to be made a being in them,” Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 109. 198

CONCLUSION TO PART I It will be useful to summarize our analysis to this point. I have proposed an account of the deep structure of ancient Greek thinking about nature that lies beneath the later Christian understanding of nature and world and have given some brief indications of how it relates to Maximus in particular. I argued that Parmenides sees the world of appearances, wherein natures come in and out of being, as a preliminary training for the unified vision of what is, in anticipation of the διάβασις, or transit, through the material world of nature that will be a central aspect of Maximus’ own vision of philosophy. The unified vision of reality and the overcoming of the dualities, which seem to constitute the cosmos, will also have their place in Maximus’ Ambigua, though he will also maintain that the differentiation of beings in accordance with their own rational principles (λόγοι) of existence is the manifestation of the divine will for creation, which–in defiance of Parmenides’ insistence–has been made out of nothing. Heraclitus, though perhaps from the opposite perspective, also teaches the unity of all apparent dualities and significantly, in anticipation of Maximus, of the duality between motion and rest. The rest of perpetual motion towards and around God will become an important theme in Maximus’ understanding of the relationship between the motion of the cosmos and the stability of God. My reading of Plato’s Timaeus has introduced many of the most important elements of Maximus’ account of the contemplation of nature: the experience of the order and beauty of the cosmos as evidence for the nature of its causation, the cosmos understood as image of an intelligible paradigm, the question of what it means for the universe to come into existence. I have also argued that the Timaeus, when read alongside the erotic dialogues, reveals that love lies at the heart of the contemplation of the cosmos for Plato and this concept of love will prove to be essential to Maximus’ own account.

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Aristotle’s extension and revision of Platonic themes introduced the theme of the goal (τέλος) of human life in a systematic way and with it the problem of how the life of the exercise of practical virtue relates to the realization of the final good of human life in pure contemplation. Aristotle’s way of conceiving the final human good also brings forward the notion of human self-transcendence, since the life of uninterrupted contemplation is most properly the divine life and more-than-human even as it is the human ideal. This theme of nature transcending nature will become a central aspect of Maximus’ thinking about θεωρία φυσική. Secondly, the rigors of Aristotle’s research into nature along with his conceptual physics reveal a universe that operates according to a continuous mode of motion and causality wherein the highest contemplation of the production of motion by an unmoved mover is recapitulated on the lowest levels of material being, the pivoting of a joint, for example. This general idea will be sharpened by Maximus into a strong notion of the recapitulation of the Divine in all things. With the Stoics, the question of the unity of philosophy as a whole concentrated on their notion of virtue, which is life in agreement with nature, as the only good. The immanence of the divine principle in the world of nature drew all of Stoic philosophy into the pursuit of an all-encompassing rationalism wherein living in agreement with nature as the properly virtuous life was understood as living in agreement with the divine ordering of the cosmos. Maximus is indebted to the Stoic synthesis of ancient psychology (mediated to him through Nemesius of Emesa) and so his discussions of the soul, praxis, virtue, and apatheia often resonate with Stoic teaching. Of course, the notion of the will and human freedom is central to Maximus’ understanding of practical philosophy and he would obviously reject a Stoic materialist account of causality, whether ethical or physical. However, his actual descriptions of the psychology of action are thoroughly indebted to Stoicism and so it has been important to introduce these issues here. Our reading of the Stoics has also raised the problem of speaking about God and the world as though they were two “things” that relate to one another. While Maximus will certainly insist upon Divine transcendence and will reject the Stoic identification of God and nature, he will nevertheless maintain a robust notion of Divine immanence in the world, although he works this out in a more Platonic way. Finally, in Plotinus we observed a strong account of how the world of nature is bound to intellectual being and beauty (which are one and the same) so that the contemplation of the beauty of the natural world leads ultimately,

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through the transcendence of subject-object duality, to the beautification of the human being in union with Beauty itself. Plotinus articulates the Platonic notion of the world as image of intellectual reality and this notion, as transmitted through Dionysius the Areopagite, will be absolutely central to Maximus’ understanding of nature. The very notion of the beauty of the natural world itself, which becomes especially apparent in the Cappadocians, has an important place in Maximus’ arguments against the “Origenists” of his day, and he conducts this argument, as we shall see, in terms that are redolent of Plotinus’ arguments against the Gnostics. More generally, we see in Plotinus, despite the clear hierarchical priority of contemplation over praxis, a certain unity between them; indeed, his very mode of organizing reality from Nature to Soul, Intellect, and the One entails the presence of the higher in the lower and the dependence of the lower on the higher. Just as nature is not without contemplation, so too is praxis not removed from the higher aspects of philosophy. As his polemic against the Gnostics indicates, the ethical consequences of their metaphysics and doctrines of nature are arguments against these very doctrines, indicating that while the contemplative life and the vision of reality to which it leads go beyond the concerns of the practical life–as they do for Maximus as well–they are never utterly removed from these concerns. Among the Christians, Clement established the positive role of Greek cosmic speculation and learning as preliminary stages of Christian “gnostic” philosophy. He pointed to the basic unity of Scriptural revelation and what philosophy can learn about the world, though he insists that natural knowledge must be enlightened by the Word of Scripture. Nevertheless, Scripture and the Cosmos have the same author and are intended to accomplish the same task amongst human beings: to give preparatory instruction in anticipation of the reception of divine knowledge. Clement also articulates the bond between the created world and the economy of the incarnation, using the imagery of the temple to show how Christ puts on the “vestments” of worldly reality in order to reveal the Father to the world, anticipating in this way the “cosmic liturgies” of Dionysius and Maximus. Origen reiterated many of the themes we raised first with Clement, in particular the relationship between Scripture and world in the pursuit of wisdom and the grounding of this in the incarnate Christ. Origen also introduced for us in a Christian context the state of human understanding that finds itself caught in a state of desire for knowledge that cannot be satisfied, at least in this present world, and in this way he extends Clement’s notion of nature (and Scrip-

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ture) as preliminary to divine knowledge in his own distinctive way. Origen’s myth of the fall of intellects into cosmic multiplicity illustrated that for him there is an absolute inseparability of ontological and ethical philosophy, centered on divine eros, and this will become significant for our interpretation of Maximus, particularly–and ironically–with respect to what appears to have been another iteration of Origenist and anti-Origenist controversy over the respective places of asceticism and contemplation in the monastic life. In Basil we observe a sharpening of the practical focus of the contemplation of the natural world and a focus on how the world looks to us in simple terms. Basil cautioned against the search for essences since such knowledge is completely irrelevant to the conduct of the world as it actually is and to the demands of the Christian life. He sought to inscribe humanity’s moral life within the phenomena of nature, not so that nature is seen as symbolic of human morality–the reality of the world is there for its own sake–but so that humanity would find its place within the created order as a part of it. For Basil, the sheer presence of the realities of the cosmos overwhelms our intuition and thereby brings the Creator before us so that to abstract from the world any “inner meaning” or “essence” is to lose the world and its Creator at once. Basil’s approach here goes beyond a mere accommodation to a relatively unlearned audience and is grounded in a profound sense of the importance of how things give themselves simply in the world. While Basil focused on the relationship of natural contemplation to the life of praxis, Gregory Nazianzen considered natural contemplation in anticipation of theology. He emphasized the idea that the human mind is limited in its nature to the perception of natural realities and has only a partial knowledge even of these. This notion of the incomprehensibility of both the world and God will be significant for Maximus’ account of nature in the Ambigua. Gregory also continued the Christological context of the contemplation of nature– “the back of God”–by interpreting the rock that sheltered Moses during his vision as the incarnate Christ. Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa showed the positive aspect of the mind’s relation to the world, seeing in its formation an organism perfectly fit for perceiving the world while yet maintaining its unity as the image of the one God. He also defined the scope of the Biblical account of creation to be Moses’ guidance to intellectual reality through the perception of phenomena. This accounted for the structure of the Biblical narrative and the unfolding of creation is at the same time the unfolding of human knowledge of the world, which

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culminates in the praise of God. Gregory also provides a clear precedent for an open-ended, non-dogmatic, approach to the contemplation of nature, an approach that Maximus will take as well. Evagrius provided a thoroughly worked-out theory of intellectual activity as it relates to knowledge of the created world and knowledge of God. His emphasis on the dynamic relationship between the various stages of spiritual life, particularly the close relationship between the acquisition of dispassion through the ascetic life and the knowledge of reality, will be picked up by Maximus in his ongoing encounter with Evagrius’ own epigones, among whom we should count Maximus himself. Evagrius also emphasized the pedagogical and especially therapeutic function of natural contemplation in the very specific terms of his theories of cognitive experience and all of this is given by Evagrius as the specific teaching of Christ. Finally, in Dionysius we saw that the world exists as the ecstasy of God and that all existing things without exception lend themselves to the naming of God in praise. It is this activity of praise that may be said to constitute Dionysius’ vision for the contemplation of nature for it is precisely as the name of God, as that which is the manifestation of God, that nature is what it is. To know the world is to know the world as the appearance of God so that God’s knowledge of the world as the knowledge of Himself is the paradigm for human knowledge of the world, i.e. the knowledge of the world is the knowledge of God as He appears. This dynamic answers to the dynamic of the world as the outpouring of divine love in which God’s love for the world becomes the love of the world for God and returns the world to God. Secondly, Dionysius understood the name of Jesus in the terms of this same process and thereby made his “Christology” and his “cosmology” one and the same. Finally, at the culmination of human knowledge, when all the symbols from the realm of being have been made manifest, the human being reaches the “Christ-like attainment (χριστοειδοῦς λήξεως)” and comes to behold God in the way the disciples beheld him at the Transfiguration.1 Though Dionysius did not elaborate this theme in great detail, the vision of the Divine in Christ at the Transfiguration is absolutely central to Maximus’ understanding of the contemplation of nature and he extends and transforms what lies inchoate here in the thought of Dionysius.

1

Div. nom. I.4, 114.8.

PART II THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE IN THE AMBIGUA TO JOHN

INTRODUCTION I have proposed a deep structure of ancient approaches to the contemplation of nature in Part I as background to Maximus. We turn now to Maximus’ Ambigua to John, which are in constant and creative interaction with the earlier traditions. This analysis of the contemplation of nature in the Ambigua to John is divided into four chapters. The first (Chapter 4) gives a reading of the first section of the Ambigua, Ambigua 6–8, in terms of Maximus’ analysis of the fundamental experience of human affectivity or πάθος, which I shall typically translate as “passibility.” This initial section of the Ambigua raises all of the major themes that Maximus will treat throughout the rest of the text: the question of the relation of the soul and body, the relation between praxis and contemplation, and the task of achieving simplicity in order to see the world as it is. This section also introduces the fundamental concept of motion and the idea that love is the foundation of cosmic motion and order. All of this reflection comes within the context of Maximus’ analysis of human passibility in which he describes the basic sense of disturbance the human being initially experiences in relation to the world and specifically his own body. Chapter 5 expounds Maximus’ vision for the philosophic life as a response to the passibility he has analyzed in Ambigua 6–8. Maximus presents philosophy as a διάβασις or “traversal” of the material world to intellectual reality. I show in this chapter how the contemplation of nature as the path of this διάβασις is related to the practical life of asceticism and virtue and the ascent to God, who transcends nature. Chapter 6 addresses the question of the relation between God and the world and presents the different ways in which Maximus considers this question, which is central to Maximus’ theological philosophy of nature. Chapter 7 examines the Christological fulfillment of Maximus’ philosophy of nature and shows how Maximus envisions the renewal of nature and of the contemplation of nature in Christ. Finally, the Epilogue returns to the

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shifting appearances of Ambigua 6–8 and recalls what we observed in our Introduction, that for Maximus all philosophical reflection about the world is like the play of children: the Word comes down to the human level to instruct and guide humanity in its immature thinking to the higher and changeless reality of the Divine. The Word in various ways truly becomes embodied “in all things” and this “economy of appearances” is the way in which God “uses nature within nature in a manner beyond nature” 1 in order to renew nature from within.

1

Amb. 31, 1280C4.

Chapter 4 PATHOS–“WHAT IS THE WISDOM CONCERNING ME?” Introduction: Ambigua 6–8 and the Ambiguity of Human Existence As we noted in the Introduction, the “cosmic” scope of Maximus’ thinking is apparent in nearly all of his works, so that to read Maximus at all is to read his cosmology. This indicates the thoroughly integrated nature of his vision. We begin our analysis of this integrated vision as it is found in the Ambigua to John with the first three chapters of the text, Ambigua 6–8, and the beginning of the philosophic life as Maximus conceived of it, the question of human passibility. Maximus begins the Ambigua to John with a series of three quotations from Gregory’s oration On the Love of the Poor (Or. 14). All three revolve around the question of the soul and its relation to the body, and through the course of Maximus’ exposition, which is conceptually continuous through these first three chapters, Maximus establishes the nature of human being as a mixture of matter and spirit, which means, initially, that the human being finds himself in perplexity. My exposition here will expound this dynamic, but before proceeding to Maximus’ thought we should consider the oration from which he begins. The precise time, place, and situation of the composition and original delivery of the oration On the Love of the Poor is unclear.1 It seems to have been composed as a public fund-raiser and has been connected with Basil’s charitable

1 See Susan Holman, The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 142-167 for background and discussion of Gregory’s Oration 14. See also the analysis of John McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Semianry Press, 2001), 145-155.

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efforts in Caesarea.2 It may also have been intended as a general statement of Christian thought on the matter of care for the poor3 and on the dynamics of the ethical life more generally. This, at least, is how Maximus reads it, i.e. as a discourse within the context of ethical philosophy. Indeed, the oration begins with a general consideration of different virtues and modes of life and the skopos of the work, though obviously directed towards the practical manifestation of acts of charity for those in need, has as its underlying philosophical structure a reflection upon the experience of instability and the uncertain state of the human composition of soul and body, a situation which Gregory uses to further his aim of encouraging philanthropy and which Maximus interrogates directly for his own philosophical purposes. It will be worthwhile to quote the passage from On the Love of the Poor that immediately precedes the passages upon which Maximus comments in Ambigua 6 and 7 (Ambiguum 8 begins with a quotation from much later in the oration) in order to gain something of the context of Gregory’s thinking at the point where Maximus approaches it: How I have been yoked together with [the body], how I am both an image of God and am kneaded together with clay, I do not know. That which, when healthy, wages war with me, causes grief when it itself is attacked. That which I love as my fellow servant I also shun as my enemy. That which I avoid as my fellow servant I also pity as my fellow heir. In agony I wish that it would melt away, but I have no other fellow laborer to use for my journey towards what is most beautiful. I know why I have come into being, and that it is necessary for me to ascend to God through actions.4

This consideration of the ambivalence of the body as a yoke-mate, which employs familiar paradoxical juxtapositions and reversals, as well as a typical Hellenic rhetorical disposition towards the recalcitrance of the body, opens up to the fundamental ethical questions: Why do I feel at odds with myself? and What should I do about this feeling? The reflection focuses upon the body as the locus of anxiety, but the anxiety itself, and the grief, love, avoidance, and pity all pertain to Gregory as a conscious being with an affective soul and so the question is the question primarily of the affective disposition of the one who

2 Brian Daley, “Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999), 455. 3 McGuckin, Saint Gregory, 147. 4 G. Naz., Or. 14.6, PG 35.865A-B.

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is aware of his body as both companion and stranger: ὢ τῆς συζυγίας καὶ τῆς ἀλλοτριώσεως, “What a coupling! What an alienation!” The section from which Ambigua 6 and 7 derive their preliminary quotations is the following: I treat [the body] gently, as my fellow worker; and then I have no way of escaping its rebellion, no way to avoid falling away from God, weighed down by those bonds that drag me down or keep me held down to the earth. It is a magnanimous enemy and a treacherous friend. What a coupling! What an alienation! That which I fear I treat well, and that for which I have fondness I dread. I am reconciled to it before battle, and I am separated from it before making peace. What is the wisdom concerning me, and what is this great mystery? Does God will that we who are a portion of God and have rolled down from him as in a stream always should look towards him while we are in the midst of a battle and struggle against the body so that we should not despise the Creator by exalting and elevating ourselves because of our worthiness? And is this weakness with which we are joined a training for that worthiness? Is it that we might know that we are both the greatest and the lowliest of all, that we are earthly and heavenly, temporary and immortal, heirs of light and fire or of darkness, depending upon our tendency? Such is our mixture, and because of these things, as it appears to me, whenever we exalt ourselves because of the image, we come back down again because of the dust. Therefore, let whoever wishes philosophize about these things; we shall philosophize along with him at a more opportune time.5

Gregory goes on to devote the rest of his oration to the persuasion of his audience, in specifically Christian terms, of the necessity of care for the poor; for his part, Maximus takes up the charge to “philosophize about these things” in Ambigua 6–8. I. Ambiguum 6 i. This is my body? Maximus sets the following quotation as the starting point for Ambigua 6: I treat [my body] gently, as my fellow worker; and then I have no way of escaping its rebellion, no way to avoid falling away from God (ἀπὸ Θεοῦ πέσω), weighed

5

G. Naz., Or. 14.7.

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down (βαρηθείς) by those bonds that drag (κατασπώσαις) me down or keep me held down (κατεχούσαις) to the earth.6

Maximus first has Gregory present us with the body as something other, something of which one is aware, something that will be treated in a certain way as an object of concern. The body is a question; it is something that must be dealt with. The body is not presented here as an abstraction, however, as an objective thing “out there” in need of definition. Rather, from the very beginning, the body is already folded into one’s anxious experience of it. We are already with it, in its midst, when we start to question it. The body is experienced as something that weighs us down and holds us to the earth. These themes are commonplaces of Greek philosophy, whether pagan or Christian; our question is, How does Maximus think the relationship between body and soul at this beginning stage of reflection, and what does this mean for his understanding of the contemplation of nature? According to this introductory quotation and what precedes it in Gregory’s oration, the human being thinks about the body as an accompanying reality–συνεζύγην, σύνδουλον, συγκληρονόμον, συνεργόν: a yoke mate, “fellow slave,” “fellow heir,” “fellow worker” 7–but it is something that accompanies in an ambiguous way. Gregory “loves” his body as his “fellow slave,” but he also shuns it (φεύγω) as such; it is an enemy from which he turns himself away (ἀποστρέφομαι), and fellow heir that he pities; it is a “fellow worker,” which, when it receives kind treatment, rebels and leads to the downfall of the one it accompanies. This immediately raises the question of who or what the body accompanies. We have the σύν, but we must ask, σὺν τίνι, with whom? We are, in effect, asking the question that Porphyry set as Plotinus’ first question in his edition of his master’s works: τίνος ἂν εἶεν? “Pleasures and sadnesses, fears and assurances, desires and aversions and pain–whose are they?”8 Plotinus is asking the question of the nature of affectivity and seeking to identify to whom it belongs, whether to the body, the soul, or to something resulting from their combination. Gregory is referring specifically to the body, but as we have seen, the question is broader and reaches out towards affectivity in general. Gregory

6 7 8

G. Naz., Or. 14.7. G. Naz., Or. 14.6. Plotinus, Enneads 1.1.

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loves, and also fears, his body. It is his. But what, or who, is this who is with a body in such an uncertain way? In a manner typical of the erotapokriseis tradition, Maximus identifies the initial problem with the quoted text as a linguistic one: the potential redundancy of the words κατασπᾶσθαι and κατέχεσθαι. He assures his addressees that these two words do not refer to the same reality, as though Gregory were not defining precise states of being with precisely articulated concepts. On the contrary, as Maximus will explain, “being dragged down” and “being held down” are two different experiences undergone by two different sorts of people. We observe here the centrality of language in ethical philosophy. States of body and soul have precise characters with precise linguistic descriptions. It is Gregory’s purpose “to show the way to what is best and most useful to those who pursue them” by means of his “exalted speech.” 9 According to Maximus, Gregory “is a theologian who speaks in an extremely dense way”10 and the unfolding of his meaning requires the greatest care and attention: “In order that the enigma of what has been said may become entirely clear to us, let us examine the words of the blessed one themselves just as they are.”11 As an orator and teacher, Gregory takes on a universalized persona for Maximus: “He is clearly not saying this about himself specifically; when he speaks from his own perspective (δι᾽ ἑαυτοῦ) here he is discussing what is common to the human condition.”12 Everyone “who desires (ὁ ἐρῶν) salvation” is then characterized either as one who is devoted to asceticism (πράξει) or as one devoted to contemplation (θεωρίᾳ), which, as the ways to virtue and knowledge, are necessary for salvation.13 Maximus understands that Gregory belongs to the second category, and goes on, speaking in the person of Gregory, to describe the disposition of such a devoted contemplative: Regard me as one of those who attend to God through contemplation and luxuriate in blessed beauty; I have complete peace and holiness since I have brought myself into a state of simplicity with the undivided God (ἑμαυτὸν ἁπλώσας Θεῷ ἀδιαιρέτῳ) in the identity of the mental orientation of my will (κατὰ τὴν γνώμην) with His by making the irrational powers of my soul appropriately rational, lea-

9

Amb. 6, 1065C2-4. Amb. Prol., 1065A5. 11 Amb. 6, 1065C9-11. 12 Amb. 6, 1065C14-D1. 13 Völker, has shown the consistent confluence of the terms πρᾶξις and θεωρία in the texts of Maximus: Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 232-235. 10

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ding and assimilating them–I mean the irascible and appetitive faculties–to the intellect through reason. I have transformed irascibility into love and appetite into joy.14

The one devoted to contemplation possesses peace and holiness, which Maximus explains in the terms of simplicity (ἁπλώσας), identity (ταυτότητι), and assimilation (οἰκειώσασθαι). ii. Rationalization of Obscurity

After his initial description of the ambiguity of embodiment, Maximus refracts the human soul into the familiar four Greek aspects: the two irrational powers, θυμός (irascibility and appetite), λόγος (reason), and νοῦς (intellect). He says that the peaceful state of the contemplative is achieved through the assimilation of that which is irrational–the irascible and appetitive faculties of the soul–to that which transcends reason, the intellect (νοῦς), by means of and through reason (λόγος) itself. This assimilation and appropriation of the irrational to the supra-rational by means of the rational is also a transformation in which irascibility becomes love (ἀγάπη) and the appetite becomes joy (χαρά). This dynamic, of course, had long been a part of Greek philosophical culture. In Parmenides it is the strength of θυμός that conditions his journey to the truth: ὅσον τ᾽ ἐπὶ θυμὸς ἱκάνοι (“as far as spirit could reach”).15 Plato continues Parmenides’ image in the Phaedrus, where the soul is figured as a chariot drawn by two horses (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία), which lead it (potentially) towards the beauty of the forms. Indeed, much of Gregory’s language of being “weighed down” and falling to the earth resonates with Socrates’ description of the soul in the Phaedrus.16 As Maximus explains it here, the central dynamic of conscious and affective life is the assimilation of the irrational powers to the intellect, by means of their rationalization, i.e. by means of their coming under the sway of λόγος. By doing so, the human being becomes “simple for God” in peace and holiness, “in the identity of the mental orientation of the will.” Maximus presents the self as scattered, and the task for the acquisition of blessed beauty is the simplification of this scattered reality to a way of conscious orientation toward the world 14 15 16

Amb. 6, 1065D4-1068A5. Parmenides, Fr. 1.1. E.g. Plato, Phaedrus 248d.

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(γνώμη) that is one with God. But who, or what, accomplishes this gathering, and therefore, who or what is the human being? When the irrational powers are assimilated to the νοῦς by λόγος, they are transformed into love and joy, which we may take as the rationalized modes of these basic energies of the soul. Maximus then gives a description of the affectivity of these modes, beginning with joy, in which he says Leaping and exultation in a divinely-appropriate manner are characteristic of joy–it is like John, the great forerunner and herald of the truth, who leapt forth in the womb, or like David king of Israel, who did so at the resting of the ark.17

From this image of leaping in the womb, Maximus gives a description of the current mode of human being in the world: For both we and the God-Word, who is the Maker and Lord of all, are in the present state of life as in a womb. This idea may be difficult to accept since it is not very common, but it is true nevertheless. The God-Word shows through with great difficulty in this sensual world, obscurely as in the womb, and it is those who are like John in spirit who recognize him; human beings see the Word hidden in existing things even if only to a certain degree, out of the “womb” of the material environment, as it were. And this is how they would be indeed, if they were to exult with the joy of John (for, compared to the ineffable glory and radiance of the age to come and the character of its life, the present life mixed with gloomy darkness is no different than life in an all-encompassing womb. Because of the childishness of our minds, the God-Word himself, who is perfect and even transcends perfection, became a child within this present life because of his love for humanity).18

This passage lays out in compressed and imagistic form the basic mode of human being in the world: to be a human being in the sensual world is to be in a womb and Maximus draws the God-Word and human being together in a definitive way. First, the God-Word is only obscurely seen in the world, as though still in the womb, and it is only those who are like John the Baptist who are able to discern his presence even while both he and the God-Word are still in the womb. Most human beings, however, only see things at all when they have emerged from the womb, and even then, vision is only attained to a certain degree (ποσῶς), for the λόγος has been “hidden in existing things (τὸν ἐν τοῖς

17 18

Amb. 6, 1068A6-10. Amb. 6, 1068A10-B11.

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οὖσιν ἐγκρυπτόμενον… λόγον).” The question of the λόγος of beings has rightly been regarded as a central element of Maximus’ understanding of the nature of reality. Here our concern is not with the ontology of the λόγοι but rather with how knowledge of them relates to the affective life of human beings. Ambiguum 7 will show them to be the stable aspect within the instability of cosmic flux that make possible the knowledge of the world and the knowledge of God through the world. When we take these two together–the unassimilated being of humanity and its dim vision of beings–we see that Maximus considers the human being to be in a state of obscurity. A human being can hardly see, and what one does see, one sees only darkly and neither loves it nor rejoices in it. Rather, one is filled with irrational irascibility and appetite to consume, possess, destroy, but not to see, contemplate, and understand. We may also see in this an inchoate indication of Maximus’ understanding of how beings give themselves to be apprehended and how human beings intend them. The logos/Logos is concealed, hidden in beings. There are those (like John the Baptist) who are able to respond to and rejoice in the invisible in its invisibility, those for whom manifestation is precisely the hidden presence of what has yet to come to light. And it is precisely this one who is the forerunner of what is to come, the emergence into the light of what was hidden. In contrast to this, Maximus describes the normal state of human beings who see only dimly what a being is, even though the being has already emerged from “the womb.” iii. The Ascetic and the Contemplative Maximus continues, in the persona of Gregory, the description of the dynamics of what it means to be a human being in the world: And so, as Gregory says, If this is what I am like and if I have mounted up to the divine heights that can be attained by human beings during this present life, I would be negligent of the God-like way of life if I were to incline myself voluntarily toward the love of the body: ‘I have been dragged down, having been weighed down by bonds,’ that is, by cares, ‘and I have fallen away from God,’ since I would have dedicated my attention and searching, which are intended for the kingdom of the heavens alone, to that for which it was not intended–I mean the earthly life–preferring for my mind’s activity to be joined to the senses rather than for it to be carried to God.19 19

Amb. 6, 1068B11-C6.

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The contemplative, as one who has ascended to a certain degree, is in between the “deiform habit” and the body, and so the phrase “being dragged down” would apply insofar as such a person has once ascended and then voluntarily shifted the orientation of the will “toward the love of the body.” One might do this because of a preference for the thought of sensuous things to that of divine things. The senses are related to the cares of the earthly life and are thus bonds, but they are also a place of settling rest for the intellect that has grown weary from its ascent to the divine realm, as Gregory says in his Great Theological Oration: “Thus our intellect grows weary of transcending bodily realities;”20 hence its willingness to direct its attention to the body. When Maximus comes to consider the state of the one who is engaged in ascetical practice, he applies the other term, “being held down” (κατέχεσθαι): If I am still in the midst of an ascetical battle against the warring passions because I have not yet cleanly escaped the snares of the enemies who wish to catch me with them, and if I love the body without proper discernment, clearly I am ‘held down’ by it, since I would prefer relation to it over separation from it through the practice of virtue.21

Again, the submission is willing. The ascetic who is held down prefers relation to the body over separation from it through virtue, and so is held down. In his conclusion of Ambiguum 6, Maximus characterizes the state of the contemplative as one of “neglect” and that of the ascetic as one of “surrender.” In both cases, the falling away from God is consensual and is based simply on the preference for the bodily senses. II. Ambiguum 7 i. The Question of Origenism Ambiguum 7 has received the most sustained attention of any of Maximus’ works from modern scholars of theology and philosophy. It is the most densely argued chapter of the whole of the Ambigua to John and has been regarded as an important document within the history of doctrine vis-à-vis the question of Origenism22 and of the development of concepts within the philo20

G. Naz., Or. 28.13. Amb. 6,1068C6-11. 22 e.g. Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 72-116; Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 127-120.; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 81-83. 21

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sophical tradition more generally.23 Polycarp Sherwood, who put the “refutation of Origenism” at the heart of his study of the Ambigua to John, himself sees this refutation as “essentially a digression” within Ambiguum 7,24 however, and a fortiori within the Ambigua as a whole. Ambiguum 7 begins from a passage (quoted above) in which Gregory speaks of being “a portion of God,” which then “flows down from above” and is joined to a body “to battle and struggle” as a training for existing humbly as a portion of God and not “despising the Creator.” Maximus begins with the misreading of those who apparently had used this quotation in support of the myth of the primordial henad of intellects that were gathered in rapt contemplation about God, but then, out of satiety, turned away and were dispersed, so that God generated “this bodily cosmos for the purpose of binding rational beings to bodies in retribution for sins they had previously committed.”25 There is indeed evidence that Gregory was used as an authoritative justification for what was often labeled “Origenist” speculation “about the world–or worlds– matter, the soul, the superior and inferior rational natures, the resurrection, the judgment, the retribution, the sufferings of Christ.”26 In the mid-sixth century, Cyril of Scythopolis reports a conversation he had with an Abba Cyriacus concerning monks in Palestine who made precisely this appeal as justification for their speculations about the origin of the cosmos, the soul, Christ’s relation to the Trinity, and the apokatastasis (universal restoration of all things to unity with God). These doctrines are laid at the door of “Pythagoras and Plato… Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus.”27 As Maximus reports in Ambiguum 7, the fallenness of creation is figured by such people as a falling into motion from an originally stable state, and this is the point at which Maximus begins in his response and exposition. Before proceeding to the exposition itself, we should say a word regarding this question of Origenism in the text. As we have observed, Ambiguum 7 is usually read in light of the Origenist controversies of the fourth and sixth cen23 Gersh, From Iablichus to Eriugena, 193ff, especially 218-229, 244-248; Riou, Le Monde et l’ église, 49-54; Moreschini, Ambigua, 127-140; Philipp Gabriel Renczes, Agir de Dieu et liberté de l’ homme: recherches sur l’anthropologie théologique de saint Maxime le confesseur (Paris: Cerf, 2003), 155ff.; Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology, 47-51. 24 Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 29. 25 Amb. 7, 1069A12-15. 26 G. Naz., Or. 27.10. 27 See The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R.M. Price (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 252-254.

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turies, even though, as Sherwood claimed, the refutation of Origenism is by no means the leading concern of the text. Maximus does, of course, set views that would have been called “Origenist” as the initial aporia for his own reflections, and the contours of Maximus’ counter-argument are well known. As Maximus reports it, the typical Origenist scheme of the generation of the cosmos posited that rational creatures originally existed in a state of stability (στάσις) and then fell through movement (κίνησις) so that God brought about the γένεσις of the corporeal universe “for the purpose of binding rational beings to bodies in retribution for sins previously committed.”28 For Maximus, by contrast, if something is in motion, by definition it has never been in a state of rest, since everything that is in motion is in motion towards the final object of its desire and if it is observed to be in motion now–as all things are–then it cannot have once been in a state of rest with the final object of its desire. The notion of falling away from the highest and most desirable good is simply incoherent for Maximus. How could something from which one could possibly turn away actually be beautiful enough to produce satiety in the beholder, so that a turning away would even be desirable? Moreover, if this could take place even within a state of stability, what would prevent it from happening again, even if one were to re-attain the primordial state of stable unity? Rather, all things are first brought into being (γένεσις), are thus set in motion (κίνησις), and are directed towards stability (στάσις) in their final end, who is God.29 The crucial insight of Maximus’ refutation is to assert motion/change as the fundamental reality of generated being; it is this insight that links the refutation of Origenism to the central concern of the text, namely his analysis of the basic experience of human passibility in the world. ii. Nature and Passibility In the first sequence of argument, Maximus raises two essential issues: 1.) The comportment of creation towards the Divine (τὸ θείον) as the “unmoved reality that fulfills all things (ἀκίνητον…πάντων πληρωτικόν) and “final object of desire” (ἐσχατὸν ὁρεκτικόν), and 2.) The comportment of creation–specifically intellectual creatures–towards the divine as the beautiful (τὸ καλόν). With respect to the first, Maximus asserts, “no moving thing is yet stable when it has

28 29

Amb. 7, 1069A8-15. Amb. 7, 1069B4-1072D2.

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not yet put a stop to the impetus of its power of motion with the final object of its desire.”30 The basic claim is that if something is now in motion, then it has been in motion for as long as it has been in existence. The syllogism Maximus gives in support of this conclusion is If 1.) the Divine is immovable because it fills all things; 2.) everything that receives existence out of non-being is moveable because it must be carried along for some cause; and 3.) no moving thing is yet stable when it has not yet put a stop to the impetus of its power of motion with the final object of its desire–for only the manifestation of the final object of desire, and nothing else, can give stability to what is moved by nature–then 4.) nothing that is now in motion was once stable, since it has not yet attained the final object of its desire. It is because the final object of desire has not yet appeared that it causes a state of motion in the things that revolve around it.31

The idea that motion could follow stability is incoherent to Maximus; those who hold it assume “impossible things.” Something moves because it tends towards that which it desires, its cause (αἰτία), and it does not stop until it has reached that goal. Therefore, the undeniable reality of the change we undergo indicates that we have never been in a state of stability. With respect to the second point, Maximus begins by asserting that if intellects were able to despise God and turn away from stability once, then there is no reason to think that this wouldn’t happen in a continuous cycle. He then places an argument in the mouths of his hypothetical opponents: it is not a matter of being unable but of being unwilling to remain steadfast in the beautiful, such that intellects had to experience the opposite of τὸ καλόν–i.e. τὸ κάκον, evil–in order truly to love it. The conclusion of this imagined account would be that evil has served to educate intellects in the good with the result that they become fixed more securely in the beautiful, even giving birth to love, “by which everything that has come to be from God is naturally gathered to God in stability and changlessness.”32 In response, Maximus argues that that which is only loved because of the experience of its opposite is not of itself (δι᾽ ἑαυτό) good or beautiful, and as such, would not be able to “draw the impulse” of those who enjoy it. This initial consideration raises a determinative theme of the whole of the Ambigua, that of the pursuit of a singleness and simplicity 30 31 32

Amb. 7, 1069B7-10. Amb. 7, 1069B4-11. Amb. 7, 1072A8-10.

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of perception that is independent of duality. Maximus leaves the issue in its nascent form here. Maximus then returns to the first point, that of the relationship between motion and generation. Here we shall focus on Maximus’ use of the term πάθος, which he has given as another word for κίνησις. “‘Passibility,’” he writes, is not being used here in the sense of a change or corruption of potentiality, but as what exists together with beings by nature (τὸ φύσει συνυπάρχον τοῖς οὖσι). For all things that have come into being experience being moved, since nothing is self-moved or self-sufficient with respect to potentiality.”33

There is no primordial nature of beings that then undergoes some sort of change or corruption; πάθος–passibility, undergoing a force from outside oneself–is the heart of created being itself. A being is πάθος as such. This insight is crucial for our understanding of Maximus’ views on being and nature in general, and, within our context here, of the foundation of the philosophic life. Beings are passible in their nature and thus are moved by nature. God in this context is “the bounteous Giver of being and well-being, since He is Source and Final End,” and it is towards this source (ἀρχή) and final end (τέλος) that beings are moved, even as it is from God that they have come.34 Focusing specifically on human beings, Maximus describes the movement of thought into God as that which circumscribes thought: If something intellectual is moved intellectually in proportion to itself, then it must be thinking. If it thinks, then it must also love what is thought. If it loves what is thought, it also must be drawn out of itself towards it as the object of its love. (Εἰ δὲ κινεῖται ἀναλόγως ἑαυτῷ νοερῶς τὸ νοερὸν, καὶ νοεῖ πάντως· εἰ δὲ νοεῖ, καὶ ἐρᾷ πάντως τοῦ νοηθέντος· εἰ δ᾽ ἑρᾷ, καὶ πάσχει πάντως τὴν πρὸς αὐτὸ ὡς ἐραστὸν ἔκστασιν).35

This ecstasy results in an impulsion (ἐπείγεται) and an extension–a stretching out (ἐπιτείνει)–of the “intensity of movement” until it is completely absorbed by what it loves. As a result, it willingly renounces its ability “to make itself known solely from itself” (ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ αὐτὸ ἐκεῖνο ὅλον γνωρίζεσθαι), and is rather shown forth inseparably with the object of its desire, which completely circumscribes it “as when the air is entirely lit up by light, and iron by fire, where

33 34 35

Amb. 7, 1073B12-14. Amb. 7, 1073C5-7. Amb. 7, 1073C9-13.

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one is entirely lit up by the flame of the other.”36 As such, the one who undergoes intellectual (νοερῶς as distinct from αἰσθητικῶς) motion ceases to be “oneself” in that the willing of the will is given over and subordinated to God, so that one becomes like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and can say, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt 26.39), or like St. Paul, saying, “I no longer live, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2.20).37 Immediately Maximus anticipates the objection that this amounts to the destruction of freedom. Rather than destroying freedom, Maximus asserts that this subordination of the will secures the establishment (θέσις) of freedom according to its nature. Maximus characterizes this establishment of freedom as a “deliberate surrender” (ἐκχώρησιν γνωμικήν), which is a desire “to be moved by the very Source from which being comes to us, as an image returns to its archetype.”38 In its passibility, which, as we have seen, is at the core of its being and is constitutive of its being, it achieves the ability “not to want to be carried elsewhere”39 than to God. This is what Maximus means by θεώσις in this context: the intellect is victorious because God is the active agent in all things. The intellect–the image of God the archetype–“takes greater pleasure when the things it understands to pertain naturally to itself are set aside.” The mind is ecstatic as that which is drawn out towards the object of love. The free and “deliberate surrender” of the will shows that it has only God as active within it. Thus, there is one single activity in all things, that of God and of those who are worthy of God, or rather, that of God alone, since he has completely and beneficently interpenetrated all of those who are worthy (καὶ μόνον ἔχουσαν ἐνεργοῦντα τὸν θεὸν δείξασαν, ὥστε εἶναι μίαν καὶ μόνην διὰ πάντων τὴν ἐνέργειαν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τῶν ἀξίων θεοῦ, μᾶλλον δὲ μόνου θεοῦ, ὡν ὅλου ὅλοις τοῖς ἀξίοις ἀγαθοπρεπῶς περιχωρήσαντος).40

We see here, then, that God is the one who is active in all things. This is fundamental for understanding Maximus’ notion of the contemplation of nature. God as the end, “outside” of which there would be nothing, is seen here to be in all things. All things that are in “self-impelled motion” (ἐξουσιαστικῆς κινήσεως) around something other (τι ἄλλο) than themselves are stopped with

36 37 38 39 40

Amb. 7, 1076A2-4. Cf. Amb. 7, 1076B4-9. Amb. 7, 1076B13-C1. Amb. 7, 1076C2-4. Amb. 7, 1076C9-13.

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the advent of “the final object of desire,” and they “contain” God, who is “contained uncontainedly” in accordance with the potentiality of each thing. iii. Partaking of God as the Substance of Virtue Maximus’ account of human πάθος is foundational for whatever concepts or arguments might be brought to bear on his metaphysics, including his refutation of Origenism. Maximus places rest (στάσις/μονή) as the goal of motion, not that from which motion departs, and characterizes that goal as “silence and imperturbability.”41 Movement is considered by Maximus here as “straining”: one “becomes God by straining towards Him and will be called a portion of God by virtue of his suitably partaking of God (τῇ πρὸς αὐτὸν ἀνατάσει θεὸς γίνεται καὶ μοῖρα θεοῦ λέγεται τῷ μετέχειν προσηκόντως θεοῦ).”42 When Maximus gives a specific explanation of human participation in God, he considers it in the context of the virtues (ἀρεταί), which he gives as including wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (I Cor 1.30). He says that the Word (Λόγος) of God–identified with Jesus Christ–is the οὐσία of the virtues, that is, He “possesses these things…unconditionally, being Wisdom itself, and Righteousness, and Sanctification, and does not possess them as specific instances of the virtues as would be the case with us.”43 Therefore, to partake of virtue is to “partake of God, who is the οὐσία of the virtues.” The possibility of this participation is founded in the cultivation of “the natural seed of the good”44 in the human will so that participation in what transcends humanity is part of the potentiality of human nature, another instance of the grounding of human being beyond human nature. It is in this sense, for Maximus, that the famous phrase “The end is the same as the beginning (source)”45 is true. The source and final end of human nature come under a unified σκοπός, which is the attainment of “genuine agreement with God (ἀνόθευτος θεοῦ τυγχάνων συνήγορος).” The course of human life is run with a community of willful orientation (γνώμη) and purpose (προαίρεσις) between man and God so that from the beginning man receives being and the good as inseparable. Through the exercise of the virtues, a person becomes assimilated

41 42 43 44 45

Amb. 7, 1080D2-9, quoting Basil the Great, Enarratio in prophetam Isaiam I, 30 (PG 30, 177C-D). Amb. 7, 1080C5-7. Amb. 7, 1081D1-7. Amb. 7, 1084A1. Amb. 7, 1084A3-4; cf. Origen De princ. I.6.2.

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to the beautiful (καλῷ) nature and divine purpose because he is in the image of God. Assimilation, is not, however, a product of the exercise of the virtues, as he says later in Ambiguum 10. Rather, the virtues make it manifest; assimilation is manifestation, the making evident of what has been sown in human nature from the beginning: τὸ ἀγαθόν. The attainment of τὸ ἀγαθόν, “the good,” which is the τέλος of being, has been placed in the nature of man from his arising (φύσις as φύεσθαι), so that the principle of his growth is the transcendent good towards which he arises and from which he has come. This gives us an indication of the relationship between the good and the beautiful: τὸ καλόν is τὸ ἀγαθόν as its manifestation. By “conforming” to its “own proper Source (ἰδίαν ἀρχήν)” the human being discloses as τὸ καλόν the good that has been planted in his nature and in this way receives “being God” (τὸ θεός εἶναι) from the one God. The manifestation of human being as the visible beauty of the good is what man receives from God. Maximus then uses the phrase “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28) as a framework for another summary statement of his teaching: [The human being] comes to be in God through diligence by not corrupting the logos of his being, which pre-exists in God. He is moved in God according to the logos of well-being, which pre-exists in God, when he acts virtuously. Finally, he lives in God according to the logos of eternal being, which pre-exists in God.46

The triad of being (εἶναι), well-being (εὖ εἶναι) and eternal being (ἀεὶ εἶναι) recurs at various points in the Ambigua to John and elsewhere in his works.47 We return here to a passage the first part of which we have already observed but which also contains a reference to the triad of being, well-being, and eternal being: But one must understand the term “passibility” in the correct sense. “Passibility” is not being used here in the sense of a change or corruption of potentiality, but as what exists together with beings by nature. For all things that have come into being experience being moved, since nothing is self-moved or self-sufficient with respect to potentiality. If, therefore, generated rational beings exist then they

46

Amb. 7, 1084B2-7. Cf. Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 67 n.27. See discussion of this theme in Larchet, Divinisation de l’ homme, 165-174; Thunberg, Microcosm, 368-372; Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology, 172-174; Renzses, Agir de Dieu, uses the triad as a framework for his study of the concepts of ἐνέργεια and ἕξις in Maximus’ anthropology. 47

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must also be in motion, since from the beginning they are moved naturally in virtue of the fact that they have being, and are moved in the deliberative orientation of their will48 toward an end for the sake of well-being. For the end of the motion of moving things, which is well-being in eternity, is the same as the Source of being, and this is God, the bounteous Giver of both being and wellbeing, since Ηe is Source and Final End: we are moved simply from Him, as our Source, and somehow we are also moved towards Him, for He is our Final End.49

This most general statement of the nature of being comes within the consideration of πάθος, since as we have seen, πάθος “exists together with beings by nature.” Created things are in motion in virtue of their being and their motion is teleological in that it is directed toward the good (well-being). The achievement of the end, which is a return to the beginning, is the arrival at eternal well-being in God. Maximus gives a fuller explanation of this in Ambiguum 65 where he considers Gregory Nazianzen’s reference to “the eighth day” in his Oration on Pentecost. Maximus quotes Gregory: “…there being one day lacking, which we have received in addition from the coming age, being the eighth, which is also itself the first, indeed, one and perpetual. For there [in the coming age] it is necessary to put an end to the keeping of the Sabbath of souls as we do here.”50 The context of this quotation from the Oration on Pentecost finds Gregory reflecting upon various numbers that are held to be sacred by various groups: the ancient Hebrews honored the number seven, the Pythagorians the number four, etc. This is a natural mode of reflection for Gregory since the feast, Pentecost, takes its name from a number: it is the fiftieth day after Pascha/Passover. As such, Gregory is led to consider the mystical content of sacred numbers. He observes that the number seven is particularly honored by the feast of Pentecost, “for seven multiplied by itself produces the number fifty, there being one day lacking, which we have received in addition from the coming age…,” at which point Maximus begins his interpretation. He begins his analysis, following Gregory’s lead, with a consideration of the number seven and its relation to the eighth day. The number seven “signifies time, eternity, the ages, motion, enclosure, measure, boundary, providence, and many other things…It alone is regarded as rest and so it is invested with great significance with respect to the

48 49 50

γνώμη. Amb. 7, 1073B11-C9. G. Naz., Or. 41.2.

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knowledge of the sacred mysteries.”51 We are still, therefore, within the scope of Maximus’ reflection in Ambiguum 7 with this discussion of the nature of time and motion. Maximus then comes to the point that is most important for our purposes: Those who have an understanding of divine things speak of three modes: they contemplate the all-encompassing logos of the common generation of rational beings (ὁ σύμπας τῆς ὅλης τῶν λογικῶν οὐσιῶν γενέσεως…λόγος) according to the modes of being, well-being, and eternal being. The mode of being has been given to beings first of all as the foundation of their substantiality (κατ᾽ οὐσίαν δεδωρῆσθαι); secondly, the mode of well52-being, which is dependent upon the inclination of their will, has been given them insofar as they are self-moving; and thirdly, the mode of eternal being has been lavished upon them by grace.53

This initial statement differentiates the gift of being and places it under three successive concepts: οὐσία, προαίρεσις and (αὐτο)κίνησις, and χάρις. Sherwood observes that the first and last terms in this series, that is, being and eternal being, “are not within man’s power,” whereas the middle term, well-being, “involves choice.”54 The implication, initially, is that the source and end–the ἀρχή and τέλος–of man’s being come from without, whereas the movement between these two is up to him, but more to the point for our present purposes is the fact that those things that “are not within man’s power” are, more deeply, in him precisely κατὰ δύναμιν, though not, with respect to eternal being, in the ontological sense. Sherwood obviously means that a person’s being and the everlasting endurance of that being are not generated by the person himself whereas the quality of that being–good or evil–does fall under the power of a person’s will and freedom of choice (variously γνώμη, θέλησις, προαίρεσις). However, the true aporia of this thought is that being in its radical temporality and eternal being, which escapes, by definition, the horizon of time, are both given to the human being as potentiality (being) and as the outcome of the potentiality of being (eternal well- or evil-being). As Maximus wonders, “how could eternal being, which has no beginning or end, exist in things that have a beginning to their nature and an end to their motion?”55 And yet these two reside together

51 52 53 54 55

Amb. 65, 1389D-1392A. εὖ is lacking in PG; Eriugena has bene esse. Amb. 65, 1392A4-11. Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 202. Amb. 65, 1392B9-11.

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in the human being so that we are directly in the middle of Gregory’s questions from the Oration on the Love of the Poor that inaugurate Maximus’ Ambigua: “Is it that we might know that we are both the greatest and the lowliest of all, that we are earthly and heavenly, temporary and immortal, heirs of light and fire or of darkness, depending upon our tendency?” It is this mixture that places the human being in question to himself. He is heavenly enough to recognize the earth as earth, and yet is bound to this earth; he has eternity inscribed in him as “the outcome (πέρας) of [his] potentiality”56 so that he recognizes time as temporal, i.e. as a limit and horizon, and yet he is bound to corruption in the passing of time. Human awareness outstrips human power and this places human being in its anxious state so that the beginning of the Christian way of life, faith, is linked to fear (φόβος): “Faith in the Lord gives birth to the fear of God…”57 To address this question, Maximus proceeds to delimit the three modes of being with more conceptual precision: The first (i.e. being) determines the realm of potentiality (δυνάμεως), the second (i.e. well-being) that of actualization (ἐνεργείας), the third (i.e. eternal being) that of rest (ἀργίας). That is to say, because the logos of being naturally possesses only the potential for actualization, it is not at all able to possess the fullest actualization itself without resolutely inclining towards it (διχὰ τῆς προαιρέσεως). Moreover, because the logos of well-being only possesses the natural actualization of that which is potential when it deliberately sets the orientation of its will to it (γνωμικῶς), it does not at all possess the complete potentiality of nature itself as an independent reality (χωρίς). And finally, because the logos of eternal being completely circumscribes both the potentiality and the actualization of these two that precede it, it does not at all exist naturally in the potentiality of beings, nor is it at all a necessary consequence resulting from the resolute inclination of the will (θελήσει προαιρέσεως).58

Being as δύναμις cannot, of itself, come to actualization without the resolution to come to actualization, which leads it, then, into the realm of well-being, which is itself similar to the realm of being in that it only possesses the actualization of the potentiality of being γνωμικῶς, volitionally, as a deliberate orientation of the will, and not χωρίς, as a bare and “natural” phenomenon. Finally, 56

Amb. 65, 1392C12. Capita de caritate I.2, Massimo Confessore Capitoli sulla Carità, ed. Aldo Ceresa-Gestaldo (Roma: Editrice Studium, 1963). 58 Amb. 65, 1392A11-B9. 57

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both of these, being and well-being, are contained within eternal being–and not eternal being within them–so that eternity is neither natural nor necessary to being: “For how could eternal being, which has no beginning or end, exist in things that have a beginning to their nature and an end to their motion?” Because the focus of our present chapter is πάθος, our observations will not address the metaphysical relationship between time and eternity. Rather, we shall allow this simultaneously coincidental and disjunctive rapport between finitude and eternity in the consciousness of the human being to elicit the wonder that Gregory expresses in his question, “What is the wisdom concerning me, and what is this great mystery?” Gregory is aware of his inherent limitation and kinship with the finitude of the earth and yet his undeniable thoughts of eternity and immortality arise and cause him to strain against the downward pull he feels from the earth. We have already referred to Kant’s notion that “Human reason…is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature or reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer” in reference to Origen. As Gregory himself would say, “Our intellect grows weary of transcending bodily realities and of holding converse with bare bodiless realities, while it looks in its own weakness on what transcends its power.”59 The human being grows weary with desire (κάμνουσα τῷ πόθῳ) for what is beyond him–ultimately God as Source and Cause of his being–and yet strains against his limits in the attempt to get beyond them. It is at this point that Maximus introduces his understanding of the “seventh day,” the day of rest: But there is a limit (ὅρος) that makes steadfast the nature in its potentiality, and the resolute inclination in its actualization. It does not change in any way the logos of the existence of either of these, and defines all ages and times for all things. And it is, perhaps, this limiting reality that is (in my opinion at least) the mystically blessed Sabbath–the great day of rest from divine works–which, according to the Scriptural account of the generation of the world, appears as having neither beginning, nor end, nor generation. It is the appearance, after the motion of those things that are limited by measure, of those things that are beyond limit and measure; it is the boundless identity, after the quantifiable amount of what is contained and circumscribed, of what is uncontained and uncircumscribed.60

59 60

G. Naz., Or. 28.13.21-24. Amb. 65, 1392B11-C9.

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In the midst of the straining of being against its limits, Maximus finds a limit, a horizon, that does not frustrate human nature in its attempt to get beyond itself, but rather stabilizes it in its being as potentiality and its προαίρεσις as actualization. As the limit of the temporality of the world it itself “appears as having neither beginning, nor end, nor generation.” For Maximus, this eternal limit, which is not identical with God, is what allows the human being to enter eternity and in the end, despite the conceptual distinctions Maximus has made with respect to eternal being and temporal being, inscribes eternity into the structure of the human experience of time: whenever the resolutely inclined actualization realizes–either in accordance with or contrary to nature–the potentiality inherent to nature, it receives the potentiality as having either well- or evil-being as its possible outcome, and this outcome of potentiality is eternal being, in which souls have their Sabbath rest when they have acquired the cessation of all motion.61

Whatever else might be said about the status of “the cessation of all motion,”62 at this stage Maximus envisions the outcome (πέρας) of human being in its potentiality to be eternal being. He has said that this outcome is not achieved without the grace of God, but it is clear that eternal being, whether “well- or evil-being,” is the direction in which being naturally moves and it is precisely this movement of human being between the temporal and the eternal that creates the tension and anxiety of which Gregory speaks. Beyond the eternal rest of the seventh day comes “the eighth and first, or indeed, the one and indivisible day… the unmixed and all-radiant presence of God, which comes after moving things are brought to stability.”63 The quality of this presence, as Maximus has indicated, depends upon the resolution of the one who resides in being, directed either, in accordance with his nature, towards God, or contrary to his nature, away from God: God is present in those who have realized the logos of being according to nature by directing their inclination to Him, so that He resides completely and harmoniously in all things, and provides eternal well-being through their participation 61

Amb. 65, 1392C9-14. The quality of this “cessation of all motion (πάσης παῦλαν κινήσεως)” has provoked study amongst scholars. Paul Blowers gives an adequate summary of the various positions and concludes that “Maximus wants to show that the final ‘rest’ is real, and yet in the overall context of deification relative: the stasis is not an utter cessation or termination, but a stabilization, a ‘Sabbath,’ and a transformation”: “Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Concept of ‘Perpetual Progress,’” 162. 63 Amb. 65, 1392C14-D3. 62

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in Him, since He alone actually exists, eternally exists, and exists in goodness. But He is also present in those who have deliberately realized the logos of being in a manner contrary to nature, so that God in His fullness fittingly imparts to them eternal evil-being instead of well-being, since they are no longer able to contain well-being: they are disposed contrarily towards it, and, after the one who is sought after is made manifest, they no longer have the possibility of motion, which is what enables that which is sought after naturally to appear to those who seek it.64

Maximus here introduces another aspect of the human being’s awareness of his own temporality and mutability. While in this age of flux and corruption, the human being undergoes the process of resolutely inclining potentiality to actualization and is therefore constantly changing. There is coming a time, however, when the possibility for turning and reorienting motion towards the good will no longer be a potentiality. Because it is precisely motion that “enables that which is sought after naturally to appear to those who seek it,” once the one sought for (τὸ ζητητόν), God, appears, there will be no more motion and “those who have deliberately realized the logos of being in a manner contrary to nature” will no longer be “able to contain well-being.” This possibility hangs over the human being as he seeks to actualize his being by resolutely choosing the good. The inevitability of change and decay and the struggle against the weight of the body place human being in question; the equally inevitable manifestation of God and final rest of motion, with their consequences for the status of human possibility, induce fear and provoke, at least potentially, the assumption of the ascetic struggle, which is the beginning of the life of Christian practice for both Gregory and Maximus. This, then, is the importance of the triad being/well-being/eternal being for our understanding of what motivates Maximus’ vision of affectivity. To return to Ambiguum 7 and its account of affectivity, the progression from being through well-being to eternal being describes the σκοπός of human existence: that man should exist, exist in the good, and exist in God. Those who do not live according to the λόγος of their own being–“those who have deliberately realized the logos of being in a manner contrary to nature” in the language of Ambiguum 65–are said “to flow down from above,” and this is experienced by them as being “turned round and round in terrible disorder of both soul and

64

Amb. 65, 1392D2-13.

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body.”65 But this disorder is willfully assumed since the one who has “flowed down” willfully directs himself “towards what is inferior.” This is a fundamental mystery of human existence on Maximus’ account. Man, of all beings, is able to live contrary to his natural motion and λόγος, which reside eternally in God. He is able to live at odds with his own nature and does so willingly, recalling what we observed at the very beginning of our study with the introduction of the possibility of living contrary to nature in Parmenides and Heraclitus, a sort of negative possibility, the avoidance of which motivates the philosophical pursuit of nature. Those who do achieve the progression from being to eternal being come to actualize that which already characterizes their being by coming to participate in God. In this participation, the creature is free from that which characterizes the present life–the inhalation of air and the flowing of blood through the arteries, a mode of life that has corruption as its “constitutive characteristic” (συστατικῆς ἰδιότης).66 It is “life constituted through corruption;” its constitution has its own de-constitution contained within it. In short, it is life that is not truly alive. Its vital processes bring it closer to its own dissolution and bring about its own death. Something that is fundamentally characterized by its own corruption has its own fall into non-being always before it as a possibility and this radical and utter contingency of human life and of the world in general is held together with the conviction that God in the λόγοι of beings is the meaning and τέλος of the world. iv. Soul and Body As further confirmation of the essentially affective focus of the question of Origenism in Maximus’ text, Maximus goes on to say of Gregory’s words, “I do not think he intends to expound upon the cause of human generation in this passage but rather to speak to the distress that subsequently came into being.”67 Maximus sets aside the question of metaphysical causality as not being Gregory’s concern in the present text in favor of a consideration of ταλαιπωρία, “distress” or “weariness from labor.” Again, the question of the composition of soul and body comes to the fore as the perplexity of my relating to what is mine, what is “me,” in fact, and yet is also a stranger: “What a coupling! What an 65 66 67

Amb. 7, 1084D8-9. Amb. 7, 1088B8-C1. Amb. 7, 1089D6-1092A2.

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alienation! That which I fear I handle with honor, and that which I love I fear.” As we saw in Ambiguum 6, a person considers the complex of body and soul as a question. What is the body in relation to me? Is it me? The alienation (ἀλλοτριώσις) is made most acute by the union (συζυγία). One is “yoked together” with one’s body, a process that binds but also manifests difference. With respect to the cause of ταλαιπωρία, the question is, What is the cause of evils that bind us? Human experience is of being bound in a body that suffers pain and weakness, and with which–or against which–human beings are engaged in a struggle. The problem of evil is posed here in a very specific sense. Maximus does not ask about evil generally, but specifically as a function of the experience of weakness and pain–distress–in the body. This much comes from Gregory. Maximus sharpens the question by saying that man’s composition of soul and body has been brought into being by the goodness of God. Gregory’s perplexity is due, then, to the fact that we often do not experience the body as a result of goodness, but as productive of pain. To speak to this difficulty Maximus begins with the end, with the τέλος and σκοπός of the body and soul. The soul is the εἰκών of the Creator because its impulse is held fast by God and is drawn up to deification in its taking on of the likeness of God, and because it is commanded to love the neighbor, the love of humanity being fundamental to what we know of God as φιλάνθρωπος.68 The soul’s potentiality is to assimilate the body to God, making it rational through the exercise of the virtues, even “mediating through itself the Creator as an inhabitant of the body.”69 This allows immortality to pass to the body, and “the one Fashioner of all things is shown forth, proportionally inhabiting all beings through human nature so that the many different things that are set apart by nature will become one in their convergence about the one nature of man.” 70 This all takes place so that God Himself will become “all in all” (I Cor 15.28). This passage expresses in a highly compressed way Maximus’ “cosmic anthropology,” or “anthropological cosmology,” where the human being, as Thunberg has put it, is “microcosm and mediator.” The account is so compelling that one may forget what Maximus says he is explaining: the distress and struggle of human life. The soul “has been given 68 69 70

Amb. 7, 1092B1-14. Amb. 7, 1092B12-15 Amb. 7, 1092C2-6.

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to man” (δοθεῖσαν αὐτῷ) as an image of knowledge and love. Gregory’s question becomes, Why have I been given this? More radically, the rational soul as the core of human existence is the gift of human existence to itself. Man is given, given to himself, so that his entire constitution is a pure gift. The soul as a gift “to man” constitutes man himself as both gift and recipient so that Gregory’s question finally becomes, What is this given that I am? Maximus addresses this question by way of an explanation of Adam’s apostasy in the beginning. Although he had been created with the fundamental purpose (σκοπός) of elaborating the unity of body and soul as the linchpin of the unity of the cosmos as a whole, the forefather “freely made use of what was at hand for a baser purpose: man directed his impulse away from that which was entrusted to him and toward that which was forbidden.” 71 The forefather “was free either to be ‘united to the Lord’ and to become ‘one spirit with Him,’ or to be ‘united to a harlot’ and become ‘one body with her’ (I Cor 6.16-17); but he preferred to be deceived, and he consciously estranged himself from the divine and blessed purpose, preferring to become dust by choice to being God by grace.” 72 Because of this irrational use of the intellect, God has lovingly chastised the intellectual power with death. The intellect has violated the gift at the heart of its existence by using its freedom contrary to the purpose of that gift. Maximus describes this violation as “loving what is not real (τοῦ μηδενὸς ἐρῶντες)” and it is only by undergoing the passivity of our being in suffering (διἁ τοῦ πάσχειν) that we are able to learn “to stir up this [intellectual] power and direct it once again towards that which truly is.” 73 Here we see that the turning away from the divine purpose of creation is a turning “towards” non-being so that the ἔρως of human life is swallowed up in delusion. The experience of the transitoriness and changeability of life (διὰ τοῦ πάσχειν), which we come to see as a game (“we are played with among visible things” 74), is intended to lead us toward “what is to come,” but this presupposes a tendency amongst human beings to seek stability: Because of this it seems to me that there is nothing trust-worthy or long-lasting for people here, but even if there is something else, and this has been made by the skilled Word and Wisdom who resides above every intellect, we are played

71 72 73 74

Amb. 7, 1092C14-D2. Amb. 7, 1092D7. Amb. 7, 1093A8-9. Amb. 7, 1093A15, quoting G. Naz., Or. 14.20.

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with among visible things–which themselves change and produce change at different times and in different ways, which are born along and turned about up and down–so that, before we are taken by what is passing away and fleeting, we might direct our course toward what is to come when we see the unstable and inconsistent state of things now. For what stable reality can we produce with our good work? It does not endure as something that we can hold on to, and the pleasure and trickery that attend this life are able to enslave us to such an extent that we are unable to think of anything better and higher than the realities of this present life, even though we have come to be according to the image of God and hear and believe in this image, which is above and draws us towards itself.75

This long quotation from the Oration on the Love of the Poor confirms that Maximus takes the philosophical scope of the oration to be that of the dynamics of the human situation between instability and stability, present and future. Gregory begins by acknowledging the intention of the economy of change: that “we might direct our course toward what is to come.” And yet he recognizes that our common state is to be “unable to think of anything better and higher than the realities of this present life.” He is in the rhetorical position of trying to convince his auditors to “store up treasures in heaven” and so release their treasures on earth to those in need. Philosophically, Gregory (and Maximus) will say that human existence is naturally directed towards God, as “an image toward its archetype,” yet human beings live as though the opposite is true, as though there is nothing “better than the realities of this present life.” The consciousness of πάθος draws human awareness back to itself and to a realization that “we are nothing in relation to the true and primordial Wisdom.” 76 Within this πάθος, this distress and hardship–or as Heidegger insightfully translates Aristotle, this “being-out-of-composure (Aus-der-FassungSein)” 77–we see ultimately that the experience of distress does not derive from the mixture of soul and body, which Maximus, quoting Gregory, says is a manifestation of divine magnificence and the wealth of goodness and allows for the praise of God to be made known on earth as it is in heaven.78 Maximus argues for this in the final component of his demonstration. He has employed common notions about the body and soul elsewhere in Ambiguum 7 (what the soul is to

75

Amb. 7, 1093A10-B12. Amb. 7, 1093B13-15, quoting G. Naz., Or. 17.4. 77 Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 184-185; Metcalf and Tanzer, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 125. 78 Amb. 7, 1093D2-1096A12, quoting G. Naz., Or. 38.11 and Or. 39.13. 76

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the body, God is to the soul, etc.), and he concludes the Ambiguum with a consideration of the relationship in itself. On the most basic level, the body is naturally receptive of the soul’s activity, which “imparts life and motion to [the whole body] since it is simple and bodiless by nature, and is not divided up in it or confined to it, but is entirely present to the whole and to each of its members…and so maintains the body’s unity.” 79 The body and soul are said to be constitutive of human being, and as such, a mention of one necessarily makes “reference to the relation”: body and soul are “only divided from each conceptually for the discernment of what each is essentially.”80 The content of this conceptual division is the distinction between life and motion, i.e. the soul, and what lives and moves, the body. After this argument from relation, Maximus asserts an argument from form. If the soul and body exist independently from each other, then they exist according to their own respective form. If they were then synthesized, a new form would be produced either by “force” or by a “natural process.” Force would destroy the forms of body and soul so that the synthesis could not be said to possess either. If it were a natural process, then souls would combine and recombine with bodies in an endless cycle. Maximus’ teaching, however, is that “the complete form of the whole (ἡ τοῦ ὅλου κατ᾽ εἶδος ἐκπλήρωσις)” is constituted by the generation of soul and body together.81 To the objection that the endurance of the soul after death is an indication of the possibility of its preexistence, Maximus responds, “the logoi of generation and of being (οὐσίας) are not the same.”82 The logos of generation pertains to “where, when, and relation-to,” whereas the logos of being pertains to existence (τὸ εἶναι) and the “purpose and mode of being.” The soul, in light of this, exists with the condition of time, place, and relation–it is the soul of a particular human being (τοῦ τινος ἀνθρώπου ψυχή). By its very essence the soul is alive; it is life by definition. According to its generation, it is limited as the soul of someone. With respect to the body, Maximus argues that it is “mortal” by nature and limited because of its generation as the body of a particular human being. Even though bodies dissolve at death, the form of a particular body derives from human nature as a whole and so every body is a particular body of a particular

79 80 81 82

Amb. 7, 1100A10-B4. Amb. 7, 1100C12. Amb. 7, 1100D11-1101A4. Maximus expands upon these arguments in Ambiguum 42. Amb. 7, 1101A10-11.

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human being. In both cases, soul and body are not ever out of relation to one another: “their condition of relation is unchangeable.”83 Distress is not, therefore, produced by the soul’s union with the body. Rather, the distress we experience derives from the willfulness of the apostasy, the freedom with which the lower was and is chosen. This orientation away from the final desirable is contrary to nature and tends away from the structure of the universe. As such, it produces distress. III. Ambiguum 8: Training in Disorder Ambiguum 8 continues the thought of Ambiguum 7: “The scope of this passage”– Gregory’s phrase, “as long as matter bears disorder about with itself, as if in a flowing stream”–“is obtained from the thought of the previous chapter.”84 Gregory, says Maximus, is speaking to those who are “attached to matter and the body (τοὺς φιλύλους τε καὶ φιλοσωμάτους)” in an attempt to release them from this attachment. The question of the Ambiguum is that of ἀταξία, disorder–τὸ ἄτακτον as it is born along by matter. Maximus first recapitulates his narrative of the cause of our current state: When man came into being and had been arrayed by God with the beauty of incorruption and immortality but preferred the coarseness of the material nature that surrounded him to intellectual beauty, he completely forgot the pre-eminent worthiness of the soul, or rather, of God, who adorned the soul with the beauty of the divine form.85

Man preferred material nature, but precisely material nature as that which “surrounded him (περὶ αὐτόν).” In preferring what was περὶ αὐτόν he forgot his own life, forgot God Himself, because in forgetting the worthiness of the soul, the human being forgets the divine form, which is its worthiness. In light of this, we may give the concrete description of human being in the world: the human being is rapt in attention to what is περὶ αὐτόν, to what surrounds him, and this gives rise to forgetfulness–λήθη; attention leads precisely to distraction. This basic interval περὶ αὐτόν – λήθη introduces the “corruption and death of the body, and a movement and disposition prone to every passion, and also the

83 84

85

Amb. 7, 1101C8-9. Amb. 8, 1101D1-3, quoting G. Naz., Or. 14.30.

Amb. 8, 1104A2-8.

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instability (τὸ ἄστατον) and irregularity (ἀνώμαλον) of the material reality that was both outside (ἔκτος) him and surrounded him (περὶ αὐτόν), and he became susceptible to changeability and even indifferent to it.”86 This is man’s inheritance, the fruit of his attention to the περὶ αὐτόν at the expense of intellectual beauty. He is in the world as subject to the world, attacked by the world, and ultimately consumed by the world. Maximus then gives two explanations of how this submission could have come about. First, it could have come about “when God mixed the soul with our body because of the transgression (διὰ παραβάσεως), and the possibility of change (τὸ ἀλλοιοῦσθαι) was given to the soul,” a possibility that is realized on the bodily level as “suffering, corruption, and complete dissolution.”87 From the beginning, we wonder how this comports with the previous statements of Ambiguum 7 that affirm the inseparability of soul and body. It could be taken to imply that the unity of soul and body is a result of transgression but this is one of the points Maximus explicitly rejects in Ambiguum 7. Given this, it is more precise to understand Maximus as saying that the current mode of union–that of the soul with a mortal, corrupt, and unstable material body–is a result of God’s mixing the soul with what is changeable (“the possibility of change was given to it”) as a means of realizing the “hope” of the redemption of creation from its submission to corruption (cf. Rom 8.20: “And creation itself is submitted to corruption, not of its own will, but because of the one who has submitted it in hope,” which Maximus quotes). The second alternative Maximus gives is that “[God] created the soul this way from the beginning according to His foreknowledge because He foresaw that man would transgress.”88 The experience of pain and suffering under this mode of thinking serves to instruct the soul and make it aware of itself so that it would come to see its superiority to the body. Maximus attributes this to the fact that “the all-wise Provider of our life often concedes to use what arises in our own impulses for the sake of our moderation (πρὸς σωφρονισμὸν ἡμῶν).”89 Moderation is not at all the human experience of impulse in its untrained state. Rather, we frantically make use of impulses through the confusion and disturbance that surrounds them and comes from them. ὁρμή, impulse in general, and

86 87 88 89

Amb. 8, 1104A10-13. Amb. 8, 1104A14-B4. Amb. 8, 1104B7-9. Amb. 8, 1104B13-15.

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ὁρμεῖς, the particular instances of this drive, are conceived here as those things which pull apart, scatter, and fragment. Confusion and disturbance–σύγχυσις and ταραχή–both surround (περὶ αὐτά) and derive from (ἐξ αὐτῶν) the realities that are the concern of ὁρμή (τὰ πράγματα ἐν ταῖς οἰκείαις ὁρμαῖς), so that by themselves, they condition our drives and sensations to confusion and disorder, rather like the account in the Timaeus in which newly established souls that have not become accustomed to the harmonious and ordered revolutions of the cosmos are disturbed by the disordered sensations that come upon them.90 Rather than keeping us from the perception of confusing and disturbing phenomena, God gives these phenomena to us precisely to provoke us to a love of what is “loveable by nature” in place of “what we happen to love right now” (τὰ παρόντα ἔρωτα). Again, this dynamic is based upon the conviction that human being naturally tends towards stability and that when ὁρμή finds itself in pursuit of what is unstable, confused, unsatisfying, it will naturally seek to go beyond it towards what abides. All of this is part of the παιδεία of the passions, a training that results in healing (ἐξιᾶσθαι).91 Maximus says there are three modes of this healing, three ways in which the disorder of matter is applied “according to the excellent logos that transcends us as the cure of the oppressive evil, which is guided by the passions, for the fulfillment of the good purpose that has been determined by God.”92 In the first, “we are required to pay a penalty for sins previously committed.” In the second, we cleanse ourselves from weakness or take preemptive action and “cast away from ourselves the present evil that is about in the world, learning beforehand to look to the suppression of whatever evils may come in the future.” In the last case, the pious example of another holy person is given for imitation. The ground for such a person’s exemplary status is “exaltation in thought… glory in virtue, and being sufficient through himself, by virtue of his unrelenting struggle against powerful forces (τῇ ἀκλονήτῳ πρὸς τὰ δεινὰ συμπλοκῇ), to make manifest the truth that yet remains hidden (φανερῶσαι τὴν τέως κεκρυμμένην ἀλήθειαν).”93 Again, the virtuous life of the saint comes before us as the beautiful manifestation of the good.

90 91 92 93

Tim. 44a-b. Recall the importance of this theme in our analysis of Evagrius, Chapter 3 above, 179ff. Amb. 8, 1104C7-9. Amb. 8, 1104D8-1105A3.

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Maximus concludes the Ambiguum, and the set of three modes of healing we have observed, with these words: Therefore, perhaps the present unevenness of lifestyle has been allowed so that the power of reason in us, which prefers virtue to all else, might be shown. For the change and alteration of the body and what is outside the body are common to all human beings. They are both actively and passively involved in motion, and the only steadiness and stability they possess are constant unsteadiness and motion.94

He ends with the manifestation of the power of logos, a manifestation that comes forth by means of the instability of material life and the inequities it entails. He thus gives a radically affirmative evaluation of the motion of the cosmos and of the human being within the cosmos. In addition to serving a pedagogical function for man, it serves to bring about the manifestation of the power of reason in its disposition towards virtue. It is perfectly natural that Maximus should raise the passibility of human existence in a consideration of the foundations of ethical philosophy. As the elder says at the beginning of Maximus’ Liber asceticus, the human being in the state of corruption and death is “led along by the manifold passions of the flesh.”95 The life of ascetical practice is precisely a therapy of the passions, and so passibility in its various manifestations is of the essence of ethics for Maximus. Maximus’ thought in Ambigua 6–8, however, places passibility on the ontological level of human being and thus radicalizes its significance for every aspect of human life.96 We are in a position now to distill this initial description of human being in the world. The human being finds himself with a body and in a world, both of which present him with ambiguity, anxiety, and distress. The body is with a person as an unstable and rebellious companion that responds to the attention given to it–of whatever kind–with an overweening drive to dominate the soul, which obscures the truth of beings like a veil, and yet is, at the same time, the means for discerning this truth of beings. The awareness of time as time and the potential for eternity provoke the human being with his fundamental questionability and provide the moment for the basic choice of orientation towards 94 95

Amb. 8, 1105B6-12. Maximi Confessoris Liber Asceticus, CCSG 40, ed. Peter Van Deun (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 5.11-

12. 96

Recall our discussion of ontology and ethics in Origen, Chapter 3 above.

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either the stability in God or the dissolution of material existence. With this conceptual foundation that has been laid through the course of Ambigua 6–8, we turn now to Maximus’ response to the basic human condition in the world, his vision of the nature of the philosophic life and particularly his understanding of the relationship between the life of praxis and the contemplation of nature.

Chapter 5 ETHOS–PRAXIS AND THE CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE Introduction: The Coherence of the Philosophical Life We began this study with the question of the place of the contemplation of nature in ancient Greek philosophy and in Greek patristic thought, showing that it is an aspect of a broader philosophical way of life. Now that we have articulated the basic foundation of the meaning of human passibility as Maximus expresses it in Ambigua 6–8, we turn to Maximus’ vision of the philosophic life, which is a response to this passibility. The first question with which we shall be concerned is the question of the relation between the ethical life, with its concern for the exercise of virtue, and the contemplation of nature, which, as we shall see, leads to the higher contemplation of the Divine. All three stages–the ethical, the natural, the theological–imply one another in the Ambigua to John, so our study of Maximus’ understanding of them will address both the specific characteristics of each stage and the ways in which they relate to one another. That these stages exhibit an inseparable mutuality in the Ambigua is clear–Maximus repeatedly refers to φιλοσοφία with the three-fold set of adjectives ἐθική, φυσική, θεολογική in such a way that the true philosopher is understood to manifest all three aspects; the dynamics of their relationship, however, require examination. I argue that the contemplation of nature is the key to this relationship and this chapter will focus on the central place of the contemplation of the created world in Maximus’ consideration of the philosophic life in the Ambigua to John. Indeed, “creation, by virtue of its own logos, teaches ethical, natural, and theological philosophy from its composition of heaven, earth, and the things in the midst of them,” so that the “thorough inspection of creation” itself yields insight into philosophy as a whole.1

1

Amb. 10, 1136C4-9.

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Hans Urs von Balthasar has claimed that Maximus’ “thinking is dominated by an undiminished optimism with respect to the reasonableness of nature’s motion, to its directedness and consequently to its correctness; this is a trust in the essential goodness of nature, which works toward reducing the difference between ontological (transcendental) and moral goodness”;2 and a bit further, “Since this natural motion…is directed toward a goal, and since that goal cannot be anything else than God, its origin, the underlying orientation of nature must have goodness written into its being; intelligence can only have the task of translating this naturally ingrained goodness into a goodness that is consciously acquired. The borderline between natural and moral goodness thus becomes somewhat fluid.”3 Walther Völker, however, challenged this insistence as zu stark and was particularly concerned to qualify Maximus’ relation to Aristotelian (and, by extension, Thomistic) thought, with which von Balthasar discerns an affinity in Maximus on this point.4 At times, Maximus gives very clear evidence for von Balthasar’s position. Commenting on the Transfiguration of Christ, which we shall examine in more detail below, Maximus writes, Elijah is the image of nature, not only as one who preserved undamaged the logoi that pertain to himself and kept the mentality of the orientation of his will, which depends upon them, free from passionate alteration, but also as the one who, as a sort of natural law, trains in discernment those who use their nature unnaturally. For such also is nature: it chastens those who try to pervert it precisely in their pursuit of a life contrary to nature, for they have already been diminished by not yet naturally acquiring the whole power of nature in its integrity and are thereby chastened, since they inconsiderately and foolishly render to themselves a defective existence through their inclination towards non-being.5

Thus nature is the teacher and corrector in the moral sphere and shows to the human being the properly human mode of life. On the other hand, Maximus will write that virtue wars precisely against nature in the attempt to free the human being from devotion to the corrupt and derivative existence of the natural world so that all thought may fix itself on God alone.6 Indeed, the natural

2 3 4 5 6

Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 146. Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 147. Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, 36. Amb. 10, 1164C3-D2. Amb. 10, 1140B13-15.

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law (and the Scriptural law) are finally overcome when a person becomes Godlike in conformity to Christ.7 There appears, then, to be a tension within Maximus’ thinking centering upon the concept of nature. To address this question of the relation between “natural and moral goodness,” and then the relation between these and the contemplation of and union with God, we shall analyze the main aspects of Maximus thought in the Ambigua that relate both to the two-fold distinction of philosophy as πρᾶξις and θεωρία and to the three-fold structure of ethics, natural philosophy, and mystical theology, focusing especially on the massive Ambiguum 10. As it does throughout the Ambigua, Maximus’ thought in Ambiguum 10 moves from topic to topic in a way that is generally, if vaguely, coherent, but it does not unfold in a clearly linear argument.8 As such, I shall rearrange the presentation of concepts in Ambiguum 10 for the sake of demonstrating the underlying structure of Maximus’ thinking more coherently and we shall also introduce texts from other chapters in the Ambigua to augment and illuminate what Maximus is doing in Ambiguum 10. This chapter will articulate Maximus’ basic concern to define the parameters of the Christian spiritual/philosophic life and in particular to show how Maximus accounts for the coherence and conduct of this life in terms of the contemplation of nature in his reading of Gregory and of Scripture. In response to the initial problem I have raised with respect to the relationship between virtue and nature, we shall see that Maximus’ orientation towards nature changes depending upon whether he is considering it within the context of the ascetical life or in reference to contemplation and theology: the ascetic sets himself against nature with its corrupt and contingent mode of being–nature as generation and corruption–whereas the contemplative strives to know nature, understood as the essence of reality in its arising by the will of God, and to live according to nature with the final aim of coming to union with the Creator of nature. Similarly, the structure of spiritual experience, when considered from the perspective of the passions, is two-fold: the task is to free oneself of the passions and achieve devotion to God alone. However, within contemplation, that is, when the mind has achieved a certain freedom from the passions,

7

Amb. 10, 1152C7-D6. Louth characterizes the movement of Maximus’ thought in Amb. 10 as “sideways,” wherein the content of the overall demonstration only gradually begins to appear with the accumulation of ideas: Maximus the Confessor, 94. 8

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the philosophical life is seen as three-fold, for a distinction is made between the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of the Divine. Moreover, a place for the world and the contemplation of the world is rediscovered in the freedom from passionate attachment to the world. I. Ambiguum 10: Virtue and Nature i. Praxis and Contemplation Ambiguum 10 begins with a quotation from Gregory’s oration In Praise of Athanasius (Or. 21). Though his thought moves in many different directions through the course of Ambigua 10, Maximus actually does follow and expound one of the basic themes of the oration from which it takes its initial quotation, which is the coherence of the various aspects of Gregory’s vision for the philosophical life: the acquisition and practice of virtue, the contemplation of the natural world, and the contemplation of and discourse about God. Gregory begins Or. 21 by saying “In praising Athanasius, I shall be praising virtue.”9 Athanasius is in Gregory’s oration completely identified with virtue and also, therefore, with the work of God, for “by praising virtue, I shall be praising God since it is God who grants virtue to human beings.” Later in the oration Gregory holds Athanasius up as one who exemplified the combination of the solitary life of contemplation (τὸν ἐρημικὸν βίον) with the communal life of practical virtue (τῷ κοινωνικῷ), “showing that there exists a priest who is also a philosopher, and that philosophy is in need of mystical initiation (μυσταγωγίας).”10 Here philosophy refers more directly to the solitary life of withdrawn study and contemplation, but Athanasius is exemplary of one who was able to unite this form of withdrawal to the practical exercise of the virtues in “action infused with stillness (πρᾶξις ἡσύχιος)” and “a stillness filled with action (ἡσυχία ἔμπρακτος).”11 It is precisely this fusion that Maximus explains in the initial sections of Ambiguum 10. He shows how the disposition of dispassion is translated from the practical level to the contemplative level so that the mind may

9

G. Naz., Or. 21.1, p. 110.1. G. Naz., Or. 21.19, p. 150.1-2. 11 G. Naz., Or. 21.20, 150.2. Gregory had a “gentlemanly” vision of the eremitic life, in apparent contrast to certain trends that would develop in Syria and Egypt, and even to the vision of his friend, fellow student, and countryman Basil of Caesarea: McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, 87. For Basil’s vision of the philosophic life, see Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 61-92, in relation to Gregory especially 82-92. 10

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be freed from its false apprehension of the world and the true nature of the world may be seen clearly. Gregory goes on to define philosophy in the terms of “passing beyond this material and fleshly cloud or veil” to union with God by means of “reason and contemplation” and adduces many figures from the Scriptures–Abraham, Moses, Joshua, etc.–who exemplified in their actions an image of this διάβασις, or journey, through the world to God.12 Maximus himself takes up many of these figures for consideration in his Ambiguum 10 and explores the various aspects of the stages of philosophic life as he finds them inscribed in the texts of Gregory and in Scripture. Ambiguum 10 is by far the longest chapter in the Ambigua to John and is itself composed of numerous subsections. As we have noted, the general theme of Ambiguum 10 is the notion of διάβασις, the passage through the material world to God. More precisely, in Ambiguum 10 Maximus studies the various ways in which the “saints” (Scriptural figures and those who imitate them) interact with the world–in its brute materiality and as an ordered cosmos–on their way to, and as part of, their communion with God. This question puts natural contemplation at the center of Maximus’ consideration of the conduct of the philosophic life in the saints, for it is precisely this “cloud or veil” of natural reality that is the environment of the saints’ journey to intellectual reality. The Ambiguum begins with a passage from Gregory’s oration On Athanasius in which Gregory says, Whoever is granted to pass beyond this material and fleshly cloud or veil (whichever we should call it) by means of reason and contemplation, and is granted to attain kinship with God and to be mixed with the purest light–as far as this is attainable by human nature–is blessed, both on account of the ascent from here below and because of the deification there above, which is given by genuine philosophy and by transcending material duality through the unity that is understood in the Trinity.13

Gregory gives here what Maximus and his correspondents took to be a complete summary of “genuine philosophy,” but, as Maximus’ initial statement indicates, any mention of the practical life of virtue is conspicuously absent:

12 Sherwood identifies the διάβασις from lower to higher things, from flesh to spirit, as the underlying theme of Amb. 10, Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 33ff. 13 G. Naz. Or. 21.2.

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I myself do not think the teacher’s statement here about the virtue of the saints is missing anything, even if there are some, as you have written, who think it is because it speaks of the divine philosophy of those who pursue it with reason and contemplation alone and makes no reference to practical philosophy…14

This forms the kernel of the difficulty in this passage. Was Gregory advocating as a philosophic ideal a life devoted solely to reason and contemplation, with no place for ascetical discipline and the obedience to the commandments of the Gospel? It has been well documented that in the two Origenist controversies of the late-fourth and mid-sixth centuries, one of the consistent criticisms directed against the “intellectualist” monks was that they advocated a life of intellectual speculation with little concern for the practical life15 and Gregory the Theologian was apparently cited by intellectualist monks as an authority to justify both specific doctrines considered Origenist and their basic speculative orientation more generally16 so that this passage from Gregory might have been used to justify an excessively speculative and intellectualist approach to the Christian philosophic life that would have left little room or justification for a life of ascetic practice. Ambiguum 10 appears to address itself to this issue. In general, Maximus can be read as addressing both Origenists, who may have been regarded as neglecting the life of practical virtue, and those with an excessive anti-Origenist position, who over-emphasized the body in the Christian life in reaction to their fears of an extreme Origenist intellectualism.17 We shall first give Maximus’ basic argument for the coherence of praxis, reason, and contemplation, and then present how Maximus develops this basic argument in various ways to present his vision of philosophy.

14

Amb. 10, 1105D7-1108A5. Daniel Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy: A New Perspective on Cyril of Scythopolis’ Monastic Biographies as Historical Sources for Sixth-century Origenism (Roma: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 2001), 246-248. 16 In Cyril of Scythopolis’ Life of Cyriacus 12, Gregory’s Oration 27.10, which asserts that speculating about “the world or worlds, matter, the soul, higher and lower rational natures, resurrection, judgment, retribution, the sufferings of Christ” is permissible and that coming into error about such things is “not dangerous,” is presented as a text used by Origenists to justify their speculative approach to the monastic life; cf. Hombergen, The Second Origenst Controversy, 161. There is also an episode of appeal to Gregory in support of “Origenist” positions recorded in the correspondence of Barsanuphius and John; cf. Brian Daley, “The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium,” Journal of Theological Studies 27 (1976), 367. 17 See Grigory Benevich, “Maximus the Confessor’s Polemics Against Anti-Origenism: Epistulae 6 and 7 as a Context for the Ambiguum ad Iohannem,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 104:1 (2009), 5-14, for a discussion of this theme. 15

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ii. Rationalizing the Practical Life Maximus addresses the problem of the relationship between the practical life of ascetical discipline and dispassion and the life of rationality and contemplation in the first section of the Ambiguum in which he presents a conceptual account of the coherence of the different aspects of philosophy that will be developed through the course of the text. He begins by arguing that Gregory’s statement is, in fact, complete with respect to the different stages of philosophy because his notions of “reason and contemplation” contain within them the notion of praxis: I myself do not think the teacher’s statement here about the virtue of the saints is missing anything, even if there are some, as you have written, who think it is because it speaks of the divine philosophy of those who pursue it with ‘reason and contemplation’ alone and makes no reference to practical philosophy, when on the contrary, their true discernment and activity concerning reality–which I boldly define as the only truly complete philosophy–is defined by the exercise of the practical life. I think he is actually saying more than you realize when he shows that philosophy is accomplished by reason and contemplation since praxis, in fact, is always joined to reason, and philosophical discernment comes as a result of contemplation.18

First, Maximus defines true philosophy as “true discernment and activity concerning reality (τὴν ἀληθῆ περὶ τὰ ὄντα κρίσιν…καὶ ἐνέργειαν)” and asserts that this true philosophy is “defined by the exercise of the practical life.” In other words, the saints’ insight into the nature of reality and their activity with respect to this insight do not constitute a realm independent of the practical life. As such, when Gregory defines philosophy in terms of reason (λόγος) and contemplation (θεωρία), Maximus takes this definition as including practical philosophy within it, for “praxis is always joined to reason (τῷ λόγῳ), and philosophical discernment comes as a result of contemplation.” To justify the first part of this claim, that “praxis is always joined to reason,” Maximus states that it is reason that gives order to the movements of the body so that every virtue that pertains to the body is bound to reason: it belongs to reason to order the movement of the body, skillfully checking it as if with a bit and bridle when it tries to wander off the path, whereas the resolution to grasp intellectual and discernible things in an appropriate and mindful way

18

Amb. 10, 1105D7-1108A12

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belongs to contemplation, which, through knowledge, shows forth the truth itself as if it were a most radiant light.19

In naming reason in the context of philosophy, Gregory has also named bodily virtue, which is the result of the rationalization of the body’s movements. Secondly, bodily virtue is also a manifestation–albeit a partial manifestation–of the fruit of reason and contemplation, which Maximus calls “philosophical virtue,” referring both to reason’s ordering of the movements of the body and contemplation’s “resolution to grasp intellectual and discernible things in an appropriate and mindful way (τὸ τὰ καλῶς νοηθέντα τε καὶ κριθέντα ἐμφρόνως αἱρεῖσθαι ψηφίζεσθαι).” Philosophical virtue “is produced by both reason and contemplation, is preserved by them, and is revealed through the body, though not completely.”20 The external life of praxis, then, is essentially a rational activity and is a manifestation of the theoretical understanding of τὰ ὄντα. In this way Maximus shows how Gregory’s definition of true philosophy in terms of rationality and contemplation is, in fact, a complete definition, for rationality and contemplation are inseparable from the life of praxis: philosophical virtue is at once theoretical and practical. Maximus expands upon the notion of the body as manifestation of philosophical virtue but qualifies it, saying, “philosophical virtue, being a representation of divine power, is not confined to the body; rather, the body produces shadows of the things that belong to philosophical virtue.”21 Reason and contemplation, as the instruments of philosophical virtue, are together “a representation of divine power (χαρακτὴρ ὑπάρχουσα θείας δυνάμεως, referring to φιλόσοφος ἀρετή)” and the body provides a “shadow” of this representation. Maximus here recalls Gregory of Nyssa’s notion that the mind is the image of God and that matter is the image of the mind, as Gregory puts it, “the mirror of the mirror.”22 Maximus discerns this process of representation in those who have been purified “by the grace of divine power and come to the imitation of the deiform way of life that belongs to those who love God.”23 And further,

19 20 21 22 23

Amb. 10, 1108A12-B3. Amb. 10, 1108B3-6. Amb. 10, 1108B6-8. G. Nyss., De hom. op. XII, PG 44.161D1. Amb. 10, 1108B9-11.

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“they receive in the depths of their soul the hidden disposition of the virtuous that is made manifest through the body in praxis.”24 These notions of image, imitation, and participation are two-fold. First, there is the imaging and participation of “philosophical virtue” with respect to divine power. Philosophical virtue is the manifestation of the divine in human beings. Secondly, those who manifest “the deiform way of life” themselves become images for others to follow, as we saw in Ambiguum 8. As revealers of virtue they are the manifestation of truth itself. Receiving the saints as exemplars is one aspect of the grace that grants virtue to the soul and body, and it is this second aspect to which much of Ambiguum 10 is devoted, as Maximus will go on to study the lives of numerous Biblical characters for insight into the nature of the philosophic life. Having shown initially how bodily praxis is bound to the intellectual aspects of philosophy–that the contemplative life entails the practical life– Maximus then goes on to relativize the body in a way that would draw him a bit closer to the disposition of the more intellectualist monks. He is perhaps safe to do so now that he has given such a strong account of the role of practical virtue. He writes that it is “not strange” to speak of reason and contemplation “without a specific demonstration of these virtues” being brought forth in an external demonstration, for, as he will say near the end of this line of argument, “bodily asceticism…is not productive of virtue, but rather makes it manifest, and is useful for divine contemplations and reasonings alone.”25 In other words, while the life of contemplation presupposes the practical life of virtue, it also goes beyond it and the life of practical virtue is lived in the service of contemplation and not as an end in itself, a clear rebuke to any of the ascetically minded who would have disparaged the pursuit of intellectual knowledge. The ethical life, in its activity of mortifying the passions, corresponds to the death of Christ; to achieve the resurrection of Christ, one must press on to contemplation.26 iii. Images of Dispassion Maximus extends this argument in a number of different directions through the course of Ambiguum 10 and throughout subsequent Ambigua as

24

Amb. 10, 1108BC1-3. Amb. 10, 1109B3-5. 26 Amb. 10, 1145A14-B3; see Chapter 7, 323-328, where I discuss this understanding of the death and resurrection of Christ in greater detail. 25

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well. We shall begin with his analysis of dispassion and soul as it relates to his understanding of nature and then consider the contemplation of nature itself. The first stage of the philosophic life for Maximus concerns the passions, where the goal of praxis is the acquisition of the state of dispassion. Maximus uses a number of different figures for the consideration of this, giving concrete examples of those who manifest the truth through virtue. In general, the practice of asceticism is directed towards an estrangement from the world and the senses, and more particularly, from the passionate attachment to the world and the senses: “the preference for and disposition toward the body and this world (ἡ πρὸς τὸ σῶμα καὶ τὸν κόσμον τοῦτον στοργὴ καὶ διάθεσις),” Maximus writes, “is a truly fearsome and great chasm between God and human beings,” referring here to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Lk 16.19-31).27 In Lazarus, who sat sick and desolate at the gate of the rich man, Maximus sees the image of estrangement from the world and from the body, for Lazarus had no share of wealth, position, or comfort, and even his flesh was afflicted with disease. But it is this very estrangement that leads Lazarus to rest in Abraham’s bosom. The theme of estrangement is a consistent element of Maximus’ description of the practical life and it answers to the basic experience of alienation we studied in our discussion of πάθος in the previous chapter. Ascetical practice “estranges [one] entirely from matter”28 and allows one to “pass beyond the body and the world.”29 In this way the ascetic accepts the alienation that besets him in his initial experience of the world and follows it into the first stages of philosophical practice. Maximus takes the parting of the Red Sea by Moses as a figure for the “stripping away” of “the deceit of sensuous objects,”30 and Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai to receive the law as his “rising above everything here in this world.” In this way Moses freed his mind from “every relation to anything outside of God.”31 The world of sensation “abandons” the one who would come to partake of “incorruptible things,” like the mother in the Psalm “my father and mother forsook me” (Ps 26/27.10).32 In the character of Hannah, who became the mother of the prophet Samuel in her barrenness, Maximus sees an image of 27 28 29 30 31 32

Amb. 10, 1172A10-12. Amb. 10, 1109D3-4. Amb. 10, 1113C8-9. Amb. 10, 1117A5-6. Amb. 10, 1117B8-12. Amb. 10, 1121B7-9.

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one who gives birth to the Word of God through the denial of the flesh. She teaches that the soul, “when it is barren of fleshly pleasures through the putting off of its relation to material things,” must “ask God for the seeds of the virtues” so that it may conceive and give birth to the Word of God.33 Similarly, the widow of Saraphath (I Ki 17.9-24), who was “bereft of beauty, virtue, and the knowledge of God,” is an image of one who repents in her emptiness and comes thereby to the exercise of the virtues.34 Maximus will return to this reproductive image of bringing forth the Word in later chapters of the Ambigua to John.35 We also see an example of the cutting off of the passions for the sake of acquiring knowledge in the migration of Abraham: And the one who has broken himself away from his fleshly disposition and transcends it by separation from the passions, has left behind the senses and no longer accepts any error of sin that comes through them, and has gone beyond all sensuous realities, from which deception and stumbling come to the soul through the senses, such a one becomes a spiritual Abraham, who ‘went out of his country and kindred and from his father’s house’ and came ‘unto the land’ shown him by God (Gen 12.1).36

This separation from the determinacy of one’s natural birth will also become an important theme in the final chapter of our study. Maximus extends the notion even further in his contemplation of Melchizedek, who is “without father, without mother, without descent” and has “neither beginning of days nor end of life” (Heb 7.3). Maximus here provides another example of moral purification: everyone who has ‘mortified’ his ‘members which are upon the earth’ (Col 3.5), and has entirely extinguished his own ‘carnal mind’ (Rom 8.6) and has shaken off his fixed relation to it, through which the love that is due to God alone is separated from us, and has denied all the telling marks of the flesh and the world for the sake of divine grace so that he is able to say with the blessed apostle Paul, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ (Rom 8.35), and so on, such a one has become ‘without father, without mother, and without descent’ like Melchizedek and, because of his union with the Spirit, there is no way that such a person could ever be conquered by the flesh or nature.37

33 34 35 36 37

Amb. 10, 1124D2-1125A11. Amb. 10, 1125C2-15. See Chapter 7 below. Amb. 10, 1145C2-8. Amb. 10, 1144B4-15.

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Melchizedek is, in fact, a crucial figure for Maximus. He exemplifies the sort of person who becomes free of nature through philosophy and is thus the most compelling image of Christ offered by Scripture. Speaking more generally, Maximus observes that the saints respond to the instability of the present order and intuit that “this life is not the life that was originally given by God to human beings.”38 On the contrary, the original state fashioned by God was divine and perfectly stable (ὡσαύτως ἔχουσαν) and for the sake of acquiring this original life, they “put off this present life.” “Putting off life” is, of course, nothing other than death and the death of the present life is conceived of by the saints as “the throwing away of fleshy affection (τῆς κατὰ σάρκα στοργῆς),” and this is, in fact, much more a “death for death” than a death for life since to live in this present condition of corruption is really to “live in death.” Casting this away by the practice of asceticism is to emerge from death into life: For I do not think that the end of this present life is rightly called death, but deliverance from death, and separation from corruption, and freedom from slavery, and rest from trouble, and escape from warfare, and a way past confusion, and the withdrawal of darkness, and relaxation from labors, and the silencing of meaningless noise, and stillness of agitation, and the covering of shame, and flight of the passions, and disappearance of sin; in short, it is the circumscription of all evils.39

So the initial activity of the spiritual life is to depart “through voluntary mortification” from the corrupted state into which all creation has fallen. One therefore becomes a “foreigner” and “sojourner” like Abraham and sets oneself against the world and the body, which are both bound to the deceit of the senses, which have become “interwoven with sensuous things.”40 This theme of dying to this present life will reemerge as well, when Maximus grounds these ascetical teachings specifically in the life of Christ.41 Maximus considers this more abstractly near the end of Ambiguum 10, where he considers the “material duality” traversed by the saints. Gregory has said that the saints “attain kinship with God” and come to be “mixed with the purest light” by “transcending material duality through the unity that is under-

38 39 40 41

Amb. 10, 1157B6-7. Amb. 10, 1157C11-D6. Amb. 10, 1157D6-12. See Chapter 7 below.

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stood in the Trinity,” a passage that Maximus will take as an indication of the link between the unity of God and the unification of the human soul. Maximus initially takes “material duality” to be a reference to the duality of “matter and form,”42 so that when the saints transcend material duality they are transcending this basic physical conceptual structure. He also offers the possibility that “material duality” refers to “flesh and matter,” where to transcend flesh and matter refers to the soul’s withdrawal from the realm of the senses in order to devote itself fully to the “desire for the Divine.”43 In order to clarify this, Maximus gives a number of analyses of the soul. II. The Soul i. The Soul and Nature in Aristotle and the Commentators In his treatise On the Soul, Aristotle observes, “the knowledge of the soul contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of nature (μάλιστα δὲ πρὸς τὴν φύσιν).”44 He goes on to deduce, from the observation that all of the soul’s experiences (πάθη) are in some way related to corporeality, and are therefore “material rational principles (λόγοι ἔνυλοι),” that “the study of the soul belongs to natural philosophy (φυσικοῦ τὸ θεωρῆσαι περὶ ψυχῆς),”45 since, at least in its passions, it undergoes change in the realm of space and time. The later commentators on Aristotle took up this notion of the importance of understanding the soul for the other facets of philosophy. Themistius, a philosopher of 4th century Constantinople, argues in his paraphrase of the De anima that an understanding of the soul, unlike knowledge of other subjects, necessarily leads us on towards knowledge of the truth as a whole: This is because [the soul] offers valuable foundations (ἀξιολόγους) for every part of philosophy: for the practical [part], because we could more easily establish the virtues or perfections of the [soul] if we first knew its essence; and for the investigation of nature (τὴν δὲ περὶ φύσεως θεωρίαν), because the [soul] is the fount and source (πηγὴ καὶ ἀρχή) of all movement, perhaps for all bodies, but primarily for those of animals and plants. So if [the soul] knows itself, it is credible on

42 43 44 45

Amb. 10, 1193C8-9. Amb. 10, 1193D4-5. Aristotle, De anima 402a4-6, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 535. Aristotle, De anima 403a28.

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other [matters] too; but if misled about itself, on what else could it be considered credible?”46

This passage indicates the central role the soul plays in both ethics and in the contemplation of nature. Ethics is concerned with the virtues, which define the excellence of the soul, so that coming to an understanding of the essence of the soul will lay the foundation for a more enlightened practice of the ethical life. With respect to nature, Themistius takes Aristotle’s notion that “soul is, in some sense, the principle of animal life (ἀρχὴ τῶν ζῴων)” to mean that soul is the principle of movement, and it is movement/change that is the central concern of natural philosophy. Simplicius’ 6th century commentary on the De anima comments on the passage we’ve quoted from Aristotle and reiterates the great benefit psychology grants to “the scientific knowledge of beings (τὴν τῶν ὄντων ἐπιστημονικὴν γνῶσιν).” Simplicius then asserts that, with respect to the attainment of “the knowledge of beings (τῶν ὄντων),” it is impossible to know intellectual things without knowledge of the intellect, so it is impossible to do so without knowledge of our own intellect…Similarly, indeed, sensuous things are unknowable without knowledge of the faculty of sensation; but since they are not scientifically knowable, nor substances (οὐκ ἐπιστητὰ οὐδὲ οὐσίαι), but it is reason and intellect that study substances, including natural substances (λόγος δὲ καὶ νοῦς ὁ τῶν οὐσιῶν καὶ τῶν φυσικῶν θεωρετικός), knowledge of these sufficiently contributes to the knowledge of natural things qua scientifically knowable.47

Knowledge of the soul is the precondition for knowledge of anything at all. Moreover, because soul is “intermediate between the truly intellectual and natural beings (τῶν φυσικῶν ὄντων),” the study (θεωρία) of the soul contributes both to what is above it, as it were, to the first philosophy of forms and causes, and to what is below it, to natural philosophy, since the soul itself is a sort of cause48 of the movement of the things of nature. Indeed, “it contributes most to knowledge

46 Themistius, In libros aristotelis de anima paraphrases 1.24-2.6. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca V.3, ed. Richard Heinze (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1899); Themistius on Aristotle’s On the Soul, trans. Robert B. Todd (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15-16. 47 Simplicius, In libros aristotelis de anima commentaria, 7.32-8.22. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XI, ed. Michael Hayduck (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1882); Simplicius on Aristotle’s On the Soul 1.1-2.4, trans. J.O. Urmson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 21-22, modified. 48 Following Carlos Steel’s proposed emendation of αἰτία (cause) for ἄλλα (others), Urmson and Lautner, Simplicius on Aristotle’s On the Soul 1.1-2.4, 160 n.38.

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of nature, because knowledge of effects from causes is more perfect than that which ascends from effects to causes.” Beginning with the knowledge of soul as cause of movement confers a greater degree of exactitude than working from natural things up to soul and again from soul to the immaterial forms. It is for this reason, according to Simplicius, that Aristotle has placed the study of the soul in such a central place within the study of nature. Form and intellect constitute the actual source of change (ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως), but soul, which is “similar” to a cause, is able to contribute to the contemplation of the lower realities of nature: “natural things (τὰ φυσικά) depend on the soul as on their source (ὡς ἐξ ἀρχῆς).” Its proximity to the natural makes this inquiry “easier,” according to Simplicius, but also, in virtue of this very similarity to cause, the soul provides a foundation for inquiry into the higher realities of form. Finally, Philoponus, the 6th century Alexandrian philosopher–and a Christian–takes Aristotle’s claim that the study of the soul “contributes” (συμβάλλεσθαι) to the whole of truth to be an indication that the study of the soul actually has its own specific integrity (αὐτόθεν) and is not simply included in the other established parts of philosophy, that is, ethics, physics, and theology. To make sense of Aristotle’s notion of “contribution” generally Philoponus writes, When dealing with theology, it turns in (ἐπιστρέφει) to the intelligible and the divine objects, and it examines the rank of orders there, and when it turns in on the intelligible objects it also turns in on itself and it will deal with its own being and rank; for the soul is the lowest species of the intelligible and divine objects. On the other hand, when it deals with characters and studies the ranks of the virtues, it will also deal with its own faculties, to which the virtues belong.

The soul participates in the realities of theological and ethical inquiry so that when it turns to theological or ethical contemplation it necessarily also turns to itself as a divine reality and as the entity that actualizes the virtues. With respect to nature more precisely,49 Philoponus argues that soul is “a productive (ποιητική) and a formative (εἰδική) and a final (τελική) principle, for these are the principles in the proper sense.” The soul is a productive principle as volitional (μόνῃ τῇ βουλήσει) source of motion in a living being that does not require any kind of physical leverage (μοχλεία) to get the motion started. As 49 The following is a summary of Philoponus, In aristotelis de anima libros commentaria 25.20-26.12. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XV, ed. Michael Hayduck (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1897); Philoponus on Aristotle’s “On the Soul 1.1-2,” trans. Philip J. van der Eijk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 41-42.

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formative principle, the soul “defines the form of the living being.” Because soul is the best aspect of an “ensouled being,” and because, according to Aristotle himself, that which is superior “is the form of each object,” it follows that soul is the form of the being that possesses it. Finally, as final principle, soul is “that for the sake of which the body exists (αὐτῆς ἕνεκα τὸ σῶμα).” Differences in bodily composition amongst living things derive from the differences in the nature of soul in each thing. In some the irascible faculty (θυμός) predominates, in others the appetitive (ἐπιθυμία). Philoponus concludes with a reaffirmation of the distinction between nature and soul, asserting that “[Aristotle] has added ‘in a way (οἷον)’, because the most immediate source (προσεχὴς ἀρχή) of living beings is their nature, not the soul.” It is precisely the nature of a living thing that determines what kind of soul it has, not the converse. We see from these three examples, and indeed from Aristotle himself, the propriety of including, even beginning, a theoretical consideration of the contemplation of nature with an inquiry concerning soul. While the exact nature of Maximus’ philosophical sources is unclear, his philosophical intuitions and tendencies as evinced by his Ambigua place him squarely within the intellectual realm–if not the concrete literary practice–of this commentary tradition. ii. Maximus on the Motions of the Soul In his own exposition of soul, Maximus defines the three basic motions of the soul as intellect (νοῦς), reason (λόγος), and sensation (αἴσθησις). From the very beginning, however, Maximus affirms that these three motions “are ultimately reducible to one,”50 a further indication of the notion of unity that underlies Maximus’ understanding of philosophy. Maximus has just demonstrated that Gregory’s use of the terms “reason and contemplation” constitutes a complete definition of philosophy since reason implies and contains within itself the practical life of virtue. In his analysis of the soul he affirms that this ennobles the nature of the body itself 51 and indeed the purpose of the philosophical life for Maximus is finally to draw the body, through its rationally directed activity, into union with the intellect, and thus into union with God so that every aspect of human existence–and by

50 51

Amb. 10, 1112D6. Amb. 10, 1113C5-6.

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extension, every aspect of the cosmos itself–might become one with God. This is grounded in the notion that God and man are paradigms of each other, and to the degree that God became human because of His love for mankind, so also does man, having been empowered, become deified through love for God, and to the degree that man is seized intellectually by God so that he is brought before what cannot be known, so also does man manifest God, who is invisible by nature, through virtues.52

Maximus takes Gregory’s notion that Christ the incarnate Word is “the visible God, or God below”53 and extends it as a general description of the goal of the Christian life: to attain divine knowledge and to make God manifest through the virtues. Within this perspective, the practical life, which we have seen to be concerned with manifesting virtue, has as its end the manifestation of God. The reciprocity of the phrase “God and man are paradigms of each other (ἀλλήλων εἶναι παραδείγματα τὸν θεὸν καὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον)” is typical of Byzantine theological rhetoric and it indicates the importance of the human being–and by extension creation as a whole, material and intellectual–as the manifestation of God. God is the model for man to attain, but man is also the model for God to attain presence in the world. We shall show how Maximus works this out in our next chapter. Maximus goes on to give a summary of the three basic movements of the soul in order to lay the foundation for his understanding of the unification of the senses with the intellect. He first considers the soul as νοῦς in relation to God alone, then as λόγος in relation to God as Cause of all, and finally as αἴσθησις in relation to the realities of the world, which it receives into itself by sensation. The first movement, νοῦς, is simple and inexplicable and in accordance with this simple motion, the soul, being brought near to God without knowing (ἀγνώστως) Him recognizes (ἐπιγινώσκει) Him in his transcendent superiority in a way that is completely unrelated to existing things.54

52 53 54

Amb. 10, 1113B10-C2. G. Naz. Or. 29.19; cf. Max. Conf. Amb. 3 (ad Thomam). Amb. 10, 1112D7-1113A2.

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At this highest level of the soul’s life, the intellect makes no reference to the realm of beings and nature in its awareness of God; it is to this immediate mode of apprehension that the lower movements are to be joined. The second movement, λόγος, serves to define the unknown as cause and as the soul is naturally moved in this way, it applies to itself, through its active acquisition of knowledge (ἐπιστήμην), all the natural logoi that are accessible to it, which give shape to the One who is known only as Cause.55

According to this second, rational movement, the soul is active in its thinking about the world and comes to know God simply as the Cause of all that is. It is thus concerned both with the created realm of being and the God who is beyond it; and we should recall also that it is λόγος to which Maximus has joined the life of ethical praxis. Finally, Maximus defines αἴσθησις as a mixed (σύνθετον) motion according to which the soul by laying hold of what is outside itself, receives the impression of the logoi of visible things, as from symbols, into itself (τῶν ἐκτὸς ἐφαπτομένη, ὡς ἔκ τινων συμβόλων, τῶν ὁρατῶν τοὺς λόγους πρὸς ἑαυτὴν ἀναμάσσεται).56

The soul as νοῦς accommodates itself to God in virtue of its independence from the world of beings and nature and it does so not in a relation of knowledge but of “recognition.” We have seen how, from our earliest sources, νοῦς describes the indubitable content of real experience.57 It is the soul insofar as the soul receives true vision. λόγος, though Maximus does not refer to it as “mixed,” does contain a kind of duality in that it comes to define God as the Cause of all things, that is, as related to the world. It is, therefore, the link between the lower realm of sensation and the higher realm of intellect. In sensation itself, Maximus employs the image of receiving impressions in the soul from outside, but he introduces the language of “symbol” to describe the relationship between what the soul in fact takes into itself and the materiality of objects in the world. At the basic level of human experience of the world in sensation, the soul functions symbolically, though, as we shall see, this symbolic approach to beings will finally be put aside when the mind moves beyond the contemplation of nature. 55 56 57

Amb. 10, 1113A2-6. Amb. 10, 1113A6-8. See Chapter 2 above, 48 n.18.

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These “motions of soul” constitute the pathway through which “the saints nobly pass (διέβησαν),”58 and correspond to the three-fold path of philosophy. Within the context of Maximus’ psychology, this philosophical way proceeds from the soul’s experience of the world through the senses to its understanding of the spiritual reality at the heart of sensous objects (τὰ αἰσθητά) and within this to God Himself. First the saints “skillfully pass beyond the body and the world” in the sense of freeing the faculties of perception from the determination of the world so that they may “inseparably bind themselves to God…in no way giving in to the allurements of the world and the flesh,” and this, says Maximus, “is the fulfillment of all virtue and knowledge…and is also their final end.”59 Given this strong notion of transcendence of the world for the sake of virtue and knowledge, what could the role of the contemplation of nature be for Maximus’ vision? It seems on this account as though the goal is precisely to be free of the world as the realm of sensual deception for the sake of union with God. Maximus anticipates this problem: But even if the saints ever do concern themselves with the appearances of existing things (περὶ τὰ τῶν ὄντων θεάματα κεκίνηνται), they are not concerned materially like we are in order principally to see and know those very things, but in order that they might hymn the God who exists and is made manifest in many ways ‘through all and in all’ (Eph 4.6) and that they might gather to themselves the great power of wonder and the starting-point (ὑπόθεσιν) of praise.60

The contemplation of existing things, as it is for Dionysius the Areopagite, is directed first of all not towards the reception of the world itself but towards the God who appears in and through it. The response to this perception of nature is the praise of God who gives nature being. The “starting-point,” the “hypothesis” of concerning oneself with the appearances of beings is praise and it is this that holds together the three motions of the soul: the sensuous perception of the world, the rational intuition of the λόγοι of existing things, and the theological response to the God who is made known through them individually and as a whole. Thus the contemplation of nature as “concerning oneself with the appearances of beings” is really the point upon which Maximus’ vision of the philosophic life of union with God turns. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a “rigor58 59 60

Amb. 10, 1113A11. Amb. 10, 1113C9-D7. Amb. 10, 1113D7-1116A3.

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ous examination of reality (περὶ τὰ ὄντα ἀκριβοῦς κατανοήσεως)” that the saints discover another related triad of concepts: being, well-being, and eternal being.61 We considered this triad in Chapter 4 within the context of Maximus’ understanding of human passibility. There we saw how the first and third terms, being and eternal being, do not fall within the natural potentiality of created things since they receive being and eternal being from without. It is only well-being as a function of will and therefore of the practice of ethics that is “up to us.” Nevertheless, within our present context of Ambiguum 10, we see that the contemplation of reality discloses this three-fold structure of being, whose possibility transcends those who come to understand it. In Maximus’ view, the natural order is able to indicate from itself the power that ultimately transcends it and makes it possible. Maximus gives special emphasis to the middle term of the triad, wellbeing, in this context, arguing that “when [well-being] is not present, the naming of the extremes is vain, since if they do not have ‘well’ joined to them, the truth in the extremes is not otherwise able to come forth in them and be preserved.”62 The truth of being and eternal being is here dependent upon the goodness of being and while we need not consider this goodness in ethical terms alone, Maximus does explicitly link well-being to “the mental orientation of our will (γνώμης) and movement,” the directing of which is a critical aspect of the practice of ethics. Indeed, as Maximus goes on to say, the intuition of the triad being, well-being, eternal being, along with the observation that wellbeing is bound to the human will, reveals that the natural activities of the soul are to proceed in accordance with the “fitting logos of nature (τὸν πρέποντα λόγον τῆς φύσεως)” and so be “carried to the Cause of nature.” In this way, one advances from “mere being (ἁπλῶς τὸ εἶναι)” to “actual being (τὸ ὄντως εἶναι),”63 by which Maximus clearly means the triad of being, well-being, and eternal being. In this way we see how nature and the good–and for our purposes nature and the life of virtue–come together in the soul so that both the cultivation of the soul and the theoretical inquiry into the nature of the soul and its activity provide an all-embracing account of philosophy. The natural observation that creatures are not the cause of their own existence leads the saints to direct the movement of their being away from themselves and towards God, who is the 61 62 63

Amb. 10, 1116B1-6. Amb. 10, 1116B10-14. Amb. 10, 1116C1-10.

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Cause. The intellect is taught “to think only of God and the virtues that come from Him,” reason to “interpret and offer praise for intellectual things,” and sensation “to make known the logoi of beings that are accessible to the soul by being ennobled in its assimilation to reason and by receiving the impressions of the diverse powers and activities in the universe.”64 Here the three-fold structure moves from perception of reality through its interpretation and the offering of praise to the contemplation of God as Cause of all. iii. The Passivity of the Soul We began this account of Maximus’ Ambigua to John with his analysis of the basic passibility of human being in Amb. 6–8. In Ambiguum 10 Maximus presents a more technical account of the passible element of the soul. It is a standard and generic account that is based–often verbatim–on Nemesius’ On the Nature of Man, a text that is itself infused with many of the common notions of ancient Greek philosophy and medicine. The sections to which Maximus refers here are particularly Stoic in presentation, though they also, therefore, are indebted to Aristotelian psychology. After distinguishing between the passive part of the soul that is not subject to reason–that which governs growth and the functions of the living body independently of reason–and the part that is potentially “obedient to reason,” Maximus further divides this latter into θυμός and ἐπιθυμία, the familiar dyad of irascibility (or spiritedness) and appetite. As we’ve observed, the work of the ethical life is to bring these faculties under the control of reason, “to guide irascibility and appetite in the direction that is appropriate to reason.”65 This process of mastery is situated within the various psychological experiences that constitute the human encounter with the world, the most basic being the experience of an appetite for something and the subsequent pleasure (ἡδονή) at its attainment or distress (λύπη) at the failure to attain it.66 Maximus goes on to report the various refinements of these categories of experience: they say that when appetite is divided, it yields by itself all four of the forms: appetite (ἐπιθυμία), pleasure (ἡδονή), fear (φόβος), and distress (λύπη). And since, among existing things, there are good things and evil things, and these are either present or impending, they call an expected good ‘appetite,’ a present good ‘plea-

64 65 66

Amb. 10, 1116D1-10. Amb. 10, 1197D5-6. Amb. 10, 1196C5-D4.

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sure,’ and again they call an expected evil ‘fear,’ and a present evil ‘distress,’ since pleasure and appetite pertain, and are observed to pertain, to goods, whether they be true or putative goods, whereas distress and fear pertain, and are observed to pertain, to what is evil.67

This is a standard Stoic account reported by Nemesius.68 Maximus follows Nemesius further in dividing distress into “shock (ἄχος), grief (ἄχθος), envy (φθόνος), and pity (ἔλεος),” a division that is another, if limited, reproduction of Stoic thought.69 Maximus similarly reports the analysis of fear into “hesitation (ὄκνος), embarrassment (αἰδώς), shame (αἰσχύνη), terror (κατάπληξις), panic (ἔκπληξις), and anguish (ἀγωνία).” 70 Finally, Maximus gives a division of irascibility–which Nemesius, following Aristotle, defines as “the boiling of the blood around the heart”–into “wrath (ὀργή), which they call bile (χολή) and gall (χόλον), rage (μῆνις), and rancor (κότος).” Maximus reports this account of the various passions that the human soul undergoes to indicate precisely what it is over which the saint “achieves mastery.” All of these passions make up the “material duality” of θυμός and ἐπιθυμία for Maximus and so it is the irrational experience of them that is overcome in the διάβασις through the material veil on the way to the attainment of “kinship with God.” It is precisely by “connecting oneself to God,” along with the corresponding estrangement from worldly things, that the person devoted to contemplation (ὁ θεωρετικός) is able to “remain dispassionate” in the midst of circumstances that provoke the passions.71 Maximus follows this theoretical exposition of the basic psychology of the ethical life with exempla from Scripture. This feature of Maximus’ composition recapitulates a theme that we shall examine at some length when we consider the interrelationship of the natural and the written law. Maximus will say that these two modes of divine revelation say exactly the same thing and that neither has precedence over the other. In our present case, Maximus has given a rational account of the passions, one that is derived from the philosophical tradi67

Amb. 10, 1196D4-1197A3. Nemesius, De natura hominis 17, ed Moreno Morani (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987); cf. Stobaeus, Anthology 2.6.166, noted in Nemesius-On the Nature of Man, trans. R.W. Sharples and Philip J. van der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 132 n.654. 69 Amb. 10, 1197A4-5; Nemesius, De nat. hom. 19; Sharples and van der Eijk, Nemesius-On the Nature of Man, 140 n.698. 70 Amb. 10, 1197B2-3; Nemesius, De nat. hom. 21; Sharples and van der Eijk note the generally Stoic character of this list: Nemesius-On the Nature of Man, 142 n.719. 71 Amb. 10, 1197A14-16. 68

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tion and is, in a sense, “naturalistic” in that it gives an account derived from careful observation of human psychology. To transcend irascibility and appetite and drive them away is to be like Abraham, who drove away the slave woman Hagar and her son Ishmael (Gen 21.9-14).72 When Moses removed his sandals near the burning bush (Ex 3.5), he showed the necessity of “releasing the soul’s disposition from all bodily realities” in order to begin to approach contemplation.73 Moses also teaches that one must remove the passions at their source–at the material duality of irascibility and appetite–when he gives instructions for removal of the “tallow, the kidneys, the breast, and the lobe of the liver from the sacrificial animals” (cf. Ex. 29.13, 22, 26-27, etc.).74 The different forms of leprosy (Lev 13-14) with their different surface manifestations are an indication of the different aspects of appetite and irascibility, which Maximus has just analyzed theoretically. Just as the leprous person was required to stay outside the community, so too the person afflicted with the passions “is not counted among those who are worthy of divine visitation.” 75 The gruesome story of Phineas (Num 25.6-13) is yet another symbolic account of reason’s mastery over the passions: For when he struck down the Midianite woman along with the Israelite man, he mystically indicated with his spear that it is entirely necessary for matter along with form, appetite along with irascibility, and foreign pleasure along with impassioned thought to be expelled from the soul through the power of high-priestly reason.76

It is precisely the duality that Maximus rejects. He does not privilege form over matter, irascibility over appetite, or thought (λογισμός)77 over pleasure for, as dualities, they are inseparable from each other and must therefore be overcome as a duality: For form provides a particular manner of being to matter, as spirit does to appetite, giving motion to that which is motionless in itself by drawing near to it.

72

Amb. 10, 1200A5-7. Amb. 10, 1200C2-13. 74 Amb. 10, 1200C15-1201A3. 75 Amb. 10, 1201A6-B7. 76 Amb. 10, 1201B11-C1. 77 This term, when it is a matter of temptation or of attaining the highest levels of prayer, tends to have a negative connotation in Evagrius; cf. De malignis cogitationibus (Περὶ λογισμῶν), Sur les Pensées 1.17, 25, etc. and the editors’ remarks, 27. 73

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Similarly, [impassioned] thought tends to confer form upon pleasure, which exists as formless and shapeless according to its own principle.78

Reason, then, pierces the duality and expels it from the soul. We shall see below how this becomes manifest on the level of contemplation. Maximus also adduces examples from the Gospel that continue the ethical theme. When Christ instructs his disciples, “give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine” (Matt 7.6), he is indicating that that which is holy in us, the intellect as “image of the divine glory,” must be kept in stillness and not submitted to the “barking” of “angry movements.” 79 The “pearls” refer to the intellect’s thoughts (νοήματα) and must “remain undefiled and free of the impure passions of material appetite.”80 When he commands his disciples to take “‘neither staff, nor purse, nor shoes’ for your feet” (Matt 10.10; Lk 9.3, 10.4), Christ teaches that one who has undertaken the exalted pathway of knowledge must be free of every material weight and pure of every passionate disposition of appetite and irascibility as the ‘purse’ and the ‘staff’ show, where the ‘purse’ signifies appetite, and the ‘staff’ irascibility. It is especially necessary that such a person be stripped of the malice of hypocrisy, which, as it were, covers over the track of one’s way of life like a ‘shoe’ and hides the passionate state of the soul with an artificial goodness. 81

Here we see clearly that putting off the passions of irascibility and appetite is the condition for moving to the stage of contemplation. It is also significant to note the importance Maximus assigns to the avoidance of false shows of virtue, for he concludes Ambiguum 10 with the observation that the saints “have wisely formed themselves in accordance with [the logoi of divine realities], bringing to manifestation the quality of the inapparent and invisible beauty of divine magnificence in an accurate imitation through the virtues.”82 The life of praxis is fundamentally a life of manifestation. Virtue is a revelation of the divine glory and the saint is the image of the “glory of God, which will be made manifest.”83 As such the saints are signs in space and time of the presence of

78

Amb. 10, 1201C2-6. Amb. 10, 1204A4; the word for “movements,” κινημάτων, is perhaps a play on the word for dog, κύων. Maximus uses similar word play explicitly elsewhere in this section of Amb. 10: 1197C6-9. 80 Amb. 10, 1204A4-9. 81 Amb. 10, 1204A9-B9. 82 Amb. 10, 1205A4-7. 83 Amb. 10, 1205C3-5. 79

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God, which transcends space and time, and are examples precisely of the transcendence of space and time who may be looked to for guidance on the path through “this material and fleshly cloud or veil.” iv. Soul as Mediator between God and Matter Maximus concentrates his thinking on soul with respect to this theme because soul is the intermediary reality set between God and matter (μέσην γὰρ κειμένην Θεοῦ καὶ ὕλης τὴν ψυχήν) and has the potential to be united either to the one or to the other (τὰς πρὸς ἄμφω ἑνοποιοὺς δυνάμεις ἔχουσαν). As such, it leads the saint through materiality to the Divine. The faculty of sensation (αἴσθησις) connects the soul to the material realm and intellect (νοῦς) provides the way for communion with God. Therefore, the saints, who understand the unique position of soul between matter and God, completely shake off the soul’s sensuality in terms of its relational activity in its disposition towards sensuous things (τὴν μὲν αἴσθησιν μετὰ τῶν αἰσθητῶν παντελῶς ἀπετινάξαντο, κατὰ τὴν ἐν διαθέσει σχετικὴν ἐνέργειαν), and, through a perfectly united intellect (τὸν νοῦν μονώτατον), they ineffably bring the soul into communion with God, with whom it is entirely and unknowingly united, as far as possible, as an image with its archetype, in intellect, reason, and spirit.84

In Maximus’ view, the soul as milieu of human experience draws the duality that characterizes sensation toward the singular reality of νοῦς, which is directed towards intellectual reality. The saint recognizes the soul as the image of God, and precisely, in this context, as the image of “the unity that is understood in the Trinity.” The soul, as a triad of “intellect, reason, and spirit,” answers in its unity to the unity of the Trinity, and in its process of assimilating the soul’s faculties of sensation, it draws the material world into unity with the intellectual and thereby with the divine. Maximus gives a different, though not unrelated, interpretation of “material duality.” Again, he considers duality in terms of soul, but here he focuses on the soul in its passivity, specifically the “irascible (θυμός) and appetitive (ἐπιθυμία) faculties.” These two faculties of the soul may be said to constitute “‘material duality’ because they are the materially oriented powers that come from the passible part of the soul, are set against reason, and are able to scatter

84

Amb. 10, 1193D10-1196A3.

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the intellect into multiplicity.”85 Overcoming material duality in this context refers to the intellect’s overpowering of irascibility and appetite so that it is able to achieve its natural state of unity and withdraw itself from its dispersal amongst material–i.e. non-intellectual–realities. This will have an analogue on the level of the contemplation of nature, where the intellect achieves a unified vision of reality. Here Maximus is directly concerned with the passions and the orientation of desire towards God. The philosophical task at this stage is to overpower these faculties (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία) and…to persuade them to be born along appropriately as they should, by being submitted like a servant to the rule of reason, or even to depart by leaving them all behind, and to be captivated solely by the unwavering enchantment of knowledge in love through ‘reason and contemplation,’ and to be drawn from multiplicity to the single and unique, pure, simple and indivisible movement of the most virile desiring power (τῆς κατ᾽ ἔφεσιν ἀῤῥενωτάτης δυνάμεως), according to which one ceaselessly and philosophically attains for oneself stability around God in the identity of one’s evermoving desire. 86

With respect to the passions, the work of the practical life is to unify desire in the soul’s motion toward and around God. In this way, the first level of philosophy is directly linked to the highest stage of divine union in which one attains both union with God and the unity of God. The one who has unified desire and ordered it singularly towards God attains not only true and blessed union with the holy Trinity, but also ‘the unity that is understood in the’ holy ‘Trinity, having become simple, undivided, and uniform in potentiality (κατὰ δύναμιν) with (πρός) the Trinity, which is simple and undivided in essence (κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν).87

The potentiality of becoming for the human being is directed towards the simplicity of the Trinity. What does the phrase κατὰ δύναμιν mean in this context? It is clearly set in contrast to the phrase κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν, which refers to the unity and simplicity of the Trinity. Thus, when the human being acquires simplicity, it is not κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν; the human being does not become simple “in essence,” just as when the human being “becomes God,” Maximus says θέωσις happens κατὰ χάριν (“by grace”) and not κατὰ φύσιν. What this means con-

85 86 87

Amb. 10, 1196A6-10. Amb. 10, 1196A11-B6. Amb. 10, 1196B7-11.

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cretely is related by Maximus at the end of this section. The goal of the ethical life, the true possession (ἕξις) of virtue, is the means by which one “imitates the unchanging goodness (τὴν ὡσαύτως ἔχουσαν ἀγαθότητα), as far as this is possible, by the possession of virtues, and puts off, by the grace of God, with whom he has been united, the property (τὴν ἰδιότητα) of the powers that are divisible by nature.”88 Human simplicity in the ethical sphere is thus a simplicity of imitation and this μιμήσις makes God manifest in the world. As the initial aspect of this manifestation, Maximus shows how the body manifests philosophical virtue, which is “a representation of divine power,” and knowledge. III. Dispassion and Contemplation We have seen how Maximus accounts for the unity of praxis and contemplation on a conceptual level. This account has itself been the working-out of a θεωρία. We shall now consider how Maximus draws the aim of praxis, which is dispassion, together with his understanding of contemplation. The goal of the first stage of the spiritual life is the practice of the virtues and the attainment of dispassion, which is the freedom from the determinacy of the world and the passions;89 this would have been assumed by Maximus’ readers in the monastery of Cyzicus and we shall observe how Maximus describes this process in what follows. Of greater importance for our consideration of the coherence of praxis and contemplation, however, is Maximus’ assertion that one “cleanses” one’s “former defilements (μολυσμῶν) by the practice of the ethical part of philosophy.”90 Indeed, in the initial sections of Ambiguum 10 Maximus speaks of dispassion and virtue in terms of reason and contemplation: the one who has piously come to understand how things really are (ὡς ἔχει τὰ ὄντα), and has come accurately and rightly to define the logos of existing things through the rational will, and preserves discernment in himself, or rather, preserves himself steadfast by discernment, possesses the whole of virtue, which he has gathered together.91 88

Amb. 10, 1196B11-C1. For Maximus’ treatment of this theme in his other works, see, for example, Cap. car. I.2, where dispassion, which engenders love for God, comes as a result of faith, fear of God, self control (ἐγκρατεία), endurance, patience, and hope. The Liber asceticus explains the “purpose” (σκοπός) of the incarnation to be the freeing of fallen humanity from the passions into which it had fallen in Adam through the revelation of a divine way of life (πολιτείαν ἡμῖν θεοειδοῦς ζωῆς ὑποδείξας) that was given in Christ’s commandments, Lib. ascet., 5.2-7.18. 90 Amb. 10, 1197D6-8; PG has λογισμῶν for μολυσμῶν. 91 Amb. 10, 1108C10-15. 89

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Here Maximus speaks of “the whole of virtue” in terms of the understanding of the logos of existing things, that is, according to their divinely ordained inner structure and identity. To acquire this knowledge of creatures is to gather all virtue together with the result that such a person is no longer moved toward anything else after the truth has come to be known; he goes beyond all things with zeal, and thinks of nothing that is and is said to be of the flesh and the world.92

Stability is associated with the mind’s association with the world and the mind’s stability is indicated by the fact that it does not “think,” or “make concepts for itself (λόγον ποιούμενος)” that derive from its sensual experience of the world. The mind remains unmarked by sensation and it is in this state that it is open to what Maximus will call the “spiritual knowledge of beings.” In this context, we see that the doctrine of the λόγοι, which accounts for the stable identity of beings in God, serves the description, on the ethical level, of the stabilization of the human intellect in its intuition of the λόγοι. Again, Maximus has alerted his readers that he is speaking of virtue without making reference to its outward and bodily expression in the actions of the saints. The one who has gathered the true knowledge of beings as virtue already inherently possesses praxis encompassed, with no resistance (ἀμάχως), by reason, such that the intellectual faculty (τοῦ διανοητικοῦ) brings with itself all the most excellent dispassionate logoi (τοὺς κρατίστους ἀπαθεῖς λόγους) to us.93

The practical life of bodily virtue is implied in the natural activity of reason such that reason possesses praxis without struggling for it against the body. The dispassion of this state of mind is the foundation of “all virtue and knowledge” since the “dispassionate logoi,” as “powers of the rational soul,” make virtue and knowledge possible.94 Thus, according to Maximus, Gregory is justified in using the terms λόγος and θεωρία as the constitutive elements of true philosophy, for within them all virtue–and therefore all praxis–is contained. Dispassion, which is the goal of the ascetic life, is fundamentally a description of the mind in the world and therefore has its realization and fulfillment in the life of contemplation.

92 93 94

Amb. 10, 1108C15-D4. Amb. 10, 1108D4-7. Amb. 10, 1108D7-9.

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Dispassionate thinking is not, however “entirely without an existential relation to the body (πρὸς μὲν τὸ εἶναι σώματος οὐδ᾽ ὅλως χρῄζοντας),” nor does it “refuse to use it at the proper time for the manifestation of virtue.”95 All aspects of knowledge and virtue are governed by the different elements of the faculty of thought (τὸ διανοητικόν): the specific elements of thought are the intellections of intellectual things, the virtues, the different kinds of knowledge, the logoi of the arts, the faculty of choice (τὸ προαιρετικόν), and the faculty of will (τὸ βουλευτικόν), whereas judgments (κρίσεις), assents (συγκαταθέσεις), refusals (ἀποφυγάς), and impulses (ὁρμάς) are its general categories.96

The specific forms of thinking (the intellections of intellectual things, the virtues, the different kinds of knowledge, the logoi of the arts, the faculty of choice, and the faculty of will) are related to the basic categories of the psychology of ethics and action (judgments, assents, refusals, and impulses). The former belong to thinking ἰδικῶς, as the specific powers and activities of the mind, as those realities that properly pertain to it as an active reality, whereas the latter belong to thinking γενικῶς, as the generic descriptions of its various specific activities. The point for Maximus is that the ethical life, which comes to outward manifestation in the body, is invariably an aspect of the life of rationality and contemplation, and so the contemplative life maintains a relation to the body through the rationality of virtue. As we have seen, Gregory did not consider it to be at all necessary to mention bodily asceticism, for he knew that it is not productive of virtue, but rather makes it manifest, and is useful for divine contemplations and reasonings alone.

Virtue comes to the human being as a gift of God that is attained through the right understanding of the created world, which, as we shall see below, is directly related to the knowledge of God. Bodily praxis has its place as that which makes virtue known and as an aid to contemplation, and indeed, true philosophy is “defined by praxis” in that any form of intellectual life that does not carry with it the fruits of upright ethical action is a false form of “philosophy.” Nevertheless, bodily asceticism–even the more general notion of practical virtue–is not an end in itself and is ultimately done in the service of contemplation,

95 96

Amb. 10, 1108D9-1109A2. Amb. 10, 1109A3-7; cf. Nemesius, Nat. hom. 12.6-9.

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whose highest goal is union with God. Maximus considers this point further in a clarification at the end of this section, where he writes those who have not yet become purified of the communion with matter that results from their relation to it remain concerned with the life of ascetical praxis because the discernment of beings is still complex (μικτῆς οὔσης τῆς περὶ τὰ ὄντα κρίσεως) for them, and because they are changeable, since they have not yet put off their relation to changeable things. But they say that those who approach God’s perfection through virtue by relating to him and bear the fruit of blessedness by meditating upon him, are turned toward themselves and God alone by utterly breaking the bonds of the material condition, have estranged themselves entirely from matter through practical asceticism, and have become assimilated to God in contemplation.97

Those who are still bound to matter still find themselves in a state of duality with respect to the world; their consideration of things is “mixed,” not simple. Thus, they continue in the way of life that is intended to purify their perception of the world precisely by “estranging (ἠλλοτριώσθαι)” them from the duality of matter as set over against form or λόγος. Those who have achieved this estrangement “are turned toward themselves and God alone” and are able to achieve communion with God as ones set free from “the bonds of the material condition (τῆς ὑλικῆς σχέσεως).” As an explanation of this material condition, Maximus explores Gregory’s use of the terms “cloud (νέφος)” and “veil (προκάλυμμα)” to describe the flesh. The cloud is an image for “fleshly passion that casts a shadow over the ruling faculty of the soul,” whereas the veil stands for “sensual deceit, which assaults the soul with the appearances of sensuous objects” and prevents it from rising up to the realm of thought (τὰ νοητά). These movements of passion and of sensation–to the exclusion of thought–are the result of the mind’s wandering away from its own “natural movement,” which “naturally carries it towards God,” and thus drive the soul into the throws of “irascibility, appetite, and pleasure through sensual appearances.”98 97 Amb. 10, 1109C8-D5; cf. Capita Theologica I.78: “A wealth of virtue [exercised] through practical conduct is always necessary for the one with true knowledge (Ἀναγκαῖος τῷ γνωστικῷ ἐστὶν, ὁ διὰ πράξεως πλοῦτος τῶν ἀρετῶν),” PG 90.1112C1-2. On the other hand, in his exposition On the Lord’s Prayer, Maximus emphasizes the limits of the purely practical life, saying that once the intellect has achieved freedom from the realm of sense perception, it should no longer allow itself to be “burdened with the questions of ethics (οὐκ εὔλογον ἐπιβαρεῖσθαι…τῷ κατ᾽ ἦθος τρόπῳ),” Maximi Confessoris Opuscula Exegetica Duo, CCSG 23, ed. Peter Van Deun (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 48.360-361. 98 Amb. 10, 1112A8-B13.

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Focusing on pleasure specifically, Maximus connects the pleasures of the senses to the “irrational appetite,” defining pleasure as “nothing other than either the form (εἶδος) taken by a sensation when it is shaped in the sense faculty by some sensuous object, or the mode that is established when the senses are actualized in accordance with irrational appetite.”99 Appetite “changes into pleasure” when it supplies sensation with a form and sensation itself completes pleasure when the object of desire is finally obtained. This movement towards materiality through the mediation of the flesh is, for Maximus, contrary to the nature of the soul and causes it to put on an “earthly form” by its reception into itself of the impressions of earthly things. “The saints,” by contrast, undertake the opposite movement. Rather than assimilating the soul to matter by means of the flesh, “they set out to assimilate the flesh to God appropriately through the mediation of the soul, which is naturally moved towards God, by beautifying (καλλωπίσαντες) it as far as they are able with divine adornments through the exercise of the virtues.” 100 The beautiful body, which is the starting point for the Platonic ascent, is for Maximus the result of the exercise of the virtues, which themselves manifest the assimilation of the flesh to God and thus make the body into a revelation of the Divine. To summarize what we have analyzed thus far, Maximus, in response to the concern that Gregory has given an entirely intellectualist vision of philosophy, wants to show how Gregory’s definition of philosophy as “reason and contemplation” includes the idea of practical philosophy within it. To do so, he emphasizes the inseparability of bodily action from reason and places practical philosophy in a necessary, if subservient, relationship to the contemplative aspects of philosophy, or better, he shows how practical philosophy is contained within reason and contemplation in that it is directed by the faculties of the soul, it lends aid to the tasks of contemplation, and it manifests philosophical virtue in and through the body. The analysis of soul in particular is essential for Maximus’ account. In another clarification, Maximus explains that Gregory has “named praxis” in terms of reason “with respect to causality (ἐκ τῆς αἰτίας), but not matter.”101 In other words, reason is the cause of practical philosophy but the

99

Amb. 10, 1112C2-7. Amb. 10, 1112C7-D3. 101 Amb. 10, 1109B14-C1. 100

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“matter” of what concerns them is different. Practical philosophy entails the struggle with the passions and the corruptibility of nature whereas the contemplative remains among true things at the level of reason and true knowledge but not with a battle or struggle and, on account of the pleasure that attends these realities, he does not allow himself to behold anything except them.102

Thus, while practical philosophy and contemplation are inseparable and are bound together by the causality of λόγος, the experience of the two phases is very different. Practical philosophy seeks to free the ascetic from subservience to worldly and fleshly pleasures through the cultivation of self-control and estrangement from material reality and the senses. It is often spoken of by Maximus as “overcoming nature” and regards the cosmic order of coming-to-be and passing-away as a corruption of the true life that is given by God. The contemplative life, on the other hand, is driven and sustained precisely by pleasure, the natural pleasure one experiences when the mind undertakes its natural activity of the contemplation of intellectual realities.103 This contemplation, in turn, leads through the “material and fleshly cloud or veil” to “kinship with God.” This basic exposition with its emphasis on purification, pure vision of beings, and ultimate union with God will be developed in various ways throughout the rest of Ambiguum 10. Our task for the remainder of this chapter will be to analyze in detail how Maximus develops this vision of philosophy with reference to the contemplation of nature. IV. The Contemplation of Nature We turn more directly now to Maximus’ understanding of the contemplation of nature, though, on Maximus’ own terms we have been considering it all along. Through the acquisition of virtue and the contemplation of nature, which includes the study of Scripture, the human being comes to fashion a “mental cosmos” in which he is recreated as a restored image of God and in this way comes to transcend nature in union with God.

102 103

Amb. 10, 1109C3-C6. Recall the discussion of Aristotle, Chapter 2 above, 72ff.

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i.“οὐσία is the teacher of theology” When we consider Maximus’ presentation of philosophy in the Ambigua to John from the perspective of the contemplation of nature, we see that it is “creation” itself that “teaches ethical, natural, and theological philosophy from its composition of heaven, earth, and the things in the midst of them.”104 The created order contains within itself the potentiality of the whole of philosophy; the dynamics of the contemplation of nature, then, should yield the clearest insight into Maximus’ overall vision. Maximus shows the centrality of the contemplation of nature in a section in which he divides contemplation into five basic components: substance (οὐσία), motion (κίνησις), distinction (διαφορά), mixture (κράσις), and position (θέσις). The goal of the contemplation of nature is to come “to the highest logoi (τοὺς λόγους τοὺς τελευταίους),” which define intelligible and sensuous things themselves,105 and to these “five modes of contemplation that are joined to them.”106 These five modes of natural contemplation relate outward to the other two levels of philosophy, and this illustrates that, for Maximus, the contemplation of nature has as its telos the fulfillment of the whole of philosophy; there is no independent or self-sufficient contemplation of nature that is not directly related to the life of ethics and the theological recognition of God. So nature is the center of Maximus’ philosophy as the point around which philosophy is organized. To give a pictorial analogy not unlike Stoic analogies for the different parts of philosophy, we may take philosophy as a circle in which nature is the center point, theology is the circumference, and the practices of the ethical life are the radii that emanate from the center and lead to the circumference, but which also pass through and beyond the center. Maximus defines the first three foci of contemplation–substance, motion, and distinction–as directed towards the knowledge of God and as the concepts that serve as guides to this knowledge. In this way, natural philosophy becomes the first step towards theology. οὐσία is the “teacher of theology (θεολογίας

104

Amb. 10, 1136C7-9. Cf. Amb. 10, 1132D8-10. 106 Amb. 10, 1133A7-B1. Evagrius mentions “five principal contemplations,” which refer to the Trinity, incorporeal and corporeal reality, and judgment and providence: KG I.27, Les Six Centuries des ‘Kephalaia Gnostica” d’ Evagre le Pontique. Édition critique de la version syriaque commune et edition d’une nouvelle version syriaque, intégrale, avec double traduction francaise, ed. Antoine Guillaumont (Paris: Patrologia Orientalis, 1958.) 105

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διδάσκαλον)”107 and reveals God as the “Fashioner (δημιουργός)” of all things.108 It is through οὐσία, the substance of what exists, that we are taught “that there is a Cause, but,” continues Maximus, we do not try to know what It is in Its essence, since there is nothing that emerges from Its appearance among beings by means of which we might look upward as though through what is caused towards its Cause, even to a certain degree (ὅτι μηδὲ ἔστιν ἐμφάσεως ἐν τοῖς οὖσι τούτου προβολὴ, δι᾽ ἧς κἂν ποσῶς ὡς δι᾽ αἰτιατοῦ πρὸς τὸ αἴτιον ἀνανεύσωμεν).109

Maximus refers frequently to the distinction between “knowing that” something exists and “knowing what” it is, and here the distinction does the work of showing how the world and the things in it are transparent, in the fact of their existence, to their Fashioner and Cause while at the same time preserving God’s unknowability. In this context, causality itself does not provide a way of ascent from the creature to the Creator, for there is a fundamental discontinuity between them. ii. “The Heavens Declare the Glory of God”110: Providence and Judgment κίνησις (motion, change) indicates God’s providence (πρόνοια) in that, in the midst of the ceaseless change of the material universe we are (potentially) able to see “the essential identity of each thing that exists according to its unchanging form, its self-identical and inviolable arrangement, which constitutes and guards in their ineffable unity all things as clearly defined from each other, for each reality instantiates its logos as a united and defined entity.”111 This is quite a compressed deduction but what Maximus seems to be implying is that motion forms the backdrop against which the stability of beings appears so that God’s providence is seen in the endurance of beings in their λόγοι in the midst of an existence that is characterized by motion. Finally, διαφορά (distinction, difference) reveals God as Judge (κριτής) in that God wisely distributes the logoi in accordance with “the natural potentiality of the substance in each being” and these logoi are “appropriate to the underlying subject (τῷ ὑποκειμένῳ).”112

107 108 109 110 111 112

Amb. 10, 1133C1-2. Amb. 10, 1133B6. Amb. 10, 1133C3-6. Psalm 18(19).1, quoted with reference to providence and judgment at Amb. 10, 1121A3-14. Amb. 10, 1133C8-13. Amb. 10, 1133C14-D3.

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As we saw in our discussion of Evagrius, the pair “providence and judgment” is a central theme of the Evagrian understanding of the contemplation of nature. Relying on Origen’s notion that the material world is a place for the chastisement and training of fallen intellects,113 Evagrius’ γνωστικός is able, through insight into the nature of reality, to determine the nature of God’s providence and judgment in assigning certain intellects to certain bodies. This discernment, much more than simply reflecting the insight of the gnostic, allows the gnostic to teach others in the specificity of their own situation so that they might know how best to make use of their situation for their own healing and education, and for their return through the different levels of being to the primordial unity of intellects before God. Maximus denies these interpretations of the Origenist notion of providence and judgment, for they could be taken to imply that the reality of the cosmos and of the bodies that fill it is relative and qualified in a way that goes beyond the mere contingency of the fact of their creation. This conception could be taken to call into question the integrity of the created order and treat it as though it had no enduring reality or connection to the original purposes of God. Maximus’ understanding of the concepts is quite the opposite to this extreme version of Evagrian/Origenist providence and judgment. Maximus teaches that providence “is constitutive of all that is and preserves the logoi according to which the universe has been primordially endowed with subsistence.”114 It is providence that preserves beings in their own being; it does not construct an alternate and lower realm for creatures that have fallen away in order to arrest their fall and provide a means for their return and escape from what they now are. Bodies are not “invented for the sake of the retribution of souls on account of evil that had previously been committed by bodiless beings.” This would imply that evil is actually the only cause of the overwhelming magnificence (ἐκπρεποῦς μεγαλουργίας) of visible things, through which God Himself, who is proclaimed by them in silence, is known, as though it were evil that forced God to fashion a reality (οὐσίαν) that he had no intention of making.115

113 114 115

Origen, De princ. I.vi.3. Amb. 10, 1133D3-8. Amb. 42, 1328A2-9.

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Maximus finds it to be simply unbelievable (“these ideas are completely absurd [πολλῆς γὰρ ὄντως ἐστὶ τοῦτο μετὸν ἀτοπίας]), and indeed seems offended by the notion, that the beauty of the world is the result of a post hoc response to evil and is not rather the reflection of the wisdom of the divine mind born of the divine goodness. Maximus’ thinking here is related to his argument in Ambiguum 7 against the notion that souls are somehow taught to love the good all the more through their experience of its opposite. On the contrary, nothing has been “recently conceived” by God; everything is fashioned according to the eternal knowledge of God who “endows each existing thing with being (οὐσιοῖ) and gives substantial existence (ὑφίστησι) to each at the fitting and suitable time.”116 Similarly, Maximus asserts that judgment is not pedagogical or some kind of punishment for sinners but is rather a distribution that preserves and defines beings. By means of this distribution the things that have come to be and are unalterably connected to the logoi according to which they have come to be possess an unchanging constancy of natural identity, even as from the beginning the Fashioner made a judgment concerning existence with respect to what, how, and what quality each thing is, and granted each thing subsistence.117

Again, Maximus’ conviction is that God has fashioned the existence of all things in accordance with his eternal wisdom not as punishment for primordial acts of sin but as an expression of the very logoi of the divine mind. The way things are, in terms of “what, how, and what quality each thing is,” was fashioned from the beginning and not in response to a cosmic fall. This is not to say, however, that providence and judgment are unrelated to the practical life of virtue, for Maximus recognizes that providence “and judgment are ‘affixed’” to our purposive impulses (ταῖς ἡμῶν προαιρετικαῖς ὁρπμαῖς παραπεπήγασι)” and direct us toward the beautiful and away from evil.118 Providence and judgment bring the aspects of reality that go beyond human control within the purview of what is within our power (διευθύνειν τὰ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν ἐναντίως τοῖς ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν) so that past, present, and future evils are cut off. In this way, providence and judgment do not function within a context of chastisement and eventual return to a fundamentally different form of exist116 117 118

Amb. 42, 1328C1, B5-6. Amb. 10, 1133D8-1136A4. Amb. 10, 1136A5-7.

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ence, as in an extreme Evagrianism. Rather, while they do serve the training of the soul in virtue and the resistance of evil, they do so as guarantors of the established order that has been ordained by God in the logoi of creation. Moreover, Maximus does preserve an element of the Origenist/Evagrian account of the world as training ground in Ambiguum 42, where he interprets the transgression of Adam as a fall into the mode of birth that characterizes the life of the “pasture,” in which animals are born through seed and their life depends upon the vitality of their blood.119 Christ’s birth without seed reintroduces “the original grace of incorruption” and heals human nature of its fall into corruptible birth. Maximus makes a distinction between the “logos of human generation (λόγος τῆς γενέσεως)” and the “mode of human birth (τρόπος τῆς γεννήσεως)” to explain the meaning of the process of human birth after the transgression. In Maximus’ understanding of the Genesis narrative, the first human being was given life through the “inbreathing” (ἐμφύσημα, ἔμπνευσις) of God (Gen 2.7) so that the λόγος of human generation reveals the source of human life to be divine. Because the first human being failed to understand this and rather turned to the flux of materiality for life, Maximus argues that God established the τρόπος of human birth as an “educative economy (παιδευτικὴ οἰκονομία)… which has as its goal the rectification of the one being trained and the perfect return to the logos of human generation.”120 As we saw in the Introduction, Maximus returns to this pedagogical element of cosmic reality in the final chapter of the Ambigua to John (Ambiguum 71) as well. He qualifies it so that it is not taken to imply that the world is a secondary result of a pre-cosmic fall into evil while maintaining the teaching that human beings are instructed like children by the contingencies of the natural world. The common element between Maximus and Evagrian Origenism in this is in their understanding of paideia, that the human being is fundamentally a being in the process of formation or cultivation; here the German Bildung seems to capture the Greek notion of paideia more accurately. The human being is a disciple, a learner, and the basic human experience of the world is determined by this fact. As we shall see in our final chapter, Maximus (following Gregory) considers Adam’s original state in Eden to be one of contemplation of the world. Where

119 120

Amb. 42, 1320D1-4; 1321A9-11. Amb. 42, 1319D4-11ff.

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Maximus differs from Evagrius and Origen is in the latters’ construction of a pre-cosmic narrative as the ground for their understanding of cosmic paideia. For Maximus, then, providence and judgment preserve and direct the world in accordance with the eternal divine will and the experience of nature itself gives an indication of this: Do we not comprehend that nature itself teaches from itself that the providence of God clearly pertains to all things? ‘Nature’ itself ‘gives not an insignificant proof that the knowledge of providence has naturally been sown’ in us, whenever it prepares ‘us without teaching,’ as if it were pushing us toward God, to seek salvation from Him ‘through prayer in our immediate’ circumstances. ‘For we call upon God when we are in need’ with immediate apprehension, ‘without forethought, prior to any examination,’ as if providence itself were drawing us towards itself independent of our thinking, revealing the swiftness of the power that conquers the workings of the intellect in us and the divine help that is stronger than all things.121

Maximus thinks that attentiveness to our immediate, pre-rational, “natural” responses to circumstances in the world reveals the basic intuition regarding the providence of God for the world: that the world has been fashioned precisely and in all its minute aspects by God and is totally dependent upon God for the continuation of its being. The fact that Maximus adduces this as an argument for the existence of providence indicates his basic trust in the order of the world as we experience it. iii. Creating the World in the Mind This trust reaches its highest point in Maximus’ teaching that a person “experiences being God (τὸ Θεὸς εἶναι παθὼν) as if seeing intellectually the complete manifestation of God’s goodness in beings.” Such a person takes on the form (μορφούμενος) of this goodness in accordance with reason (κατὰ λόγον) and, in a version of the doctrine of the identity of intellect with what it thinks, “it habitually becomes that very thing through virtue.” Such a person “becomes God (ὁ ἄνθρωπος Θεος γίνηται).”122 “Deification,” “assimilation to God,” takes place here within the realm of the practical life of virtue, but this life of virtue opens back out onto the cosmic

121 122

Amb. 10, 1192C2-12; quoted phrases from Nemesius, Nat. Hom. 43. Amb. 10, 1133B9-13.

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plane as the practical life of virtue gives birth to the creation of a divine world of thought in the mind: We understand the mixture or synthesis of beings to be the symbol of the orientation of our will (γνώμης σύμβολον), for when it has been mixed with virtues, and has mingled these with itself, it also establishes a world of understanding most fitting to the Divine.123

I have translated γνώμη as “orientation of our will” here to capture the ethical potential of this aspect of the human mind or will.124 Maximus sees the natural world and the ethical world as images of one another and not simply because both are constituted of laws. He expands upon this theme in Ambiguum 21 where he shows how the elements of the physical cosmos (ὁ κατ᾽ αἴσθησιν κόσμος) correspond to the inner, “mental” cosmos (ὁ κόσμος τῆς διανοίας), “the intellectual world that is within us (ὁ ἐν ἡμῖν νοητὸς κόσμος)”: For that which is, as they say, ‘the ether’–that is, the fiery element in the sensuous cosmos–is mindfulness (φρόνησις) in the mental cosmos, since mindfulness is the habit that brings to light and demonstrates the spiritual logoi particular to each being, unfailingly makes manifest the Cause in all things through them, and attracts the soul’s inclination to the Divine. The air in the sensuous cosmos corresponds to courage (ἀνδρεία) in the mental cosmos, since courage is the habit that moves, constitutes, and effects the natural life of the spirit. It is also the habit of the soul that invigorates its continual motion about the Divine. Water in the sensuous cosmos corresponds to moderation (σωφρόσυνη) in the mental cosmos, since moderation is the habit that produces the vital power of spiritual generation, and generates the ever-bubbling erotic enchantment of the urge for the Divine. The earth in the sensuous cosmos corresponds to righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) in the mental cosmos,125 since righteousness is the habit that, in virtue of its form,

123

Amb. 10, 1136A-B. Maximus would later get involved in the controversy of the will(s) of Christ and would distinguish the human will into “natural” and “gnomic” wills, where Christ is understood to possess the former but not the latter; cf. Opusculum 3. 125 Öhler’s text as printed in the Patrologia Graeca is clearly faulty here: καὶ ὅπερ ἐν τῷ αἰσθητῳ κόσμῳ ἐστὶν ἡ δικαιοσύνη; Sherwood, supplies ἡ γῆ, τοῦτο ἐν τῆς διανοῖας κόσμῳ ἐστίν to follow ἐν τῷ αἰσθητῳ κόσμῳ ἐστὶν: Earlier Ambigua, 46. This is reflected in Eriugena’s Latin translation as well: Et quod est in sensibili mundo terra, hoc est in intellectuali mundo iustitia, Jeauneau, Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam Interpretatione, 138.72-74. 124

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gives birth to all the logoi in beings, and equally distributes the life-giving spiritual endowment to each being, and is the unchangeable foundation of its stable position in the beautiful.126

Moreover, the physical world gives “elementary (στοιχειωτικός) instruction” to the senses of the soul through their apprehension of the world, and in the same way the mental cosmos gives the soul “elementary spiritual instruction” about the virtues. The “inner” perception of the soul is directed toward the world of virtue so that the soul begins to form its understanding of this realm in a way analogous to how the senses come to an understanding of the physical world through its perception of physical phenomena.127 Maximus goes further still to explain how the powers of sensation and the virtues are bound together as images of each other. The senses of the body reveal the nature of the powers of the soul by leading the soul outward among existing things where it observes its own logoi through their manifestation in the world. The natural world corresponds to the world of the soul and teaches it about itself by actualizing its bodily senses. To anticipate the final discussion of this chapter, on the knowledge of God in relation to the knowledge of nature, Maximus makes the assertion that It is through these logoi as though through letters, that the God-Word (Θεὸς Λόγος) is read by those who have keen vision for the truth. For this reason they call the senses paradigmatic images of the powers of the soul, since each sense in each power of the soul has been naturally and primordially endowed with its instrument–that is to say, its faculty of sensation–and refers to the more divine Word.128

Here Maximus identifies vision with intellect, hearing with reason, smell with irascibility, taste with appetite, and touch with life itself. In this context it is not a matter of transcending or cutting off the senses – whether physical or psychic–but of using them naturally, “in accordance with the law of God.”129 The soul does so by drawing to itself “everything visible, wherein God, who is proclaimed in silence, is hidden” and in this way becomes a sort of demiurge in imitation of God, “who has wisely fashioned all things (τὰ πάντα σοφὼς δημιουργήσαντος), by

126 127 128 129

Amb. 21, 1245B1-C7. Amb. 21, 1248A4-11. Amb. 21, 1248B2-10. Amb. 21, 1248C4-5.

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fashion[ing] a most beautiful and spiritual world in accordance with the intention of its thinking (κάλλιστον καὶ αὐτὴ (sc. ἡ ψυχή) κατὰ προαίρεσιν ἐν τῇ διανοίᾳ καὶ πνευματικὸν κόσμον ἐδημιούργησε). It synthesizes the four kinds of virtue like elements with each other, and this results in the spiritual construction of a cosmos filled intellectually with the virtues.130

The soul’s life in the world, its “knowledge-gathering and scientific activity (γνωστικῆς τε καὶ ἐπιστημονικῆς ἐνεργείας),” which combines intellect and reason with their corresponding senses (sight and hearing) to produce mindfulness (φρόνησις), along with all its other sensual experiences combined with their corresponding faculties bring about the formation of an ordered universe of matter and soul, in which the laws of nature correspond to the laws of virtue. Courage is the result of a balanced irascible faculty in its combination with the sense of smell. Moderation comes from the “measured use” of appetite in relation to the sense of taste. Righteousness has its source in the “even, well-ordered, and harmonious distribution of life-giving power in its actualization through the sense of touch within all–and also, I think, around all–sensual things.”131 In this way the virtues are folded into the fabric of nature and sensuous reality as a description of the soul’s life in the mental world that parallels, or recapitulates, the soul’s experience of its faculties in the sensual realm. Maximus draws these four general virtues into two even larger categories, “wisdom and meekness,” which serve to unite the life of contemplation and the life of action. Wisdom, he writes, perfects knowledge and meekness is the fulfillment of action. Knowledge (γνῶσις) and mindfulness, and science (ἐπιστήμη) and righteousness, are directed towards wisdom, which is their “constitutive cause (συνεκτικὴ αἰτία).”132 On the side of action, the soul brings forth meekness from courage and moderation and Maximus defines meekness here in terms of dispassion: meekness “is nothing other than the complete lack of motion in the irascible and appetitive faculties towards any thing that is contrary to nature– some call this dispassion–and because of this it is the final end (τέλος) of action.”133 Again, Maximus draws the practical life of virtue within the realm of nature and considers the virtuous life to be the life precisely according to nature. This gathering of the four virtues under the concepts of wisdom and

130 131 132 133

Amb. 21, 1248C11-D4. Amb. 21, 1248D7-1149A6. Amb. 21, 1249A11-15. Amb. 21, 1249A15-B5.

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meekness, so that knowledge of nature and life according to nature complete human virtue, is yet another way Maximus expresses the essential unity of practice and contemplation. To sum this line of reflection up, then, the soul has access to sensuous realities through the senses and “spiritually appropriates (πνευματικὴ… οἰκειουμένη)” their logoi. The senses themselves are the “rational vehicles of the soul’s powers,” and the soul joins these powers to the virtues and thus gives itself a path to “the more divine logoi in them.” These more divine logoi are then united to “the spiritual intellect that is invisibly hidden in them (τῷ ἐν αὐτοῖς ἀφανῶς κεκρυμμένῳ πνευματικῷ νῷ),” and the intellect, continuing the journey, finally frees itself “from every natural relation that directs the soul towards present realities, and presents the soul, simple and whole, entirely to God.”134 Thus Maximus introduces the part of philosophy that begins to draw the soul beyond nature. Everything up to this point has followed the progression of nature. Senses have a natural relation to the world and a natural correspondence to the virtues. The powers of the soul have natural functions that bring the soul into harmony with the law of God. However, even these natural movements are transcended when intellect draws the soul beyond the temporality towards which it is naturally inclined and to the immediacy of the presence of God, who “assimilates [the soul and body] proportionately to himself ” and is thereby “made entirely manifest without being circumscribed, since his nature is in no way manifested in any being whatsoever.”135 The final goal of the philosophic life, assimilation to and manifestation of God in soul and body, which begins in nature and unfolds naturally, finally transcends nature, which is bound, in this context, to the corruption of sin and death. Maximus sees the resurrection and indeed the very incarnation of Christ as a reversal of the progressive obscuring of the knowledge of the presence of God by the soul and flesh, a reversal that precisely undoes and renews nature: For since flesh has been swallowed up by corruption because of sin, and the soul, having been found guilty for its deeds (γνωσθεῖσα ταῖς ἐνεργείαις), has been swallowed up by the flesh, and the knowledge of God has been swallowed up by the soul through its complete ignorance–since it did not know if there is a God–then surely the flesh will be swallowed up by the soul in spirit at the time of the resurrection by the symmetrical reversal that will take place (κατὰ τὴν καλῶς 134 135

Amb. 21, 1249C4-10. Amb. 21, 1249C10-D1.

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γενησομένην ἀντιστροφήν) in the Holy Spirit by the grace of God who became flesh. The soul, in turn, will be swallowed up by God, who is truly life itself, since it will have Him alone entirely showing forth through all things (ὡς αὐτὸν μονώτατον διὰ πάντων ὅλον ὅλη προφαινόμενον ἔχουσα). To put it simply, in terms of the reversal (ἀντιστρόφως) of the present order of things with which our existence and conduct are now concerned, the divine grace of the resurrection will make known everything that will be ours in the age to come, so that, just as death, which had become strong because of sin, gorged itself here below, so too will it justly be swallowed up above, where it will have been weakened by grace.136

This intuition of the reversal, restoration, and renewal of nature will become a central theme in the more Christologically focused chapters of the Ambigua and will prove to be a decisive element of Maximus’ vision of nature and particularly of the contemplation of nature as a discipline of soul. The understanding, and, to a certain degree, achievement, of this reversal and restoration of nature comes to the soul that “uses its powers rightly (καλῶς)…according to the intention of God (κατὰ τὸν σκοπὸν τοῦ θεοῦ), and wisely makes its way through the sensual world by means of the spiritual logoi that are contained therein.”137 This, for Maximus, brings the human being into union with God, a union that is considered here within the realm of the contemplation of nature. However, the contemplation of nature can also lead to the opposite: “permanent estrangement from God (τὴν πρὸς τὸν θεὸν σχετικὴν ἀλλοτρίωσιν).” To “misuse (κακῶς χρήσαιτο)” the powers of the soul in this context is to “examine the present cosmos in a way that is contrary to the dictates of reason (παρὰ τὸν δέοντα λόγον τὸν παρόντα διαθρήσασα κόσμον).”138 Specifically, the disposition (διάθεσις) of the soul in this case would be directed towards “what is not as though it had substantial being (τὴν ὑποστήσασαν τὸ μὴ ὂν διάθεσιν).”139 τὸ μὴ ὂν, “what is not,” refers here to nature’s current condition of coming to be and passing away. Because no created thing is the source of its own being, nothing can be said truly “to be,” for all things undergo a constant process of change with respect to their material existence. It is thus necessary to regard the external manifestation of the cosmos with detachment, without the kind of gaze that invests its appearance with substantial being in and of itself. Only in this way can the logoi of created things, the inner principles 136 137 138 139

Amb. 21, 1252A1-B2. Amb. 21, 1252B2-6. Or, “in a way that is contrary to its logos.” Amb. 21, 1252B6-13.

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that define the reality of things, appear. And as we shall see presently, this appearance is inseparable from the appearance of God. Indeed, [The saints] have been completely persuaded by a rigorous examination of beings that in the final analysis God alone truly is and is the being and motion of beings, the clear distinction of different things, the insoluble continuity of things that have been mixed, and an immovable foundation of what has been established.140

The final result of the failure of natural contemplation is that the soul is cast back down into its state before its undertaking of the life of philosophy, into “dishonorable passions,” where it finds itself bound to the continual awareness of the disposition that is directed away from what is and toward what is not. As we shall see in our last chapter, Maximus will describe the first transgression of Adam and the economy of salvation in precisely these terms of the failure and restoration of the contemplation of nature. iv. Nature and Scripture As a Christian theologian Maximus is obviously concerned with the study of Scripture and as I have indicated he considers this study to be directly parallel to the study of nature; the content is, in fact, the same: “neither possesses more nor less than the other.”141 He employs the familiar image of “the book of nature”: The natural law possesses this equivalence easily, since it is organized in an exceedingly rational way and holds the harmonious web of the universe like a book in the form of visible realities that naturally arise in it, for bodies composed by the conjunction of their many qualities are for the contemplation of nature as letters and syllables, which are the first things most proximate and accessible to us. There are also statements, which encompass more than these and are less immediately grasped and more subtle, from which the Word, whο wisely inscribes and is ineffably inscribed in them, is composed when He is read there–although He provides only the basic concept that He is, not what He is, whatever He may be.142

If the universe is like a book to be read, then Scripture is a book that constitutes another world with its own heaven, earth, and air in between, whose content is precisely ethical, natural, and theological philosophy. This conjunction of world and text shows how the laws of Scripture and nature perfectly fit together: “the Scriptural law is potentially the same as the natural law (κατὰ τὴν δύναμιν)” in 140 141 142

Amb. 10, 1137A7-12. Amb. 10, 1128C11-17. Amb. 10, 1128D8-1129A8.

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that Scripture creates a world of philosophical knowledge that comports itself to the natural world and becomes the world of the person who undergoes the transformation of virtue and knowledge; “and the natural law contains the Scriptural law within it (τὸν δὲ φυσικὸν [νόμον] τῷ γραπτῷ κατὰ τὴν ἕξιν)” in that the rigorous examination of reality reveals, within the created order, the content of the teaching of Scripture, which shows the way we are to live, the true nature of reality, and ultimately reveals union with God.143 Moreover, both nature and Scripture exhibit the dynamic relationship between apophatic and kataphatic theology, for they both “reveal and conceal the same Word, revealing with respect to language and what appears, concealing with respect to thought and what is hidden.”144 The words of Scripture and the external appearances (εἴδη τε καὶ σχήματα) of created things are “garments” that cover the intellectual reality that lies within, what Maximus calls “the flesh” or “body” of the Word: Thus, if, having ascended the mountain of transfiguration, we shall also see through exalted contemplation the garments of the Word, I mean the sayings of Scripture and created phenomena, radiant and glorious, fitting with respect to both the coherence of the teachings concerning them and to the divine word … then we shall know that the Word Himself is ‘God’ who is ‘all in all’ (I Cor 15.28) and has in His goodness made everything His own intellectual reality His body and sensuous reality his garment.145

To come to such an understanding of the Word in relation to Scripture and created things requires the same freedom from materiality that we have traced in the context of the ethical life. Within the context of the contemplation of nature, as we shall see in our analysis of Maximus’ reading of the Transfiguration of Christ, the Creator appears together with and through the creation, revealing “the ineffable and supernatural divine fire that exists–as in the [burning] bush–in the substance of things.”146 Ambiguum 37 gives a brief account of Scriptural interpretation and relates it to the three-fold structure of philosophy as well, showing how the different aspects of the content of Scripture, “time, place, genus, character, and position

143 144 145 146

Amb. 10, 1129B3-6. Amb. 10, 1129B5-7. Amb. 10, 1132C8-D10. Amb. 10, 1148D1-2; see below, Chapter 6, 262-263.

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in society,” give instruction on ethics, the nature of reality, and ultimately God.147 The study of Scripture becomes analogous to the study of the cosmos in that the components of Scripture, the characters, the locations, the different kinds of things in the narrative, possess their own substance, potentiality, and actuality, and are either active or are acted upon within the economy of the Scriptural world so that contemplating them is an exact parallel to the contemplation of natural characters, locations, and different kinds of things in the natural world. As such, the study of Scripture “introduces (εἰσηγοῦνται) practical, natural, and theological philosophy to us,” where philosophy as the “love of wisdom” is nothing other than the love of God. This is ultimately the unity of the philosophic life, and therefore of the study of Scripture and nature. All ethical praxis and all natural or theological contemplation are assimilated to the love of God in true philosophy and it is for this reason that Maximus seems to indicate at times that passing through the formal stages of philosophy may not be necessary for every person, that the practice of the virtues, which has love as its final end, may lead a person directly to union with God without the need of devoting himself to the contemplation of nature and cosmic speculation.148 Moreover, each part of philosophy, as ultimately directed towards the love of God, contains the whole within itself, which Maximus argued in Ambiguum 10. Maximus also considers the relationship between nature and Scripture in the terms of the incarnation of the Word of God. In Ambiguum 33, Maximus gives an interpretation of Gregory’s statement, “The Word was made thick (ὁ λόγος παχύνεται),”149 which Maximus takes as a reference to the incarnation of the Word, who is “simple and bodiless and spiritually nourishes all the divine powers in heaven in succession.” In being “made thick,” the Word teaches ineffable and transcendent things through word and deed, speaking in parables– and living as a parable Himself–in order to guide his disciples to understanding. To become thick here is to become more readily understandable.150 Maximus also considers the phrase with respect to the presence of the Word in the logoi of beings:

147

Amb. 37, 1293B1-8. See Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 348-349, noted in our Introduction, 21-22, for discussion of this distinction between the two possible ways of ascent to God. 149 Amb. 33, 1285B12-C1; G. Naz., Or. 38.2, 106.16-17. 150 Amb. 33, 1285C3-D1. 148

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He has hidden Himself ineffably in the logoi of beings for us and is signified through each visible thing so that they lead the mind to Him as though one were reading a text. He is fully in the universe as a whole, and complete in each thing individually, whole and undiminished. He who is without differentiation and always the same is present in the multitude of different beings; the simple and uncompounded in composite realities, the one without beginning in those who are subject to a beginning, the invisible in the visible, the impalpable in the tangible.151

This claim is followed by the parallel claim concerning Scripture: on account of our thick-headedness, He allowed Himself to be both embodied and impressed in letters and syllables and words for our sake so that from all of these He might slowly gather us to Himself to follow Him and be made one in the Spirit, and that He might lead us to a simple and unqualified conception of Him by drawing us together (συστείλας) through Himself towards His own unity in a measure corresponding to His expansion (διέστειλεν) of Himself for us by the logos of condescension.152

Just as the Word has diversified himself in the logoi of created things and yet remains unified in Himself, so too has the Word been expanded into the logoi of Scripture while yet drawing all those who study them back into the unity that He maintains. Maximus also speaks of the unity of Scripture, nature, and philosophy in relation to the “Word in the beginning.” It is the Word who has made the five modes of Scripture, the three phases of philosophy, and the two aspects of time– present and future, which indicate “type and truth”–into a “single reality (μονάδα)” that “engraves the form of the divine character of the simplicity that naturally belongs to the Divine so that [each mode is] able to possess [simplicity] perfectly in grace.”153 So, just as the Word holds together all the logoi of creation and thus encompasses all philosophy within Himself, so too does the Word unify all of the logoi of Scripture and grant them the simplicity that belongs to God by nature. The movements of passion, nature and intellect are all transcended by the unity granted by the Word. As we observe in Ambiguum 10, the saints eventually transcend the Scriptural and natural laws; here not only the movements of passion and nature, but even the movement of intellect is transcended in the gift of divine simplicity. The truth to which we have access

151 152 153

Amb. 33, 1285D1-10. Amb. 33, 1285D10-1288A7. Amb. 37, 1296D3-1297A3.

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now is a “type, a shadow and image of the greater reality (μείζονος λόγου)” to come.154 v. Transcending Nature Maximus describes this transcendence as the complete cessation of thought beyond intellect and reason. Thinking itself stabilizes the intellect as it goes out from itself to the object of thought and comes to rest there with it in the actuality of its thinking,155 but when it passes intellectually beyond everything that can be thought about sensual and intellectual reality, it takes its leave of all intellectual reality as well as of the whole of intellectual activity and any relation to relative or intellectual things, since it has absolutely nothing left to think after thinking those things that naturally fall within the realm of thought. After this it will be united to God without thought, knowledge, or speech by a simple approach beyond intellect, reason, and knowledge, for it will neither think nor rationalize God in any way. For God is not a certain object of thought (τι τῶν νοουμένων) such that the soul is able to possess the thought of Him by relation; rather, this takes place by a union that is simple–because it is unrelated and beyond thought–and according to a certain ineffable and inexplicable logos, which God, who gives this ineffable grace to those who are worthy, alone knows.156

God the final object of thought and desire is not among things that can be thought. Thus, the goal of contemplating nature–all sensual and intellectual reality–is precisely to take leave of it in order to be united to God. This simultaneous “natural” and “supernatural” insistence in the thought of nature is precisely the milieu and definition of grace for Maximus. God grants to the human being a potentiality (δύναμις) that does not spring from human substance (οὐσία) as a created physical and intellectual being, a potentiality to be united to that which it cannot think, know, or relate to. I have mentioned the importance of Melchizedek as an image of the fulfillment of philosophy for Maximus, for he is a character who, according to the Scriptural narrative, does not seem bound by the purely “natural” condition of humanity, and so Maximus takes him as one in whom we may see the fulfillment of this journey through and beyond natural thought to simple union with

154 155 156

Amb. 37, 1296C4-7. Amb. 15, 1220A10-B3. Amb. 15, 1220B3-C3.

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God by grace. Maximus presents Melchizedek as an example of one who has gone “beyond time and nature” to become like the Son of God “in habit by grace.”157 Maximus follows in the tradition of the epistle to the Hebrews and identifies Melchizedek as a preeminent type of Christ because he is “without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life” (Heb 7.3). Melchizedek exists “beyond time and nature” in that he has “the knowledge that comprehends the quality of every time and age, and the contemplation that transcends the existence of every material and immaterial substance.” Because he endures in this mode of contemplation–and does not simply briefly attain it and then fall back–he is said to “remain a priest forever.” Such enduring contemplation is made possible by the intellect’s “unchanging habit of the most deiform virtue” and by its “divine attention” being “fixed on God.”158 Having made the assertion that Melchizedek, the paradigmatic saint and image of Christ, is “beyond time and nature,” Maximus goes on to examine the relation between nature and time itself, as though the assertion of transcendence is what allows for the contemplation of that which is transcended. He writes, “virtue naturally fights against nature…so that virtue, as something that is considered to follow after God, should remain unenslaved to other things, and under no one’s authority, since it knows God as its only Progenitor.” The “nature” in question here is nature in its generative sense–φύσις as φύειν, “bringing forth” or “engendering.” For Maximus, human birth in Adam is conditioned by passion and passibility so that the human being is considered to be a slave to his corruptible nature, in submission to dissolution and death. In the practice of virtue, however, man overcomes the corruption of his nature and comes to be submitted to God alone, since he has been born of God as his “only Progenitor.” Nature, the rising and falling of beings into and out of existence, is not the source of life; virtue leads to a divine and super-natural way of being. Similarly, θεωρία fights against time and this age…so that true contemplation may remain uncircumscribed, for it does not abide with what has a beginning or end, being, through itself, the image of God, who defines every beginning and end and draws every thought of those who think to Himself in an ineffable ecstasy.159

157 158 159

Amb. 10, 1137D1-2. Amb. 10, 1140A. Amb. 10, 1140A.

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The highest contemplation remains “uncircumscribed” by the limitations of the world since it has as its only content God Himself, who cannot be thought in the terms of time, space, coming to be, and passing away. Therefore the intellect is drawn beyond the realm of nature and “natural contemplation” leads directly to theological contemplation. The νοῦς as image of God realizes itself as such by transcending the fundamental horizon of created being: time. Thus, while Maximus affirms that all of philosophy is contained in nature itself, that the saints learn ethical, natural, and theological philosophy from the rigorous examination of created reality, the actual process of philosophical transformation leads the saint beyond nature by means of virtue and contemplation. Understanding the essence of the contemplation of nature allows for its transcendence. We have seen in this chapter how Maximus articulates the relationship between the practical life of virtue and contemplation. He argues that the practical life is essentially rational and therefore inseparable from reason and contemplation and shows that there is a direct link between the dispassion that is attained through the struggle against the passions and the ability to see beings in their logoi, which ultimately lead the mind to union with God beyond nature. We have raised the question of how the contemplation of the world of nature, which is to be transcended, is nevertheless determinative for Maximus’ vision of the soul’s journey to God. In other words, what does it mean to contemplate the changeable on the way to the changeless, the temporal on the way to the eternal? Whereas God is shown, in the burning bush for example, to reside in the substance of things, Maximus also refers to God as “the limit of the universe (πέρας τῶν ὅλων)”160 so that God is within the world and “without,” as it were, and Maximus steadfastly maintains both sides of this paradox. Whether philosophy is concerned with this world or beyond, it is, in fact, concerned with God, yet God is essentially unrelated to the world. Maximus addresses this problem in various ways, both logical and metaphorical, and our next chapter will consider them in detail.

160

Amb. 20, 1240Α10.

Chapter 6 COSMOS: GOD AND THE WORLD Introduction We have studied Maximus’ vision of philosophy, beginning with the experience of human passivity and progressing through the life of praxis to the contemplation and finally transcendence of nature in union with God. This study has raised the question of how Maximus understands the relationship between God and the world. On the one hand, we might summarize Maximus’ view with his statement that “The Creator and creation are not the same (οὐ ταὐτὸν κτίστης καὶ κτίσις).”1 Moreover, with respect to God as Cause of the universe, we do not try to know what It is in Its essence, since there is nothing that emerges from Its appearance among beings by means of which we might look upward as though through what is caused towards its Cause, even to a certain degree (ὅτι μηδὲ ἔστιν ἐμφάσεως ἐν τοῖς οὖσι τούτου προβολὴ, δι᾽ ἧς κἂν ποσῶς ὡς δι᾽ αἰτιατοῦ πρὸς τὸ αἴτιον ἀνανεύσωμεν).2

More radically still, Maximus, one of the great students of the apophasis of Dionysius the Areogapite, says that God is ἄσχετος3–absolutely unrelated to anything–so that the very question of the “relation” between God and the world must be explained. As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, God is not one intelligible thing among others that we might think about; union with God comes about–is precisely given–without thought, knowledge, or relation, i.e. in a manner that has nothing in common with our thinking about the world. 1 2 3

Amb. 15, 1221A6-7. Amb. 10, 1133C3-6. Amb. 23, 1260B7.

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And yet, Maximus has much to say in the Ambigua to John about the way in which God and the world do come together in the human mind and, despite the apophatic preamble we have given to this chapter, he is more concerned to speak in positive terms of the “relation” between God and the world. As we saw in the last chapter, the saints have been completely persuaded by a rigorous examination of beings that in the final analysis God alone truly is and is the being and motion of beings, the clear distinction of different things, the insoluble continuity of things that have been mixed, and an immovable foundation of what has been established.4

God just is every mode of natural contemplation, every way that is used to define the world. The Dionysian notion of divine names is certainly the foundation for this way of thinking and it does indeed presuppose for Maximus the rigors of the way of denial. The relation between affirmative and negative theology in Maximus is, in fact, analogous to the migration of the notion of dispassion from the ethical to the contemplative sphere, in which detachment from the world allows for the true vision of the world. Here the absolute negation of any commonality between God and the world allows one to see how God is absolutely no less than the very meaning of the world itself. So, this chapter, which will presuppose the work of negation that Maximus demands, will give an account of how Maximus boldly affirms God in/through/as the world. I. God and the World i. The World as the Self-Multiplication of the One God We may take Ambiguum 35, which is thoroughly indebted to Dionysius (whom he cites by name) as foundational for Maximus’ approach to this question. Gregory speaks of the need for goodness to be “poured out and proceed forth” to other beings in order to expand the circle of divine blessing and he accounts in this way for the creation of the intellectual and sensual worlds. The question of the Ambiguum is, What precisely is this “goodness” that is poured out? Maximus, referring to the authority of a “wise old man,” identifies the outpouring of goodness with God Himself, “who willed to impart Himself proportionately (ἀναλόγως) to the universe (τοῖς ὅλοις), and to impart without defilement (ἀχράντως) the freely given power for existence and abidance to each

4

Amb. 10, 1137A7-12.

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being individually (τῷ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον).”5 He defines, albeit tentatively (κατὰ τὴν ἐμὴν ἀφροσύνην: “in my ignorance”), the out-pouring of goodness as “the proportional multiplication (πληθύνεσθαι) of the one God by the impartation of goodness to those beings that receive it.”6 Taken in the positive sense, the world is the self-differentiation of the perfectly unified God, which is accomplished with respect to some beings “in an abundant out-pouring of Goodness, for others by mediation, and for others still in their ability to image him forth in some way.” 7 We shall unfold this basic intuition in the discussion to follow. ii. Transfiguration: The Word as Type and Symbol of Himself The Transfiguration is an event Maximus privileges in the Ambigua as a locus for reflecting upon human knowledge of the world and God, since, according to his understanding, both are present in the Transfiguration at the same time.8 The first thing to notice in his treatment is that while Maximus considers the Transfiguration (μεταμόρφωσις) of Christ to be precisely His “manifestation” (φανερώσις), the emphasis at the beginning of his interpretation is on the disciples and the way in which they come to the manifestation of Christ. First, Maximus describes their passage from flesh to spirit and the removal of “the veil of the passions from the power of their intellectual faculty” so that, with purified perception of both soul and body they were able to see the mysteries and learn “the spiritual logoi when they were shown to them.”9 This is the basic spiritual program that we observed in the previous chapter: the purification of perception by the removal of the domination of the passions in order to open up the true vision of reality. The disposition of passionate attachment does not allow the human intellect to see things as they are because it over-determines intellectual experience by what is immediately perceptible and does not allow it to see into the logoi of things. On the one hand we should say that the Transfiguration, as the manifestation of the Son of God, is unique in that the particular progression of the disciples’ awareness of Christ leads from His lack of “form” and “comeliness” (Is 53.2) to the vision of Him as “fairer than the children of men” (Ps 44.3), as 5

Amb. 35, 1289A1-2. Amb. 35, 1289A14-B2. 7 Amb. 35, 1289A11-14; i.e. ἀναλόγως. 8 Maximus gives the event extended treatment elsewhere in his works as well: Maximi Confessoris Questiones et dubia 190, 191, ed. Jose Declerck (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982); Cap. theol. I.97, II.13-16. 9 Amb. 10, 1125D9-1128A7. 6

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the one who was “in the beginning with God” and “is God” (Jn 1.1), and finally to “the glory as of the Only-Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1.14).10 The light of the Transfiguration is “the symbol of His Divinity that is beyond all intellect, sensation, being and knowledge.” However, the vision of this symbol of Divinity and therefore the revelation of Christ as the Son of God who is “with God and is God” is inseparable from the transfigured vision of Scripture and of the created world, whose symbol, Maximus teaches, are the radiant garments of Christ. Because of the disciples’ “detachment from the world and the flesh” the Scriptures and creation are clear to them and they see the Word that is hidden obscurely in the language of Scripture and the things of the world. The Transfiguration takes place as much in the disciples as it does in the garments of Christ, for it is the removal of “the base way of thinking” bound only to sensation that allows the disciples to discern in creation the one who created it.11 The whitened garments of Christ at His Transfiguration show that the words of Scripture themselves have become transformed for the disciples and are “understood without any riddling enigmas or symbolic shadows;” rather, in their transfigured state they clearly reveal the Word contained within them. Something similar occurs with creation. The disposition with respect to creation that corresponds to the knowledge of Christ according to the flesh alone or Scripture according to the letter alone is to regard the world according to sensation (αἴσθησις) alone. In the transfigured state, creation “reveals, by means of the wise mulitiplicity of the diverse forms that fill the creation, the worthiness of the one who bears the power of the creative Word.”12 In all three of these realms–Christ, Scripture, world–the initial impressions reveal by word and vision but at the same time hide what these mean in the very act of showing them. It is for this reason that the disciple must undergo the purification of ridding himself of passionate attachment to the appearances of the world, for such attachment encloses creation (or Scripture, or Christ) within the lowest aspect of its being, that which is immediately grasped but which may thereby arrest one’s advancement to higher understanding. This is not, however, to remove the aesthetic element from the contemplation of the created world. In another consideration of the bright garments of 10 11 12

Amb. 10, 1128A12-B3. Amb. 10, 1128B14-C5. Amb. 10, 1128C2-5.

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the transfigured Christ, Maximus says that affirmative theology “introduces the demonstration that God is the Fashioner of all things ‘by the beauty and greatness of the creatures’ (Wis 13.5).”13 The world and Scripture are both taken as “books” of revelation and if we take this notion of the beauty of creation and combine it with Origen’s notion that the coarse words of Scripture must be transfigured to reveal the Divinity of Christ,14 we may say that the world is actually a more direct and less obscure source of revelation with respect to its beauty: “the very nature of visible things as a whole…all but shouts with a clear voice.”15 In both cases–of Scripture and of creation–the hiddenness of the Word in the words and of the Creator in creation occurs economically, “on account of us (δι᾽ἡμᾶς),” so that we should not be overbold to approach what cannot be contained. Maximus explains that anyone who wishes to approach God must first go through Scripture and the contemplation of nature. These two incarnations “are equal in honor and teach the same things as each other,” and, more strikingly still, “neither possesses more nor less than the other.”16 The question with respect to nature and revelation is not, What can reason find out on its own and for what is revelation required? Rather, Scripture and world are equally revelation in that they are equally the clothing of the Word and reveal Him in the same way as His flesh. Everything, when seen in its proper light, allows for the manifestation of the Divinity of the Son of God and is understood to be His incarnation. Maximus extends his reflection on the Transfiguration and the contemplation of nature by examining the different ways Elijah and Moses, who appear together with the transfigured Christ, may be understood in order to contemplate what it means for creation to appear together with the Creator. After considering Moses and Elijah as types of the law and the prophets, wisdom and goodness, knowledge and paideia, praxis and contemplation, the married and the unmarried states, and as indicating how God is the Lord of life and death, Maximus moves more specifically into the realm of natural contemplation in his consideration of Moses and Elijah as types of time and nature. This interpretation raises the question of the relation between God and “everything that

13 14 15 16

Amb. 10, 1168B8-10. Cf. Origen, Philokalia 15.19. Amb. 10, 1169B2. Amb. 10, 1128C10-D3.

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is after God,” by which Maximus means “time and the nature of beings,” for time and nature appear together with God in the persons of Moses and Elijah.17 Moses, on this interpretation, represents time. He is the one who gave the first account of time and how it is measured in the book of Genesis and also taught ancient Israel how to worship the timeless God in time. Moses also represents time in that he did not enter the “repose” with those whom he guided through the wilderness before the giving of the Gospel: “such also is time: it does not arrive before or enter together in its motion with those whom it naturally escorts to the divine life of the age to come.”18 The successor to Moses, Joshua/Jesus (both are Ἰησοῦς in Maximus’ version of the Scriptures), receives time and takes it into the promised land where it is brought to rest, for “time is eternity whenever it stops moving, and eternity is time whenever it is measured while being born along by motion (αἰὼν γὰρ ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, ὅταν στῇ τῆς κινήσεως, καὶ χρόνος ἐστὶν ὁ αἰὼν, ὅταν μετρῆται κινήσει φερόμενος).”19 This definition draws upon the Platonic notion of time as “a moving image of eternity.”20 The simultaneous distinction and identity of time and the age to come in which it is the concept of motion that makes the difference bears an analogy to how Maximus will speak of the entrance of the Word into the realm of being, time, and motion and “receives” this created reality to take it beyond itself to the presence of the Father.21 Maximus advances Elijah as the image of nature, as one who fulfilled the logoi of his own being and was also able to serve “as a sort of natural law” that instructs those who live contrary to nature to be more discerning of their nature. Nature itself “chastens those who try to pervert it precisely in their pursuit of a life contrary to nature.” The limitations that are introduced by an unnatural mode of life are themselves the chastisement of life contrary to nature so nature both shows the way and corrects those who do not follow it.22 Maximus also sees Moses and Elijah as symbols for sensual and intellectual creation, which appear together with “the Creator Word.”23 Because the Scriptural narrative recounts his birth and death, showing him to be subject to

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Amb. 10, 1164A11-13. Amb. 10, 1164B6-9. Amb. 10, 1164B14-C3. Cf. Plato, Tim. 38a-c. See the discussion of Amb. 41, Chapter 7 below, 306ff. Amb. 10, 1164C3-D2; see Chapter 5 above, 205-206. Amb. 10, 1164D3-5.

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generation and decay, Moses is taken to stand for sensual creation (αἰσθητὴ κτίσις), which has a clearly defined beginning and end. By contrast, neither Elijah’s birth nor his death are recorded in Scripture and Maximus takes him therefore as “the logos of intellectual reality.” The generation of intellectual reality is not manifest to human beings “even if it has come to be, has a beginning, and has been led from non-existence into being.” However, because it has been endowed with “indestructibility (τὸ ἀνώλεθρον)” it has no defined end.24 Maximus thus interprets the fact that Moses and Elijah appear together with the revelation of the Divinity of Christ as an indication that the nature of creation is revealed together with the Divine. Nature discloses the Divine but is also revealed by the Divine. We shall return to this revelation of God and the world in our discussion of Maximus’ arguments against the eternity of the world. Maximus sees the relationship between theology in its apophatic and kataphatic modes and its relationship to creation as symbol in the Transfiguration as well. Intellectual creation provides a symbolic path for theology to come to the knowledge of God and divine things and falls under the discourse of denial, in which God is affirmed by the removal of what is made by Him. The reality beyond sensation is beyond the questions of “What? How? What quality? Where? When? (περὶ τοῦ τί καὶ πῶς καὶ ὁποῖαν εἶναι καὶ ποῦ καὶ πότε),”25 and so the symbolism of intellectual creation is truly a symbolism of negation. In the Areopagite’s thought, the way of denial culminates in the denial of the higher, intellectual realities that are “closer” to the Divine, the ideas of life, goodness, thought, and so on.26 Maximus is giving a version of this notion here. On the other side, material, sensuous reality is symbolic in the opposite sense. Sensuous objects “indicate (ὑπογράφοντα)” the Divine through the process of affirmation, so that “we say…[God] is everything inasmuch as we have recognized Him, as Cause, from the things that have been made by Him.”27 It is clear from this that Maximus does not consider “nature” without some reference to the Divine Source of nature. As such, the contemplation of nature always par-

24

Amb. 10, 1164D6-1165A11. τί καὶ πῶς καὶ ὁποίαν εἶναι καὶ ποῦ καὶ πότε; these concepts ultimately derive from Aristotle’s Categoriae (Cf. Cat. 4.1b26, etc.), which, according to what became the predominant Neoplatonic view, apply only to the realm of sensation; cf. Barnes, Porphyry–Introduction, p. 336–337. 26 Ps. Dion. Areo., De mystica theologia 3-4, Corpus Dionysiacum II. 27 Amb. 10, 1165C13-15. 25

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ticipates in theology for Maximus just as creatures themselves participate in God. Maximus further explores the imagery of light in the narrative of the Transfiguration to explain this. Both Creator and creature are revealed when the light of Christ’s Divinity shines forth from His face, and His garments, which are the symbols of creation, are illumined as well: For it is natural and appropriate for the knowledge of things that have come to be by His agency to appear together with Him. For as all bodies appear clearly together with the perceptible sun when it rises, thus also God the intellectual ‘Sun of righteousness’ (Mal 4.2), when He rises in the intellect, even as He Himself seems to be contained by creation, wills that the true logoi of intellectual and sensuous beings appear together with Him. The radiance of the garments that appeared together with the light of the face of the Lord during His transfiguration on the mountain shows this, since, in my view, it brings together with God the knowledge of things that come after Him and the knowledge that pertains to Him.28

Maximus then employs an idea that Gregory Nazianzen used in the expression of his theology of the Trinity–the phrase, “In Thy light shall we see light” (Ps 35.10/36.9), which Gregory uses to articulate the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit29–and extends it to our knowledge of the world: For the eye is unable to lay hold of sensuous things without light, and the intellect us unable to receive spiritual contemplation without the knowledge of God. For in the realm of sensation light grants to sight the ability to lay hold of visible things, whereas in the intellectual realm the knowledge of God gives knowledge of intelligible things to the intellect.30

Not only does the knowledge of God appear together with knowledge of nature, it in fact makes knowledge of the meaning of nature, that which is intelligible within it, possible. This “descending” mode of knowledge of the world coming from God is the other side of the “ascending” notion of the acquisition of the knowledge of God in and through the world. Maximus affirms that the saints come to know God by means of contemplating the world:

28 29 30

Amb. 10, 1156A11-B7. G.Naz. Or. 31.3.280.16-19; Or. 40.34.276.21-23. Amb. 10, 1156B7-B13.

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Thus, the saints are taught about the Fashioner from the things that have been made by Him when they carefully observe creation, its good order, proportion, and functioning, which each thing provides to the whole, and that all completed things have been fashioned wisely and providentially with respect to the logos according to which they have been fashioned, and that the things that have come to be are not such that they could exist differently and more beautifully than they do now, for they require nothing more nor less in order to be beautiful in some other way.31

However, the intellectual knowledge of created things depends ultimately on the illumination of the knowledge of God so that God and world, which are radically distinct as Creator and creation, nevertheless appear together–as we see with Elijah, Moses, and the transfigured Christ–and God reveals the world to the same degree that the world reveals God. So every aspect of creation symbolizes God, either negatively or positively, and this symbolic approach to the world is characteristic of Maximus’ notion of natural contemplation in general. The stage of contemplation beyond nature, where the mind begins to approach God without the mediation of created things, is characterized precisely as the stage in which symbolic thinking is transcended. But Maximus’ notion of the symbolic nature of creation runs even deeper than this. Because of the inseparability of flesh–and hence creation– from the Divine Word in the incarnation, Maximus affirms “the Lord was created like us without change” and became “the type and symbol of Himself (ἑαυτοῦ γενέσθαι τύπον καὶ σύμβολον), and symbolically present[ed] Himself from Himself and through Himself, and by being made manifest led all of creation to Himself.”32 This draws the created world very close to God and says more than the simple affirmation that the world is a symbol for God. Rather, when the Word becomes flesh, He becomes the symbol itself, thereby closing the divide between symbol and symbolized. Almost in the same breath, however, Maximus starkly separates the Divine from the world in his reflection upon the light that emanated from the Lord’s face in the Transfiguration. This light goes beyond the negations of mystical theology and somehow points to the unknowable essence of God. The essence of God

31 32

Amb. 10, 1176B4-12. Amb. 10, 1165D7-11.

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has left absolutely no trace of apprehension, not even a bare hint, for those who come after it; neither does it yield to any being, even to a certain degree, any concept of how the Monad and Triad are the same, for it is not natural for that which is uncreated to be comprehended by creation, or for the infinite to be completely understood by finite beings.33

Maximus is drawing a distinction between knowledge of God as unified Trinity and the recognition of the world–and the flesh of Christ as the center of that world–as the economic embodiment of God, as God Himself insofar as He is the Cause of the world. This distinction further clarifies my argument that the contemplation of Christ is the way Maximus (and the earlier Greek patristic tradition) follows to contemplate the natural world and its relation to its Cause. As a way of immaterial contemplation, the silence of the contemplation of the Trinity finally has no reference to the world in a logical sense. All of Maximus’ thinking about the created world comes under the economy of the incarnation of the Word, which is the entrance of the God beyond being into being. iii. The Burning Bush: The Divine Fire in the Substance of Things Maximus gives another account of the imagery of light in his interpretation of the revelation of God to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3). He gives a particularly significant interpretation of Moses’ response to the burning bush, a Scriptural event that gives him another way of thinking about God and the world. Moses averted his gaze when God announced Himself as the “God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” turning away his face (ἀπέστρεψεν…τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ; Ex 3.6) in the presence of this revelation. Moses is taken as exemplary of the way of philosophy, and we are told in particular that Moses was “kept safe externally by the ethical ways of life that pertain to the flesh and internally by the divine thoughts that pertain to the soul” and was “raised to live subject to sensation…until the acquisition of natural contemplations.”34 Maximus considers all of this to be Moses’ preparation for the vision of the burning bush. One who follows his example and devotes much labor to this mountain by means of spiritual natural contemplations after the abandonment of the intellectual relation to sensuous things–for

33 34

Amb. 10, 1168A11-16. Amb. 10, 1148A-B.

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I think this is the meaning of the forty years of wandering–he will be made worthy to become an intellectual seer and hearer of the ineffable and supernatural divine fire that exists, as in the bush, in the substance of things (τῇ οὐσίᾳ τῶν ὄντων ἐνυπάρχοντος θείου πυρός), the God Word who radiated at the end of time from the bush, that is, the holy Virgin, and has held converse with us through the flesh, leading the footstep naked of thought and completely free of human ways of thinking, as of dead sandals, to such a mystery (cf. Ex 3.5). With respect to questioning, he averts the eye of the mind, like the face of Moses (πρὸς μὲν ζήτησιν, ὥσπερ πρόσωπον, τὸ τῆς διανοίας ὀπτικὸν ἀποστρέφων; cf. Ex 3.6), with faith alone opening the ready obedience of the soul, like an ear, to the reception of the mystery.35

Natural contemplation leads to the recognition of “the supernatural divine fire that exists in the substance of things,” symbolized by the burning bush, which itself is the image of the Virgin Mary bearing the Word of God. In this way the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of Christ constitute paths that run parallel to one another and can, in a sense, be considered as the same path. Moses’ response in the face of this announcement of Divine identity, which is at the same time the revelation of the Divine Word at the heart of creation, is to turn away his face and Maximus takes this as an indication that “the questioning (ζήτησις)” of the mind is turned away and “human ways of thinking (λογισμῶν ἀνθρωπίνων)” laid aside like “dead sandals.” The dualism of questioning is itself a turning away from the manifestation of the essence of things for it cannot receive the mystery of the presence of the Divine in the world. Thus Moses’ “turning away” is actually a “turning towards”: he turns away from conventional human modes of thought and towards the faith that opens the mind to the divine reality in the essence of the world. II. The World and Eternity i. Maximus Against the Eternity of Matter and the World In the midst of these strong affirmations of the presence of the Divine in the world, Maximus is compelled to argue for the ultimate finitude of matter and the cosmos, since, perhaps, one might take the opposite position given how Maximus has interpreted the burning bush. Indeed, most pagan Greek philosophers, with whom he shared so much intellectually, did affirm the eternity

35

Amb. 10, 1148C12-D12.

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of matter so that Maximus’ arguments against it were necessary in order for him to clarify the distinction between the Creator and creation. We shall trace Maximus’ arguments for this position, which has the concept of motion as a decisive element, and also consider Philoponus’ refutation of Proclus’ arguments for the eternity of the world. We shall then consider how Maximus accounts for the motion of the finite world in relation to the infinite and unmoved God, who is the Source of its motion. Maximus gives a long, slowly developing argument near the end of Ambiguum 10 against the eternity of the world and matter. Maximus has spoken of the simultaneous appearance of Creator and creation in the Transfiguration; however, he does not take this as an indication that the world is coeternal with God and seeks, in fact, to demonstrate the impossibility of God and matter eternally coexisting “alongside” one another. His line of thinking begins with an invocation of the beauty and order of the cosmos, which, says Maximus, naturally leads to the understanding that the cosmos has an “Originator (γενεσιουργός), Source (ἀρχή), Cause (αἰτία), and Maker (ποιητής).”36 He focuses specifically on the motion of things and reasons that everything in motion must have a beginning to its motion, that is, a cause and source.37 Because there is nothing that is without motion except the unmoved first Cause, everything must have a source and this conclusion is the foundation upon which the whole series of arguments is built. Maximus proceeds to analyze the notions of substance (οὐσία), quantity (ποσότης), and quality (ποιότης) in order to show in another way that it is impossible for anything to exist without a source. Substance is modified into genera and species “according to the dynamic of expansion and contraction (κατὰ διαστολὴν καὶ συστολήν).” It expands into genera and species but this expansion is limited by “the most specific species (τῶν εἰδικωτάτων εἰδῶν)” so that substance is circumscribed in its “downward” diversification into species. Similarly, as substance contracts and is considered to return to the more general genera, it is bounded in this “upward” motion as well and is thus circumscribed from both below and above. Quantity also undergoes modification in beings in that beings experience increase and diminution as well as relaxation and tension. Quality in beings likewise undergoes change by the expansion and

36 37

Amb. 10, 1176D4-6. Cf. Aristotle, Physics VII.1.241b.

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contraction as well as the alteration and scattering that result from the fact of difference.38 Change in relation to what is external to a thing indicates that a thing is limited and thus has a source. In all three cases, Maximus argues that the process of “scattering” and “gathering” indicates that all things are in motion and thus have a source and come into being through generation (γένεσις). The diversification of substance and the fluctuations of quantity and quality imply motion and therefore a beginning of motion, a source. Nothing, therefore, exists without a source and a source, for Maximus, implies generation. Another way of saying this is that all things that exist are conditioned in certain ways (τὸ πῶς εἶναι ἔχον) and are thus not simple. Existing in a certain way “is the first kind of circumscription” and the fact that substance is conditioned is a proof of its circumscription and thus generation.39 Maximus moves from this general consideration of the conditioned existence of beings to an argument concerning the fundamental conditions of existence: space and time. Again, the ultimate goal of this is to demonstrate the finitude of the world and of matter: the totality of the universe is not beyond the universe itself (for to declare that somehow the universe itself is beyond its own totality is irrational and impossible), but possesses in itself its own self-circumscription after the all-circumscribing infinite power of the Cause of all, which is its outer limit (οὐ γὰρ ὑπὲρ τὸ πᾶν αὐτὸ τὸ πᾶν τοῦ παντὸς [τοῦτο γὰρ πως καὶ ἄλογον καὶ ἀδύνατον, αὐτὸ τὸ πᾶν ὑπὲρ τὸ ἑαυτοῦ πᾶν εἶναι θεσπίζειν], ἀλλ᾽ ὑφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὴν περιγραφὴν ἔχον μετὰ τὴν πάντα περιγράφουσαν τοῦ παναιτίου ἄπειρον δύναμιν, αὐτὸ τὸ πέρας ἑαυτοῦ τὸ ἐξώτερον).40

Maximus understands the universe to be a limited whole, limited precisely because it is a whole; it is a self-circumscribing space. Maximus also argues that conditioned existence implies finite temporal existence, so that “anything that admits of the logos of a condition, even if it exists now, such a thing has not always been.”41 Not only is the universe limited by space and time, it is also limited by the fact that the many things that fill it compose a “quantifiable amount (τἠν ἐν

38 39 40 41

Amb. 10, 1177B11-D11. Amb. 10, 1180B4-8. Amb. 10, 1180C3-9. Amb. 10, 1180D1-3.

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πλήθει ποσότητα),”42 that is, they are not infinite. Maximus takes this to imply that the concrete existence (ὑπόστασις) of each thing is also limited, since the members of the quantifiable multitude of things circumscribe each other. Maximus infers, then, that “a thing is not without source if one can observe something else before it; neither is it uncircumscribed if one can observe something else along with it.” Within the context of this argument, that which is “before” a thing must be the antecedent conditions of existence, which are space and time. That all things are subject to space and time implies for Maximus that all things have a source for their being. Maximus concludes from this universal circumscription and dependence upon a source that “there must have been a ‘when’ when each existing thing did not exist (ἦν πάντως ποτὲ ὅτε τι τῶν ὄντων οὐκ ἦν).”43 The fact that something did not exist at one time and then does exist at another time implies that it has come into being and therefore has undergone change (τροπή) or alteration (ἀλλοίωσις), change when it has been brought into being through generation and alteration when something has been added to it in order to bring it to completion. This deduction of the change, alteration, or incompleteness of all things provides Maximus with a foundation for a new line of reasoning that leads directly to the conclusion that nothing possesses existence of itself and therefore nothing exists eternally. So far Maximus has argued for the essential finitude of individual things in the universe, a position that was not controversial. Maximus takes it a step further, however, and argues for the finitude of matter as such, and it is this move that begins to challenge the fundamental position of the eternity of the cosmos. The argument is that anything that requires something to be added to it for its completion also requires something outside itself for its existence: For if, as they say, substance is greater than form, and if what exists is able to provide substance for itself or to possess it simply, which is what they want to say, how is it not sufficient to possess simply or provide for itself the lesser reality–I mean form? If ‘that which is,’ which those who dare to apply the quality of being without a source to what comes after God and is from Him (for we do not make a distinction between coming ‘after’ and coming ‘from’) want to call either ‘substance’ or ‘matter,’ is not sufficient to provide the lesser reality for itself or to possess it simply, how is what is unable to possess a lesser reality able to possess

42

Amb. 10, 1181A11-12. Amb. 10, 1181B13-14, an interesting modification of the rallying cry of fourth century Arianism: ἦν ποτὲ ὅτε οὐκ ἦν, “there was a time when He was not,” referring to the Son of God. 43

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either simply or from itself what is superior, I mean existence itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶναι)? If matter is completely unable to possess a lesser reality, either from itself or simply, all the more will it be unable to possess existence itself, whether simply or in some manner, from itself.44

Maximus argues here that because matter is incomplete without form and does not possess form of itself, form must be conferred from outside in order to bring matter to perfection. If matter does not possess form on its own, how can it be said to possess that which is greater than form, existence itself? Maximus’ conclusion is that matter cannot be said to have always existed since it is not capable of possessing existence from itself. If it receives form from outside itself, a fortiori it also receives being from outside itself through generation, and this leads Maximus to God as “Creator and Fashioner of beings.” Maximus then brings motion into his thinking and argues if matter has always existed, as some say, then clearly it has not undergone generation; if it has not undergone generation, then it is not moved; if it is not moved, then there is no beginning of its existence (τοῦ εἶναι ἤρξατο); if there is no beginning of its existence, then it must be without a source (ἄναρχον); if it is without a source, it is also infinite (ἄπειρον); if it is infinite then it must be unmoved, for that which is infinite must be unmoved, since the boundless has nowhere to which to be moved).45

This line of reasoning would entail that there is an infinite duality composed of God and matter. This would be a contradiction for Maximus, “for duality is neither infinite, nor without a source, nor unmoved, nor can it be the source of anything at all, since it is circumscribed in terms of both unity and division.”46 A duality is finite by definition. It is composed as “a synthesis of monads” and because it is composed, it is divisible and admits of relation. The infinite, however, cannot be divided, for it has no parts, and it is not in any sort of relation with anything (οὐ γὰρ ἔχει τι κατὰ σχέσιν συνημμένον παντάπασι). Maximus argues, then, that when a duality is considered as a unity, it cannot be thought of as infinite because of its inherent limitations, that is, the two members of the duality limit each other when they are united. From the side of division–the duality as two separate realities–the duality is comprised by monads that are counted together to form it: “it takes its beginning from number and is comprised by number.” The existence of duality is dependent upon the concept of 44 45 46

Amb. 10, 1181C13-1184A2. Amb. 10, 1184B6-12. Amb. 10, 1184B14-C2.

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number, which is prior to it; its existence is therefore not infinite. Also, because the dyad of immaterial cause and matter sets two essentially different realities alongside each other it incorporates relation and circumscription into itself and a duality cannot, therefore, be infinite.47 In light of this, a duality must have a source and must be moved. It cannot itself be the source of something since it is moved.48 Only the Monad is without motion, without source, and infinite: The Monad alone is, properly speaking, without motion, since It is neither a number, nor countable, nor counted–for the Monad is neither part, nor whole, nor relation–and properly without source, since there is nothing else that is older than It, from which the Monad would have received existence by being moved. Again, It alone is, properly speaking, infinite, since there is nothing that exists along with It or is counted along with It. And It alone is properly Source, since It is the Cause of every number, of everything that is counted, and of everything that is countable, being remote from every relation and every part and whole, and the Monad is properly and truly, primarily, uniquely, and simply–but without condition–primary and alone.49

On this account, an infinite duality of essentially different monads, which is how Maximus has described the notion of the infinity of matter alongside God, is simply a contradiction. The Monad (that is, the unity of the Divine) is, by definition, not set alongside anything. It is significant, however, that Maximus, again following Dionysius, is using the language of monad to describe the unity and boundlessness of God vis-à-vis the finitude of the world not as a way of “signifying the blessed Divinity as It is in Itself…not as though the term is perfectly representative of the divine and blessed essence, but because it points to its complete simplicity, which goes beyond every quantity and quality, and any sort of relation.”50 The concept of unity as the foundation for the plurality of numbers is an image for the unity and simplicity of God as the foundation from which the diversity of the world comes, but the Divinity is not “the Monad” (or even the “Triad”), as Dionysius says in a passage from the Divine Names, which Maximus quotes here in Amb. 10:

47 48 49 50

Amb. 10, 1184D1-1185B1. Amb. 10, 1185B7. Amb. 10, 1185B8-C4. Amb. 10, 1185C4-15.

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‘therefore while both the Monad and the Triad are hymned, the Divinity beyond all things is neither Monad nor Triad, being known neither by us nor by anyone else, but in order that we might truly hymn Its transcendent unity and divine fecundity, we name the Divinity that transcends every name with a three-fold and unified divine name, and the Divinity beyond being by means of beings.’51

The unity and plurality that are expressed by numbers provide us a way of speaking, and more properly hymning the Divine, but as with all divine names, these names provide us with ways to speak but do not directly name what is beyond them. The notion of an eternal duality, therefore, is untenable according to Maximus. The “relationship” between God and the world of material reality consists not in the fact that they are coeternal with each other but that we believe in the existence of God from the existence of creatures. Maximus does not consider this an argumentative proof; it is “by faith” that we know the existence of God from creatures.52 On their own terms, certain aspects of this argumentation are less than convincing, or at least are only convincing to someone who already believes that the universe had a beginning. For example, the mere fact of having an ἀρχή does not entail a temporal beginning to existence. The theological tradition speaks of the ἀρχή or μοναρχία of the Father, which the Son and Spirit share, but which derives from the Father, so that the Father may be said to be the ἀρχή of Son and Spirit as the one from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds;53 this most definitely does not imply that the Son and Spirit began to exist. Second, Maximus does not make it entirely clear why the God-beyond-being could not eternally grant the cosmos being. The issue is whether or not the eternity of matter entails its total infinity, as Maximus thinks it does. We observed in a quotation above that Maximus constructs a line of reasoning such that eternal→ungenerated→unmoved→beginningless/without a source (ἄναρχον)→ infinite. But can something be eternally finite, i.e. the eternally existing finite effect of an eternal cause? Finitude in this sense refers not to temporal duration (the effect would be infinite in this sense), but to the existence of the effect, which depends upon–is limited by–its cause. A duality of an eternal God eternally giving being to eternal finite material reality may be permissible from the perspective of an infinite duration of time so that material 51 52 53

Ps. Dion. Areo., Div. nom., XIII.3. Amb. 10, 1188B1. Cf., G. Naz., Or. 29.2, and Maximus’ comments, Amb. 1 (ad Thomam); G. Naz., Or. 31.14.

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reality would be considered infinite in one sense (temporally) but finite in another, existentially, that is, its being would derive from, and therefore be determined (bounded) by, what is outside itself. In response to this, Maximus stipulates that what is infinite must be infinite–i.e. boundless–in every sense (not just temporally): No one who has even the slightest share of rational thought would call infinite something that admits of something essentially different from it being forever contemplated along with it or at the same time as it, for he would know that the meaning of infinity completely escapes one who thinks like this. For that which is infinite is infinite according to every logos and mode: according to substance, potency, activity, and…according to the source and the final end.54

Is this necessary? Maximus’ point is that the very notion of another (God) set alongside material reality as its “eternal” source renders material reality finite. However, this position, while somewhat intuitive on a linguistic level (α – πειρον), is not absolutely transparent. Aristotle defined the infinite in terms of an infinite extension in which “one thing is always being taken after another”55 so that Aristotle’s infinity, as Richard Sorabji notes, is precisely what “always has something outside it.”56 Moreover, the notion that God and matter constitute an eternally opposed duality is a rather facile Manichean position to be arguing against, and the resources of Neoplatonism would certainly provide a response to Maximus’ arguments in favor of the eternity of matter, agreeing as such about the incoherence of dualism but precisely as such disagreeing about the eternity of the substrate of the world and therefore the world itself: the world just is the eternal image and manifestation of the eternal Forms. It could, of course, very well be that Maximus has not refined his thinking on these points; these sections of the Ambigua to John are rather unpolished and speculative pieces, not tightly presented logical treatises. Given the specific issues he addresses, however, it is also likely that he was familiar with the contours of the arguments for and against the eternity of the universe amongst the Neoplatonists and is perhaps presupposing the positions of those who argued that the universe had a beginning against the predominant Greek pagan view. Philoponus’ refutations of Aristotle’s and Proclus’ arguments for the eternity of the uni-

54 55 56

Amb. 10, 1184D5-13. Aristotle, Phys. III.6, 206a27-28; Basic Works of Aristotle, 265. Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum, 210.

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verse in particular shed some light on what Maximus is doing in the Ambigua, so we shall turn to them in order to clarify the issues Maximus has raised. ii. Proclus and Philoponus on the Eternity of the World Nearly every witness we have to ancient pagan Greek philosophy denies that there was an absolute beginning to everything that exists. The specific details of this denial are various–Did this current world order have a beginning? Has there been an infinite succession of worlds? Have time and motion always been?–but the fundamental conviction was that the matter of the universe, however it might be described, is without beginning. The philosophers denied creation out of nothing, a position summed up by Proclus: “generation out of nothing is impossible (ἐκ μηδενὸς γίνεσθαι ἀδύνατον).”57 This view had a long history, from Parmenides, who thought the notion of non-being, and therefore the teaching of generation out of nothing, was incoherent, to the various ways in which philosophers tried to interpret the Timaeus.58 I shall focus here on Proclus’ arguments for the eternity of the world and Philoponus’ refutations, since this particular debate crystallizes issues that are important for our understanding of Maximus. I shall give a brief summary of the contours of Proclus’ position and then present Philoponus’ counter-arguments. Proclus gave eighteen arguments for the eternity of the world, which he variously refers to as ὁ κόσμος or τὸ πᾶν. He relies on various aspects of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions to make his arguments, but the focal point is the account of the formation of the cosmos by the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus. Proclus takes the text as the authority on the nature of the universe and seeks to show how it should be interpreted to teach the eternity of the world. In the first Argument, Proclus argues that the Demiurge’s eternal goodness and desire that all things resemble himself entail that he has eternally caused the world to come to be, that its eternal coming into being and temporal progression constitute the way it resembles the eternal being of God. Because the Demiurge is always able to bring his will to actualization, the world has always been. The eternal goodness, will, and power of the divine Demiurge to

57 Proclus, De aeternitate mundi, 9, On the Eternity of the World (De Aeternitate Mundi), trans. and ed. Helen S. Lang and A.D. Macro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). My account of Proclus modifies some of the translations of this edition. 58 Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum, 268-276; Reydams-Schils, Demiurge and Providence, 77. Much of this section follows Sorabji’s analysis in Time, Creation, and the Continuum, 210-224, 228-229.

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produce an image of himself is the basic foundation upon which many of the subsequent arguments depend. In Arguments 2 and 3 Proclus argues that God’s eternal identity as paradigm and actualized demiurge entail that the copy and effect of this eternally actual paradigm must also be eternal. He argues in Argument 4 that because the Demiurge is unmoved by nature there has been no change from non-making to making in his being. In Argument 5, he argues from the fact of temporality–ποτε, that there is a “when”–that time always is, i.e. is coextensive with eternity. He argues for the incorruptibility and thus ungenerated and eternal nature of the world from the goodness of the Demiurge, who alone could undo the cosmos he fashioned, but who would not because of his goodness, in Argument 6. In Argument 7 Proclus claims that the world soul (ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦ παντός), which, as soul, is self-moving, is also therefore “ungenerated and incorruptible.” The universal soul is the source of the motion of the universe (τὸ πᾶν), so it follows that the universe, whose soul is ungenerated and incorruptible, is ungenerated and incorruptible as well. With respect to the universe in its allembracing wholeness, Proclus argues in Argument 8 for its incorruptible and ingenerate nature from the fact that there is nothing “outside” it that could introduce corruption into it or bring it into being. On the other hand, in Argument 9 he argues that any corruption of a thing comes from the evil within it, but because the universe is “a blessed god” according to Plato, the universe has no evil and therefore is incorruptible. This implies that the universe is ungenerated as well, since generation implies the corrupting process of destruction in birth by means of active (κρατῆσαν) and passive (κρατηθέν) agents. Argument 10 claims that the existence of “proper” or “natural” places (ὁ οἰκείος or κατὰ φύσιν τόπος) for the elements is a proof of the eternity of the world. If the elements were in their proper place before the universe was put into order then there was no beginning of the order of the universe. If they were not in their own proper place, then something must have moved them from their proper place, since elements, as bodies, are not self-moving. The view that the universe came into being, then, would require that unnatural places precede natural places for the elements. However, the unnatural only exists in relation to the natural so that if there is an unnatural place, there also is a natural one, and as he has shown, a natural place for elements implies the eternity of the universe, though not of the individual things in it. Argument 11 identifies the “receptacle (ὑποδοχή)” of Plato’s Timaeus with matter, arguing that matter “is for the sake of” generation. If matter were brought

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into being out of nothing, argues Proclus, it would be “for the sake of something by chance (κατὰ τύχην)” and not necessary so that that which has been fashioned would not be stable (οὐδὲ τὴν δημιουργίαν ἔχειν τὸ βέβαιον). Conversely, if matter does not come from nothing but is eternal, and if matter and generation are understood always to be together as τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα (“cause,” “that for the sake of which”) and τὸ ἕνεκα τοῦ (“what has a cause,” “what is for the sake of something”), then generation is eternal along with matter. From matter’s relation to generation Proclus moves to consider it in relation to form. Matter, he argues, is in an inseparable relation to form. Matter is, in fact, always matter for some form. Assuming that simple (incorporeal) matter is sufficient for all generation, is potentially all things, and is sufficient actually to exist, it follows for Proclus that all forms are in it. Quite simply, if matter exists, it has form (μηδενὸς γὰρ δεομένη πρὸς τὸ εἶναι ὕλη οὐδενὸς δεῖται πρὸς τὸ εἴδη ἔχειν). If matter is eternal–which Proclus seems to take as demonstrated from his initial claim about the consequences of matter coming from nothing–then form is eternally in matter and thus the cosmos is eternal as well. Matter exists for the sake of order (κόσμος), not disorder (ἀκοσμία) so that if there is matter there is the cosmos. Taken together with the earlier part of the argument, matter exists for the sake of generation, form, and the cosmos; the issue, of course, is whether matter is eternal. Argument 12 points to the problems of positing that the generated cosmos is not eternal. This would be due either to a failing on the part of matter or a limitation on the part of the maker. However, the Demiurge is always the same and sufficient for fashioning the cosmos and matter is unchangeable so that the universe must be eternal. The implication seems to be that the present existence of the cosmos, which is composed of unchangeable matter by an unchanging and always sufficient Demiurge, implies its eternal existence. Argument 13 reasons that, in accordance with Plato’s description of the circular motion of the heavens, the heavens must be eternal since their perfectly cyclical motion does not admit of an opposite motion to introduce corruption into it. The heavens as part of the whole cosmos could not be eternal while the cosmos itself was not, so it follows that the cosmos, which is composed of both generated and ungenerated things, is eternal. In Argument 14, Proclus seeks to establish the eternal orderliness (τάξις) of generation in matter, which in turn would establish the eternity of the κόσμος, since “from the moment there is order there is the cosmos.” To do so he distinguishes between “matter” and “the substrate (τὸ ὑποκείμενον)” so that matter is taken to be that which is “well-suited (εὐεργόν)” to being fashioned whereas the substrate does not have matter’s potentiality (δύναμις) for being

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formed. The question is, does matter preexist the traces (τὰ ἴχνη) of the forms or vice versa? Proclus denies both of these, arguing that matter is always suited to receive the traces of the forms that are always present to it, so that the order of the cosmos as matter endowed with form is eternal. Proclus’ Argument 15 considers how the cosmos is like (ὅμοιον) the eternal (τὸ αἰώνιον). The eternal is non-temporal (it has no “when”: οὐδαμῇ ἔχει τὸ ποτέ), has no extension in time (παράτασιν), or “before” and “after” (πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον). Therefore, for the cosmos to be like it, it must not have a beginning and end but must extend perpetually (τὸ ἀεὶ ἔχει) in both directions, to the future and the past. Only in this way does it resemble the eternal. In Argument 16, Proclus uses the notion of the Demiurge’s will (βούλησις) to demonstrate the eternity of the world. According to the Timaeus, the Demiurge wills that there be no disorderly motion in the cosmos and that what is brought into being be “bound” together so as to be preserved in its existence. Because the Demiurge is eternal and therefore does not will something at one time or another but rather always wills the same thing, it follows that cosmos is eternally free of disorder and is preserved in its existence. Argument 17 begins from two axioms: 1.) everything generated is corruptible, and 2.) everything ungenerated is incorruptible. Because Plato’s Demiurge has said, “I am the Demiurge of immortal things,” thus indicating that the cosmos is incorruptible, the cosmos must be ungenerated. Finally, Argument 18 reiterates a basic intuition that has appeared throughout Proclus’ arguments, that because the Demiurge, as eternal and most divine, is “uniform and self-identical (κατὰ τὰ αὐτὰ καὶ ὡσαύτως ἔχειν),” it follows that he is always actively a demiurge and thus always actively produces the world. The world itself must therefore be eternal. Because the Demiurge is always present to the cosmos as the paradigm of its order, the cosmos has always been and always will be in a state of order. The nuances of these arguments, particularly the notion of time in its infinite duration to the past and future as the image of durationless eternity and Proclus’ account of the difference between matter (which is matter for something, i.e. towards formation) and the totally unformed substrate, really go beyond Maximus’ arguments in the Ambigua, and as we have just seen, Maximus employs the notion of time as an image of eternity in his study of the

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Transfiguration.59 I shall return to Maximus’ account below, but first it will be helpful to observe a few of Philoponus’ central arguments against Proclus. Philoponus composed his refutation of Proclus’ arguments in 529. I cannot present an overview of Philoponus’ refutations of all eighteen of Proclus’ arguments here. I shall confine this discussion to how Philoponus deals with the strongest and most determinative aspects of Proclus’ thinking about the eternity of the world, namely his contention that an eternally good and actualized Demiurge, who is the paradigm of the world, necessitates an eternal world as its effect and image, and his account of how matter and (the traces of) form are eternally present to one another. Not only are these interesting arguments, they are of particular relevance to Maximus (or nearly any other Greek patristic thinker) because they begin with premises he would accept, that the Creator is eternally good, unchanging, and the paradigm of the world and that the “forms” (Maximus usually calls them λόγοι) exist eternally in the mind of God. We shall begin with Philoponus’ refutation of the notion that an infinitely powerful, actual, and paradigmatic cause must eternally generate that which it causes. His refutation of this basic argument is relevant to Proclus’ Arguments 1-3, 12, 15-16, and 18, since these all, in one way or another, are related to this basic position. Philoponus demonstrates that it is due to the nature of what has been generated alone–as opposed to the nature of God, who generates in His infinite power–that it is impossible for “more or better things (μήτε πλείονα τῶν ὄντων μήτε κρείττονα)” to have come to be than actually have.60 He then uses this notion as a foothold for advancing the argument that the world is not without beginning “even though God has always been good and always a Creator.” Just as the finitude (in magnitude and number) of things is not due to any limitation on the part of God–since, as Philoponus says, everyone admits that an actual and traversable infinity of things is impossible–but inheres in the nature of things, so too, argues Philoponus, would the fact of the world’s not being ungenerated not imply a limitation on the power and goodness of God. If the world had existed from everlasting with God then there would necessarily (on Aristotle’s account) be an actual infinity of things that have filled the world and which has been traversed until the present moment.

59

See above, 258. De aeternitate. mundi contra Proclum, I.3, 7, Ioannes Philoponus de Aeternitate Mundi contra Proclum ed. Hugo Rabe (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1963 [1899]); Philoponus Against Proclus’s ‘On the Eternity of the World 1-5,’ trans. Michael Share (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 60

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A finitude of number for created things implies a finite time of the world’s existence. Indeed, Richard Sorabji has written that it was Philoponus who first isolated this basic contradiction in Aristotle’s philosophical account of infinity. Aristotle’s account of infinity describes an extended infinity of finite realities so that, rather than conceiving of infinity as including everything, infinity, as we noted above, is precisely that which does not include everything, because one more thing could always be added. However, he denies that infinity is ever actual or traversable. Philoponus points out that these restrictions pose a problem for Aristotle’s belief that the universe and its motion have no beginning: “If the world had existed from everlasting, it would be absolutely necessary for the number of things that have come into existence in the world from the beginning until now to have become actually infinite as well (ἄπειρον γεγονέναι κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν).”61 Aristotle’s account thus implies an actual and traversable infinity. Now, Philoponus’ statement that “that which consists of finite [parts] is finite” is not logically necessary, but given what Philoponus has just said, he must mean by it “finite in number” so that he is speaking of “a finite number of finite parts.”62 The point of Philoponus’ critique, then, is that the notion of an ungenerated, beginningless universe violates commonly accepted limitations to the concept of infinity, namely that it cannot be actual or traversable. If it were actual, as a beginningless universe would seem to imply, then it would be added to as time continues to progress so that infinity would “grow,” which is absurd. Therefore God does not create more or better things than he has created and the world does not exist from everlasting. Because the heart of Proclus’ first argument for the eternity of the world is founded 1.) on the goodness of God, that God’s goodness entails that He has never begrudged existence to the world and has always desired to make the world like Himself, and 2.) on the power of God, that He is always able to cause the world, Philoponus addresses the question of why God did not confer on the world His own substance (οὐσία) so that it would be co-eternal with Him. Philoponus argues that it would be impossible for the ungenerated Cause to produce something identical to It in substance because this would entail God’s creation of Himself and the creation of an uncreated substance. Rather, the creature, for Philoponus, is by definition of a different substance than the Cre-

61 62

Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, I.3, 9. Share, Philoponus Against Proclus’s ‘On the Eternity of the World 1-5,’ 92 n.32.

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ator, but this in no way limits the goodness of God or His power. It is simply a consequence of the nature of created reality, that it is not without beginning.63 In his refutation of Proclus’ second argument, which contends that the eternity of the paradigm of the world entails the beginninglessness of the copy, Philoponus discusses the relationship of the Forms, considered as “creative principles or concepts,” to the realities that have been produced “according to” them. The point of the discussion is to demonstrate that those things created in accordance with the principles need not coexist with them; i.e. an eternal paradigm does not imply a beginningless copy. At this point in the refutation, Philoponus has already denied that being paradigmatic is constitutive of the essence of the Forms so that their eternal existence does not necessitate the co-existence of copies of them. He then goes on to note that principles of the creation of something very naturally, in fact must, preexist what is created according to them, just as a builder “may be in possession of the principles for [building] a house but not yet be creating [anything] based on them.” The principles of creation, whose “being consists in their being concepts of a certain kind,” become patterns when the Creator creates something according to them. 64 Philoponus extends the dynamics of this argument in the next chapter of his refutation in which he addresses Proclus’ claim that the Creator, as “always an actual creator,” must always actually be bringing the world into being. According to the Aristotelian dynamics of potentiality and actuality (δύναμις and ἐνέργεια) Proclus argues that any move from potentiality to actuality requires an antecedent actuality, so that there must be a foundational actuality that is not brought from potency into actuality and thus eternally actualizes the world. The alternative for Proclus is an infinite regress. In response, Philoponus argues that Proclus has equivocated the notions of potentiality and actuality in that he has failed to distinguish between different kinds of these two concepts. Citing Aristotle,65 Philoponus distinguishes between first and second potentiality and first and second actuality. First potentiality refers to a basic receptivity or fitness for the acquisition of an ability, such as a child’s potentiality for being a grammarian. The child is potentially a grammarian in the sense that the child has the natural capacity as a human being for acquiring knowledge of the rules and conventions of grammar and 63 64 65

Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, I.4. Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, II.4-5. Aristotle, De anima 417a21-b2.

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literature, but it is not therefore the case that the child could begin to actualize the activity of the grammarian at any given moment. This state would pertain to second potentiality, the state, in this case, in which a person has in fact acquired the knowledge of grammar and therefore could actualize it at any moment, whether or not the person is actually doing so. This is also what Philoponus (following Aristotle) means by “first actuality,” the stage in which–to continue the example–someone has “actually” acquired the knowledge of grammar as opposed simply to being fit potentially to receive it. On this account, second actuality applies to the grammarian in active exercise of his knowledge, whether in teaching or in his own study. Thus, the axiom that would hold that “when a cause is actual, that which is caused will likewise be actual” is only true for Philoponus for the case of “second actuality,” when God is actually creating something.66 Philoponus’ refutation of Proclus’ account of matter, generation, and form (Argument 11) is of particular relevance to Maximus, since, as we saw above, Maximus makes an argument that is premised on the fact that matter must receive form from outside itself and since it is dependent in this way, all the more is it not self-sufficient with respect to its being and is therefore not eternal. Proclus makes precisely the opposite argument within the same framework: since matter lacks nothing in its being matter, it lacks nothing with respect to its possession of form. Philoponus uses the relation of matter and form to argue for the generation of matter out of nothing, i.e. that matter has no need of an ungenerated substrate for it to come into being. As Philoponus writes, “things that come to be have need of matter because they are invested with form as they come to be,” this because form, as Philoponus acknowledges, needs matter in order to be what it is. With respect to matter itself, however, “it follows that if it comes to be, it does not have need of matter,” since it is form that needs matter, not matter itself.67 The relation of matter and form does not imply their eternity68 and the logic of their relation implies the opposite. Things in relation need their opposites in order to be, so if matter needs anything to come into being, it would not be eternal prime matter, but form, whereas form needs matter. Philoponus notes that Proclus has not shown the necessity that matter be

66 67 68

Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, III.2-3; Share, Philoponus, 44-45. Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, XI.12, 458. Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, XI.10, 451.

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eternal69 and so Philoponus thinks his own arguments establish the possibility of creation out of nothing. At the very least, Philoponus shows that the ancient arguments for the eternity of the cosmos are not unassailable philosophically. Maximus may be presupposing these arguments or arguments like them, though he does not articulate them precisely as does Philoponus. On the other side of this discussion, while Maximus argues that the universe and matter are not eternal, he does preserve the Alexandrian tradition that “the logoi of all things that exist and will exist substantially according to essence, or have come to be or will come to be, or have been made manifest, or will be made manifest, preexist firmly in God (ἐν τῷ θεῷ προϋπάρχουσι παγίως).” 70 The logoi answer here to Philoponus’ point about the eternal Forms, which do not imply the eternity of the realities that instantiate them. We have seen in Maximus’ interpretation of the Transfiguration that God and creatures appear together in the transfigured Christ, but it is precisely the knowledge of God and creatures that appears and this is not an indication of the coeternity of God and world. The unity occurs in the mind of the human being and simultaneously effects and expresses this intellectual unity. Maximus’ critique of the pagan view of the eternity of the world–beyond the logical problems he and Philoponus raise–would be its fundamental inability to separate the world from the mind’s understanding of the world. This is ultimately not an issue of rationality but of faith, since Maximus grants the unknowability of things in their essence or substrate (τὸ ὑποκείμενον), just as he does for God. Indeed, the human intuition of the world leads to faith in the existence of the world as a reality independent of the mind just as it leads to faith in the existence of God. Thus, for Maximus the inseparability of God and the world in human understanding does not entail their eternal inseparability, for human understanding is bounded by time and cannot now see beyond it, even as it is compelled to try and transcend it. At the beginning of its contemplation, the mind can only consider God in terms of the world so for all it knows within the bounds of its own nature God and the world have always eternally been together. The act of faith and transcendence of human nature by grace, however, lead to the understanding that this world has a beginning and an end.

69 70

Philoponus, De aet. mundi contra Proclum, XI.10, 448; 452. Amb. 42, 1329A1-4.

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iii. Love as Divine Motion With the establishment of the finite temporality of the world, a finitude that is indicated by the motion of the world, the question of the source of cosmic motion arises. How does Maximus account for the source of cosmic motion if it has not been eternally motivated by an eternal and changeless first mover? To address this question, we once again return to Maximus’ account of the soul and its contemplation. Maximus has analyzed the powers of the soul into intellect, reason, and sensation and has shown how they are finally unified by the ascent of sensation to intellect by means of reason. Maximus makes another reduction of the powers of the soul to the single and “most general virtue of all,” love (ἀγάπη), which invigorates (ἐκστατικήν) what comes from it, motivates (προσαγωγικήν) what exists through it, and unifies (ἑνοποιητικήν) those whose existence is directed towards it, have been moved to it, and have come to rest with it. Finally, it is preeminently what makes all things divine (θεοποιητικήν).71

This parallel unification to intellect and to love places Maximus within the erotic cosmology of Plato for which we argued above.72 Indeed, love forms the milieu in which the whole of the spiritual path that Maximus has been describing takes place. In the opening chapters of the Chapters on Love, Maximus likewise relates love to knowledge and to the practical life but there he is concerned to distinguish knowledge of God and knowledge of creatures: “Love is a good disposition (διάθεσις) of soul in which one prefers no existing thing to the knowledge of God.” 73 Moreover, love springs from ἀπάθεια,74 which, as we have seen, is the fulfillment of the practical life of virtue. Here in the Ambigua to John, Maximus is more concerned to give expression to the unitive dynamic of knowledge of God and the world and the experiences of the body. Love becomes identified with God Himself and describes the nature of the divine causation of the motion of the world. On the path of philosophy, the various modes of natural contemplation that we have observed undergo a unification that parallels the unification of 71

Amb. 21, 1249B6-10. Origen claims that Scripture uses the less intense word ἀγάπη for the sake of the less spiritual when in fact ἔρως and ἀγάπη are equally applicable to God and the conduct of the spiritual life: Comm. Cant. Prol. II.20-23, 30-31, 33-36. 73 Cap. car., I.1. 74 Cap. car., I.2. 72

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the soul and virtue and are progressively reduced to a single vanishing point of thought, where nature falls away and the mind stands before “God alone [who] truly is, and is the being and motion of beings, the clear distinction of different things, the insoluble continuity of things that have been mixed, and an immovable foundation of what has been established.” 75 The five modes of natural contemplation are contracted to three, which stand for ethical, natural, and theological philosophy, and which are contained in creation “by virtue of its own logos.” These three are then contracted again to two, wisdom and philosophy, where wisdom contains “all pious modes that are said to depend upon it” and all of the “mystical and natural logoi concerning other matters” within itself, while philosophy “is constitutive of our moral practice and way of thinking, of action and contemplation, and of virtue and knowledge, and it refers to wisdom as its cause.” 76 Finally, these two are “enfolded into one” around the unified and unifying Word who holds the universe together. In this way “they have enabled the intellect to make its way to the Cause through its simple encounter with the logoi in beings.” 77 Having arrived at this unified encounter with the Word, the unified intellect is no longer dispersed among the various logoi in the cosmos but remains only with the Cause of all. In this way, the saints transform their sensuous experiences of the world into a likeness of the intellectual world that is infused with virtue: When, in mystical contemplation, the saints have gathered these modes of contemplation into one, they impress upon themselves, as much as is possible, the single Word in the different forms of virtue, which entirely fulfills the essence of the mental (γνωμικός) world of thought, for they have traversed all beings and even the logoi of the virtues themselves, or better yet, having hastened back without knowledge with the logoi towards the Word beyond being and goodness who is beyond them and who is the Source and Goal of their existence, and having all been united to the whole as much as is possible in accordance with the natural potentiality existing in them, they take on the quality of the Word, such as they can, so that they are recognized as coming from God alone when the very God Word Himself beholds His perfectly reflected form appearing by means of His divine qualities as in ‘a perfectly clear mirror.’ 78 They lack none of His venerable characteristics, by which the human form is naturally revealed and

75 76 77 78

Amb. 10, 1137A7-12. Amb. 10, 1136C5-D6. Amb. 10, 1136D6-1137A4. Ps. Dion. Areo., De caelesti hierarchia, XVIII.3.

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which are superior to any likeness: think of air, which is itself devoid of radiance, being completely infused with light..79

This image of the Word seeing himself in the world–and specifically in the human being–as in a mirror recalls Maximus’ statement that in the incarnation the Lord became “the type and symbol of Himself (ἑαυτοῦ γενέσθαι τύπον καὶ σύμβολον)”80 and also that “God and the human being are paradigms of each other (ἀλλήλων εἶναι παραδείγματα τὸν θεὸν καὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον).”81 By gathering all of nature into the unity of the Word who has made it and holds it together, the human being makes the world as a whole into the paradigm of God and becomes the place where nature becomes a “type and symbol” of the Lord. To “know” nature is to know the God who creates it, holds it together, and ultimately identifies Himself with it: From sensuous symbols, however, we say, as far as we are able–for we have but weakly received the likenesses of the knowledge of God on the conceptual level only–that He is everything inasmuch as we have recognized Him, as Cause, from the things that have been made by Him.82

Maximus brings the concept of love explicitly to this notion of identity and causality in his consideration of how God produces the motion of the cosmos. “The Divine,” he writes, exists as absolutely immoveable according to essence and nature, since It is boundless, related to nothing, and invisible: it is like a scientific logos (ἐπιστημονικὸς λόγος) existing in the essences of things, which is said “to be moved” when it providentially sets into motion the logos of each being–which is each being’s natural logos of movement–and, without undergoing any change, takes upon Itself as Cause all of the categories that pertain to what It causes.83

The Dionysian notion of the Cause taking on the names of what It causes leads Maximus to bring in the Areopagite in response to the question of how an “absolutely immoveable” God can cause motion in something else. Quoting the Divine Names he writes,

79 80 81 82 83

Amb. 10, 1137B2-C6. Amb. 10, 1165D8-9. Amb. 10, 1113B11-12. Amb. 10, 1165C11-D1. Amb. 23, 1260B5-12.

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‘Why is it that theologians sometimes call the Divine “Love” (ἔρωτα), and sometimes “Delight” (ἀγάπην), but at other times they call It “the Beloved” (ἐραστόν) and “the Delightful” (ἀγαπητόν)?’He decides the matter in this way: ‘Because It is in one respect moved and in another produces motion.’84

Maximus explains this as follows: The Divine is moved in that It produces an innate orientation (σχέσιν ἐνδιάθετον) of love and delight in those capable of receiving them, and It produces motion by naturally attracting the desire of those who are moved to It. Again, It produces motion and is Itself moved: It thirsts to be thirsted after, It loves to be loved, It delights to be delighted in.85

It will be useful here to give the sentence in full from which Maximus has taken his quotation. Dionysius writes, In general, why is it that theologians sometimes want to call [God] ‘love’ and ‘delight,’ but at other times they call Him ‘the beloved’ and ‘the delightful’? Because He is the Cause–just as He is the Sender and Begetter–of (love), and is (love) itself. And because He is moved towards (love) and sets (love) in motion, or because He is Himself the one who leads forth and motivates the procession from Himself and to Himself (αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἑαυτῷ ἐστι προαγωγικὸς καὶ κινητικός). In this they call Him ‘the Delightful’ and ‘the Beloved’ as beautiful and good, and ‘Love’ and ‘Delight’ as being the power that at the same time moves and elevates to Himself, who alone is the absolutely self-sufficient beauty and good itself, even as He is the manifestation of Himself through Himself and the good procession and simple erotic motion of the transcending unity, selfmoving, self-actualizing, preexisting in the Good, gushing forth from the Good to existing things and returning again to the Good.86

Both Maximus and Dionysius use and extend Aristotle’s conception of the unmoved mover from Metaphysics XII.7, in which the unmoved mover is understood to effect motion in everything else as the object of desire (τὸ ὀρεκτικόν) and thought (τὸ νοητόν). The extension of the idea is precisely that God the Cause of all is said not only to be the object of love/desire but also actively to love creation. Or to use the language Maximus is trying to explain, God is moved by His love for creation and this motion is realized in the Dionysian outpouring of Goodness to beings and Its return, which is the very outpouring

84 85 86

Amb. 23, 1260B14-C4; Div. Nom. IV.14, 160.1-2, 3-4. Amb. 23, 1260C8-13. Div. Nom. IV.14, 160.1-11.

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and return of God from Himself to Himself; hence the language of “self-motion (αὐτοκίνησις).” Everything that exists just is the “motion” of God proceeding from Himself and returning to Himself. Maximus is able to use the language of motionlessness for God as a consequence of his notion that God is limit or horizon (ὅρος) of the world. There is nothing “outside” God that moves Him. This fact is observed in the words ἀκίνητον and ἀπαθόν: God is not moved passively. All cosmic motion is contained within the cycle of God’s procession and return so that Dionysius’ self-moving God, who is the initiator and object of His own self-outpouring is Maximus’ unmoved God, who undergoes no motivation from anything “outside” Himself. Within this grand vision, Maximus focuses particularly on God as the object of desire, understanding, and ultimately praise, arguing that when Gregory refers, in the quotation Maximus has set at the beginning of Ambiguum 23, to the Monad “being moved” to dyad and then Triad, which would seem to be a rather different issue than that which animates Dionysius’ text, Gregory is referring to the movement of the intellect that is “taught to confess beginning from the Father, continuing to the Son, to confess Him together with the Father, and then to receive the Holy Spirit together with the Father and the Son, to worship the perfect Triad together with the perfect Monad.”87 Just as the fullness of the Trinity is progressively revealed through the course of Scripture as Gregory says,88 so too does Maximus affirm that Its fullness is revealed progressively to the individual mind, like an art that is slowly mastered by a craftsman, and like light that illumines the mind but is also the very goal of the mind’s vision. Love, whether ἔρως or ἀγάπη, is the content of the dynamism between God and the world and this dynamism is recapitulated in the soul of each person. We see in this Ambiguum, then, a densely packed account of God and the world on the one and, and of God and the intellect on the other. Maximus first thinks how God may be said to cause movement and even to be moved in general with respect to the cosmos and then applies this notion to the intellect’s knowledge and praise of the Holy Trinity. In this way he unifies the concerns of natural philosophy–the causality of motion and change in the cosmos–and theology in the concept of love. 87 Amb. 23, 1261A4-9; Maximus makes a similar transposition of divine motion to the created mind that comes to an awareness of the Trinity in Ambiguum 1 (to Thomas). 88 Cf. G. Naz., Or. 31.26.

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iv. The Univocity of Being Incomprehensible We see in Ambiguum 17 another way in which creation reveals and participates in God. Commenting upon Gregory Nazianzen’s statement that we have “no exact understanding of creation” and that the divine nature “is ungraspable and incomprehensible,”89 Maximus explains, The phrase, ‘ungraspable and incomprehensible,’ must be posited commonly of creation and the nature that is beyond these things and from which these things– clearly creatures–exist.90

An aspect of the relation between God and creation, a way in which creation is able to reveal God, is the fact that neither are knowable in their essence. Maximus gives a more abstract rendition of Gregory’s rhetoric in Oration 28, which itself echoes the Lord’s rhetoric about the created world in the book of Job, when he questions our ability to know the “subject (τὸ ὑποκείμενον)” of the predicates we attribute to a given reality. Within the context of Gregory’s oration, the concern for defining the subject of predication comes within his polemics against the Eunomians, who claimed to know the essence of God as ἀγέννητος, “unbegotten.” Gregory challenges the notion that such a predication can give knowledge of who or what God is and then he significantly turns to the created world to make his argument, saying (and this is the quotation from which Maximus begins Ambiguum 17), For since it is not adequate to say ‘it is a body’ or ‘it has been begotten’ if one wants to bring forth and indicate to what these predicates are related and about what they are concerned, it is also necessary to say what the subject of these is, if one would perfectly and adequately bring forth the concept. For being embodied, begotten, and corruptible pertain to a human being, an ox, and a horse.”91

According to Maximus, Gregory’s rhetorical strategy against the Eunomians was to show them how the understanding of even the lowest, most common aspects of created being goes beyond the power of human reason so that they would refrain all the more from going too far in their definition of God. It is not enough to give a list–even an exhaustive list–of qualities or attributes to have complete knowledge of something. One must know the subject of 89

G.Naz., Or. 28.5, 110.10-11. Amb. 17, 1229B8-12. 91 G. Naz., Or. 28.9; supplying “begotten”–γέννητος in Gregory’s text–from Eriugena’s genitum; Jeauneau, Ambigua ad Iohannem, 123.6. 90

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these predications and this subject is not reducible to its predicates, even to them as a whole: it “does not derive from these things, is not these things themselves, or a certain one of these; neither is it from some of them, or a certain one of these select few; nor is it in them, or in some, or again in a certain one of these few.”92 What a thing is essentially therefore remains ineffable, for anything one might give as an answer to the question, What is this? could only be a certain attribute or collection of attributes that could just as well be attributed of “an ox, a horse, or anything else.”93 But the thing itself, the subject, cannot be demonstrated. We believe that it exists because there must be something of which we predicate certain qualities, but that is as far as reason can go, whether it is a matter of created things or of God. We may say then that God and creatures appear together as ineffable.94 III. God and the Language of the World i. The Problem of God and the Language of the World The foregoing considerations have led us to the question of language, a question that for many today constitutes first philosophy. The question is never far from Maximus’ thinking and is of great importance to his understanding of the contemplation of nature insofar as that contemplation is bound up with an account (λόγος) of the cosmos. In the section of the Ambigua that runs from Ambiguum 9 to Ambiguum 22, which I have identified as a loosely coherent set, the first and last chapters form an inclusio of dense statements regarding the possibility of speaking about God, and particularly the aporia of describing the utter unity of God with the words of diverse creation. Thus all of the philosophical reflection contained within Amb. 9–22, much of it concerned with the cosmos, is framed by the question of what it means to speak of God in the language of the world. Maximus follows this section with a section (Amb. 23– 30) that is explicitly about the use of theological language but as we shall see, the issue implied in Maximus’ reading of Gregory on these points is precisely the problem of applying language derived from descriptions of the natural world to God. I shall give a summary of the “frame” of Amb. 9–22 and then proceed to Maximus’ account of God and language in Amb. 23–30.

92

Amb. 17, 1225D6-9. Amb. 17, 1225C2-3. 94 This recalls Gregory of Nyssa’s observation that we should not think we can understand the essence of God when we cannot even understand the essence of our own minds: De hom. op. XI, PG 44.153D11-13. 93

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Gregory compares God to the sun in Or. 21: just as the sun both illumines that which is seen–thus enabling vision–and is itself what is seen as light, so too does God both enable thought and become Himself the highest content for thought. The quotation from which Maximus begins Ambiguum 9 then follows: “For [the most philosophical, piercing, and curious intellect] neither has nor ever will have something more exalted [for thought than God].”95 Maximus comments: With these words, I think that this God-minded teacher sets his student free from all comparative (συγκριτικῆς), contrastive (διακριτικῆς), and indeed any other kind of discursive relation (σχέσεως) that could be named. For those who are expert in these matters say that such a form of discourse is not qualified by any particular relation whatsoever (ἄσχετον γὰρ τὸ τοιοῦτον εἶδος τοῦ λόγου), and it is able to speak by what exists incomparably beyond all things since it possesses the power of transcendent negation.96

The context in Gregory’s oration indicates that he has been speaking about the contemplative aspect of philosophical life with its concern for the intellect’s journey to the final object of its desire, where it will ultimately find rest.97 Maximus draws this into a consideration of both thinking and language, for the λόγος as human reason and discourse is directed by what is “incomparably beyond all things (ἀσυγκρίτως ὑπὲρ πάντα εἶναι)” insofar as it is able to speak about what is beyond all things because of its “power of transcendent negation (δύναμιν ἔχον ὑπεροχικῆς ἀποφάσεως).” Because God, who is the mind’s true object of desire, is “incomparably beyond all things,” that is, does not fall under any sort of discursive procedure to which the human mind has recourse (“comparative,” “contrastive,” etc.), because God is, in fact ἄσχετον, the mind in its activity and discourse must be ἄσχετον as well. This is another extension of the movement to simplicity that holds together the practical and contemplative aspects of philosophy. If Ambiguum 9 indicates the possibility of human discourse reaching beyond its conventions to give an account of the Divine, Ambiguum 22 raises the specter of the extreme difficulty of such discourse. Maximus begins Ambiguum 22 with a quotation from Gregory that cautions of the special difficulty of theological language as compared to other kinds of discourse: “Speech about God, 95 96 97

G.Naz., Or. 21.1. Amb. 9, 1105C. G. Naz., Or. 21.1.

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inasmuch as it is more perfect, to the same degree is it more difficult to approach. There are both more issues to be apprehended and more difficult solutions.”98 The specific difficulty upon which Maximus focuses this brief Ambiguum has to do with the problem of the unity of God and the multiplicity of the world. Maximus observes that the diversity of the world goes all the way to the core of its being, that the “many things” that have come into existence are truly and utterly different from each other in their logoi, in the divinely constituted essence of their being. The question becomes then, how God, the source of the logoi and their ultimate referent, relates to them in their diversity: how [is] God, who is truly not one being among beings, but is also, in fact, all things and beyond all things, in each logos of each thing according to its own specific identity and in all the logoi, according to which all things exist, together?99

Every divine act “signifies God in His fullness through itself in its own particular way without dividing Him into parts” so that God is somehow in the logos of each individual thing that exists and in everything collectively and yet remains unchanged in His perfect simplicity. Maximus leaves this as a problem and while he has dealt with it in various ways in Ambigua 9-22, he uses this last Ambiguum of the section both to form an inlcusio with the first and as an introduction to the next section of the Ambigua, which addresses the problem of how we are to apply the language of the world to divine reality. These chapters will in turn effect a transition to the more explicitly Christological chapters of the second half of the Ambigua to John (Ambigua 31–71). ii. Christ, Concept, Language Ambigua 23–30 form a unit that follows the scope of Gregory’s third and fourth Theological Orations (Orations 29 and 30, the First and Second Orations on the Son), focusing primarily on issues of theological language. In what sense do we speak of κίνησις (motion) with respect to God (Amb. 23)? How does the begetting of the Son relate to the will of the Father, and more generally, what is the relation between God as a willing subject and His acts of will (Amb. 24)? How are we to understand the concept of cause and (divine) nature with respect to the relation between Father and Son (Amb. 25)? Is the Father the Father in virtue of His essence or of His ἐνέργεια (Amb. 26)? How is the Father also the 98 99

G. Naz., Or. 28.21. Amb. 22, 1257B3-7.

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“God” of Christ (Amb. 27)? What does it mean to apply attributes to God (Amb. 28)? How are we to comport ourselves to the names we give to the Son (Amb. 30)? As a continuation of the question of God and the language of the world in Ambiguum 22, the difficulty that Maximus addresses in various ways in this series of chapters has to do precisely with how the language we use within the realm of nature–the language of motion, causality, substance and actualization–relates to our discourse about God, and particularly about Christ the Son of the Father. These canonical questions from the Arian controversy are thus as much about the nature of language and the world as they are about the essence of God; indeed, the Cappadocians charged their radical Arian adversaries with the failure to understand precisely this point a. Ambiguum 23: Activity and Passivity Ambiguum 23, composed as a response to Gregory’s statement that “the Monad is moved (κινηθεῖσα) from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as Triad,”100 deals with a fundamental question of the relationship between God and the world: how is an unmoving, unchanging God related to a world that is defined by motion? Gregory’s quotation, in fact, appears to attribute motion to God Himself and thus provides the aporia and the direction of its resolution. Maximus begins with a straight-forward syllogism to demonstrate that the Divine is unmoved because It has no cause of Its being, but is rather the Cause of all things. All motion must have a cause, he says, and all things that are in motion must both have a cause of their motion and a cause of their being, which is their ultimate source (ἀρχή) of being. This ἀρχή is also the τέλος, the final end towards which motion leads. Anything, he continues, that moves from an ἀρχή towards its τέλος, which is a return to the ἀρχή, must be something that has come into being (γενητόν) as created by its ἀρχή, which as τέλος is the limit towards which it makes progress. Because God has no anterior cause of His being, He is not a moving piece in this cosmic dynamic of generation and teleology. He is rather the Cause who defines it as its horizon (ὁρίζει).101 The initial question provoked by Gregory’s quotation is of why Gregory seems to speak of a “moving Divinity,” but Maximus uses this initial confusion to address another question: How does an immovable God produce motion in 100 101

G.Naz., Or. 29.2. Amb. 23, 1257C9-1260A10.

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the world? We have addressed Maximus’ account of love and divine motion above to make a point not directly related to Maximus’ linguistic considerations. Maximus’ initial considerations in Amb. 23 are more to our present concern. Maximus first gives two analogies (παραδείγματα), from the concept of a craft or art and from the visibility of light, to aid in his interpretation of Gregory. An art or craft is said to be “set in motion” in something that is formed according to that art, but the art itself, in its own “constitutive logos (συνεκτικὸς λόγος)”–what it is in itself as an art–does not actually change in any way. It is simply realized in different ways in different artifacts: “It is shaped according to the form of each thing that is produced by it (καθ᾽ ἕκαστον εἶδος τῶν ὑπὸ τὴν αὐτὴν τέχνην μορφούμενος).” In the case of light, Maximus writes, “when it moves something into view light is said ‘to be moved’ (φῶς πρὸς τὸ ὁρᾶν τὴν ὄψιν κινῶν λέγεται κινεῖσθαι), although light itself is really the motivating force (κινητικόν) or moving principle (κινητόν) of all sight.”102 This is probably an indirect reference to Aristotle’s discussion of vision in the De anima, where he writes, “Without the help of light, color remains invisible. Its being color at all means precisely its having in it the power to set in movement what is already actually transparent, and, as we have seen, the actuality of what is transparent is just light ([διὸ καὶ οὐκ ὁρᾶται (τὸ χρῶμα) ἄνευ φωτός· τοῦτο γὰρ ἦν αὐτῳ τὸ χρώματι εἶναι, τὸ κινητικῷ εἶναι τοῦ κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν διαφανοῦς], ἡ δὲ ἐντελέχεια τοῦ διαφανοῦς φῶς ἐστιν).”103 This notion of the actually transparent being set in motion by color potentially allows for light, the actualization of the transparent, itself to be loosely spoken of as being moved into visibility. Earlier in the chapter, however, Aristotle regards it from the other side and recognizes that it is light itself that makes objects visible.104 For his own part, Maximus is indicating how language can slip between active and passive in our common–and even philosophical–usage of words, and within this point about language, Maximus has chosen examples that indicate how we might think of God and the world together. The metaphor of an art indicates differences of participation in and manifestation of the Divine among creatures. Just as the art of painting is manifest in different ways in different products of that art, and thus we might say that painting is “moved” or “actualized” differently in different paintings, so too is the Divine present individually–and therefore differently–in each being, though the Divine itself remains 102 103 104

Amb. 23, 1260B3-5. Aristotle, De anima II.7.419a9-11; The Basic Works of Aristotle, 549 Aristotle, De Anima II.7.418b2-3.

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unchanged: painting, as an art, does not change its principles depending upon what is painted. The image of light is directed towards the epistemological (ἐπιστημονικὸς λόγος) aspect of the question. We’ve observed how Maximus uses the phrase “in Thy light shall we see light” as an expression of how knowledge of God appears simultaneously with knowledge of the world. Here Maximus uses the image to show that while light appears to undergo modification when something “comes to light,” in fact it is the light itself that is active in making something else visible. Dionysius’ notion of God loving the world and being loved by the world, which Maximus uses in Ambiguum 23 and which we explored above, is another example of this theme. b. Ambiguum 24: Subject and Action In Ambiguum 24, Maximus turns more directly to the relationship between the Father and the Son, explaining Gregory’s refutation of the Arians on the point of the relationship between the will of the Father and the Father’s begetting of the Son. The claim Gregory is refuting is that the Son is the son, not of the Father (and therefore of the same essence as the Father) but of the will of the Father insofar as the Father’s begetting of the Son is according to, and not contrary to, the Father’s will.105 Gregory first transposes this line of thinking to the human realm and asks his adversaries if they are the offspring of their fathers or of their fathers’ will, implying that we would never say that we are the children of our fathers’ will, even if we do not deny that being begotten of our fathers is not contrary to our fathers’ will. He then considers creation itself and asks whether God created the world voluntarily or involuntarily. Again, it would be absurd to say He created against his will, but following the Arian line of thought would entail that the world does not have God but only the will of God as its Creator. It is at this point that Gregory introduces the argument from which Maximus begins Ambiguum 24: But I think that willing (θέλων) and the will (θέλησις) are different things, as are giving birth (γεννῶν) and birth (γέννησις), speaking (λέγων) and speech (λόγος), unless we have quite lost our wits. The first term of each pair pertains to the one who is moved (κινούμενος), and the second term pertains to the movement itself (ἡ κίνησις), as it were. The thing willed (τὸ θεληθέν) certainly does not belong to the will, neither does that which is born (τὸ γεννηθέν) belong to birth (for surely

105

Cf. G. Naz., Or. 29.6, 186.1-9.

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this does not follow), nor does that which is heard belong to acclamation; rather, all of these belong respectively to the one who wills, the one who gives birth, and the one who speaks. But the things of God, for whom perhaps the will to give birth (γεννᾷν) is birth itself (γέννησις), are also beyond all these.106

Maximus explains Gregory by arguing that a subject is required for the enactment of any potentiality in a being–will itself is not sufficient, since it depends upon the one willing. Moreover, the act of willing, or any other power of the soul, does not exist without the one who wills and that which is willed, just as “there is no vision without the one who sees and that which is seen, and there is no thinking without the one who thinks and that which is thought; thus there is no giving birth without the one who gives birth and that which is born.”107 Willing is a middle term that is always accompanied by the poles of the subject and the content of the willing. Of more importance for our purposes is what Maximus does with the final clause of Gregory’s statement, that “the things of God, for whom perhaps the will to give birth is birth itself, are also beyond all these.” Gregory is willing to make arguments, for rhetorical purposes, in accordance with the claims of the Arians, but his wider criticism is that their entire frame of reference for theological inquiry is wrong: “the question is absurd (τὴν ἐρώτησιν φημὶ τὸ ἄτοπον ἔχειν).”108 These discussions of will, potentialities of soul, subjects and objects of activity, and so on are said “with reference to human paradigms,” but “the begetting of the Son by the Father is even beyond willing.”109 It is not as though the Father were the willing subject, the Son the object willed, with the act of willing mediating between the two. Neither does the Father begin to will the begetting of the Son at a certain point in time. Rather, the Father and the Son have one will, just as they share the same essence and nature.110 Thus the language of willing, along with the related considerations of the subjects of activity, which pertain to the natural world, are relevant to the divine reality of the Trinity, if at all, only in a qualified sense.

106 107 108 109 110

Amb. 24, 1261B1-10; G. Naz., Or. 29.6, 188.26-33. Amb. 24, 1264A2-5. G. Naz., Or. 29.9, 194.16. Amb. 24, 1264A15-B5. Amb. 24, 1264B7-13

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c. Ambiguum 25: Subject, Predication, and Nature Ambiguum 25 addresses the question of the relationship between predication and nature: in what respect are qualities attributed to a subject? Gregory reports the Eunomian argument, that because the Father is greater than the Son insofar as He is Cause of the Son, and because He is Cause by nature, the Father must be greater by nature. Gregory responds by challenging his opponents’ understanding of how syllogisms work, and this is where Maximus picks up the argument: Why then couldn’t I, when I have asserted the proposition that the Father is greater by nature, and then assumed as a minor premise that what is greater is not absolutely so by nature (φύσει δὲ οὐ πάντως μεῖζον), or that what is Father is not absolutely so by nature, conclude that what is greater is not absolutely greater, or the Father absolutely Father?111

Gregory’s criticism is that the Eunomian argument commits a fallacy of arguing from the particular to the general in which the Eunomians unjustifiably attribute a predicate to a subject in an absolute sense. As Maximus explains, they take a predicate (“greater”) that applies specifically with respect to the fact that the Father is the Cause as Begetter of the Son and apply it to the Father without qualification. Maximus gives the example of a sage or king, who as sage, for example, is wise, but not simply as a human being, as though we could say, “human nature is wise,” because human being x (the sage) is wise.112 In the case of the Father and the Son, the Father is greater as Cause of the Son, but not absolutely. In this case, it is not even a matter of misapplying cosmic categories to the Divine but rather of misunderstanding how logic works on the cosmic level itself. d. Ambiguum 26: The Concepts of Essence and Activity Ambiguum 26 addresses another topic from the Eunomian controversy that introduces yet another philosophical concept, activity (ἐνέργεια), into the discourse on the Father and Son. Gregory reports the Eunomian dilemma that either “Father” is the name of an essence (οὐσία) or of an activity (ἐνέργεια). If “Father” names the essence, then the Son must be of a different essence, and if “Father” names an activity, then the Son must be a creature, since activity implies a producer and a product.113 Gregory initially responds by denying the 111 112 113

G. Naz., Or. 29.15, 208.7-11. Amb. 25, 1264D4-10. G. Naz., Or. 29.16, 210.2-9.

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Eunomian dichotomy, saying rather that “Father” names a relation (σχέσις), namely, how the Father is in relation to the Son. However, for the sake of argument, Gregory allows “Father” to name the essence and responds that “Father” brings “Son” along with it. He also allows “Father” to name an activity and argues that the activity is precisely the consubtantiality of the Father and Son, “even if the conception of activity being used in this context is rather strange.”114 Maximus then raises the difficulty: How does God effect (ἐνεργεῖ) the homoousion (consubstantiality)? To make sense of this, Maximus introduces a distinction between two different kinds of activity. The one that may be tolerated when considering the Father’s begetting of the Son is that one which “brings forth naturally from beings what is homogeneous, consubstantial, and the same in every respect as themselves (τὴν προάγουσαν ἐκ τῶν ὄντων φυσικῶς τὰ ὁμογενῆ καὶ ὁμοούσια καὶ ἑαυτοῖς πάντη ταὐτά).”115 As such, according to Maximus, Gregory says, “let it be of activity also,” for this kind of activity brings forth a “hypostasized and living activity” and “the self-substantial (αὐθυπόστατον) only-begotten Word of God and Son of the Father is the living Word and Power and Wisdom.”116 Maximus regards this move as a pedagogical, even a pastoral, one on the part of Gregory, to keep the Eunomians from “blaspheming about a minor point,” so that his attribution of this activity to God yet remains reserved. The second kind of activity, in which different substances act upon each other as from the “outside,” such as a craft in which a craftsman acts upon and shapes a material substance, is not applied to the begetting of the Son by the Father, which clearly transcends this kind of activity.117 We see here, as we saw with respect to the consideration of will, that Maximus is aware of the problems of applying philosophical concepts that obtain in the realm of space and time to God, whether as God relates to the world or in terms of the relation between Father and Son. Given the fact that Gregory and other Christian theologians use these concepts in their explanations and proclamations of Christian theology, the question is, how does the language of nature actually relate to the Divine?

114 115 116 117

G. Naz., Or. 29.16, 210.22-212.23. Amb. 26, 1268A1-2. Amb. 26, 1268A10-12. Amb. 26, 1268A13-B11.

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e. Ambiguum 30: Names and the Divine Maximus approaches this question in Ambiguum 30, where he considers the divine names of the Son of God, beginning from Gregory’s conclusion to his second Oration on the Son (Oration 30): You have the titles of the Son; walk through them, divinely in as much as they are exalted, sharing in the experience of them in as much as they are bodily, or rather, walk in a way that is altogether divine, so that you might become god here below, having ascended on account of the one who came down from on high for us.118

Gregory has been discussing the various ways Scripture speaks of God and then specifically of the Son of God. He shows how the titles of the Son–Wisdom, Power, Judge, Man, Christ, etc.–apply to Him in both His Divinity and in his humanity, concluding with this final exhortation to draw the human, creaturely titles up to the Divine for the fulfillment of human divinization. Maximus appropriates this to the vision of philosophical life he has articulated through the course of the Ambigua thus far: The one who has illuminated the intellect through the exalted contemplation of the intention of each of the divine names, having both remade it and led it up to the principle and spiritual logos of each, and has submitted the mentality of the flesh to the spirit by laboring for virtue, ‘having become obedient even unto death’ (Phil. 2.8), this one truly walks ‘through the divine names’ blamelessly according to both the spirit and the flesh, and travels the divine way that leads to God. One does so in an exalted manner through the mystical contemplation of the exalted names; one does so as ‘sharing in the experience of them’ when one engages in practical philosophy and is urged on by the bodily names to the region above.119

Encountering the Son of God through His names becomes here the content of philosophical life. The practical life of overcoming the passions and “submitting the mentality (φρόνημα) of the flesh to the spirit” is assimilated to Christ’s passion, in which, as Paul says, Christ became “obedient unto death.” Gregory exhorts his audience to “walk in a way that is altogether divine,” even as he has just made a distinction between the divine and human names of Christ, and Maximus incorporates this into the perspective for which he argued in Ambiguum 10, that “contemplative life is not without a share of praxis.”120

118 119 120

G. Naz., Or. 30.21, 274.32-35. Amb. 30, 1273B1-13. Amb. 30, 1273B13-15.

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Practical philosophy guides flesh beyond matter (ὕλη) and contemplation leads the intellect beyond form (εἶδος) so that the whole person, flesh and intellect, comes to transcend “the existence of beings,” which is constituted by matter and form. This state beyond matter and form describes union with the Word, who lives beyond matter and form and yet “for our sake truly came to be in matter and form from us, as we ourselves are.”121 These reflections, then, place the Son of God at the heart of every phase of philosophical life, from the struggle with the passions all the way to the highest mode of spiritual life and insight, and it is precisely the names of the Son, the ways in which He is spoken of, that provide the way. These reflections on God and the language of the world point to the limits of language and rationality in the quest to know God, but they also point in their own way to the transcendence of nature that we addressed in Chapter 5. Maximus’ interpretation of Gregory’s statements concerning the nature of the theology of the Son of God, by showing the limits of language, also indicates what is beyond language as it is conventionally conceived. Ambiguum 30 in particular indicates the possibility of a transformation of language in which the lowly names of the Son are brought up to the Divine and are thus given new life. The progress of our inquiry into how Maximus thinks the relation between God and the world, which has addressed the simultaneous appearance of the knowledge of God and of creation, the motion of the finite world in relation to the motionless God, and the application of the language of the world to God, has come to this exhortation to draw the names of the world up to the Divine. This exaltation is described by the final major theme of the contemplation of nature in Maximus’ Ambigua to John, the theme of the renewal of nature in Christ, to which we now turn.

121

Amb. 30, 1273C3-11.

Chapter 7 LOGOS–CHRIST AND THE RENEWAL OF NATURE Introduction Maximus’ varied considerations of the philosophical life and the contemplation of nature culminate in his description of the renewal of nature, which carries with it the implication of a renewal of the contemplation of nature as well. This chapter will demonstrate how Maximus thinks of the economy of salvation in the terms of his philosophy of nature. Within the scope of natural philosophy, Maximus defines the economy as God “loosing the laws of nature, using nature beyond nature within the natural order (ὑπὲρ φύσιν ἐν τοῖς κατὰ φύσιν τῇ φύσει χρώμενος),”1 and we may take this statement as a guiding concept for understanding how Maximus draws nature into his teaching on the salvation of the cosmos in Christ. I. The Contemplation of Nature and the Economy of Salvation Maximus describes the original transgression of Adam and the subsequent state of nature to which he was assimilated–procreation through seed, increase and decrease through consumption and decay–in terms of the possibility but ultimate failure of the contemplation of nature. He understands Adam’s transgression as a failure or misappropriation of the contemplation of the world so that the economy of salvation, which recapitulates and overcomes this failure, is also understood by Maximus as a renewal of nature and its contemplation in Christ. The ultimate end of “praxis,” “knowledge-filled contemplation of nature,” and “theological initiation” is the establishment of “the Christ-like state (ἡ Χριστοειδὴς 1

Amb. 31, 1280C4.

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κατάστασις)”2 or “Christ-like habit of being (τὴν Χριστοειδῆ ἕξιν)”3 in human beings (ἐν ἀνθρώποις), and thus in the world as a whole. This final chapter will trace how Maximus describes the economy in these terms, giving his account of the original human state, the transgression and subsequent condition of humanity, and then show how, by “renewing nature,” Christ Himself becomes the object and fulfillment of natural contemplation in that He unites the world to its Source in Himself and (re)forms the world into His own image. i. The Beginning is Like the End Ambiguum 45 gives a contemplation of human nature in its original state in which the ultimate place of the contemplation of nature as a part of philosophy is articulated; the Ambiguum is itself an expression of natural contemplation, in which the nature of human being is the focuse of the inquiry. Maximus begins with a quotation from Gregory’s Second Oration on Pascha (Or. 45) in which Gregory gives an account of the creation of the first human being as the combination of the first, intellectual creation, and the second, material creation. The human being is “a second world”4 that partakes fully of material reality and partially of spiritual reality. After giving a brief description of the dynamics of human existence amidst the temporal, changing creation, much of which we observed above in Chapter 4, Gregory considers the state in which the first created human being was when God placed him in paradise amongst the various plants, which Gregory takes to be the logoi of all things, and before the tree of knowledge, which Gregory asserts to be contemplation. In the midst of these considerations, Gregory makes the statement from which Maximus begins Ambiguum 45: the first human being was “naked in simplicity and in life without artifice, having no veil or defense. For it was fitting for [the human being] who was from the beginning to be such.”5 Maximus gives a number of different possible interpretations of this passage. He begins by speculating about the state of the human body in its original constitution (κρᾶσις τοῦ σώματος). Originally, the human body was not torn apart by qualities (ποιότησιν) that are contrary to and destructive of each other, but was at once removed from the process of

2 3 4 5

Amb. 32, 1284D6-1285A5. Amb. 38, 1297D5-1300A6. G. Naz., Or. 45.7. G. Naz., Or. 45.8.

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flowing in and flowing out and free of the continuous alteration that comes from both, depending on the predominance of one quality or another.6

The “nakedness” of the first human being did not mean that he was without flesh or body, but that his body was not coarse and mortal. Rather, the first human being “lived without artifice (ἀτέχνως)” and had no need of clothing or shelter because he was not yet subject to heat and cold. More generally, Maximus observes the stark difference between the human condition now and that condition as it was originally in paradise: For man now concerns himself (κινεῖται) with the irrational fantasies of the passions and is deceived by his love of pleasure. Or he is concerned with the logoi of the technical arts in order to provide for the needs of life in the midst of his circumstances. Or finally, he concerns himself with the logoi of nature from the law of nature through learning.7

None of these forms of “motion” characterized humanity in its original state, for humanity was not originally subject to the necessity of these things. Rather, the human being was characterized by simplicity and was undistracted “by anything below him or around him or adjacent to him,” being directed instead solely towards God.8 This answers to Maximus description of the περὶ αὐτόν in Amb. 8, where human being was analyzed as being consumed by what surrounds it to the forgetfulness of God. Originally, man was free of the passions and was therefore not deceived by their fantasies. He was not subject to the elements and so was under no compulsion to provide for the necessities of life through “the technical arts (αἱ τέχναι).” Finally, the human being “was wise from the contemplation of nature (τῆς περὶ τὴν φύσιν θεωρίας)” and had come to the place where “there was nothing set between God and the first human being that mediated knowledge to him.”9 The first human being thus offers us a paradigmatic example of the contemplation of nature in its pristine form. Maximus takes the “nakedness” of the first human being as an indication that his contemplation of nature was not characterized by multiplicity (τῆς περὶ φύσιν ποικίλης θεωρίας καὶ γνώσεως) in that

6 7 8 9

Amb. 45, 1353A4-10. Amb. 45, 1353C3-6. Amb. 45, 1353C9-13. Amb. 45, 1353D4-6.

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he did not need first to think in terms of the phenomena that appear to the senses in order to come to an understanding of divine things (τῆς ἐπ᾽ αἰσθήσεσι τῶν φαινομένων διανοίας πρὸς κατανόησιν τῶν θείων), for he had as his simple covering only the uniform, simple, and constitutive virtue and knowledge that pertain to the things after God.10

It is this form of contemplation that was originally excluded from the human experience of the world. The first human being, in both virtue and contemplation, existed in a state of simplicity and immediate apprehension of reality. He was “beyond the variegated method of asceticism and virtue (τῆς περὶ πρᾶξιν καὶ ἀρετὴν πολυτρόπου μεθοδείας ὑπάρχων ἐκτός), and instead possessed the undefiled logoi of the virtues as a habit (κατὰ τὴν ἕξιν).”11 This sort of immediacy of knowledge and virtue is reminiscent of the way in which the saints achieve the highest levels of philosophy “without a struggle (ἀμαχῶς)” as Maximus describes it in Ambiguum 10. Indeed, the focus of this Ambiguum is not primarily on a hypothetical state of Adam before the fall; as he says in Ambiguum 42, the first created human being was moved towards evil and emptied out the power of his nature “together with coming into being (ἅμα τῷ γενέσθαι).”12 The pristine state of humanity is conceived by Maximus first of all as a potentiality. The original work of mediation that was placed before the first human being, which Maximus discusses in Ambiguum 41 and which we shall discuss below, is all placed in the subjunctive or the optative in that text: “that he may acquire (λάβῃ) God;” “he would have made (ποιήσειεν) one earth;” “he would have made (ποιήσειεν) one sensible creation;” “he would have made (ποιήσῃ) one creation;” “he would have shown (δείξειε) [the uncreated and the created] to be one.”13 The first human being of course did not fulfill this potentiality; it is in the Word-made-human that we see the fulfillment of the original intention for creation. As we see in Ambiguum 45, this contemplation of the original state of human nature, which Maximus only considers in speculative terms, is directed towards the present circumstances of those “who want to lift themselves out of our paternal transgression by philosophic reason.”14 Such people

10 11 12 13 14

Amb. 45, 1356A11-B1. Amb. 45, 1356A7-9. Amb. 42, 1321B1-3. Amb. 41, 1305C6; 1305D6; 1305D12; 1308A12; 1308B7. Amb. 45, 1356B2-4.

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begin by completely removing the passions. They then free themselves of their concern with the logoi of the technical arts. And finally they look beyond (ὑπερκύψαντες) natural contemplation in order to fix their attention upon immaterial knowledge, which possesses neither form that takes shape in the realm of sensation nor notion that can be captured by the spoken word.15

As we saw in Ambiguum 10, the task before humanity is to transcend the passions, traverse the “cloud or veil” of material existence, and come to union with God. Here Maximus presents us with a primordial vision of the first created human being, but this vision serves as a τέλος for human existence, that towards which those who seek to overcome the original transgression of Adam move. In this way Maximus continues the project of Origen’s speculations, even as he refuses many of the significant details of Origen’s (and Evagrius’) account. Both Origen and Evagrius are concerned to give an account of the theory of ascetic and contemplative life and they use speculation about the primordial state of creation as a way of defining the goal of created being, so that “the end is like the beginning.” Moreover, this mode of contemplating the original state of nature–in this case human nature–may be extended more broadly to the contemplation of nature in general. Maximus maintains the dynamic sense of φύσις when he considers the nature of beings. φύσις implies growth, direction, teleology, so to contemplate nature is to contemplate that into which nature grows, and ultimately, as we have seen in many ways, nature grows towards God. For this reason Maximus does not contemplate nature without reference to the divine origin and goal of nature. Therefore, while created nature and God are not identical, the contemplation of created nature is absolutely inseparable from the contemplation of God. Whether or not the opposite holds, that is, whether God can be contemplated without creation, is a more difficult question. On the one hand, we have seen how Maximus envisions precisely a διάβασις, a movement through the created world towards God. However, as he says here in Ambiguum 45, the natural, original state of human being is such that the first created man “did not need first to think in terms of the phenomena that appear to the senses in order to come to an understanding of divine things.” This immediacy of knowledge of divine reality, which Maximus here calls τὰ μετὰ θεόν and should be understood as referring to the divine goodness, wisdom, providence, etc., points to the tran-

15

Amb. 45, 1356B4-10.

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scendence of natural contemplation, which Maximus has set as the final step in one’s emergence from the “paternal transgression.” So, while Maximus’ speculations about the condition of human nature in its original state provide a paradigm for the contemplation of nature, in terms both of the natural human potential for the contemplation of nature and Maximus’ own approach to contemplating human nature with reference to its origin and goal, the contemplation of nature as such is finally transcended and all thought moves away from the material and changeable world and fixes itself wholly on “immaterial knowledge” of divine things. The contemplation of nature as we know it now, which proceeds “through learning (διὰ μάθησιν),” and directs the motion of thought “around the logoi of nature, in accordance with the law of nature (περὶ φυσικοὺς λόγους ἐκ τοῦ νόμου τῆς φύσεως),” is not an original part of human motivation.16 Maximus considers the contemplation of the natural logoi of beings alongside the human compulsion towards pleasure and towards providing for its needs through the use of the technical arts (making clothing, building houses, etc.). However, in its natural state, humanity “was in need of only one thing for [its] perfection: an unimpeded movement driven by the full power of his love towards what is above him–and this is God.”17 Because the human being preferred what was below him,18 the created world and his own passions and needs came to intervene between God and humanity whereas the state for which humanity had been created was one of immediacy with God. ii. The Transgression of Adam Maximus interprets the “loss” of this “original state” in Adam’s transgression in terms of his attempt to know the world by sensation alone and not according to God. In other words, Adam’s transgression–“the fall”–is understood by Maximus in this context to consist of Adam’s choice not to see “the divine fire existing in the substance of things,” not to see the bush as burning, as it were. In failing to contemplate nature accordance to its true nature as sustained by divine reality, Adam “fashioned a living death for himself,” because, as Maximus speculates, he thought life depended upon food and the flux of material bodies so that he took and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and 16 17 18

Amb. 45, 1353C6-9. Amb. 45, 1353C11-13. Amb. 42, 1348A7-8.

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evil rather than relying upon “the bread which cometh down from heaven” (Jn 6.33-35). In this way, Adam became the forefather of those who fall into the contemplation of “fantasies that have not been created (οὐ ποιητέων), are unnatural (ἀφυσίκων), and non-intellectual (ἀνοήτων).” 19 The tree, which stands for the knowledge of reality, was obviously a natural creation according to the narrative, but in Maximus’ view, Adam’s sin was to think of it in a way that did not comport with its nature. It thus became unnatural for him, something with no intellectual reality (ἀνοήτων), even a non-entity (οὐ ποιητέων). Fantasies incite the passions and draw the mind away from the contemplation of what is and has come to be naturally according to the providence and economy of God. The removal (ἀφαίρεσις) of such false notions about the world causes philosophy to be “secured for the pious.” The corruption and restoration of human nature–the economy of salvation–is thus bound to the question of the contemplation of nature. The very means of the παράβασις (transgression)–natural reality and the possibility of knowledge–become the means for revealing and bringing about the διάβασις (traversal) to God.20 In contrast to the fall of Adam’s understanding, in which he mistakenly invested the flux of material existence with an autonomous life-sustaining force, a true contemplation of nature reveals that the mixture and flow of bodies into each other actually demonstrates the finitude and corruptibility of the world: For, by thoroughly inspecting the present world in a systematic way (ἐπιστημόνως), as much as is possible, and having wisely elaborated the conceptually enfolded logos (τὸν συνεπτυγμένον κατ᾽ ἔννοιαν σοφῶς ἐξαπλώσαντες λόγον) of the bodies that are diversely joined to one another in the world, the saints have discovered the bodies’ faculties of sensation and perception and its universal categories, as well as sensuous, perceptible, particular things, all of which are contained by and related to each other in terms of their correspondence to a certain property that pertains to each.21

This understanding of the qualities of created things leads to the recognition that the generation and continuity of individual things are supported by the process of the combination and decomposition of parts and wholes. Thus, the world is composed through corruption and mutation and this observation leads to the recognition that the world is unstable and does not “persist of necessity 19 20 21

Amb. 37, 1296B8-11. Amb. 10, 1156C1-1157A13. Amb. 10, 1169B6-12.

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in an unbroken sequence.” Adam, however, looked to this process of combination and decomposition for his source of life and so took corruption into himself. In contrast to this self-destructive vision of the world, Maximus sees the world as a harmonious, consistent, ordered whole that maintains its cyclical rhythms and requires no addition or difference to exist “more beautifully” than it does now. The saints have observed the stability, arrangement, and placement of what has come into being, as well as their way of being, according to which everything is established in accordance with its own form, unmixed and free from all disorder–the revolution of the stars, which proceeds in a uniform way and never alters in any way; the cycle of the year, which proceeds in an orderly manner, wherein the stars are restored to the very place from which they started; the equal number of nights and days in a year, each increasing and decreasing along with its portion, with their increase and decrease proceeding by neither a greater nor a lesser measure– from all of these they justly believe that the one whom they recognize to be God and Fashioner of the universe is the one who makes provision for what exists. 22

When the world partakes of God and does not feed on itself, it is able to persist and maintain its unity along with its distinctions. God “distributes Himself without division as diverse portions to all those who are worthy of grace in proportion to the quality and quantity of each one’s virtue,” and this distribution is not a decomposition or division even though “He appears individually when each person partakes of Him.”23 This is not, however, the world Adam strove to acquire through his partaking of the fruit; he sought a world independent of divine reality and dependent on its own corruption and alteration for the continuity of its existence. The world as it really is maintains its order and rational progression, exhibiting the cyclic continuity that, for Maximus, leads directly to an awareness of “the Fashioner of all things”: Who, seeing the beauty and grandeur of the creations of God, does not immediately understand (οὐκ εὐθὺς ἐννοήσει) that God is the Originator of their existence as Source, Cause, and Maker of what exists, and run in thought toward Him alone?24

22 23 24

Amb. 10, 1176B12-C14. Amb. 10, 1172C1-7. Amb. 10, 1176D3-7.

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The immediacy of this understanding is important. While Maximus does make arguments about causality, which construct a chain of reasoning from observable effects to necessary causes, such arguments are analyses after the fact of the fundamental experience of the beauty of creation itself. So, we have the world as “ungovernable (ἀκράτητον)” and in “constant flux,”25 a world that feeds on itself to its own corruption, a world from which the ascetic voluntarily estranges himself; but we also have the world of beauty and grandeur, a universe that revolves with perfectly measured motion, where time unfolds rationally with no fluctuation. These two orientations derive from the two basic elements of philosophy, praxis and contemplation. The notion of the world as “ungovernable” comes from Maximus’ interpretation of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16.19-31) in which he argues that the rich man had possession neither of this life, because of its constant change, nor of the life to come, since his desire was only for this world.26 Lazarus, however, endured estrangement from the world and even his own body for the sake of the world to come. This interpretation comes within a consideration of the need for purification of soul and body and the exercise of virtue. In this context, the world, when taken on its own, becomes the material of ascetical endeavor and thus is regarded as a mass of unstable and corruptible beings that devour one another in order to sustain the process of generation. It is this world as opposed to the age to come. When the saint recognizes the world as unstable and accepts alienation from the world, which, as we showed in Chapter 4, is a fundamental human experience of the world, the saint does not attempt to possess the world and the world therefore gives of itself freely and prolifically. The saint does not attempt to grasp the world and keep it from passing away; the world therefore reveals its inner coherence and endurance, its harmonious cycle of procession and return. The saint has not been ravished by the initial beauty of the world; he “runs” through it, we might even say “into” it, to its inner meaning, which is divine reality itself; the true, final necessity of the world’s beauty is therefore made manifest. Maximus thus reiterates in the context of the transgression of Adam his understanding of the relationship between the practical/ethical life, which has the acquisition of ἀπάθεια as its end, and θεωρία φυσική, whose path traces a way through the world and beyond it (διάβασις ὑπὲρ κόσμον). It is with-

25 26

Amb. 10, 1172B6-7. Amb. 10, 1169D13-1172D8.

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drawal and the acquisition of ἀπάθεια that allow the saint to see the world as it is in its harmonious functioning, in contrast to Adam, who grasped for a changeability he thought would sustain him. iii. The Renewal of Nature The heart of Maximus’ contemplation of nature is his analysis of the renewal, or transformation of nature. In his Oration on Theophany (Or. 38), Gregory says of Christ’s birth, “The laws of nature are dissolved (νόμοι φύσεως καταλύονται). The world above must be filled. Christ orders it. Let us not resist.”27 The coming of Christ in the economy of salvation inaugurates a new way of considering nature and its laws. But what precisely are these laws of nature and how does their dissolution relate to the contemplation of nature itself? Maximus gives two accounts of the law of nature in Ambiguum 31, which address the question from two different perspectives. First, he takes the laws of nature as referring to “the laws of conception through seed and birth through corruption.”28 Nature in this since has to do precisely with nativity, birth. In the birth of Christ the most basic aspects of natural birth, seed and the suffering of birthing a child, are absent in “a paradox” that “goes outside of every law and logos of nature.”29 This miraculous dissolution of nature by “the Maker of nature” (ὁ ποιητὴς τῆς φύσεως) was necessary, Maximus tells us, for the sake of the restoration of nature through its Maker. Here Maximus regards nature from the perspective of the disobedience of Adam, who introduced irrationality into human succession by his sin. In fact, the “first laws of nature” were dissolved by Adam’s disobedience, so that “the world below” was filled by fleshly birth in corruption and a new law of nature was framed by the introduction of sin and corruption into nature. Christ the new Adam, then, as Word (Λόγος) “dissolves the laws of irrationality (ἀλογίας) that had been brought into nature because of sin” and establishes the law of spiritual generation, which fills “the world above.”30 This first analysis of the laws of nature is given from within the horizon of nature as the process of generation and (after Adam) decay. The second

27 28 29 30

G. Naz., Or. 38.2, 106.9-10. Amb. 31, 1276A3-4. Amb. 31, 1276A11-12. Amb. 31, 1276C2-13.

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analysis given by Maximus regards the law of nature from the opposite side, from the perspective of beings in “the unwavering and unchangeable constancy of the logos according to which [they] exist and have come into being.”31 In this usage, the law of nature “keeps the logos of nature unalterable” and “maintains its immutable place as it has been established.”32 Nature here is not colored with the corruption of sin as in the previous analysis. It refers, rather, to what things are concretely, hypostatically, as created beings. What does dissolving the laws of nature mean in this context? Maximus’ response considers the incarnation not in terms of the virginity and incorruption of Christ’s mother but in terms of nature as circumscribed by time, space, and motion. The one who has established beings in nature, who Himself exists beyond nature, does not act in accordance with nature even though His actions are on behalf of beings that live under nature. Nevertheless, the one beyond nature really entered nature, though in a way that did not bring any motion, change, of circumscription to His Divinity as Divinity; neither did His becoming flesh and entering nature “take away anything of our nature in any way.”33 When considered within the perspective of the contemplation of nature, this typically Chalcedonian expression reveals how “God looses the laws of nature, using nature beyond nature in the natural order (ὑπὲρ φύσιν ἐν τοῖς κατὰ φύσιν τῇ φύσει χρώμενος).”34 Specifically, God uses human nature beyond its natural limitations and draws it into communion with the Divine. Maximus asserts that this does not change human nature in its nature but that it does “loose” (λύειν) or “dissolve” (καταλύειν) the law of nature. We observe here a distinction in Maximus’ thinking about the nature of things. On the one hand, there is the natural framework in which a thing exists: the conditions of its coming into being and its location in space and time. On the other hand, there is what we often think of as the nature of the thing itself, its logos, in Maximus’ terminology. Indeed, it is precisely the logos of nature that is kept unchangeable by the law of nature. Thus, Maximus thinks that the nature of something–and here the focus is explicitly on human nature–as its logos can be drawn beyond its natural framework of coming to be and passing away, the limitations of matter and form, etc., towards the Divine in a union

31 32 33 34

Amb. 31, 1280A5-6. Amb. 31, 1280A9-12. Amb. 31, 1280B10-11. Amb. 31, 1280C4-6.

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that dissolves nature as limiting structure without changing nature as logos. The logos establishes something as what it is but also determines the course of a thing’s development; the logos is a principle but also a τέλος to be realized. It is the logos that remains when a nature is “instituted anew” so that while a thing remains what it is, its “nature is actualized and acts in a way that goes beyond what has been ordained for it (τὴν φύσιν ἐνεργουμένην τε καὶ ἐνεργοῦσαν ὑπὲρ τὸν ἑαυτῆς θεσμόν).”35 Ambiguum 41 continues the theme of the renewal of nature as Maximus interprets Gregory’s famous phrase, “Natures are instituted anew, and God becomes human.”36 He shows through the course of his demonstration how Christ, in becoming human, is placed at the center of the cosmos as the one in whom all of the differences and divisions of the universe are united. Maximus begins his analysis with the articulation of a five-fold division of all of reality into pairs of polar opposites (τὰ ἄκρα): the division between created and uncreated, the division between intellectual and sensual aspects of creation, the division of sensual creation into heaven and earth, the division of earth into paradise and inhabited world (οἰκουμένη), and the division of the human being (i.e. the one who inhabits the inhabited world) into male and female.37 Maximus then places the human being at the center of the natural world and shows how his “mode of being” was “the very reason for why divisions were first brought into being (ὁ κατὰ τὴν αἰτίαν τῆς τῶν διῃρημένων γενέσεως συμπληρούμενος τρόπος),”38 namely to unify the extremes of reality: male and female, paradise and inhabited world, earth and heaven, sensual and intellectual reality, and ultimately creation and Creator. Maximus tells us that this work of unification was the original purpose of human existence. By “thoroughly expelling the property of male and female from [human] nature by the most dispassionate state of divine virtue” the human being overcomes the division–between male and female–that is closest to him. The logos of human being is not divided between male and female and in the basic act of knowledge of the logoi of creation, which coincides with selfknowledge in this case, the first division of the cosmos is transcended:

35

Amb. 42, 1341D1-9. G. Naz., Or. 39.13. 37 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 331-427, gives an analysis of this five-fold division within the wider context of Maximus’ works and the antecedent tradition. 38 Amb. 41, 1305B6-7. 36

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because of the perfect knowledge of his own particular logos according to which he exists (as I have said), [the human being] is both shown as and becomes simply a human being in accordance with the divine purpose, and is not divided by the names of “male” and “female.”39

Once again, virtue and knowledge are bound together at this first stage of cosmic reunification. The knowledge of the human logos comes through virtue. The next two levels of reunification likewise come through a “sanctified” and “virtuous way of life.” Once paradise and the inhabited world are no longer distinguished for a human being, when one has one’s habitation precisely in paradise, then one begins to transcend earthly existence to unite earth to heaven. The state of “heaviness,” in which one is “dragged down or held down to the earth,” is transcended by an angelic way of life, so that the human being “mounts up to God…as though sharing a common path with the angels.”40 The fourth step, uniting the sensual and intellectual aspects of creation, reintroduces knowledge: by uniting the intellectual and sensual realities with each other in knowledge equal to that of the angels, the human being makes the whole of creation one creation undivided for himself into what is known and what is unknown, for his knowledge-filled understanding of the logoi of beings becomes perfectly equal to the understanding of the angels.41

This level of unity describes the summit of knowledge of the world, where the logoi of created things are transparent to the human intellect as they are for the angels. But what does Maximus mean when he says that creation is undivided “into what is known and what is unknown (μὴ διαιρουμένην κατὰ τὴν γνῶσιν καὶ τὴν ἀγνωσίαν)”? According to a Platonic perspective in which only intellectual realities can be known, we may say that Maximus is asserting that the sensuous world is no longer confined to the realm of ignorance but rather becomes knowable even as the intellectual is knowable. Within the Evagrian framework, where the four elements and five senses will be transmuted and transcended in the course of the spiritual life,42 we might see this unification

39

Amb. 41, 1305C13-D4. Amb. 41, 1308A7-9. 41 Amb. 41, 1308A9-15. 42 Evag. Pont., KG I.15: “When the four [elements] will be removed, the five [senses] will also be removed…;” KG I.16: “…the one who has been separated from the four [elements] is also delivered from the five [senses].” 40

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of the sensuous and the intellectual as the intellectualization of the sensual. This does comport with what Maximus says elsewhere about the ascent through the material to the spiritual and about the assimilation of the bodily senses to the intellect by means of reason, but, as we see in his Christological explanation of the fivefold mediation of the cosmos, the reality of sensation does not cease to be sensuous when brought into union with the intellectual: “[Christ] united the sensual and intellectual realities by traversing in sequence all the divine and intellectual ranks of heaven in soul and body, that is, with our complete nature.”43 The material world, when united with the intellectual, is no longer the realm of darkness, heaviness, and ignorance. It too comes to be filled with the light of knowledge so that it may be truly affirmed as “the wisdom concerning me.” Finally, the human being is to unite the created to the uncreated in his “complete interpenetration” of God, in which “he receives the fullness of God Himself instead of his own self (ὅλον αὐτὸν ἀντιλαβὼν ἑαυτοῦ τὸν θεόν)” and becomes “everything that God is, without identity of essence.”44 In pursuing creation to its end, the human being comes to God, who is the goal of the motion of moving things, the firm and immovable stability of those that are born towards Him, and is the limit and invisible and infinite boundary of every limit, ordinance, law, logos, intellect, and nature.45

This is a strong statement of the identity of the created world as found in God and it raises once again the question of the relationship between God and the world. As we have seen, Maximus is able to speak of the world as the embodiment of God, as the self-multiplication of God, as symbolic manifestation of divine reality. In the present context, God is precisely the limit of the world, the one who gives definition and direction to cosmic motion. As such the world drives the mind inexorably towards God when the mind seeks the world’s laws, logoi, and nature. To address this issue more thoroughly, we shall examine the five-fold division of reality in detail. It has been suggested that the idea of the Porphyrian tree stands behind much of Maximus’ thought on the differentiation and unity of the cosmos, and

43 44 45

Amb. 41, 1309C4-8. Amb. 41, 1308B9-11. Amb. 41, 1308B13-C3.

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particularly here in Ambiguum 41.46 Indeed, we may render Maximus’ description of the divisions of the cosmos schematically in a way reminiscent of the Byzantine handbooks of logic that were in use in Maximus’ own day, some of which were (almost certainly erroneously) attributed to Maximus himself.47 The most general term Maximus gives for reality is ἡ πάντων τῶν γεγονότων ὑπόστασις, “the substance of all things that have come into being.” Rendering Maximus’ cosmic differentiation in the form of a Porphyrian Tree gives the following scheme: ἡ πάντων τῶν γεγονότων ὑπόστασις (the substance of all things that have come into being) τὰ νόητα (intellectual reality)

τὰ αἰσθητά (sensual reality)

τὰ αἰσθητά ὁ οὐρανός (heaven)

ὁ παράδεισος (paradise)

ἡ γῆ (earth)

ἡ γῆ ἡ οἰκουμένη (inhabited world)

ἡ οἰκουμένη τὸ ἄρσεν (male) τὸ θῆλυ (female) This tree only represents four of the five divisions that are said to distinguish “the substance of everything that has come into being,” for it is unclear precisely how we should think of the fifth (or first) division, namely that between uncreated and created nature, with respect to the other four. Uncreated nature cannot be said to belong to the substance of everything that has come into being since it has not, as uncreated, come into being. Indeed, Maximus seems to think of the division between created and uncreated as a 46 Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology, 81ff., where the author uses the Porphyrian Tree as a way of explaining Maximus’ doctrine of the λόγοι of creation; Melchisedek Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 138-141. 47 Mossman Roueché, “Byzantine Philosophical Texts of the Seventh Century,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 23 (1974), 61-76; Roueché, “A Middle Byzantine Handbook of Logic Terminology,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 29 (1980), 71-98. The handbooks attributed to Maximus are found in manuscripts containing his authentic works and so Roueché suggests that the handbooks in question were most likely found amongst Maximus’ papers after his death and subsequently attributed to him.

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division that separates created nature from uncreated nature (διαίροῦσαν τῆς ἀκτίστου φύσεως τὴν κτιστὴν καθόλου φύσιν), where the genitive (τῆς ἀκτίστου) is to be understood as a genitive of separation: the first division “divides the whole of created nature from the uncreated nature.”48 In other words, the first division, which does characterize the substance of everything that has come into being, is not internal to that substance. How then should we understand this division, and how was humanity supposed to unify the division if the division is not internal to the substance from which its own nature is derived? The idea of man as σύνδεσμος φυσικός–a natural bond–for all created things is clear: man has both intellect and sensation, which is the most general distinction amongst generated things, and so he contains all subsequent distinctions within himself. As Maximus says, the human being “exhibits the way of being that is the very reason for why divisions were first brought into being,”49 that is, the way of being that naturally unifies what is divided. What then of the division between created and uncreated? If we cannot place one of the two extreme terms (τὰ ἄκρα)–i.e. uncreated nature–within the substance of all things that have come into being, then how is this division a part of that substance? First, we may say that the division that divides creation from the uncreated itself came into being with creation, insofar as the division requires the second of the two terms for it to act as a division. In this sense, the division itself is internal to, or perhaps better, “on the surface of,” the created substance of all things. Second, we should consider Maximus’ characterization of this division as “ignorance (ἄγνοια):” For they say that God, who has produced the splendid arrangement of all beings by his goodness, is not immediately manifest to creation–either in terms of what He is or His manner of being–and therefore they say that the division in this case, which distinguishes creation from God, is ignorance: because what naturally divides these things from each other has no single unified essence and cannot be given one definition that always holds true, they leave it unexpressed (Φασὶ γὰρ τὸν θεὸν ἀγαθότητι πεποιηκότα τῶν ὄντων ἀπάντων λαμπρὰν διακόσμησιν, μὴ αὐτόθεν αὐτῇ καταφανῆ γενέσθαι τινὰ καὶ ὀποῖον εἶναι, τὴν περὶ τοῦτο τὴν κτίσιν τοῦ θεοῦ διακρίνουσαν ἄγνοιαν διαίρεσιν λέγοντες. Τὴν γὰρ

48 49

Amb. 41, 1304D7-10; Gersh makes this point, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, 237 n.152. Amb. 41, 1305B6-7.

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φυσικῶς ἀλλήλων ταῦτα διαιροῦσαν, μηδέποτε δεχομένην εἰσ μίαν οὐσίαν ἕνωσιν, ὡς τὸν ἕνα καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν μὴ δυναμένην ἐπιδέξασθαι λόγον εἴασαν ἄῤῥητον).50

This notion of ignorance brings us clearly within the realm of the thought of the Areopagite. It is not simply that we do not know the unknowable God, though Maximus does affirm this as well when he says that we leave the nature of the divide between created and uncreated “unexpressed.” As Dionysius teaches, encounter with the God beyond being can only be described as ignorance. Dionysius, like the Cappadocians, uses the image of Moses ascending Mt. Sinai as an image of the ascent to knowledge. When Moses transcends all created things, “what is seen and what sees (τῶν ὁρωμένων καὶ τῶν ὁρώντων),” he enters the “darkness of ignorance (τὸν γνόφον τῆς ἀγνωσίας),” lays aside all active knowledge, and belongs no longer to himself or anything other than the one who is beyond all things (πᾶς ὢν τοῦ πάντων ἐπέκεινα καὶ οὐδενός, οὔτε ἑαυτοῦ οὔτε ἑτέρου).51 Approaching the indefinable limit between created and uncreated reality, which Maximus identifies with ignorance, is precisely to approach the pinnacle of the ascent to God, an ascent that passes through the contemplation of created things. To cross the threshold one must abandon all γνῶσις, or more precisely, abandon the distinction between γνῶσις and ἀγνωσία, since the one towards whom the ascent leads is not only beyond knowledge but beyond ignorance (ὑπεράγνωστον) as well.52 We also see this theme of entering the place of ignorance (τὸ ἄγνωστον), the place “where God is,” in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, where Gregory defines the way to this ignorance as leading through “the contemplation of beings (ἐκ τῆς θεωρίας τῶν ὄντων).”53 The human being, even in his capacity for ignorance, is the “natural bond” holding all the extreme terms of the cosmos together. The created world is finally united to the uncreated through love (δι᾽ ἀγάπης) when the human being “shows them to be one and the same in his possession of grace (ἕν καὶ ταὐτὸν δείξειε κατὰ τὴν ἕξιν τῆς χάριτος),”54 and in this way Maximus draws God and the world into unity. It is love, not γνῶσις, or perhaps love as γνῶσις, that unites created and uncreated. The parallel reductions of soul to intellect and to love indicate that the reality transcending knowledge and ignorance is love, which

50 51 52 53 54

Amb. 41, 1304D11-1305A8. Ps. Dion. Areo., Myst. theol. I.3, 144.10-13. Ps. Dion. Areo., Myst. theol. I.1, 141.2. G. Nyss., Vita Mo., II.169, 216.1-9. Amb. 41, 1308B5-8.

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Maximus identifies with God Himself. God moves the world and is Himself “moved” towards the world precisely in terms of love, which Maximus, as we have seen in Ambiguum 23, places at the center of the cosmic process. This process of cosmic–and super-cosmic–reunification was set as the natural destiny of human existence. Because the first created human being failed in this task and actually separated creation rather than uniting it, he “very nearly returned wretchedly to non-being once again” and human nature had to be “instituted anew” for the sake of the original purpose of human existence. Thus Maximus places Christ, the incarnate Word, as the one who gathers all created things to Himself, since it was Christ “in whom they were created” (Col 1.16) in the beginning.55 Maximus shows how Christ progressively overcomes the five-fold division in His own life. His birth from a virgin, in which He “united us with ourselves,”56 overcomes the division between male and female; His words to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23.43), reunite paradise and the inhabited world; His ascension unites earth and heaven; His traversal of the intellectual powers of heaven in the body unites the intellectual and the sensual; and coming to the presence of God as a human being overcomes the final division between creation and Creator. In this way, Christ shows that “all of creation exists as one, like another human being (καθάπερ ἄνθρωπον ἄλλον);”57 indeed, Christ Himself comes before us as the unified world that is itself united to its uncreated Cause. Christ becomes the constitutive logos, as well as the external manifestation, of the unity of the cosmos and thus guarantees the logical unity of all things. Having made this initial demonstration of Christ as the unity of all creation, Maximus gives an account of the logical coherence of all the particular things in creation in which he makes use of the categories of substance, genus, species, difference, property, and accident to show how diverse things partake of unity: For all things that are distinguished from each other by their own individual differences are united as a whole (καθόλου) and generically (γενικῶς) by the identities they have in common (κοιναῖς ταὐτότησιν), and are pressed towards unity and identity with each other by a generic logos of nature (γενικῷ τινι λόγῳ φύσεως),

55 56 57

Amb. 41, 1308D2-11. Amb. 41, 1309D8. Amb. 41, 1312A14-15.

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such that the genera, in being united to each other in the same substance (κατὰ τὴν οὐσίαν), are one, identical, and undivided.58

In sharing a common logos of nature, things that fall under the same substance may be said to be “one, identical, and undivided.” Moreover, the universal substance is not divided up among the various particulars, for “every genus exists in unity, as a whole, and without division according to its own logos in the individual things that are included in it, and the whole is observed generically in each individual thing.”59 This mode of unity obtains on the level of species and accidents as well: “The individuals of a species, in virtue of their mutual commonality, are entirely one and the same with each other, are indistinguishable because of their identity of nature, and are free from all difference,” and “the accidents predicated of a subject, in being combined with each other, are a unitary reality, not one that is scattered throughout the subject.”60 The unity of the cosmos as a whole, which we are shown in Christ, is recapitulated at each level of reality, from the unified substance of everything that has come into being to the accidents that attend particular things, so that the recapitulation of all things in Christ is refracted in all of reality and thus all of reality is united to Him in partaking of this unity. In support of this, Maximus cites a passage from Dionysius’ Divine Names in which Dionysius affirms the unity of parts as a whole, accidents as a subject, individuals as a species, species as genus, and so on: plurality is not at all without participation in unity. Rather that which is many in parts is one as a whole, that which is many in accidents is one in subject, that which is many in number or in potentialities is one in species, that which is many in species is one in genus, that which is many in processions is one in its source; there is nothing that has no share in unity61

Maximus then reintroduces the language of the logoi of individual things and of generic and universal categories, gathering the “logoi of the more generic and universal” under “wisdom (σοφία)” and the “logoi of particular things (τῶν μερικῶν)” under “mindfulness (φρόνησις).”62 We encountered this pair of wisdom and mindfulness in our consideration of Ambiguum 10 and the relation 58 59 60 61 62

Amb. 41, 1312C3-11. Amb. 41, 1312C14-D2. Amb. 41, 1312D4-10. Ps. Dion. Areo., Div. nom. XIII.2, 227.13-17. Amb. 41, 1313A12-15.

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between practical and theoretical philosophy. There Maximus identified wisdom with contemplation and mindfulness with praxis. In an analogous way, Maximus in this context identifies φρόνησις with the diversity and particularity of individual things and σοφία with the more general and universal and Maximus unites both of these in Christ, who is “the wisdom and mindfulness of the God and Father.” He is “the natural Fashioner and Provider (δημιουργός καὶ προνοητής) of all things,” and “holds the universal realities of beings together by the power of wisdom and encompasses their many parts by the mindfulness of His knowledge.”63 Taken together with Maximus’ use of the terms in Ambiguum 10, this places Christ at the center of nature and of philosophy in its practical and theoretical aspects. In speaking of the common, generic logos shared by all things that have come into being, we have thought it in terms of the one substance (ἡ πάντων τῶν γεγονότων ὑπόστασις) analyzed in its various genera and species, which constitute the world. However, the other side of this remains to be considered, for since Maximus defines this precisely as the substance of what has come into being, he defines the “one logos” that is “common to all things” in this way: “that the phrase ‘it was not’ is an older description for [creation] than the assertion of its existence (τὸ οὐκ ἦν τοῦ εἶναι πρεσβύτερον ἔχουσα [ἡ κτίσις]).”64 We recall that at the beginning of Greek philosophy Parmenides denied the possibility of the thought of non-being and of the emergence of reality from non-being to being, and as we saw in the debates regarding the eternity of the world amongst pagan and Christian Neoplatonists, the problem of conceiving of the movement from non-existence into being resides at the heart of Greek philosophical cosmology. Maximus of course argues that the world had a beginning, that it has its origins in non-being. However, there is a sense in which he affirms one aspect of Parmenides’ insight, that non-being cannot be thought. We have seen that Maximus divides the created world from the uncreated Creator with ignorance so that the Creator’s act of creation out of nothing is fundamentally incomprehensible to the created mind. Elsewhere Maximus accuses the pagan Greek philosophers of refusing to acknowledge the power and goodness of God who has created out of nothing simply because they cannot comprehend how some-

63 64

Amb. 41, 1313B4-9. Amb. 41, 1312B6-7.

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thing can come from nothing. There are good arguments in favor of there being a beginning to the world, or at least against the eternity of the world, which we observed with Philoponus against Aristotle and Proclus. However, Maximus is also willing to allow the mystery, even the impossibility, of the thought of non-being to stand as a limit to human thought: “Do not say, ‘for what reason has [God] fashioned [the universe] now, if he is always good?’ For I tell you, the inscrutable wisdom of eternal being is not subject to human knowledge.”65 We return here to the ignorance that both separates and unites the creature and Creator. Nature is renewed when all of creation is united in Christ and thus to the uncreated beyond knowledge and ignorance. II. Christ and the Contemplation of Nature Maximus sees the renewal of nature and the renewal of the contemplation of nature in which the world is contemplated together with its Cause in Christ as the economy that overcomes and heals the original transgression of Adam. Because this transgression of contemplating the world in a false way is presented by Scripture as an act of eating, Maximus very fittingly considers the economy of salvation in the same terms, terms that are subtly, but definitely Eucharistic. We might say on the other hand that Maximus understands partaking of Christ in this section in terms of the contemplation of nature. The disciple comes to partake of Christ as the means of partaking of the renewed knowledge of the world, and the renewed knowledge of the world is none other than the transfigured cosmos that appears together with the Divinity of Christ. In this sequence of thought, Maximus shows how the Word of God plants Himself in the world and as the “Sun of righteousness” causes Himself to grow in the world until He becomes “the substance in the entirety of things (τὸν ἐν τοῖς ὅλοις λόγον τοῖς πράγμασιν οὐσίαν γίνεσθαι).” The disciples then partake of the world as body of Christ and the body of Christ as world. i. The Year of the Lord In Ambiguum 46, Maximus returns to the Dionysian concept of divine names and gives a concrete example of what he calls a natural contemplation of a name of the Lord. Maximus begins from a passage in Gregory’s Second Oration 65 Cap. car. IV.3. We recall that this question of the beginning (or lack thereof) of the universe is identified by Kant as the first of the irresolvable antinomies of pure reason, cf. “The Antinomy of Pure Reason” in Critique of Pure Reason, bk. 2, chap. 2 of the “Transcendental Dialectic,” A 405/B 432ff.

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on Pascha in which the Theologian refers to Christ as “the Sun of righteousness” (quoting Mal 4.2): “[He is] one year old as the Sun of righteousness, beginning from there (ἐκεῖθεν, referring to the Father on Maximus’ interpretation), circumscribed by being seen.”66 Maximus begins: Our savior has many titles and the way of understanding how they refer can lead in many different ways when we contemplate the purpose of each one, for it is possible for the many thoughts that come through natural contemplation when something is taken as a title of the Lord–in the sense that the Lord is the paradigm for that which the title names–to be applied to Him (Πολλαὶ τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν εἰσιν αἱ προσηγορίαι, καὶ, πολύτροπος ὁ ἐφ᾽ ἑκάστῃ κατὰ τὴν αὐτῆς ἐπίνοιαν τῆς κατὰ θεωρίαν ἀναγωγῆς καθέστηκε τρόπος, διὰ τὸ πολλὰς κατὰ τὴν φυσικὴν θεωρίαν τοῦ παραδειγματικῶς εἰς προσηγορίαν τοῦ κυρίου λαμβανομένου πράγματος ἐπιδέχεσθαι δύνασθαι θεωρημάτων ἐπιβολάς).67

What follows, then, is an example of natural contemplation in which Maximus shows how the Lord may receive the name of “Sun.” He begins the contemplation with a description of the “uninterrupted motion of time.” Starting from Gregory’s notion that the Lord is “one year old,” Maximus defines one year as “the restoration of the sun to the place in the heavens from which it began (ἡ τοῦ ἡλίου ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτοῦ σημείου εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ σημεῖον ἀποκατάστασις).”68 The motion of the duration of a year as divided into hours, days, weeks, months, and seasons proceeds in a consistent and continuous manner. Maximus then applies this cyclical notion of the duration of a year to the Lord, writing that the “acceptable year of the Lord” (Is 62.2), as it is written, is–to take the passage allegorically–the whole duration of the ages. At the beginning of this duration, God thought it good to bring beings into being, and to give existence to what did not exist, and through His providence, like an intellectual sun whose power holds the universe together in stability and which rises up to send forth a ray of light downward, He thought it fitting that He should diversify the ways [He is present in the world] (ποικῖλαι τοῦς τρόπους ἀξιώσας) until the completion of all the ages in order to bring those in whom He had sown His own goodness to full maturation. Then He will gather the fruits of His own seed unmixed with weeds and pure of all chaff-like residue and anything else that might be mixed in and the whole purpose (ὁ σύμπας λόγος) of the motion of moveable things will be

66 67 68

G. Naz., Or. 45.13. Amb. 46., 1356C5-11. Amb. 46, 1356D7-8.

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completed, for those who are worthy will have received the final blessedness of deification that has been promised.69

The creation of all things is here compared to the sowing of seeds and bringing them to fruition. The concept of the σπερματικὸς λόγος, logos that is sown like a seed, is a common theme in both the ancient patristic tradition and amongst the pagan philosophers, especially the Stoics. For Maximus, God the Word has sown the seeds of His own goodness in beings and He “shines” upon them like the sun to make them grow. He has “diversified the ways [He is present in the world]” by sending down His rays upon the seeds of His own goodness, which He has placed within created things. The passage from Gregory goes on to speak of the “return” of the Sun of “righteousness to Himself,” and though Maximus does not quote this phrase, he concludes this line of interpretation with the same concept: And so, the Lord is called “the Sun of righteousness” as the Maker and the one who perfects the ages, as the beginning and end of all things, as the Fashioner of the wise five-fold order70 of those things foreknown in His providence, and as the one who fills all things with everlasting light by ever bestowing His goodness upon them. It is He who ripens and prepares for the God and Father those who widen their own intellectual pathways for the reception of His blessed ray of light.71

Maximus follows Gregory’s notion of the Word as the Sun of righteousness “being born of the Father, light from light, true God from true God,” 72 inseminating His goodness in created things so that He is “circumscribed by being seen,” shining upon them to cause them to grow, which in a sense, is to cause Himself to grow in them, and then to bring the fruit of that growth, which again is the fruit of His own goodness, to the Father, thus completing the “cycle of the year,” “the acceptable year of the Lord.” Maximus considers this fulfillment of the year of the Lord in terms of the gathering of “spiritual knowledge of intellectual realities through the rigorous natural contemplation of the logoi of phenomena.” 73 Thus the contemplation of nature is precisely the way in which beings come to fulfillment for thought,

69 70 71 72 73

Amb. 46, 1357A9-B9. Probably a reference to the five-fold division of created things in Amb. 41. Amb. 46, 1357B9-C4. Amb. 46, 1357C12-14. Amb. 46, 1357C8-10.

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and as we saw above, this fulfillment is the blooming of the very Word Himself in created things. Here we see a reiteration under a different figure of the cosmic incarnation of which Maximus speaks. It is also an indication of the sacrificial, or better, Eucharistic, imagery that Maximus will bring in to his discussion of the contemplation of nature in the subsequent chapters of the Ambigua. ii. One Christ, Many Participants Because Maximus is drawing quotations from Gregory’s Second Oration on Pascha, it is quite to be expected that the imagery of partaking of the sacrifice should come to the fore. In Ambiguum 47, Maximus transposes the problem of the one and the many to the question of how each person encounters the one, unified Christ individually, in accordance with each person’s faith and level of spiritual life. He begins from a quotation of Gregory in which the Theologian says, “It is no surprise if a sheep is required for each and every house.” 74 Maximus poses a question in response: Since there is one Christ who is proclaimed mystically through the law, the prophets, and the magnificence of creation to those who are able to hear and see spiritually, how does the law, which presents a complete type of Christ, order that many sheep be sacrificed at the houses of the patriarchs?75

In response, Maximus shows how different people partake of Christ in different ways and to different degrees in proportion to the measure of grace and power each person has. Specifically, Maximus applies the stages of philosophy to the different levels of Christ’s being. The one engaged in the practical life partakes of Christ’s body; one involved in natural contemplation partakes of His soul; the theologian passes beyond the soul of Christ and the “symbolic contemplation of beings” that characterizes natural contemplation and comes to the intellect of Christ; and the one who passes beyond the discourse of theology comes to the Divinity of Christ “through an all-encompassing apophasis (δι᾽ ἀποφάσεως παντελοῦς).” 76 Maximus follows the sacrificial imagery of Gregory’s oration and places the crucifixion of Christ as the starting point for this journey from the body of Christ all the way to his Divinity. Each person “sacrifices the lamb and partakes

74 75 76

G. Naz., Or. 45.14. Amb. 47, 1357D7-1360A4. Amb. 47, 1360C6-D2.

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of its flesh, taking his fill of Jesus” 77 in his own way so that the Word who has diversified the manner of His presence in the world maintains His unity even as He “becomes all things for all” (I Cor 9.22; I Cor 15.28; Col 3.11).” 78 iii. “The Word Becomes the Substance in the Entirety of Things” Ambiguum 48 continues with the imagery of partaking of Christ and gives a more detailed account of what Gregory has called the “spiritual digestion” of the Word.79 Each part of the Passover lamb, which is a type of Christ, signifies a particular aspect of the spiritual life. The one who possesses the principles of theology in faith eats the head of the Christ; the one who receives these principles with knowledge eats the ears; the one who “considers creation spiritually” and brings the logoi of both sensuous and intellectual reality into unity partakes of the eyes. The breast is for the one who proclaims his theological knowledge, the hands for the one who keeps the commandments.80 The Word, by being “eaten” intellectually, nourishes those who partake of Him and indeed “becomes the substance in the entirety of things (τὸν ἐν τοῖς ὅλοις λόγον τοῖς πράγμασιν οὐσίαν γίνεσθαι),” even as He is “beyond nature and reason (ὑπὲρ φύσιν καὶ λόγον).”81 Maximus thus takes the metaphysical doctrine of the presence of the Logos in all things and transposes it into the Eucharistic imagery of feeding on the Word. This completes the sequence of these three Ambigua (46, 47, 48), which speak of insemination, growth, fruition, and finally offering and partaking. Even though the metaphors shift from the planting and growth of grain (bread for the Eucharist) to the partaking of the Passover lamb this sequence of thought in the Ambigua clearly holds together as a reflection upon partaking of the presence of Christ in all things. In this Christological understanding of natural contemplation the course of the spiritual life leads one to partake of Christ more and more fully until the Word “becomes the substance in the entirety of things.” To partake of the world in natural contemplation, then, is to partake of Christ, and to partake of Christ is to partake of the substance of all things.

77 78 79 80 81

Amb. 47, 1360D9-11. Amb. 47, 1361A4. G. Naz., Or. 45.16. Amb. 48, 1364C1-1365B3. Amb. 48, 1365C4-5.

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iv. Knowledge of Nature in the Desert In Ambiguum 50, Maximus considers the Passover under a different figure, though he maintains the three-fold progression of philosophy as his hermeneutical principle. His explanation of natural contemplation, however, gives a slightly different perspective. Rather than being a stage simply to be surpassed in the journey to the intellect and Divinity of Christ, in the context of Ambiguum 50 Maximus speaks of natural contemplation as that which “makes the powers of the soul powerful weapons for God for the pulling down of the strongholds and of every high-place that is lifted up against the knowledge of God, and for the contemplation of the spiritual logoi in beings.”82 Natural contemplation in this context prepares the way for the reception of the knowledge of God–the conquest of the Promised Land–in that it yields “the logoi of beings without symbols, enigmas, and the multiplicity of sensation.”83 This, for Maximus, is what it means to eat the Passover in the desert, on the way from Egypt to the Promised Land, that is, from submission to the passions to the partaking of “the most exalted Word of wisdom without mediation.”84 Thus natural contemplation transforms the world from being an obstacle to God to being the way to God. Ambiguum 67 ties together the foregoing considerations of feeding on the Word and natural contemplation. In it Maximus discusses Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand in the wilderness, which again becomes paradigmatic–like the Passover in the wilderness–of the contemplation of nature. Maximus focuses on the numbers mentioned in the Gospel narrative–the five loaves, the five thousand men, the twelve baskets used to gather what was left–in order to uncover the teaching of the story. In the quotation at the head of the Ambiguum, Gregory affirms that the numbers included in the story are not “without reason,” so Maximus seeks to expound their rationale. He begins by explaining the feeding of the five thousand in terms of the contemplation of nature: the five barley loaves are “the logoi that are accessible to natural contemplation” and the five thousand men “represent those who concern themselves with nature (τοὺς περὶ φύσιν κινουμένους).”85 The desert where the feeding took place is “this world, in which the Word of God, by 82 83 84 85

Amb. 50, 1369B1-6. Amb. 50, 1368D9-1369A1. Amb. 50, 1369A4-5. Amb. 67, 1396C1-2.

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spiritually breaking the logoi of nature into pieces, completely satisfies with good things those who concern themselves with the Divine through natural contemplation.”86 To expand this initial insight, Maximus gives a number of different interpretations of the twelve baskets that were used to gather up the pieces of bread left over after the five loaves had been multiplied. To do so Maximus assigns symbolic meanings to the numbers that may be combined to produce the number twelve, and in nearly every instance, the meanings assigned draw the twelve baskets within the scope of the three-fold progression of philosophy and particularly the contemplation of nature: 7 (time as the cycle of days of the week) and 5 (nature as the four material elements plus form);87 4 (ethics as the four vitues), 5 (nature as the four material elements plus form), and 3 (theology in the three consubstantial hypostaseis of the Trinity);88 4 (the material elements) times 3 (the three-fold logos of a being in terms of οὐσία, δύναμις, and ἐνέργεια);89 10 (as a monadic number containing the complete sequence of numbers within itself and thus standing for Christ as Cause of all things) and 2 (matter and form);90 3 (hypostaseis of the Holy Trinity), 3 (the three-fold generation of beings in terms of divine activity, providence, and judgment), and 6 (the six days of creation).91 With his interpretation of these narrative details, Maximus establishes the encounter with Christ in the desert as the disclosure of the knowledge of nature. v. The Passion of Christ and the Knowledge of Nature To come to the culmination of the earthly life of Christ, Maximus gives a symbolic interpretation of the passion of Christ and the events immediately following that folds this culmination of the economy into his vision of natural philosophy as well. The cross of Christ is emblematic, for Maximus, of the whole of philosophical life. When Gregory says that Christ “is lifted up together with the cross,” he means that when the rational nature of man is exalted through praxis and the dispassion that is yoked together with it, Christ himself is said to be exalted along with it, that is,

86 87 88 89 90 91

Amb. 67, 1396C11-15. Amb. 67, 1396D5-1397A8. Amb. 67, 1397C11-16, D4-7. Amb. 67, 1400A1-10. Amb. 67, 1400C1-16. Amb. 67, 1400D2-1401B15.

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the Christ-like state in human beings is exalted in sequence and order, making its way through dispassionate praxis to knowledge-filled contemplation of nature (εἰς θεωρίαν τῆς φύσεως γνωστικήν) and from this to the disclosure of the theological mystery (εἰς θεολογικὴν μυσταγωγίαν).92

The cross as a symbol of praxis and the struggle against the passions is fairly straight-forward. Maximus, following the Scriptural and patristic tradition, often speaks of the practical life in terms of the “mortification” of the passions, and this is taken as an assimilation to the death of Christ.93 In the context of the present quotation, the “activity” of the cross symbolizes perfect dispassion (ἀπάθεια), the goal of practical philosophy, through “the praxis that puts the passions to death.”94 But how does the passion of Christ signify the “knowledgefilled contemplation of nature,” which ultimately leads to “the disclosure of the theological mystery”? As a general observation, Maximus applies the death of Christ to the contemplation of nature when one “puts aside the intellect’s symbolic contemplation of beings and is transposed to the uniform and simple mystical disclosure (μυσταγωγίαν) of theological knowledge just as from the soul of Christ to His intellect,” where the soul of Christ represents the contemplation of nature (and His flesh practical philosophy).95 The world as symbolic manifestation of divine reality is transcended as symbol and the mind is initiated into that which is symbolized. This is a death, but it is also a return to the primordial state of Adam as Maximus has described it, in which he did not need first to think in terms of the phenomena that appear to the senses in order to come to an understanding of divine things (τῆς ἐπ᾽ αἰσθήσεσι τῶν φαινομένων διανοίας πρὸς κατανόησιν τῶν θείων), for he had as his simple covering only the uniform, simple, and constitutive virtue and knowledge that pertains to the things after God.96

Because this entails the transcendence of the material manifestation of reality, a separation from the body, as it were, Maximus will call it a death, but just as

92

Amb. 32, 1284D7-1285A5. E.g. Amb. 47, 1360B3-D2. In his commentary on this passage from Ambiguum 32 Dumitru Staniloae focuses almost exclusively on the ascetical aspect: Larchet, Ponsoye, and Staniloae, Ambigua, 480-481 n.315, n.316. 94 Amb. 32, 1284C7-D6. 95 Amb. 47, 1360C8-13. 96 Amb. 45, 1356A11-B1; see above, 381ff. 93

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he says with respect to the human death to the world of corruption, this death is rather a death of death, which leads to true life and knowledge. With respect to Maximus’ specific claim about the cross and natural philosophy, he considers the cross according to three different concepts to illustrate how it symbolizes knowledge of the world. First, the shape (σχῆμα) “intimates the power that distinguishes the whole of what is, both things above and things below, in terms of what each thing is in its own definition.”97 Maximus seems to mean that the shape of the cross separates and defines space into a four-fold division of regions and in this way indicates the definition of beings in general. Second, the composition (σύνθεσις) of the cross, that is, the cross considered as something that is put together, signifies “substance (οὐσία), providence (πρόνοια), and judgment (κρίσις),” three important concepts in the contemplation of nature.98 According to this concept it reveals “the wisdom, knowledge, and virtue of the power that directs the universe.” The vertical beam of the cross indicates “substance and wisdom as the creative power” and the horizontal beam indicates “providence and knowledge as the productive power.” “Judgment and virtue,” which constitute “the power that destroys evil,” are indicated by the cross as a whole.99 Finally, when the parts of the cross are considered individually, the vertical beam symbolizes the unchanging stability of God and the horizontal beam stands for the fact that creation is completely dependent upon God and nothing else for its being, hanging, as it were, on that single divine beam.100 This may appear to be forced, but that very fact reveals Maximus’ insistence to find a way to incorporate every aspect of the economy into his vision of the philosophic life, and particularly his philosophy of nature. Maximus considers the body of the crucified Christ in Ambiguum 54, in which he explains Gregory’s exhortation that “if you are Joseph of Arimathea, ask for the body from the crucifier.”101 In this section of Gregory’s oration, the Theologian gives various examples from Scripture as possible responses to the liberation of the Passover/Passion. As Maximus interprets these examples, Simon of Cyrene takes up the cross of practical philosophy (Amb. 52), the penitent thief on the cross suffers willingly for his sins (Amb. 53), Nikodemus, who

97

Amb. 32, 1281C12-15. Amb. 10, 1132D8ff. 99 Amb. 32, 1281C15-D9. 100 Amb. 32, 1281D9-1284A6. 101 G. Naz., Or. 45.24. 98

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came to Christ by night, attains true knowledge of Christ but does not manifest it, thus anointing Christ’s body for burial (Amb. 55). Maximus’ discussion of the body of Christ in Ambiguum 54 identifies the body of Christ with the powers of the soul as well as with the kinds of body that correspond to these powers. The body is also the virtues and the commandments.102 Thus the body of Christ stands for all the natural potentialities of this age. To ask for this body and prepare it for burial is to unite the logoi that pertain to this age to the Word through natural contemplation once the bodily senses have become servants of the soul, wrapping Him in them, as with fine linen (Lk 23.53).103 The myrrh-bearing women who went to the tomb of Christ also present an example of the acquisition of the knowledge of nature from the events surrounding the passion of Christ. Maximus takes their vision of the angels at the tomb as an indication that they have come to a spiritual knowledge of “the natural logoi of beings, which silently proclaim the Word, the cause of all.”104 The resurrection can also be understood in these terms. Within the context of his interpretation of the passion of Christ in terms of praxis and contemplation, Maximus speaks of “the resurrection of the logos of virtue and knowledge” that takes place “within” the disciple. Referring to Thomas Didymus, who confessed Jesus to be “Lord” and “God” when he saw His resurrected body (Jn 20.28), Maximus states that the two titles refer to praxis and contemplation respectively.105 Moreover, when they come to be known, the logoi of beings “piercingly proclaim in a loud voice the modes of virtue that rule the disposition of the soul as the resurrection of the Divine Word that takes place for the soul in its deification.”106 In this case the very purpose of the contemplation of nature, the contemplation of created things in their logoi, makes known the resurrection of the Word. The “words” of creation speak the resurrection of the Divine Word in the soul. Finally, in his interpretation of the Ascension, Maximus articulates how the economy of the incarnation truly fashions a world, and truly is the creation itself:

102 103 104 105 106

Amb. 55, 1376C4-9. Amb. 55, 1377A7-10. Amb. 56, 1380B7-9. Amb. 58, 1381C11-13. Amb. 58, 1381D7-1384A4.

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the one who is able to ascend from the knowledge of the economy, out of which the world of the flesh of the Word came to be with the Father, and comes to the realization of the glory [that the Word had] “with” the Father “before the world” of the Word’s incarnation “existed” (Jn 17.5), this one truly goes up to the heavens with the God and Word who descended to earth for his sake.107

The world of this age is identified with the incarnation of Christ, confirming and focusing Maximus’ claim in Ambiguum 7 that the Word desires to become embodied in all things. This present world of nature, motion, time, and law is the flesh of Christ and to ascend from this world, from the flesh of Christ, is to come to the understanding that the Word is with the Father before the world came into being. Here the contemplation of nature and of Christ as the center of nature leads to the contemplation of the eternal Word who has deified creation through His descent “to the furthest extreme of our nature (πρὸς τὸ ἔσχατον τῆς ἡμετέρας φύσεως).”108 We may recall this coherence in Ambiguum 61 as well, where Maximus interprets the tent of testimony (Ex 25.8-9) as both the economy of the incarnation of the Word and as creation itself.109 All of these reflections on the Passion of Christ are of course mediated by the written Gospels, which are, for Maximus, intended for “those who are still subject to sensation and corruption,”110 since they are “elementary instruction for those who are being instructed through [them] to Christ the Word in spirit.”111 The four Gospels correspond to the four elements of nature and are folded into Maximus’ vision of the interaction between the sensuous and the mental cosmos in which material reality and the virtues mutually symbolize each other.112 As such, all of the narrative details of the Gospels, including the details of the Passion, must have a corresponding reality in the world, since Scripture and nature teach the same thing. The interpretation of the Gospels– and the Passion narratives in particular–in terms of natural philosophy is by no means the final or “real” meaning of the text; it is precisely “elementary,” preparatory instruction. But this elementary instruction very quickly leads from the soul of Christ to His intellect and Divinity when “the Divine Word” is

107 108 109 110 111 112

Amb. 60, 1385B5-10. Amb. 60, 1385C2-3. Amb. 61, 1385C13-D1, D9-10. Amb. 21, 1245A7-8. Amb. 21, 1244D9-11. See Chapter 5 above, 240-246.

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resurrected in the soul of the disciple who, like Thomas, discerns the Lord of praxis and the God of contemplation in the body of the risen Christ. Thus, Maximus’ understanding of nature and the contemplation of nature culminates in his vision of the renewal of nature in Christ, a renewal that gives new life and possibility to the human contemplation of nature. The unity of the natural world in the Word of God, which is made manifest by the entrance of the Word into the natural world itself, gives meaning to the flux of material reality and opens the way for the contemplation of nature to lead beyond itself to the stability and “Sabbath rest” of eternal being and then to the “eighth day” of the “all-radiant presence of God, which comes after moving things are brought to stability.”113

113

Amb. 65, 1392C1-D3.

CONCLUSION TO PART II This study of Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua to John has read the text as an exposition of Maximus’ vision for the philosophical life and I have argued that the contemplation of nature is of primary significance in the Ambigua’s philosophy. Ambigua 6–8 provided a foundational analysis of human being in the world for which passibility and the distress of living between time and eternity and matter and spirit are the basic experiences of the human being. The human being is estranged from the world and his own body and yet finds himself engulfed by what surrounds him (περὶ αὐτόν) so that he is in danger of forgetting his divine source and end. These experiences are given as a means of drawing a person into a desire for what transcends the instability of the world. Philosophy, which Maximus defines as φιλοθεΐα, the love of the Divine, is the διάβασις through material reality to spiritual contemplation and ultimately to union with God. Maximus shows in Ambiguum 10 and related chapters how this path progresses through both praxis and contemplation, where the practical body is the manifestation of divine virtue and knowledge–ultimately of God Himself–in the world. The dispassion of the ascetic becomes the clear vision of the contemplative whose mind has been freed of the determinations of his corrupted way of intuiting the world. Rather than grasping the world to possess it the one who has achieved dispassionate thought allows the divine fire that resides “in the substance of things” to radiate and disclose the true nature of the world. While Maximus insists upon the radical otherness of God, the Ambigua are, in their analyses of the various aspects of the contemplation of nature, more concerned to speak of God and the world in positive terms and in this way the Ambigua begin to speak more directly of Christ as the center of natural contemplation. In the transfigured Christ God and the world are revealed at one and the same moment as inseparable in Christ. Nevertheless, despite the Divine

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Source and End of all things, the world maintains its temporality, though in Christ, time is not the distressing horizon of human passibility but is rather the eternal age to come when it ceases from its motion, just as eternity is time when it is measured by motion. This motion, which joins time to eternity, is defined by the love of God who both motivates the love of creatures in their desire for Him and actively pours Himself out into and as the world that He Himself loves. It is on this basis that all of Maximus’ philosophy–asceticism, cosmic speculation, the logical concerns of language, initiation into the divine mystery–depends. It is love that motivates philosophy and is its content. This entire vision finds its final expression in Maximus’ description of the economy of salvation in terms of the renewal of nature and its contemplation. It was Adam’s failure to contemplate the world as it was given that introduced the mode of generation and corruption that we now experience as “nature,” in which division between matter and spirit, within the material world itself, and ultimately between Creator and creature holds sway. In his accounting of the narrative of the economy of salvation in the latter chapters of the Ambigua, Maximus gathers all the elements he has worked into his analyses of the different aspects of the philosophical life and concentrates them upon the renewal of nature in the incarnation of the Word of God. His life in the flesh, His teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension are all a recapitulation of the creation of the world and of the human understanding of that world, which Maximus renders as the believer’s partaking of Christ. I have argued from all this that Maximus’ well-known “cosmic Christology” is his way of rethinking the most basic human experiences of the world, from the pre-philosophical moment of bodily alienation to the life of praxis, the contemplation of nature, and ineffable union with God. Thus, Maximus’ Christology may be seen as a culmination of his natural philosophy and indeed as a vision for the philosophical life that recapitulates and transforms the ancient tradition into a philosophy that is Χριστοειδός, that takes the “form of Christ.”

EPILOGUE This study has interpreted Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua to John as presenting a vision of Christian divine philosophy that focuses on the coherence of praxis and contemplation in general and gives specific emphasis to the role of the contemplation of nature in the philosophical life. The analysis of the Greek philosophical tradition established the theme of giving an account of nature from within the context of concern for the conduct of human life and showed various ways in which the different schools of thought approached this theme. The study of the Greek patristic authors before Maximus showed how the Christian tradition absorbed much of the philosophical culture that preceded it (or was contemporary with it) but turned it towards the specifically Christian concern of crafting a vision for philosophy in terms of the incarnation of the Word of God and it is in this way that a “Christian philosophy” took shape and was transmitted to Maximus. I would like to conclude by returning to the notion of the “Game of Philosophy,” which I articulated in the Introduction and with which Maximus in fact concludes his Ambigua to John. I have argued that in Maximus we see a number of different orientations towards the natural world. The world for Maximus is symbolic of divine reality and is identified with the Divine as its manifestation, but it is also the scene of human transgression and can be an obstacle on the way to God even as it is itself the way. διάβασις (traversal) can be overwhelmed by παράβασις (transgression) and I argued that Maximus understands the transgression of Adam as a failure of his contemplation of nature, as a false vision of the nature of the world. The renewal of nature effected in Christ reestablishes the human being as the one who knows the world simply in its transparency to the Divine. Maximus speaks in Ambiguum 71 of the “play” of the Word in the world and sees in human experience in and of the world a sort of divine pedagogy but he also absolutely rejects the notion that

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the natural world is the result of the fall and is not the good creation of God. To contemplate nature is to experience the “play” of the divine Word in the world but Maximus’ response to the play of the Word is not to reject the world as an inferior reality but to give an account of the world that is fully aware of its status as a discourse about realities that will appear as play-things, a vision in sleep as Heraclitus would say, when compared to the waking reality of the age to come.

APPENDIX Polycarp Sherwood gives a summary description of the individual Ambigua in his Earlier Ambigua, but he gives no indication of how they may be seen to hold together structurally. I am not proposing a rigorous organization here, but there are clear groupings of chapters and a discernible progression of focus that make sense of the collection as a whole. I give here a summary of the works of Gregory Nazianzen from which Maximus takes his individual difficulties and then give a brief identification of the basic theme of each of the Ambigua within the sets I have identified. Summary of the Works of Gregory Nazianzen Treated in the Ambigua to John: Ambigua 6-8 (1065B–1105B) on Or. 14, On Love of the Poor 9-12 (1105C–1208C) on Or. 21, On St. Athanasius 13-14 (1208D–1213D) on Or. 27, Theological Oration I (Against the Eunomians) 15-22 (1216A–1257C) on Or. 28, Theological Oration II (Great Theological Oration) 23-26 (1257CD–1268B) on Or. 29, Theological Oraration III (First Oration on the Son) 27-30 (1268C–1273D) on Or. 30, Theological Oration IV (Second Oration on the Son) 31-38 (1273D–1301A) on Or. 38, On the Nativity 39-41 (1301B–1316A) on Or. 39, On the Lights 42-44 (1316B–1352A) on Or. 40, On Baptism 45-60 (1352B–1385C) on Or. 45, On Pascha 61-64 (1385CD–1389C) on Or. 44, On the New Lord’s Day

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65-68 (1389D–1405C) on Or. 41, On Holy Pentecost 69 (1405C–D) on Or. 25, On Hero the Philosopher 70 (1405D–1408C) on Or. 43, The Funeral Oration for St. Basil 71 (1408CD–1417C) on Carm. II.ii. 589-590, Precepts to Virgins Structure of the Ambigua to John I. Ambigua 6–8: Analysis of Affectivity 6. The ambiguity of embodiment 7. The fundamental reality of motion and passibility in human being 8. The experience of disorder reveals reason’s orientation to virtue II. Ambigua 9–22: The Philosophic Life 9. Theological language and non-discursiveness 10. Philosophy as διάβασις through material reality: praxis and contemplation thoroughly implicated in each other i. flesh as cloud and veil ii. how pleasure comes to be iii. motions of the soul iv. Moses and the crossing of the Red Sea v. Moses on the mountain vi. Moses on the mountain (missing from PG) vii. Joshua and the Jordan; circumcision viii. Conquest of Jericho ix. Capture of Tyre x. “The heavens declare the glory of God”: natural contemplation xi. “My father and mother have left me”: transcending the natural law of fleshly birth xii. Elijah and the still small voice xiii. Elisha seeing the angelic powers around him xiv. Anna and Samuel: birth of the Word through denial of the movements of the flesh xv. Priest making determinations about unclean houses xvi. Elijah and the widow of Saraphath xvii. Transfiguration–seeing the radiance of Christ after the acquisition of virtue

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xviii. Coherence of the natural and written law xix. 5 modes of natural contemplation xx. Melchizedek: transcends matter and form (nature) by virtue xxi. The Lord in light of Melchizedek xxii. Imitating Melchizedek by putting of flesh–becoming “without lineage” xxiii. “neither beginning of days…”: letting this present life go for the sake of what is better xxiv. “a priest continually” xxv. The migration of Abraham as the movement from the senses to intellect xxvi. Moses–preserved by ethics and natural contemplation; burning bush xxvii. Moses’ flight from Egypt, endurance of hardships in Egypt xxviii. Imitation of the saints; identity of natural and written law xxix. Saints of old indicate the coming of what goes beyond the law (David, Hezekiah) xxx. Going beyond natural and written law: receiving true knowledge of beings synecdochically as following Jesus xxxi. Beyond law and scripture: stripping of all perception, reason, intellect in silence xxxii. Man who fell among thieves–spending beyond 2 denarii indicates separation from beings xxxiii. Adam’s sin of preferring sense perception is death xxxiv. Difference between the divine life of the saints and this life xxxv. Saints exercised natural contemplation and scriptural interpretation not in a human way xxxvi. Transfiguration: wisdom and knowledge in creatures and scripture appear together with the knowledge of God xxxvii. Law and Prophecy xxxviii. Wisdom and Goodness xxxix. Knowledge and Training xl. Praxis and Contemplation xli. Marriage and the Unmarried state xlii. The Word as Lord of life and death xliii. All things live in God except the one who has mortified himself xliv. The Word as the beginning and end of law and prophecy xlv. Time and Nature

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xlvi. Sensual and Intellectual Creation xlvii. The Transfiguration indicates apophatic and kataphatic theology xlviii. The Lord a type and symbol of Himself in the Incarnation xlix. Sudden illumination of the Lord’s face: the absolute unknowability of the Divine l. Illumined clothing: creatures li. Moses: affirmative theology, providence lii. Elijah: affirmative theology, judgment liii. Conversation between Christ, Moses, and Elijah: goal of nature’s present order liv. The composition and decomposition of the world lv. Affection for the body and this world is the great chasm between Lazarus and the rich man lvi. Virtues alone are sufficient for blessedness [-Thief on the cross (Amb. 53)] [-New Sunday as deification (Amb. 63)]1 lvii. The saints learn about God from natural contemplation lviii. Natural contemplation of the beginning of motion; every moving thing has a source lix. Substance, quality, quantity: the expansion and contraction lx. Everything exists in space and time; “is” does not properly pertain to God lxi. The universe is not eternal; God gives being and form lxii. Infinity is unrelated; duality is circumscribed lxiii. There is no infinite duality: matter is not eternal lxiv. Providence is all encompassing, incomprehensible in its parts lxv. Material duality as thumos and epithumia; aligning of the soul with intellect lxvi. The passible element of the soul, various passivities lxvii. “privative a” added to Abraham’s name as indication of casting off all worldly things lxviii. Moses removing his sandals as estrangement from former life lxix. removing organs from sacrifice as removing passions

1

63.

These two sections in brackets appear here in the PG text, but are exact quotations of Amb. 53 and

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lxx. leprosy as passions lxxi. Pheneas: destroying matter and form, appetite and anger lxxii. “Do not give what is holy to dogs”: intellect and passions lxxiii. The healing of the epileptic as freedom from thumos and epithumia; all the saints traverse this age 11. The difficult acceptance of providence and judgment 12. Correction and spiritual/pastoral care 13. The dynamics of teaching and learning 14. The proper place of rational demonstration 15. The soul, perception, and cosmic motion 16. The relation of negation to knowledge of essences 17. The subject and predication 18. God and place 19. The nature of φαντασία, what the saints see 20. Scriptural use of names and words, Paul’s ascent to the “third heaven” in terms of the philosophical life 21. Gregory’s discourse and Scripture; nature of Scripture and its relation to nature and virtue 22. The difficulty of discourse about God III. Ambigua 23–30: God and the Language of the World 23. Speaking of God and the world, the Divine and cosmic motion 24. The divine will and the generation of the Son 25. The relationship between nature and predication 26. Substance (οὐσία) and activity (ἐνέργεια) 27. What is properly predicated of the two natures of Christ 28. How Christ receives double predication 29. Grammatical consideration about negations 30. The names attributed to the Son, uniting human names to the divine IV. Ambigua 31–44: The Renewal of Nature and the Economy of Salvation 31. The dissolution of the laws of nature, the transgression of Adam 32. Contemplation of different aspects of the cross: shape, composition, parts and activity

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33. Incarnation of the Word in the world and in Scripture 34. God’s gift of what is “around” His essence to the world for its knowledge of Him 35. God’s self-impartation through the outpouring of his goodness 36. Hypostatic union of natures in Christ compared to the first “inbreathing” at the creation of the first human being 37. Responses to the presence of the Word in the flesh; on the interpretation of Scripture 38. Christ’s flight to Egypt as a child, Christ as the model for philosophy 39. Gregory’s description of pagan rites at the beginning of festal homily in the feast of Holy Lights to make the way to orthodoxy easier to walk for the Greeks 40. Trinitarian theology 41. The new institution of natures in Christ, the five-fold division of the cosmos overcome in Christ 42. Christ’s “three births” (physical birth, baptism, ressurection); soul and body created at the same time; explanation of what remains the same in the new institution of nature 43. The deferral of baptism for the sake of ephemeral pleasure 44. The difficulty of acquiring God for the greater appreciation of His φιλανθρωπἰα V. Ambigua 45–68: Biblical exampla of responses to the renewal of nature in Christ 45. The original state of the first created human being 46. Christ as the “Sun of righteousness,” as the yearly cycle, the beginning and end of all things 47. The one Christ partaken of by many 48. The spiritual “digestion” of Christ as the lamb of God 49. The life of praxis, as imitation of John the Baptist, is the forerunner of the knowledge to come 50. The simplicity of the philosophic life of those who proclaim the Kingdom of God, the different ways–ethical, natural, theological–of partaking of the Pascha 51. Leah and Rachel as praxis and contemplation 52. Simon of Cyrene as praxis 53. Good thief on the cross as repentance, evil thief as attachment to the world;

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good thief as praxis with reason and knowledge, evil thief as hypocrite 54. Joseph of Arimathea as the one who prepares the body of Christ (the soul, senses, body, commandments, virtues, λόγοι of generated things) and receives it “in the heart hewn out of faith” 55. Nikodemus as one who has knowledge of Christ but does not fulfill the practice of the commandments of Christ because of fear of the passions 56. Myrrh-bearing women: Mary Magdalene as praxis, the other Mary as contemplation, Salome (“peace”) as dispassion through virtue and knowledge through contemplation, Joanna (“dove) as dispassion through gentleness and spiritually reproductive through knowledge, angels at the tomb as words of Scripture, pious actions 57. Peter as faith through conversion and praxis, John as wisdom, gnosis, and theology; these two run together 58. Thomas as one who doubts the resurrection of virtue and knowledge within himself, who confesses Christ as Lord (praxis) and God (contemplation) 59. Following Christ to Hades – descent: faith and fight against passions; ascent: return to virtue and knowledge 60. Ascending with Christ as fulfilling providence, from praxis to contemplation, from knowledge of λόγοι of created things to λόγοι of theology, from the economy of the flesh of Christ to the theology of his divinity 61. Tabernacle as the incarnation of the Word, as creation, sensual nature, human nature, human soul 62. David king of Israel as Christ’s first coming, Christ’s anointing of humanity with His Divinity; in the second manifestation, Christ will be proclaimed as king of all creation 63. New Sunday (Sunday after Pascha/Easter) as the greatest feast indicates the need to make continuous progress from the resurrection of the flesh in virtue to deification in knowledge. 64. Ascetical consideration directed to female ascetics to keep them from paying attention to what happens outside their dwellings in order to avoid temptation 65. Christ as the fulfillment of the Sabbath; being, well-being, eternal being as the progression for creaturely potentiality, actualization, and rest 66. Numerology of 7 67. Numerology of the feeding of the 5000 and 4000, also considering the number 12 (baskets), 7 (loaves, baskets), 3 (days) 68. The gifts of prophecy and discernment

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69: The difference between complete and incomplete sentences 70: Gregory’s use of rhetoric and the exhortation to virtue Conclusion Ambiguum 71: The Game of Philosophy–the pedagogy of the appearances of the Word in various forms in the world

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INDEX

Abraham, 108, 207, 213 – 214, 225 activity/actualization/actuality (ἐνέργεια), 186n47, 189 – 192, 248, 272, 277, 288, 293 – 294, 323 Adam, 108, 195, 229n89, 239, 246, 251, 297 – 306, 317, 324, 330, 331 affectivity (πάθος), 28, 51, 169, 171, 174, 177, 183, 185, 187, 190, 192, 196, 212; see also passibility Alexander of Aphrodisias, 80, 99 Algra, K., 79n88 Amand de Mendieta, Emmanuel, 123n86, n88 Anaximander, 44, 105n16 Anaximenes, 44 apophatic theology/apophasis, 25, 247, 254, 259; see also mystical theology appearance (ἐπιφάνεια, φανέρωσις) of the Divine, 24, 159, 165, 190, 236, 253, 264, 296; of the world, 145, 245, 264, 296; see also manifestation appetite (ἐπιθυμία), 140, 176, 178, 218, 223 – 228, 233, 242 –243 Aristotle, 13, 28, 31– 32, 45, 53 – 54, 59, 60n41, 72 – 78, 86, 89, 108, 162, 196, 204, 215 – 218, 224, 234n103, 259n25, 264n37, 270, 275, 277, 283, 290, 317 Armstrong, A.H., 34n71, 86n108, 89 ascetic/ascetical/asceticism, 15, 20 – 22, 24

– 26, 36, 118, 120, 121, 125, 132, 137, 139 – 141, 143, 145 – 149, 151, 164 – 165, 169, 175, 178 – 179, 192, 201, 205, 208, 209, 211 – 212, 214, 231 – 232, 234, 300 – 301, 305, 324n93, 329 – 330; see also praxis Augustine, 25n54 Bardy, G. 32n66 Barnes, J., 46n16, 49n21, 56n34, Basil, 120 – 127, 129, 131, 133 – 135, 137, 146, 164, 171, 185n41, 206n11 beauty/the beautiful (τὸ καλόν), 38, 61, 62 – 71, 77, 86 – 87, 92 – 98, 113, 124, 129, 145, 147, 161 – 163, 172, 175 – 176, 181 – 182, 186, 198 – 199, 201, 213, 226, 233, 238, 242 – 243, 257, 261, 265, 283, 304 – 305 Benevich, G., 208n17 Blowers, P., 17 – 18, 115n56, 191n62 body (σῶμα), 18, 34, 62, 64, 66 – 68, 83, 86, 87, 89n119, 97, 102n2, 114, 116, 130, 141, 143, 145, 150 – 151, 169, 172 – 176, 178 – 179, 192 – 201, 208 – 212, 214, 218, 221, 223, 229, 230 – 231, 233, 242, 244, 247, 255, 285, 298 – 299, 305, 310, 314, 317, 320 – 321, 324 – 326, 328, 329 Bréhier, E., 86 Brock, S. 154n175 Bunge, G., 153n174

354

INDEX

Callahan, J. F., 121n75 causality/cause (αἰτία), 22 – 23, 37, 68, 70, 75 – 76, 81, 83 – 85, 94, 104, 114, 130, 155 – 159, 162, 182, 190, 193, 216, 216n48, 219 – 220, 222 – 223, 233 – 234, 236, 237, 241, 243, 253, 260, 262, 264 – 265, 268 – 269, 273, 275 – 276, 278, 281 – 284, 289, 293, 305, 314, 317, 323, 326 Chalcedon, 33, Christology, 18, 29, 99, 101 – 102, 165, 330 Chrysippus, 80, 82, 84 Cicero, 80, 83 – 84 Cleanthes, 78 – 79, 81 – 82, 84 – 85 Clement of Alexandria, 23, 27, 29, 29n59, 102 – 113, 118, 120 – 121, 131, 132, 141n155, 146, 163 Cooper, Α. 18 Cornford, F., 60 – 61, 70 cross of Christ, 314, 323 – 327 Curd, P., 47n17 Cyril of Scythopolis, 180, 208n16 Daley, B., 20n30, 31n63, 33n69, 102n2, 172n2, 208n16 De Andia, Y., 154n177 De Faye, E., 103n9 deification (θέωσις), 17, 21, 191n62, 194, 207, 319, 326 Demiurge/Fashioner (δημιουργός), 59n38, 60, 63 – 64, 68 – 69, 90, 107, 111, 194, 236, 238, 257, 261, 267, 271 – 275, 304, 316, 319 determinism, 79, 81 – 84 Diels, H., 55 Diogenes Laertius, 45n9, 79, 82 Dionysius the Areopagite, 23, 27, 29, 37 – 38, 72n64, 102, 137, 154 – 159, 163, 165, 221, 253, 254, 268, 282 – 283, 291, 313, 315 dispassion (ἀπάθεια), 19, 138 – 145, 147 – 149, 151 – 153, 165, 206, 209, 211 – 212, 229 – 231, 243, 252, 254, 280, 305, 323 – 324, 329 Dörrie, H., 31n63 Dörries, H., 31n63

duality, 49 – 52, 57, 65, 68, 96, 98, 154, 161, 163, 183, 207, 215, 220, 224 – 227, 232, 267 – 270 Elijah, 204, 257 – 259, 261 Epifanovich, S., 19 – 21, 24 Eriugena, John Scot 16, 188n52, 241n125, 285n91 eros (ἔρως), 61, 64n49, 65 – 66, 72, 87, 96, 120, 153, 158, 164, 195, 280n72, 284 erotapokriseis, 31 – 32, 175 eternity, 62, 69, 133, 187 – 191, 258, 259, 263 – 279, 316 – 317, 329 – 330 ethics, 26, 75, 78, 82, 105 – 106, 112, 118 – 119, 201, 205, 216, 217, 222, 231, 232n97, 235, 248, 323 Eunomius/Eunomians, 126 – 127, 129 – 131, 285, 293 – 294 Evagrius, 21 – 23, 29, 102, 120, 137 – 154, 165, 180, 200n91, 225n77, 235n106, 237 – 240, 301, 309 finitude, 14, 190, 263 – 266, 268, 275, 279, 303 flesh (σάρξ), 101, 108, 110, 116, 201, 207n12, 213, 215, 221, 230, 233, 244, 247, 255 – 257, 261 – 263, 295, 299, 307, 321, 324, 327, 330 Foucault, M., 146n166 Frede, D., 82n103, 83n104, 83n105, 84n106, 84n107 Gadamer, H. G., 46n14, 48n18 Galavaris, G., 33n70 Gallop, D., 46n3 Gersh, S., 19, 155n177, 180n23, 312n48 Gerson, L., 73n67 Gregory Nazianzen (the Theologian), 13, 26, 30, 32 – 34, 36 – 38, 120, 126 – 132, 137, 146, 154, 158n196, 164, 171 – 176, 178 – 179, 187, 189 – 196, 198, 205 – 210, 214, 218 – 219, 230 – 233, 239, 248, 254, 260, 284 – 289, 291 – 296, 298, 306, 308, 317 – 323, 323 Gregory of Nyssa, 23, 101, 115n56, 120 – 121, 132 – 137, 164 – 165, 191n62, 210, 286n94, 313 Grillmeier, A., 29

INDEX

Guillaumont, A., 145n164 Hadot, P., 28, 44n4, 53n27, 60, 77n83, 105n18 Harl, M., 114n55 Hausherr, I., 142n157 Hegel, G.W.F., 45 Heidegger, M., 28, 46, 73, 76n79, 77n83, 196 Heinzer, F., 18 Held, K., 54 –55 Heraclitus, 28, 45 – 46, 49, 53 – 58, 70, 77, 161, 193, 332 Holman, S., 171n1 Hombergen, D., 208n15 Hume, D., 118 incarnation, 14, 21, 36, 107, 109 – 110, 133, 159, 163, 229n89, 244, 248, 257, 261 – 262, 282, 307, 320, 326 – 327, 330, 331 intellect (νοῦς), 13, 47 – 49, 50, 53, 62 – 63, 68 – 71, 74, 80, 87 – 88, 91, 93, 98, 102, 116, 129 –130, 133, 138, 140 – 153, 157, 176 – 177, 179, 184, 190, 195 – 196, 216, 218 – 221, 223, 226 – 228, 230, 232n97, 240, 242 – 244, 249 – 252, 255, 260, 280 – 281, 284, 287, 295, 309 – 313, 320, 322, 324, 327 irascibility (θυμός), 50 – 51, 141, 176, 178, 218, 223 – 228, 233, 242 Itter, A., 102n3 Jaeger, W., 43n1, 72n65 Jeauneau, E., 16 Joshua (the son of Nun), 207, 258 judgment (κρίσις), 118n68, 128, 143, 145, 180, 208n16, 235n106, 236 – 238, 240, 323, 325 Justin Martyr, 59n39 Kahn, C., 55n30, 55n31, 58n35 Kant, I., 116, 190, 317n65 kataphatic theology, 25, 247, 259 Kelly, J.N.D., 29n59 Kirk, G., 55n31, 56n32, 56n33, 58n35 Larchet, J.-C., 17, 186n47 Lazarus, 212, 305 Leanza, S., 112n48

355

Lee, J.S., 87n110 Lilla, S., 102n3 Louth, A., 17 – 18, 205n8 love, 21, 25, 37, 58, 60 – 61, 64 – 67, 72, 113, 120, 129, 132, 138 – 141, 144, 148, 151, 153, 155, 158 – 159, 161, 165, 169, 172, 176 – 179, 182 – 184, 194 – 195, 200, 210, 213, 219, 228, 229n89, 238, 248, 280 – 284, 290, 299, 302, 313 – 314, 329 – 330; see also eros (ἔρως) Lyman, J.R., 29n59 Μacé, C., 33n68 manifestation (ἐπιφάνεια, φανέρωσις), 14, 38, 91, 94, 109, 153, 156 – 157, 161, 165, 178, 182, 186, 192, 196, 201, 210, 219, 226 – 227, 229, 231, 240, 242, 244 – 245, 255, 257, 263, 270, 283, 290, 310, 314, 324, 329 – 331; see also appearance Mansfeld, J., 52n24 Marion, J.-L., 25n54 matter, 75, 87, 89, 93 – 95, 128, 133, 140, 171, 180, 198, 200, 208n16, 210, 212, 215, 225, 227, 232 – 233, 243, 263, 265 – 275, 278 – 279, 295, 307, 323, 329 – 330 McGuckin, J., 177n1, 172n3, 206n11 Melchizedek, 213 – 214, 250 – 251 mindfulness (φρόνησις), 36, 57, 241, 243, 315 Moreschini, C., 17, 180n23 Moses, 59, 106, 108, 110 – 111, 117, 121, 128, 131 –132, 135 –137, 141, 164, 207, 212, 225, 257 – 259, 261 – 263, 313 motion (κίνησις), 15, 23, 45, 50, 53, 61, 70, 75 – 76, 78, 80, 97, 155, 158 – 159, 161 – 162, 169, 180 – 185, 187 – 188, 190 – 193, 197, 201, 204, 217, 218 – 223, 226, 228, 235 – 236, 243, 246, 258, 264 – 265, 267 – 268, 271 – 274, 276, 280 – 284, 288 – 291, 296, 299, 302, 305, 307, 310, 318, 327, 330 Mourelatos, A., 46 Mueller-Jourdan, P., 17 multiplicity, 23, 38, 68 – 69, 89, 118 – 119, 164, 228, 288, 299, 322

356

INDEX

mystical theology, 26, 128; see also apophatic theology/apophasis Naddaf, G., 43n3 Nemesius of Emessa, 223 – 224 Nietzsche, F., 86 Norris, F., 128n104 Nussbaum, M., 51n23, 78n86, 146n166 Öhler, F., 16, 241n125 Öhler, K., 31n63 Origen, 23, 29, 81, 102, 105, 111 – 122, 127 – 128, 143, 163 – 164, 180, 185n45, 190, 201n96, 237, 240, 257, 280n72, 301 Origenism, 16 – 17, 21, 33, 39, 153, 164, 179 –181, 185, 193, 208, 237, 239 Osborn, E., 103n9 paideia/pedagogy (παιδεία), 102, 136 – 137, 149, 238 –239, 257, 331 Parmenides, 28, 44 – 53, 58 – 59, 86, 92, 161, 176, 193, 271, 316 passibility (πάθος), 30, 34 – 35, 169, 171, 181 – 185, 187, 190, 196, 201, 203, 222, 223, 251, 329 – 330; see also affectivity Perl, E., 19, 45n10, 159n199 Philo of Alexandria, 23, 109n33, 112n47 Philoponus, 217 – 218, 271, 274 –279 Plagnieux, J., 132n124 Plato, 28, 31, 33n69, 39, 43, 45, 46, 58 – 73, 76, 86, 89n119, 95 – 96, 108, 120, 161, 176, 180, 258, 271 – 274, 280 Plotinus, 27, 28, 34, 39, 85 – 98, 162 – 163, 174 Plutarch, 31n63, 81 Ponsoye, E., 17 Porphyry, 31n63, 85 – 89, 174, 259n25 Posidonius, 80 potentiality (δύναμις), 67, 90, 137, 183, 185 – 186, 189 – 192, 194, 222, 228 – 229, 235, 236, 248, 250, 273, 277 – 278, 281, 292, 323 praxis (πρᾶξις), 13, 22, 28, 34, 35, 44, 51, 75, 85, 86, 90, 98, 119, 131 – 132, 146, 162 – 164, 169, 175n13, 202, 205 – 206, 209 – 212, 220, 227, 229 – 234, 248, 253, 257, 295, 297, 305, 316, 323 – 324, 328

– 331; see also ascetic/ascetical/ asceticism prayer, 20, 78, 132, 138, 141 – 143, 152 – 153, 225n77, 240 Proclus, 72n64, 99, 264, 271 – 278, 317 providence (πρόνοια), 25, 81 – 82, 86, 98, 107, 113, 115, 118, 130, 143, 145, 157 – 158, 187, 235n106, 236 – 240, 301, 303, 318 – 319, 323, 325 Psellos, Michael, 33n69 Renczes, P., 180n23, 186n47 resurrection, 128, 142, 143n159, 180, 208n16, 211, 244, 326, 330 Reydams-Schils, G., 59n38, 271n58 Richardson-Lear, G., 74n73 Riou, A.,18, 180n23, Robin, L., 44n4, 44n6 Rosen, S., 64n49 Roueché, M., 311n47 Rousseau, P., 121n78, 206n11 Rufinus, 114 saints, 207 – 209, 211, 214, 221 – 223, 226 – 227, 230, 233, 246, 249, 252, 254, 261, 281, 300, 303 – 304 Sedley, D., 60, 73n67 self-multiplication of the Divine, 154, 156, 254 – 255, 310 Sextus Empiricus, 55, 80, 83 Sherwood, P., 16, 18, 24n50, 30, 118n68, 154, 180 – 181, 186n47, 188, 207n12, 241n125 simplicity, 23, 50, 157, 169, 176, 182, 228 – 229, 249, 268, 287, 298 – 299 Simplicius, 73, 216 – 217 Socrates, 31, 43, 46, 58, 59, 61, 64n49, 65 – 66, 176 Solomon, 105, 111 – 112, 143 Sorabji, R., 76n80, 270, 271n58, 275 soul (ψυχή), 14, 15, 34, 44, 51, 60 – 62, 64, 66 – 68, 81, 87 – 88, 90 – 93, 97, 109, 112 – 113, 116 – 120, 125, 128, 137, 138, 140 – 142, 144 – 147, 149, 152 – 154, 162, 169, 171 – 177, 180, 193 – 199, 201, 208n16, 211 – 230, 232 – 233, 239, 240 – 246, 250, 252, 255, 262 –

INDEX

263, 272, 280, 284, 292, 305, 310, 313, 320, 322, 324, 326 – 327 space, 15, 17, 64, 71, 116, 215, 227, 252, 265 – 266, 294, 307, 325 Staniloae, D., 17, 324n93 Stoicism, 22n41, 26, 28, 59, 72n64, 78 – 86, 109n38, 162, 223 – 224, 235, 319 Sykes, D.A., 128n105 Tarán, L., 52n24 Themistius, 215 – 216 Thom, J., 78 Thunberg, L., 17 – 18, 21 – 23, 118n68, 138, 179n22, 186n47, 194, 248n148, 308n37 time, 15, 17, 62 – 63, 69, 76, 109, 116, 147, 157, 187 – 188, 190 – 191, 197, 215, 227, 247, 249, 251 – 252, 258, 265 – 266, 270, 271 – 272, 274 – 276, 279, 292, 294, 305, 307, 318, 323, 327, 329 – 330 Tollefsen, T., 19, 180n23, 186n47, 311n46 Törönen, M., 311n46 Transfiguration, 165, 204, 247, 255 – 262, 264, 274, 279

357

Trinity, 21, 114, 138, 144 – 146, 149, 152, 157, 180, 207, 215, 227 – 228, 235n106, 260, 262, 284, 292, 323 truth (ἀλήθεια), 15, 20, 38, 46, 48, 53, 57 – 58, 86 – 87, 103 – 104, 107, 110, 115, 118, 144n163, 176, 201 – 202, 210 – 212, 215, 217, 222, 230, 242, 249 Van Dam, R., 121n80 Voegelin, E., 24 –25, 28, 44n4, 44n5 Vogel, C.J. de, 72n64 Völker, W., 18, 23 – 24, 175n13, 204 Von Balthasar, H.U., 16, 20 – 21, 20, 204 Von Fritz, K., 49n18, 49n19 Watts, E., 99n160, 111n45 White, M., 80n93, 81n98, 81n100 Whitman, W., 123 Wilken, R. 17 – 18 Wittgenstein, L., 126 Wordsworth, W.,15 Zeno (the Stoic), 79 – 81 Zuckert, C., 61, 72