Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to Thomas and Second Letter to Thomas (Corpus Christianorum in Translation) 9782503531540, 2503531547

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MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR AMBIGUA TO THOMAS SECOND LETTER TO THOMAS

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CORPVS CHRISTIANORVM IN TRANSLATION

2 CORPVS CHRISTIANORVM Series Graeca 48

MAXIMI CONFESSORIS AMBIGVA AD THOMAM VNA CVM

EPISTVLA SECVNDA AD EVNDEM

EDIDIT

BART JANSSENS

TURNHOUT

FHG

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MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR AMBIGUA TO THOMAS SECOND LETTER TO THOMAS Introduction, translation and notes by JOSHUA LOLLAR

H F

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Academic Overview PETER VAN DEUN Institute for Early Christian and Byzantine Studies KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

©2009, 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 ⁄ 2009 ⁄ 0095

⁄ 53 ISBN 978-2-503-53154-0

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For Fr. John Behr

πρὸς γὰρ διδάσκαλον ὁ λόγος μικροῖς πορίζεσθαι μεγάλα δυνάμενον Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Thomam, Prol. 4

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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The Life of Maximus Maximus the Author Gregory Nazianzen and Denys the Areopagite Content of the Ambigua ad Thomam Previous Translations of the Ambigua ad Thomam and Epistula Secunda Note on References to the Translation

13 16 21 23 35 38

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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AMBIGUA TO THOMAS

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Prologue Ambiguum 1 Ambiguum 2 Ambiguum 3 Ambiguum 4 Ambiguum 5

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SECOND LETTER TO THOMAS

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AMBIGUA TO THOMAS: NOTES TO THE TEXT

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131

INDICES

Index of Scriptural References Index of non-Biblical Sources Subject Index Index of Personal and Place Names

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133 135 139 142

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Eric Wierda, who oversaw the editorial process of this volume with patience and expertise, and whose comments have enriched my work; to Bart Janssens, who first suggested that I publish this translation of his excellent edition of the Ambigua ad Thomam and Epistula secunda; to the three anonymous referees from Corpus Christianorum, who read my text with care and offered numerous helpful suggestions; to Fr. Brian E. Daley, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Albertus Horsting, and Joshua Robinson, who either read or listened to part or all of the present work, and who made many thoughtful recommendations; to my wife, Kristine, and our children Elizabeth, Justus, Constance, and Solomon, who have supported me throughout; finally to Fr. John Behr, who first introduced me to the study of St. Maximus during a memorable seminar devoted to the Confessor’s work, and to whom I gratefully dedicate this translation. JOSHUA LOLLAR Notre Dame, Feast of the Martyr Hyacinth of Cappadocia

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Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662) is a pivotal figure in the history of Christian thought, both as a theologian and as a philosopher.1 He has been called “the most daring systematician of his time” and “an incontestable pillar of the Church”,2 and his influence on the life of the Eastern Orthodox Church can perhaps best be symbolized by the fact that more space is given to his writings in the Philokalia – the great collection of texts on asceticism and prayer compiled by SS. Nicodemus and Macarius at the end of the eighteenth century – than to any other single writer in the collection.3 He was also made available to the medieval West through the translation efforts of John Scot Eriugena4 and Anastasius the Librarian5 in the ninth 1 For a bibliography of scholarship on Maximus to 1998 see VAN DEUN, Maxime le Confesseur. État de la question et bibliographie exhaustive. 2 VON BALTHASAR, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, p. 29. 3 This point is noted by the editors and translators of the English version of the Philokalia, Vol. II, p. 48. 4 Principally the Quaestiones ad Thalassium: edited and printed with the Greek edition in LAGA – STEEL, Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium, I: Quaestiones I-LV una cum latina interpretatione Ioannis Scotti Eriugenae iuxta posita, CCSG 7; II: Quaestiones LVI-LXV una cum latina interpretatione Ioannis Scotti Eriugenae iuxta posita, CCSG 22; and the Ambigua ad Iohannem: JEAUNEAU, Maximi Confessoris Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem, CCSG 18. 5 Portions of the Mystagogia; texts related to the life of Maximus, edited in ALLEN – NEIL, Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia una cum

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century. In his own time, he became an extremely important figure on the theological landscape, as is evinced not only by the power of his writings, but also by the pains to which the imperial court in Constantinople went to try to change his mind with respect to his understanding of the wills in Christ, ultimately mutilating the unbending monk and banishing him to the Black Sea coast where he died soon after on the thirteenth of August, 662. Yet, as foundational as he was for what came after him, and as controversial and influential as he was in his own time, much of Maximus’ greatness lies in his appropriation of what came before him. His constant engagement with earlier theologians – Origen, Evagrius, the Cappadocians, Cyril, Denys the Areopagite – is seen throughout his works. The two sets of Ambigua, the Ambigua ad Iohannem and the Ambigua ad Thomam, are, of course, explicit encounters with specific passages from Gregory Nazianzen and Denys, but his other works also offer subtler and more anonymous encounters with the tradition: though some treat patristic quotations, those questions in the Quaestiones et dubia6 that are devoted to passages of Scripture are in many ways an exercise in scriptural interpretation after the manner of Origen; the Capita de caritate7 begin with what appears to be a loose quotation from the Kephalaia gnostica (I.86) of Evagrius, and indeed the whole work suggests a critically engaged encounter with characteristically Evagrian themes: chapters on love corresponding to Evagrius’ chapters on knowledge;8 his Opuscula are filled with references to and quotations from earlier fathers. We have in Maximus, then, one of the most important transmitters of latina interpretatione Anastasii Bibliothecarii iuxta posita, CCSG 39; and the scholia on Denys the Areopagite; see ALLEN – NEIL, Scripta saeculi VII, p. XXXVII; and SIEGMUND, Die Überlieferung der griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert, p. 191. 6 DECLERCK, Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones et dubia, CCSG 10. 7 CERESA-GASTALDO, Massimo Confessore, Capitoli sulla carità editi criticamente con introduzione, versione e note. 8 The contents of fully one fifth of the Capita de caritate derive from a compilation of chapters from disciples of the Evagrian tradition: GÉHIN, Chapitres des disciples d’Evagre, p. 301.

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Greek patristic thought, both in its ascetical and contemplative spirit, and in its speculative aspects, which indeed are inseparable for Maximus, as we shall see below.

The Life of Maximus Despite his great importance in the history of Christian thought, however, the details of Maximus’ life are obscure. Our two main narrative sources for his life, a Greek hagiographic life and a hostile and much earlier Syriac life,9 conflict on such points as his parentage, upbringing, and early formation, and are each motivated to present Maximus as either a defender of orthodoxy, on the one hand, or as a heretic whose mutilation at the hands of the imperial government was his just recompense for blasphemy, on the other. As such, one must be careful when using them as sources.10 The Greek life claims for Maximus a noble birth in Constantinople, an aristocratic education during which he showed a particular proclivity towards philosophy and eventual appointment to the court of the emperor Heraclius as the chief of imperial records. After serving in this position for a time, Maximus left the court for the monastery at Chrysopolis because, according to the Greek life, he both desired the monastic life of silence and the practice of philosophy, and because monothelite teaching had begun to infiltrate the Church.11 He eventually made his way to the West where his teaching on the integrity of the two energies and wills of Christ found support against the monenergist and monothelite tendencies in the Greek East. He 9

BROCK, An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor. For a convenient summary of the sources for the life of Maximus, see NEIL – ALLEN, The Life of Maximus the Confessor: Recension 3, 4-31. There is an edition of materials related to the Vita of Maximus by Roosen, forthcoming from CCSG. 11 Neil and Allen note the apparent anachronism of this suggestion, as the monothelite position does not seem to have been articulated fully at this point in Maximus’ life: Life of Maximus, p. 186 n. 8. 10

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engaged in various disputes, both before and after his arrest by Constantinopolitan authorities, and eventually he and his disciple Anastasius had their right hands cut off and their tongues cut out. Both died soon after as confessors of the dyothelite position. The Syriac life presents a rather different picture. It appears to be the work of George of Resh‘aina, a contemporary of Maximus and fellow disciple of Sophronius of Jerusalem. According to its account, Maximus (named Moschion at baptism) was the offspring of an illicit relationship between a Samaritan linenmaker and a Persian slave girl, a “fruit of wickedness”12 who was left to the care of Abbot Pantoleon of the Palaia Lavra13 in his tenth year after both his father and mother had died. It was from this Abbot Pantoleon that Maximus learned the “evil teaching”14 of Origen, and George of Resh‘aina acknowledges the considerable intellectual abilities possessed by Maximus, though this was hardly to Maximus’ credit, given the purposes to which he applied them. Maximus was, on George’s account, a contentious trouble-maker whose teaching verged on Nestorianism.15 Maximus made his entry into Heraclius’ court, not as a government official, but as a purveyor of doctrines foreign to the Church, when a letter containing the teaching of Sophronius and Maximus that had been drawn up by a council of bishops was read out in the emperor’s presence. The emperor immediately rejected the teaching and issued an edict to the four major episcopal sees of the East condemning it. In re12

Syriac Life 3, p. 314. Brock identifies this as the monastery of St. Chariton, Syriac Life, p. 321. 14 Syriac Life 6, p. 315. 15 Syriac Life 9, p. 316: “[Maximus said] that ‘we should not say “who wast crucified for us” in the Trisagion.’ And he wrote four books, acknowledging in them two wills and two energies and two minds, acknowledging everything to do with Christ to be double, apart from the matter of the persons” (qnume: the word often used in Syriac to translate ὑπόστασις). The charge of crypto-Nestorianism also finds resonance in the Greek life, which reports that Maximus was accused of denying the title ‘Theotokos’ or “Mother of God” to the Virgin Mary, a charge, which he immediately denied: Greek Life, Recension 3.48 (Neil and Allen, p. 136-139). He uses the term ‘Theotokos’ in the Ambigua ad Thomam at 5.13. 13

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sponse, Maximus remained in hiding until the Arab conquest of the Levant, at which time he felt free once again to spread his teaching, since his land of residence was no longer under the control of the imperial authority of Constantinople. After this he went to Africa and took up residence with a group of Nestorian monks in Hippo Diarrhytus, finding, according to the author of the Life, a hospitable home for his doctrines and his rejection of imperial authority. However, out of fear of the advancing Arabs, Maximus left North Africa and went first to Sicily and then to Rome, where he converted Pope Martin to his doctrine, resulting in the gathering of the Lateran Synod in support of Maximus’ teaching. From Rome, Maximus made his way to Constantinople to further promulgate his teaching, starting with a women’s monastery in the city. At this point the Syriac life as we have it cuts off. Given the obvious theological motives behind the two traditions, there is no compelling reason to grant preeminent authority with respect to the events of Maximus’ life either to the Greek or to the Syriac accounts over against the other, though it should be noted that the Syriac life is much earlier, and possibly contemporary to Maximus himself. Also, it has been shown that substantial portions of the Greek life tradition actually derive from a Vita of Theodore the Studite († 826).16 In any case, both are highly tendentious in their own ways, and both provide plausible accounts in certain respects. On the one hand, Maximus was obviously deeply knowledgeable of the theological and ascetical traditions that had their source in Origen and the tradition he represented, and so a formation in an ‘Origenist’ monastic milieu is quite likely. On the other hand, his philosophical and literary abilities point to an aristocratic education of the sort one would expect for a noble youth in Constantinople, and so the Greek account of his youth and formation is equally likely. It should be born in mind, however, that the various components of Maximus’ initial education de16

Neil and Allen, 6 n. 9, referring to the work of LACKNER, Zu Quellen und Datierung der Maximosvita.

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scribed in these two accounts are not necessarily incompatible. Reading Origen and his transmitters, whether Cappadocian, Alexandrian, or Evagrian, would lead one into an engagement on some level with the kind of intellectual formation described in the Greek life: grammar and rhetoric, and ultimately philosophy in its ascetical, physical, and contemplative facets.17 Nevertheless, judging from the recipients of some of his letters, particularly John the Cubicularius, probably a eunuch who served in the imperial chambers, we can say with at least some degree of certainty that Maximus had some sort of connection to the court in Constantinople. The origin, chronology, and nature of this connection, however, is open to debate. A strong case has been made by C. Boudignon in favor of a Palestinian and Alexandrian milieu for Maximus’ intellectual formation as opposed to a Constantinopolitan one.18 By means of a careful analysis of Maximus’ letters and the personalities with whom he was in contact, Boudignon argues for the likelihood that all of Maximus’ major contacts, whether ecclesiastical or political, derive from African and Palestinian circles, and that Maximus was later rendered as “a good Constantinopolitan” after the fact by the hagiographic tradition, which sought to appropriate the Maximian legacy to the orthodox empire.19

Maximus the Author Though the details of his life remain uncertain, Maximus has left a substantial corpus of writings, which allow us to gain some insight into his intellectual universe. Maximus employed a number of different styles of writing and diverse literary genres to convey his teaching. In addition to the forty-five Epistu17

Greek Life Recension 3, 3: Philosophy “is concerned with contemplation and asceticism, and makes pronouncements about nature and the universe”. 18 BOUDIGNON, Maxime le Confesseur était-il constantinopolitain? 19 Ibid., p. 43.

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lae that have come down to us, some of which contain doctrinal elements,20 he used κεφάλαια (‘chapters’), short, densely packed statements often organized into collections of 100.21 He also engaged in sustained exegesis of both Scripture – commentaries on Psalm 59 and the Our Father,22 the Quaestiones ad Thalassium, and many of the Quaestiones et dubia, as well as certain passages in the Ambigua ad Iohannem – and the liturgy – the Mystagogia.23 He wrote in the genre of “Question and Response” in the Quaestiones ad Thalassium, Quaestiones et dubia, the two sets of Ambigua, and Liber asceticus,24 and he wrote short and long pieces making philosophical and theological distinctions in his Opuscula. In a number of his letters, and in the prologues to some of his works, Maximus’ style is eloquent and cultivated. In the Capita de caritate, his use of language, as compared to the Ambigua, is fairly straight-forward and accessible, although the content of the Capita is not at all simple. In his exegetical works on Scripture and the Liturgy, he shows himself to be well-schooled in the exegetical approach of Origen and the Alexandrians with his insistent drive to penetrate to the spirit of the text (whether written, or architectural, as in the case of the Mystagogia’s symbolic interpretation of the church building). From both a conceptual and a literary perspective, the most difficult of Maximus’ works are his two sets of Ambigua, and since the present volume is devoted to Maximus’ Ambigua ad Thomam, let us take a moment to reflect upon their literary and philosophical qualities more thoroughly. Generally speaking, the Ambigua belong, like the Quaestiones ad Thalassium and the Quaestiones et dubia, to the genre of erotapokriseis, or 20

E.g., Epistula 2, De caritate (PG 91, 392D-408B); Epistula 4, De tristitia secundum Deum (PG 91.413A-420C); Epistula 6, Qua animam esse incorpoream ostendit (PG 91, 424C-433A), etc. 21 E.g., Capita de caritate; Capita theologica et oeconomica: PG 90, 1084-1173. 22 Expositio in Psalmum LIX and Orationis Dominicae expositio: VAN DEUN, Maximi Confessoris Opuscula exegetica duo: CCSG 23. 23 BOUDIGNON, Maximi Confessoris Mystagogia: CCSG 69, forthcoming. 24 VAN DEUN, Maximi Confessoris Liber asceticus: CCSG 40.

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“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 fifth and sixth 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.25 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?”26 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 in order to “develop…what is at issue in the question and set forth the extent to which previous attempts have followed paths which were dead ends…paths that do not provide a way out into the open – ἀπορίαι”, which, in turn, “provide the impetus toward the necessary repetition of the question”.27 As he writes in Metaphysics III at the beginning of his catalogue of opinions concerning the nature of what is: 25

For a thorough discussion of the genre, see DÖRRIE – DÖRRIES, ‘Erotapokriseis’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt, Band VI, 342-370 (Maximus at 359-361). See also DALEY, Boethius’ Theological Tracts and Early Byzantine Scholasticism, especially p. 163-176, and ÖHLER, Aristotle in Byzantium. Earlier pagan examples of the genre would be Porphyry’s Homeric Questions (‘Ὁμηρικὰ ζητήματα): SODANO, Quaestionum Homericarum liber I; Aristotle’s own fragmentary ’Ἀπορήματα ‘Ὁμηρικά; or Plutarch’s Platonic Questions (Πλατωνικὰ ζητήματα): CHERNISS, Plutarch’s Moralia XIII, Part I. 26 PLATO, Meno 84c: BURNET, Platonis Opera III. 27 HEIDEGGER, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, p. 138.

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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 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.28

The way forward is occasioned by what appears to be an obstacle to progress. The ἀπορία provokes the philosophical desire to know – this is the beginning for both Plato and Aristotle29 – 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 due to the dependence of the questions on the struc28 Metaphysics III.1.995a24-b2: ROSS, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Volume I. Translation modified from ROSS, The Basic Works of Aristotle, and TREDENNICK, Aristotle: The Metaphysics Books I-IX. 29 Cf. Aristotle’s famous phrase from Metaphysics I.1: “All men by nature desire to know.”

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ture of the scriptural narrative, but even here we find examples of apparently random collections of questions and answers.30 While Maximus’ collection of erotapokriseis that have come to be called the Ambigua (’ʹἌπορα) ad Thomam do generally fit the description of the genre just given, there are certain features of the ad Thomam that cause it to diverge from the typical pattern. Unlike most sets of erotapokriseis – including Maximus’ own Quaestiones ad Thalassium and Quaestiones et dubia – which have an explicitly stated question at the head of each section, the chapters of the Ambigua ad Thomam simply present a quotation from Gregory or Denys the Areopagite and then proceed with an explanation.31 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 Thomas the addressee would have been aware of the issues at play in the quotations. This lack of leading questions is related to the second major difference between the Ambigua ad Thomam and typical collections of erotapokriseis: that Maximus, as I shall argue below, has arranged a coherent argument around passages from Gregory Nazianzen and Denys. He has not simply interpreted problematic quotations from revered theological authorities so as to confirm their orthodoxy and then left them to be arranged randomly. Rather, as we shall see, Maximus has deliberately organized the perplexing quotations as a framework for his own demonstration, in this case, of the meaning of the union of the divine and the human in the activity (ἐνέργεια) of Christ. Very much in the spirit of ancient philosophy, he begins with what is obscure in order to open up the way for his teaching. But before we come to the specific content of the Ambigua ad Thomam, we should consider the place of the two Fathers whose texts are the subject of their exposition. 30 See BARDY, La littérature patristique des Quaestiones et responsiones sur l’Écriture sainte. 31 Ambigua 1 and 5 do each begin with an indication of one of the difficulties in their respective quotations, but these indications do not really constitute specific questions.

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Gregory Nazianzen and Denys the Areopagite In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Gregory Nazianzen has been known as ‘the Theologian’ since the Council of Chalcedon (451)32 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 tenth- and early-eleventh-century monk and abbot St. Symeon the New Theologian. In the later Byzantine world, he was, for some, at least, the supreme exemplar of thought and style,33 and the Byzantine hymnographic tradition has incorporated many lines from his orations into its liturgical poetry. By at least the ninth century, illuminated editions of Gregory’s festal orations were in existence, and the reading of these festal orations became a part of the liturgical celebration of the feasts.34 Reading and interpreting Gregory became central to the intellectual life of the Byzantine world, and Maximus’ Ambigua are an early witness to this phenomenon.35 The identity of Denys the Areopagite, by contrast, is famously mysterious. Maximus, like nearly everyone until the modern era, regarded the author of the Dionysian corpus as the disciple of Paul from the Areopagus (Acts 17.34).36 The first extant citations of his texts, however, come from the early-sixthcentury monophysite bishop Severus of Antioch, one of whose texts we shall observe in the commentary below. This fact does 32 GALLAY, Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 27-31 (Discours théologiques), p. 7 n. 2. 33 So Michael Psellus (eleventh 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: GAUTIER, Michaelis Pselli Theologica I, 75.90-93, cited in DALEY, Gregory of Nazianzus, 1. 34 GALAVARIS, The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, 4. 35 MORESCHINI, Massimo il Confessore di fronte a Gregorio Nazianzeno (a proposito degli Ambigua), p. 136. The essay gives an overview of some of the important themes in Maximus’ doctrinal engagement with Gregory Nazianzus in the Ambigua ad Iohannem. 36 VÖLKER, Der Einfluß des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita auf Maximus Confessor, gives an overview of Dionysian themes in the thought of Maximus.

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not necessarily imply, however, that Denys was originally the property of monophysite theologians, and was only later wrested away from them by John of Scythopolis, Maximus, and others. Parties on all sides of the question concerning the nature(s) of Christ, in fact, made use of Denys in support of their arguments, though he was by no means the dominant authority for either side.37 Another significant early reference for our purposes occurs in 532, in a letter sent to the emperor Justinian by a group of monks and bishops who opposed the Council of Chalcedon (451). The letter attempts to justify their opposition to the language of Chalcedon in which Christ is spoken of as existing “in two natures”. They sought to assert that the Cyrillian notion of the “one incarnate nature of God the Word” implies the presence of one corresponding activity in Christ.38 Their quotation of Denys, in fact, expresses a theme that would be central to Maximus’ own reading of the Areopagite: “In a manner beyond words, the simplicity of Jesus became something complex, the timeless took on the duration of the temporal, and, with neither change nor confusion of what constitutes him, he came into our human nature, he who totally transcends the natural order of the world.”39 As we shall see below, this unconfused inherence of contraries – the simple and the complex, the atemporal and the temporal, the transcendent and the realm of human nature – lies at the heart of Maximus’ understanding of Christ and this precisely was the initial appeal 37

For an introduction to the early reception and use of the Dionysian corpus, see ROREM – LAMOREAUX, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, p. 9-22. 38 Μία φύσις τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου σεσαρκωμένη: Apologia XII capitulorum contra orientales 65.29-30: SCHWARTZ, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum I.I.7, p. 48 (PG 76, 349B; PUSEY, Cyrilli archiepiscopi Alexandrini Vol. VI, p. 318). Cyril attributes the phrase to Athanasius of Alexandria, though the sentence containing the phrase in Cyril’s Defensio is a direct quotation from Apollinarius’ Ad Iovianum: LIETZMANN, Apollinaris von Laodicea, p. 251. For Maximus’ reading of Cyril on this point see THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, p. 40-47. 39 De divinis nominibus I.4: SUCHLA, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De divinis nominibus, 113.9-12. See FREND, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, p. 364.

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of Denys to those who opposed Chalcedon and its formula, which Maximus would so vigorously defend, and with the same texts.

Content of the Ambigua ad Thomam The Ambigua40 addressed to Thomas41 are the so-called ‘later’ set of Ambigua, which, however, appear before the earlier and much longer Ambigua ad Iohannem in nearly all of the Greek manuscripts that contain both works.42 Thus, the standard numbering of the two independent sets of Ambigua is arranged as though they constitute one work: the Ambigua ad Thomam correspond to Ambigua 1-5, and the Ambigua ad Iohannem correspond to Ambigua 6-71. Sherwood dates the Ambigua ad Thomam to around 634,43 seemingly before Maximus entered the Christological controversy publicly and came out firmly in favor of an explicitly two-energy and two-will Christology.44 As we shall see, however, the beginnings of his fully articulated po40 As Janssens notes in the introduction to his edition of the Ad Thomam, the term ‘Ambigua’ as a translation of ’ʹἌπορα goes back to John Scot Eriugena, who used it in the prooemium to his translation of the Ambigua ad Iohannem. The term’s use in the titles of the two sets of Ambigua was standardized by Migne when he printed the two sets of Ambigua in PG 91 and gave them the (erroneously) collective title Ambiguorum liber; see Ambigua ad Thomam, p. XV-XVI. 41 I shall not be giving a specific analysis of the Epistula secunda, translated below, since it is fragmentary and consists to a large degree of restatements and direct quotations from the Ambigua ad Thomam. 42 Sherwood, from a cross-reference in Opusculum 1 (PG 91, 33A), argued that it was Maximus himself who arranged the two sets of Ambigua in this order: An Annotated Date-list of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, p. 32. However, see BRACKE, ‘Some Aspects of the Manuscript Tradition of the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor’, for a problematization of this conclusion. Janssens has more recently argued for the correctness of Sherwood’s position, that it was likely Maximus himself who arranged the two sets of Ambigua, though originally composing them separately. At the very least, the arrangement was known to, and accepted by, him: JANSSENS, ‘Does the Combination of Maximus’ Ambigua ad Thomam and Ambigua ad Iohannem go back to the Confessor himself?’. 43 SHERWOOD, Annotated Date-List, p. 39. 44 LOUTH, Maximus the Confessor, p. 14-18, 54-58.

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sition are already to be found in the Ambigua ad Thomam,45 and he explicitly rejects a monenergist position in Ambiguum 5. The addressee, Thomas, was probably a monk who had spent time with Maximus at the Philippicus monastery in Chrysopolis. In the introduction to his edition of the work, Janssens suggests, on the basis of a reference to a “sanctified Lord Abba Thomas” in Maximus’ Epistula 40 to Stephanus46 (probably also a monk and abbot of the Philippicus monastery), that the Ambigua ad Thomam are, in fact, a response to Stephanus’ request for a work on the activities (ἐνέργειαι) of Christ, a request he originally made to Thomas himself. It would seem that Thomas passed the task along to Maximus.47 Within the story of Christian theology as it unfolds from Christ’s primordial question, who do you say that I am? (Matt. 16.15), and makes its way through an increasingly complex mode of expression when the answer, Thou are the Christ, the Son of the Living God, was no longer sufficient, Maximus’ conception of the ἐνέργειαι of Christ (and later of the wills of Christ) and the problems it seeks to address can be seen as the logical outgrowth of the use of ontological language in Christian discourse. Theological thought progressed from the Nicene affirmation that the Son is ὁμοούσιος with the Father through the various statements of what this entails to the eventual affirmation at Chalcedon that the Son is also ὁμοούσιος with human beings, an affirmation which many of its adherents in the East sought to interpret in a Cyrilline way, that is, in a way that kept the unity of Christ at the center of theological discourse. Maximus may be regarded as one of the strongest exponents of this teaching with his rigorous insistence on the unity of Christ, on the one hand, and on the integrity of the human and divine natures, on the other.48 45

VON BALTHASAR, Cosmic Liturgy, p. 78. Inaccurately addressed to Thalassius in Combefis’ edition, PG 91, 633C. Reference to Thomas at 636A. 47 JANSSENS, Ambigua ad Thomam, p. XXIII-XXV. 48 See THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 36-48, for Maximus’ relationship to this ‘Neo-Chalcedonian’ position. 46

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As a philosopher, Maximus continues in the Greek philosophical (especially Neo-Platonic) tradition of ontological speculation – what the Greek Life of Maximus called “the knowledge of beings” – with his discussion of change/motion (κίνησις), nature (φύσις), being/substance (τὸ εἶναι, οὐσία), potency (δύναμις), and activity (ἐνέργεια) in the Ambigua ad Thomam and elsewhere.49 For Evagrius, “the knowledge of Christ is the contemplation of beings”,50 and for Denys, as we shall see, it is in Christ that God has “come into the realm of being”. Maximus stands within this tradition of a Christ-centered contemplation of beings and nature. We might say that this tradition of contemplation, whose outcome is summed up in the statement of Gregory the Theologian, which Maximus will quote numerous times, and which will prove determinative for his understanding of Christ, that “natures” – divine and human – “are instituted anew” in Christ, is the Christian contribution to, or perhaps overturning of, the very concept of nature in Greek thought. Through his focus on Denys’ notion of “theandric activity” in the Ambigua ad Thomam, Maximus seeks to demonstrate the dynamic relationship, in all its radicality, between the natures, created and uncreated, which are united inseparably in Christ. There are five individual chapters of the Ambigua, four of which treat quotations from Gregory the Theologian, while the fifth and by far the longest interprets Epistula 4 of Denys the Areopagite, which contains the disputed phrase “a certain new theandric activity (θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια)” with respect to the conduct of Christ. Each of the five Ambigua has its own theological point, and serves as a sort of speculative exercise that takes as its starting point a problematic or obscure statement from either Gregory of Denys.

49

See GERSH, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, especially p. 193 ff., for a detailed analysis of Maximus’ place in the history of Neo-Platonic thought. 50 PG 12, 1208C, Selecta in Psalmos, attributed to Origen, but now recognized to be from Evagrius.

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Ambiguum 1 treats a quotation from Gregory that states, “the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad” (1.1). To make acceptable sense of the passage, Maximus makes the familiar Cappadocian distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘hypostasis’ with respect to God.51 He also teaches that the ‘movement’ or ‘change’ – κίνησις – from monad to triad takes place not in God but in the mind in contemplation, and this, as we shall see in the commentary below, is the fundamental principle underlying the consideration of ἐνέργεια in the Ambigua. Ambiguum 2 shifts the focus to Christ and, working from the distinction between οὐσία and ὑπόστασις made in Ambiguum 1, defines the proper mode of predication of activities and attributes, divine and human, with respect to the two natures of Christ. Ambiguum 3 deepens the reflection on the unity of the eternal Word with the flesh established in Ambiguum 2, so that Maximus refers to the incarnate Christ as “a visible God”, one who is “truly subject to natural perception” (3.3). From this he moves in Ambiguum 4 to a further consideration of the dynamics of the Word’s assumption of, and activity through, the passible elements of human nature, where it is precisely by means of the activity of the flesh that the Word works the salvation of human nature, a dynamic he intimated in Ambiguum 2. Finally, in Ambiguum 5, Maximus gives a comprehensive treatment of the whole of Denys’ fourth Epistula, showing the meaning and appropriateness of the phrase “theandric activity” (5.16) as a description of the thorough-going communion of divine power with the activity of the human flesh in Christ. With respect to the structure of the demonstration, then, we see a straight-forward delineation of theology and economy: a progression from a distinction and definition on the level of Trinitarian language, its application and modification to language about Christ, and then a deepening reflection and in51 BASIL, Epistula 236: COURTONNE, Saint Basile – Lettres III, p. 47-55; GREGORY OF NYSSA, Ad Petrum fratrem de differentia essentiae et hypostaseos (= BASIL, Epistula 38): COURTONNE, Saint Basile – Lettres I, p. 81-92.

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creasingly paradoxical application of that language to the Word made flesh, i.e., he does divine things in a human way, and human things in a divine way (cf. 4.7, 5.16). Within the framework of this structure, however, we see something more: Maximus is using the question of the ἐνέργεια of Christ to clarify the dynamics of the transcendent God’s immanence in the world in and through Christ, an encounter that results in the deification of human nature through the passibility of the human flesh taken on by Christ. If it is correct on historical grounds that the whole work is intended as an explanation of the ἐνέργεια of Christ – and I believe the content of the work confirms this – then it is significant that Maximus begins his response as he does and conducts it in the manner in which he does, arriving only at the end of the Ambigua at the disputed quotation from Denys concerning the theandric activity of Christ. The question of ἐνέργεια (and the related question of κίνησις), which is the thread binding the Ambigua together, is a question of γνῶσις for Maximus. In this he follows earlier theologians, as the florilegium that constitutes Opusculum 27 indicates.52 To give a few examples from the florilegium: From St. Alexander’s epistle to Aeglon bishop of Cynopolis against the Arians: “The movement inherent in each substance is its natural activity (ἐνέργεια φυσική). The essential and cognitive principle (οὐσιώδης καὶ γνωστικὸς λόγος) of each nature is its natural activity. The manifesting power of each substance is its natural activity.”53 From Gregory of Nyssa: “(...) Activity is the essential characteristic movement of nature, the traits of which are that by means of which it is known, essen52

PG 91, 280B-285B. Sherwood dates this Opusculum to 640-646: Annotated Date-List, p. 52. Geerard, however, does not consider the florilegium to have been compiled by Maximus: CPG 7697 (27), and Alexander’s epistle (CPG 2015) quoted above is itself now considered to be spurious. At the very least, we can say that the quotations contained in Opusculum 27 indicate the sort of definitions that would have been common amongst the learned Christians of Maximus’ day. 53 PG 91, 280D.

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tially distinguishing it from other things. Activity is an active movement. Something is called ‘active’ when it is moved from itself. For we say an activity is the natural power and motion of each substance, without which the nature neither is, nor is known.”54 From St. Basil: “The definition of each substance is its natural activity, the confirmation of which leads the intellect up to the nature, from which it proceeds.”55

These quotations reveal that the gnoseological element of the concept of ἐνέργεια played an important role in the fourthcentury Trinitarian debates. In that context, Nicene theologians argued from the unity of activity of Father and Son to a unity of essence. When the principle that activity gives rise to knowledge is transposed to the relation of the divine and human in Christ, we find Maximus making use of it to understand how the God who is “beyond being” comes to be known in the realm of being through the θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια of Christ.56 In Ambiguum 5, Maximus interprets the phrase θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια in this way: On the one hand, as God, he was the motivating principle of his own humanity; on the other, as man, he was the revelatory principle of his own divinity, divinely possessing suffering (for it was voluntary), if I may speak that way, since he was not mere man, and humanly possessing wonder-working (for it was through the flesh), since he did not exist as bare God. Indeed, the passions are wonderful, for they are renewed by the divine power of the one who suffers, and the wonders are passible, for they have been fulfilled by the natural passible power of the flesh of the one who works them. Knowing this, the teacher says, “and further, having accomplished the divine things not insofar as he was God”, since 54

PG 91, 281A. PG 91, 281C. 56 For a recent discussion of ἐνέργεια in Maximus and the antecedent philosophical and patristic tradition, see RENCZES, Agir de Dieu et liberté de l’homme. 55

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they were not wrought only divinely, and separated from the flesh (for “he was not only beyond being”), “neither did he accomplish the human things insofar as he was man”, since they were not wrought only in a human way, and separated from divinity (“for he was not only man”). “Rather, God having become man, he conducted his life for us according to a certain new theandric activity.” (5.16)

This is a daring interpretation of Denys by Maximus in light of the typical Christological grammar of attributing the human acts to the human nature and the divine acts to the divine nature, as we find in the quotation from Gregory the Theologian at the head of Ambiguum 2. To come to this statement in Ambiguum 5, where it is possible to ascribe passibility to God, Maximus begins his series of interpretations in a context where one cannot speak of passibility with respect to God. Having quoted Gregory the Theologian, that “the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad”, he concludes Ambiguum 1 with this: But if, having heard the word ‘movement’ (κίνησις), you wonder how the divinity that is beyond eternity is moved, understand that the motion (πάθος) belongs not to the divinity, but to us, who first are illumined with respect to the rational principle (λόγος) of its being, and thus are enlightened with respect to the mode (τρόπος) of its subsistence, since surely being is observed before the manner of being. And so, movement of divinity, which comes about through the elucidation concerning its being and its manner of subsistence, is established, for those who are able to receive it, as knowledge. (1.4)

Γνῶσις is quite literally the last word of Ambiguum 1 and is the governing principle of the whole enquiry. But here it is precisely κίνησις, the κίνησις of divinity, which nevertheless is a passivity that “belongs to us” in illumination and enlightenment, that is established as γνῶσις. From the outset, then, Maximus begins to show the means by which God is made known to the mind, and thus to the flesh, through the mind’s awareness of its own movement, movement which, as he shows in

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Ambiguum 7 (i.e. the second chapter of the Ambigua ad Iohannem) inheres in the very structure of its creation.57 The most proximate source for Maximus’ reflection on this point seems to be Evagrius’ Kephalaia gnostica:58 The Unity did not move itself from its unified state. It was moved by the receptivity of the intellect, which, by its negligence turned its face from it, and by its loss of it brought forth ignorance. (1.49) Movement is the cause of evil, and the destruction of evil is virtue. Virtue is the daughter of names and means, and the cause of these is movement. (1.51) Conversion is the ascent from movement, evil, and ignorance toward the knowledge of the Holy Trinity. (6.19)

It has been shown that Maximus effected a reversal in Ambiguum 7 of the typical Origenist scheme, which held that rational creatures existed primordially in a state of stability (στάσις) and then fell through movement (κίνησις) into becoming (γένεσις). Maximus, by contrast, argues in Ambiguum 7 that intellects are first brought into being (γένεσις) and as such progress through movement (κίνησις) towards the final goal of stability (στάσις).59 The so-called Origenism of Maximus’ own day seems to have been inspired particularly by the thought of Evagrius60 and it is quotations like the three above that would have inspired a scheme equating movement with fallenness. In the context of his concerns in the Ambigua ad Thomam, Maximus effects another reversal, but in a slightly different mode. In Ambiguum 7, the primary concern was to show the incoher57

PG 91, 1072B. GUILLAUMONT, Les Six Centuries des “Kephalaia Gnostica”: édition critique de la version syriaque commune et édition d’une nouvelle version syriaque. PRADO, Voluntad y Naturaleza: La Antropologia Filosofica de Maximo el Confesor, gives a philosophical analysis of Maximus’ positive understanding of κίνησις vis-à-vis Evagrian Origenism, see especially p. 23-29, 57-77, 83-145. 59 SHERWOOD, The Earlier Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor and his Refutation of Origenism, especially p. 72-116. See also VON BALTHASAR, Cosmic Liturgy, p. 127-130; and GERSH, From Iamblichus to Eriugena, p. 218-229, 244-248. 60 GUILLAUMONT, Les “Kephalaia gnostica” d’Evagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origènisme chez les grecs et chez les syriens, p. 156 ff. 58

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ence of a view that could permit a falling away from the supreme and most desirable good. 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? Here in the Ambigua ad Thomam, Maximus focuses on the question of knowledge, and he overturns the statement from the Kephalaia gnostica cited above that would implicate movement in the production of ignorance. Rather, on Maximus’ account, intellectual movement is co-terminus with the acquisition of knowledge itself. So we would seem to have another reversal of Evagrian Origenism. Yet, Maximus may have found a way into this reversal on Evagrian grounds, since, as the second quotation from the Kephalaia gnostica implies, movement, as the cause of its progeny, is the condition of the possibility of virtue. This is a point similar to one made in Ambiguum 4, where obedience and disobedience are shown to pertain to those who are moveable by nature (4.2). Similarly, the third Evagrian quotation envisions the condition of movement as the condition from which one begins the assent to knowledge. It is indeed a condition to be overcome – along with evil and ignorance – but nevertheless involved in the acquisition of γνῶσις. In any case, because the practice of virtue and the acquisition of knowledge are inseparable for Maximus and Evagrius alike,61 we may regard this rerouting of Evagrian thought as a privileging of one of its components over another. κίνησις, then, is established as γνῶσις. Ambiguum 3 introduces the concept of δύναμις, the philosophical counterpart to ἐνέργεια. As noted above, Maximus refers to Christ as “the visible God”, who is “truly subject to natural perception”, by virtue 61 For Evagrius, see Kephalaia gnostica III.61: “The virtues give the vision of the second natural contemplation to the intellect, and this in turn makes it see the first; and the first, in turn, makes it see the Holy Unity.”

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of his manifestation in the flesh. He continues from here to define what precisely is visible in this “visible God”. The Word who has become perceptible by being emptied out “all the way to the passibility of our nature … has made manifest the superinfinite power by means of a flesh passible by nature” (3.3). In Ambiguum 1 we see Maximus refer to the κίνησις of the mind as a πάθος, an affect or change, and he clearly conceives of flesh as naturally intelligent, as endowed with soul and mind. We see here in Ambiguum 3 the entry of the Word into the realm of κίνησις by means of the passibility of flesh. He extends this theme in Ambiguum 4, where he reflects upon the teaching that the Son took “the form of a slave” (Phil. 4.7). He quotes Gregory as saying that neither obedience nor disobedience pertain to the Son, because as eternal Son of the eternal Father, he is not subject to anyone’s authority. As Maximus explains, the fulfillment and transgression of commandments “are characteristic of those who are changeable by nature” (τῶν φύσει κινουμένων, 4.2). Thus, in taking the form of a slave, and coming into the realm of obedience to commandments, the Son took on a form alien to himself. This is, of course, part of Gregory’s argument against the Eunomians of his own day, a group that vigorously denied any essential likeness between the Father and the Son, and who claimed that the essence of the Father was knowable by the human mind. The important point for our purposes, however, is the notion of being ‘changeable’. The implication of Ambiguum 4 is that, in taking the form of a servant, and entering the realm of commandments, to use Gregory’s language, the Son has come into the realm of change/κίνησις and passibility, and as such, when we regard this under what I have defined as the governing principle of the Ambigua ad Thomam, this entry of the Son into the realm of κίνησις is the grounds for knowledge based on a manifestation of divine power – δύναμις – by means of passible flesh. Not only is the divine δύναμις made manifest in flesh, it is also imparted to flesh. This is not the addition of something wholly foreign to flesh, for as Maximus goes on to say, “by

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performing (ἐνεργῶν) the activities of a slave as a master would perform them, that is, fleshly activities in a divine way, he demonstrated the dispassionate power (δύναμις) which naturally rules among fleshly things, making corruption disappear through suffering, and fashioning indestructible life through death” (4.7). On the other hand, by “doing the divine deeds by means of the flesh, he showed forth an ineffable self-emptying, which does a divine work by means of passible flesh for the whole race” (4.7). From this Maximus concludes that Christ establishes both natures with their proper activities, which he here equates with motion/change: ἐνεργείας ἤγουν κινήσεις. As such, “he shows forth the power of his own divinity and the activity of his flesh at one and the same time, without separation” (4.7). When he comes finally to address Denys’ fourth Epistula, and particularly the notion of the “new theandric activity”, he explains what Denys means by his affirmation that Jesus is called ‘human’ not only because he is the cause of human beings, but because he truly exists as human “according to the complete [human] essence”. Within this explanation, he writes: The God of all who became incarnate is not called man in a superficial way, “but rather, as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence”. The only true proof of this integral essence is its naturally constitutive power (συστατικὴ δύναμις). Were one to call this a “natural activity” (φυσικὴν ἐνέργειαν), one would not stray from the truth, since it is properly and primarily characteristic of the essence. It exists as the formconstituting movement that is most proper to it, and contains every property that naturally belongs to it. (5.2)

Here it is δύναμις that manifests essence, but this manifesting power can be called ἐνέργεια, an activity that exists as a “form-constituting movement”. So we see the coalescence of δύναμις, ἐνέργεια, and κίνησις in the one manifestation of the human flesh of Christ, which is nothing less than the entry of God into being (οὐσιωμένος, 5.4). Maximus goes on to refer to Denys’ example of the miracle of the walking on the water:

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By virtue of this traversal [of the water] he manifests without separation the natural activity of his flesh together with the power (δύναμις) of his own divinity, since the facility of movement belonged to the flesh by nature, but not to the divinity beyond infinity and being, which is hypostatically united to it. (5.8)

Again, κίνησις does not apply to the divinity beyond being. It is a phenomenon of beings in the realm of being. Therefore the manifestation of divine δύναμις as ἐνέργεια in the realm of being is by means of “the natural activity of flesh”. Thus Maximus can say that Christ “manifests, inseparably with the divine power, the activity of his own flesh” (5.12), and that he “demonstrates in an exalted union that the human activity is assimilated to the divine power without being changed” (5.14). Maximus holds that δύναμις and ἐνέργεια are given in the same act, or more precisely, that divine δύναμις is given as fleshly ἐνέργεια, and made manifest in the acts of Jesus. As Maximus goes on to say near the end of Ambiguum 5, But let us consider the “theandric activity” as it has been given. “Having conducted his life for us” – not for himself – according to it, he renewed human nature by what is beyond human nature. For conduct of life is life led according to the law of nature. The Lord is double with respect to nature. Suitably he manifested the corresponding life, brought together without confusion in the same act by both the divine and human law, new and identical, not only in a way that was foreign to those upon the earth, both paradoxical and unknown to the nature of beings, but rather he lived out in a new way the characteristics of a new activity, which perhaps the one who has conceived of the concord in this mystery has given the name ‘theandric’, so that he might demonstrate the manner of exchange according to the ineffable union. (5.22)

The conception and affirmation of the theandric activity of Christ is the affirmation that this one “who is truly subject to natural perception” is the self-emptied Word, the “God below”, in Gregory’s language, “the visible God”, according to Maximus. This is the meaning of γνῶσις for Maximus, when ἐνέργεια in the realm of being is seen as the manifestation of divine δύναμις. The content of γνῶσις, then, is at once the revela-

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tion of the power of God and therefore the presence of God, and the revelation of the nature of the flesh, by whose natural activity the Divine works and saves created nature itself in a divine-human act where change/κίνησις gives rise to γνῶσις and transformation. The apprehension of the θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια, then, is the knowledge of divine power/δύναμις made manifest in and by passible human flesh. Maximus’ reflection upon the unified activities in Christ is at one and the same time both a meditation upon the person and work of Christ, and a description of the on-going transformation of flesh by communion with the power of God. As Maximus writes in Ambiguum 4, “[Christ] is one, and there is nothing more unified and nothing more unifying and able to save than him, or than what is proper to him” (4.8).

Previous Translations of the Ambigua ad Thomam and Epistula Secunda The Anglican priest Thomas Gale made a Latin translation of the Ambigua ad Thomam at the end of the seventeenth century. It is printed with Öhler’s Greek text in PG 91, 1031-1060. Modern translations of some or all of the Ambigua ad Thomam are the following: I. Sakales, Φιλοσοφικὰ καὶ θεολογικὰ ἐρωτήματα τοῦ ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ Ὁμολογητοῦ (1973, Modern Greek); D. Sta˘niloae, Ambigua: Traducere din Greces¸te, introducere ¸si note (1983, Romanian); E. Ponsoye, Ambigua (1994, French); A. Louth (Ambigua 1 and 5), Maximus the Confessor (1996, English); and C. Moreschini, Massimo il Confessore Ambigua (2003, Italian). Translations of the Epistula secunda include P. Canart, La deuxième lettre à Thomas de S. Maxime le Confesseur (1964, French); I. I. Ica˘, Sf. Maxim Ma˘rturisitorul. Epistola a doua ca˘tre ava Toma (1993, Romanian); and C. Moreschini, Massimo il Confessore Ambigua (2003, Italian).

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Partial translations of both texts may be found passim in J.M. Garrigues, Maxime le Confesseur. La charité, avenir divin de l’homme (1976); J. Stead, The Meaning of Hypostasis in Some Texts of the Ambigua of Saint Maximos the Confessor (1989); and J.-C. Larchet, La divinisation de l’homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur (1996). As justification for the present translation, I shall confine my comments on these existing translations to the three most accessible to Western readers: those of Ponsoye, Louth, and Moreschini. I have referred to all three in the preparation of the present volume and have found them helpful in many respects. They do, however, have certain limitations. On a purely formal level, the translation of Ponsoye and the partial translation of Louth suffer from the fact that they are based upon Öhler’s text in the Patrologia Graeca. As such, in addition to being limited to a less than satisfactory text, both provide minimal references (as does the Patrologia Graeca) for Maximus’ quotations of authorities (usually Gregory Nazianzus) that derive from passages other than the quotations heading each chapter of the Ambigua. Though Moreschini based his own translation on Janssens’ critical edition, he, too, does not always provide the citations noted in the critical edition. This is unfortunate in that a clear indication of the quotations in Maximus’ text reveals the extent to which he has appropriated especially Gregory’s style of expression to his own. On the other hand, Moreschini’s notes do clearly show Maximus’ relationship to patristic (especially Cappadocian), Chalcedonian, and Greek philosophical (especially Aristotelian and Stoic) thought. With respect to the substance of the translations themselves, I would say with respect to Ponsoye’s translation that while it is quite readable, there are a number of places where I have interpreted Maximus’ text somewhat differently,62 and a few places 62 E.g., Ponsoye renders a passage from the beginning of Ambiguum 3, παντὸς αἰῶνος δηλονότι καὶ πάσης δι᾽ ἑαυτὸν ὑπάρχων ἐπέκεινα φύσεως, κἄν ὑπ᾽ ἄμφω νῦν διὰ σὲ γεγένηται θέλων, as “…étant lui-même au-delà de tout temps et de

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where one finds what I think are mistakes, either mis- or overinterpretations of Maximus’ Greek,63 or omissions of words.64 Louth’s translations of the more technical passages of Ambigua 1 and 5 tend to be bound fairly tightly to the Greek, but this occasionally results in awkward English. There are, however, certain inaccuracies, which render his work unreliable at times,65 though the notes to the translation do clarify some of the unclear points of the translation itself.66 toute nature, meme s’il a voulu venir en l’une et l’autre natures pour toi”, Ambigua, p. 106. The pairing of παντὸς αἰῶνος and πάσης φύσεως in Maximus’ explanation is reminiscent of the Evagrian mode of speaking about the created order in terms of ages and natures or worlds (intellectual, corporeal, etc.); Maximus is referring to the entrance of the Word who is beyond every age and nature into the created realm, into the realm of being as he will put it in Amb. 5, and so I have translated the passage as, “he existed self-sufficiently beyond every age and nature, even if now he has willingly come to be subject to both because of you” (Amb. 3.2), where ἄμφω (‘both’) refers not to the divine and human natures, as Ponsoye’s translation indicates, but to “every age and nature”. 63 E.g., PONSOYE, Ambigua, 109, “Différent en effet est le salaire de qui ne peut pécher par nature et de qui a péché…”, for ’Aλλότριον γὰρ τοῦ κατὰ φύσιν ἀναμαρτήτου, τὸ τοῦ ἁμαρτήσαντος ἐπιτίμιον; corresponding to our Amb. 4.3, “the penalty that belongs to the one who has sinned is alien to the one who is naturally without sin”. 64 E.g., PONSOYE, Ambigua, 110, where Ponsoye fails to translate νόμῳ σώματος, corresponding to our Amb. 4.6, “according to the custom of the body”. 65 E.g., the opening lines of Ambiguum 5, where Louth translates ’Eπειδὴ κατὰ τὴν ἁπλῆν ἐκδοχὴν τῆς ἁγίας γραφῆς, ὡς πάντων αἴτιος ὁ θεὸς, πᾶσι σημαίνεται τοῖς τῶν ἐξ αὐτοῦ παρηγμένων ὀνόμασιν, οἰόμενον τυχὸν καὶ μετὰ τὴν σάρκωσιν τούτῳ μόνον (μόνῳ in the PG) τῷ τρόπῳ πάλιν ἄνθρωπον τὸν θεὸν ὀνομάζεσθαι as “Since, according to the simple interpretation of Holy Scripture, God as the cause of all is designated by the names of everything that he has produced, and again after the Incarnation is only in this mode called man…”, Maximus the Confessor, p. 171172. At best the phrase in italics is unclear; at worst it expresses the opposite of Maximus’ meaning. I have rendered the passage thus, “Since it is the case that, according to the simple interpretation of Holy Scripture, God, as the cause of all, is signified by all of the names of those things which have come from him, the great Denys corrects the monk Gaius, who may have thought that God is called man after the incarnation only is this way” (Amb. 5.2). 66 E.g., LOUTH, Maximus the Confessor, p. 215 n. 8, referring to the translation of Οὐ … ἢ σάρκα συνουσιωμένην οὐρανόθεν ἑαυτῷ συγκατήγαγε, κατὰ τοὺς ’Aπολιναρίου μύθους as “nor did he come down from heaven to share being with the flesh, after the Apollinarian myths (p. 172). The note clarifies the caricatured presentation of Apollinarius’ position “that Christ brought his flesh down with him from heaven”, but the translation itself obscures this. I have translated the passage as “neither did he bring down from heaven flesh coessential with himself, according to the myths of Apollinarius” (Amb. 5.4).

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Moreschini’s translation is the soundest of the three mentioned here, and there are indeed only a few places where I differ substantially in the interpretation of Maximus’ meaning. One potentially confusing aspect of his translation in general is its rendering of Maximus’ technical term τρόπος with the Italian ‘modo’, on the one hand, and its occasional rendering of certain Greek adverbs with the Italian construction “in modo”, on the other; e.g., “una sola natura divina che esiste in modo monadico (μοναδικῶς) e sussiste in modo triadico (τριαδικῶς)”, and “in quanto noi riceviamo il raggio innanzitutto dal principio razionale (λόγον) del suo essere e così siamo illuminati circa il modo (τρόπον) in cui essa sussiste”.67 The important distinction between λόγος and τρόπος may potentially be obscured by Moreschini’s translation here. Given the absence of a complete English translation of the Ambigua ad Thomam and the limitations of the French translation of Ponsoye, and despite the overall quality of Moreschini’s translation, a full English translation seems to be needed for the wider audience of readers, especially in the English-speaking world, for whom Italian is not so accessible. It is my hope that the present translation will fulfill this need.

Note on References to the Translation Paragraph numbers following the unnumbered divisions of the critical edition have been added to the text of the translation for the sake of referencing in the Introduction and Notes to this volume.

67 MORESCHINI, Ambigua, 577, corresponding respectively to our Amb. 1.3, “the divinity is one, existing monadically (μοναδικῶς), and subsisting triadically (τριαδικῶς)”; and Amb. 1.4, “but to us, who first are illumined with respect to the rational principle (λόγον) of its being, and thus are enlightened with respect to the mode (τρόπον) of its subsistence”.

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Abbreviations CCSG: CPG: PG: SChr:

Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca, Turnhout: Brepols, 1977Clavis Patrum Graecorum, Turnhout: Brepols, 1974J.-P. MIGNE (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus, series Graeca, Paris: Migne, 1857-1866 Sources Chétiennes, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1941-

Editions of Works of Maximus Ambigua ad Iohannem iuxta Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae latinam interpretationem – ed. E. JEAUNEAU (CCSG 18), Turnhout: Brepols, 1988. Ambigua ad Thomam una cum Epistula secunda ad eundem – ed. B. JANSSENS (CCSG 48), Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. Capitoli sulla carità editi criticamente con introduzione, versione e note – ed. A. CERESA-GASTALDO, Roma: Editrice Studium, 1963. Liber asceticus – ed. P. VAN DEUN (CCSG 40), Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Mystagogia – ed. C. BOUDIGNON (CCSG 69), Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming. Opuscula exegetica duo (Expositio in Psalmum LIX; Orationis Dominicae expositio) – ed. P. VAN DEUN (CCSG 23), Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. Quaestiones ad Thalassium I: Quaestiones I-LV una cum latina interpretatione Ioannis Scotti Eriugenae iuxta posita – ed. C. LAGA, C. STEEL (CCSG 7), Turnhout: Brepols, 1980.

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Quaestiones ad Thalassium II: Quaestiones LVI-LXV una cum latina interpretatione Ioannis Scotti Eriugenae iuxta posita – ed. C. LAGA, C. STEEL (CCSG 22), Turnhout: Brepols, 1990. Quaestiones et dubia – ed. J. H. DECLERCK (CCSG 10), Turnhout: Brepols, 1982. Scripta saeculi VII vitam Maximi Confessoris illustrantia una cum Latina interpretatione Anastasii Bibliothecarii iuxta posita – ed. P. ALLEN, B. NEIL (CCSG 39), Turnhout: Brepols, 1999.

Modern Translations of Works of Maximus CANART, P., ‘La deuxième letter à Thomas de S. Maxime le Confesseur’, Byzantion 34 (1964), p. 415-445. ICA˘ , I. I. , ‘Sf. Maxim Ma˘rturisitorul. Epistola a doua ca˘tre ava Toma’, Revista Teologica N.S. 3 (75) (1993), 3, p. 37-45. LOUTH, A., Maximus the Confessor, London-New York: Routledge, 1996. MORESCHINI, C., Massimo il Confessore, Ambigua, Milan: Bompiani, 2003. PONSOYE, E., et al., Ambigua: Introduction par Jean-Claude Larchet; avant-propos, traduction et notes par Emmanuel Ponsoye; commentaire par Dumitru Sta˘niloae, Paris: Éditions de l’ancre, 1994. SAKALES, I., Φιλοσοφικὰ καὶ θεολογικὰ ἐρωτήματα («Περὶ διαφόρων ἀπορίων τῶν ἁγίων Διονυσίου καὶ Γρηγορίου») τοῦ ἁγίου Μαξίμου τοῦ ‘Ὁμολογητοῦ, vol. 1, with introduction and notes by D. STA˘ NILOAE (’Eπὶ τὰς πηγὰς, 1, 4), Athens: ’ʹἚκδοσις ’Aποστολικὴ Διακονία, 1973, 1978. STA˘ NILOAE, D., Ambigua: Traducere din Greces¸te, introducere ¸si note, Bucharest: Editura Institutului Biblic ¸si de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1983.

Other Ancient Sources Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum I.1.7 – ed. E. SCHWARTZ, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1919. Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.2.2 – ed. R. RIEDINGER, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992.

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ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary – ed. W. D. ROSS, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1924]. BASIL OF CAESAREA, Saint Basile – Lettres Tome I – ed. and trans. Y. COURTONNE, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957. —, Saint Basile – Lettres Tome III – ed. and trans. Y. COURTONNE, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966. DENYS THE AREOPAGITE, Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De divinis nominibus – ed. B. R. SUCHLA, Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1990. —, Corpus Dionysiacum II: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De coelesti hierarchia, De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De mystica theologia, Epistulae – ed. G. HEIL, A. M. RITTER, Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1991. Doctrina patrum de incarnatione Verbi – ed. F. DIEKAMP [1907], 2nd ed. B. PHANOURGAKIS, E. CHRYSOS, Münster: Aschendorff, 1981. EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS, Chapitres des disciples d’Evagre – ed. P. GÉHIN (SChr 514), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2007. —, Les six centuries des “Kephalaia gnostica”: édition critique de la version syriaque commune et édition d’une nouvelle version syriaque – ed. A. GUILLAUMONT, Patrologia Orientalis, 28, fasc. I, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1958. GREGORY NAZIANZEN, Discours 38-41 – ed. C. MORESCHINI (SChr 358), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990. —, Lettres théologiques – ed. P. GALLAY (SChr 208), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974. MICHAEL PSELLUS, Michaelis Pselli Theologica I – ed. P. GAUTIER, Leipzig: Teubner, 1989. Philokalia Vol. II – trans. G. E. H. PALMER, P. SHERRARD, K. WARE, London: Faber and Faber, 1990 [1981]. PLATO, Platonis Opera III – ed. J. BURNET, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 [1903]. PLOTINUS, Plotinus: Ennead V – ed. A. H. ARMSTRONG, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. PLUTARCH, Moralia XIII – ed. H. CHERNISS, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. PORPHYRY, Quaestionum Homericarum Liber I – ed. A. R. SODANO, Napoli: Giannini & Figli, 1970.

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Modern Studies BARDY, G., ‘La littérature patristique des Quaestiones et responsiones sur l’Écriture sainte’, Revue Biblique 41 (1932), p. 210-36, 341-369, 515-537; and 42 (1933), p. 328-352. BELLINI, E., ‘Maxime interprète de Pseudo-Denys l’Areopagite. Analyse de l’Ambiguum ad Thomam 5’, in Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1982, p. 37-49. BOUDIGNON, C., ‘Maxime le Confesseur était-il constantinopolitain?’, in Philomathestatos: Studies in Greek Patristic and Byzantine Texts Presented to Jacques Noret for his Sixty-Fifth Birthday – ed. B. JANSSENS, B. ROOSEN and P. VAN DEUN, Leuven-Paris-Dudley, MA: Peeters Publishers, 2004, p. 11-43. BRACKE, R., ‘Some Aspects of the Manuscript Tradition of the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor’, in Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1982, p. 97-108. BROCK, S., ‘An Early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor’, Analecta Bollandiana, 91 (1973), p. 299-346. COOPER, A., ‘“Suffering wonders” and “wonderful sufferings”: Maximus the Confessor and his fifth Ambiguum’, Sobornost, 23:1 (2001), p. 45-58. DALEY, B. E., ‘Boethius’ Theological Tracts and Early Byzantine Scholasticism’, Medieval Studies, 46 (1984), p. 158-191. —, Gregory of Nazianzus, Routledge: London-New York, 2006. DE

ANDIA, Y., ‘Transfiguration et théologie negative chez Maxime le Confesseur et Denys l’Aréopagite’, in Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident: Actes du Colloque International Paris, 21-24 septembre 1994, Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997, p. 19-30.

DÖRRIE, H. – H. DÖRRIES, ‘Erotapokriseis’, in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum: Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt, Band VI, ed. T. KLAUSER, Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1966, p. 342-370. FREND, W. H. C., The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. GALAVARIS, G., The Illustrations of the Liturgical Homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

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GARRIGUES, J.-M., Maxime le Confesseur. La charité, avenir divin de l’homme (Théologie historique, 38), Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1976. GERSH, S., From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition, Leiden: Brill, 1978. GRILLMEIER, A., Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche 2/3, Freiburg: Herder, 2002. GUILLAUMONT, A., Les “Kephalaia gnostica” d’Evagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origénisme chez les Grecs et chez les Syriens (Patristica Sorbonensia, 5), Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962. HEIDEGGER, M., Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force – trans. W. BROGAN and P. WARNEK, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. JANSSENS, B., ‘Does the Combination of Maximus’ Ambigua ad Thomam and Ambigua ad Iohannem go back to the Confessor himself?’, Sacris Erudiri, 42 (2003), p. 281-286. LACKNER, W., ‘Zu Quellen und Datierung der Maximosvita (BHG3 1234)’, Analecta Bollandiana, 85 (1967), p. 285-316. LARCHET, J.-C., La divinisation de l’homme selon Saint Maxime le Confesseur (Cogitatio fidei, 194), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996. LIETZMANN, H., Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule: Texte und Untersuchungen, Hildesheim-New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970. MORESCHINI, C., ‘Massimo il Confessore di fronte a Gregorio Nazianzeno (a proposito degli Ambigua)’, in L’Antico e la sua Eredità: Atti del Colloquio internazionale di studi in onore di Antonio Garzya – ed. U. CRISCUOLO, Napoli: M. D’Auria Editore, 2004, p. 135-151. NEIL, B. – P. ALLEN, The Life of Maximus the Confessor: Recension 3, Strathfield, Australia: St. Paul’s Publications, 2003. NORRIS, F. W., Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning, Leiden: Brill, 1991. ÖHLER, K., Aristotle in Byzantium, in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 5:2 (1964), p. 133-146. PRADO, J. J., Voluntad y naturaleza: la antropologia filosofica de Maximo el Confesor, Rio Cuarto: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional de Rio Cuarto, 1974. REDOVICS, A., ‘Gregory of Nazianzus (Or. 29.2) in Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua’, Studia Patristica, 37 (2001), p. 250-256. RENCZES, P. G., Agir de Dieu et liberté de l’homme: Recherches sur l’anthro-

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pologie théologique de saint Maxime le Confesseur (Cogitatio fidei, 229), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2003. ROREM, P. – J. C. LAMOREAUX, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. ROSS, W. D., The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Random House, 1941. SHERWOOD, P., An Annotated Date-list of the Works of Maximus the Confessor (Studia Anselmiana, 30), 1952. —, The Earlier Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor and his Refutation of Origenism (Studia Anselmiana, 36), 1955. —, St. Maximus the Confessor: The Ascetic Life, The Four Centuries on Charity, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1955. SIEGMUND, A., Die Überlieferung de griechischen christlichen Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche bis zum zwölften Jahrhundert, Munich: FilserVerlag, 1949. STEAD, J., ‘The Meaning of Hypostasis in Some Texts of the “Ambigua” of Saint Maximos the Confessor’, The Patristic and Byzantine Review 8 (1989), p. 25-33. THUNBERG, L., Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2nd ed., Chicago: Open Court, 1995. TREDENNICK, H., Aristotle: The Metaphysics Books I-IX, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 [1933]. VAN DEUN, P., ‘Maxime le Confesseur. État de la question et bibliographie exhaustive’, Sacris Erudiri, 38 (1998-1999), p. 485-573. VÖLKER, W., ‘Der Einfluß des Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita auf Maximus Confessor’, Studien zum Neuen Testament und zur Patristik: Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 77 (1961), p. 331-350. —, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965. VON BALTHASAR, H. U., Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor – trans. B. E. Daley, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003. WINKELMANN, F., Der monenergetisch-monotheletische Streit, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001.

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AMBIGUA TO THOMAS

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Concerning various difficult passages of SS. Denys and Gregory, to Thomas the Sanctified

Prologue To the sanctified servant of God, spiritual father and teacher, Master Thomas; humble and sinful Maximus, unworthy servant and disciple: [1] In that you have taken firm possession of unwavering contemplation by a harmonious zeal for divine things, you have become, dearly beloved of God, a most pure lover, not simply of wisdom, but of its beauty. The beauty of wisdom is knowledge in practice, or practice filled with wisdom, the distinctive mark of which is the design of divine providence and judgment, since it is filled with both. In accordance with this design, by interweaving the intellect with sense perception through the Spirit, you have shown truly how God is wont to make man according to the image of God (Gen. 1.27). You have established a renowned wealth of goodness, lavishly demonstrating in yourself, by means of a comely mixture of opposites,

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5

God embodied in virtues, to whose self-emptying you have achieved a certain symmetry by an exalted imitation, and have not disdained to descend even unto me, seeking those things of which you already have experiential knowledge. [2] These chapters concern Denys and Gregory, those highly praised saints and blessed men, truly the choicest portion of those who have been set forth from above by God in accordance with his eternal purpose (Eph. 3.11). They have received every “stream of wisdom”,a which is truly accessible to the saints, and by the putting aside of natural life, they have been made into vitality itself. Because of this they have obtained Christ, who alone lives, or better, who has become for them the vitality of their life, and is manifest to all through all their actions, words, and thoughts. For, these should not henceforth be believed to derive from them, but from Christ, who has exchanged himself for them by grace. [3] But how shall I say, Jesus is Lord (1 Cor. 12.3), I who have not yet received the Spirit of holiness? How shall I who am slow of speech (Isa. 35.6; Mark 7.32) speak of the dominions of the Lord (Ps. 105.2), I who have affixed the intellect in a relation to corruptible things? How shall I make even some of His praises heard (Ps. 105.2), I who am dumb, whose ears have entirely rejected the blessed voice of the Word because of my devotion to the passions? How will the Word become manifest in me, defeated as I am by the world, that He might overcome the world (John 16.33), though He would not thereby be revealed naturally to the world (John 14.22), since He is not distinctly known by a disposition naturally inclined to the material? How is it not audacious for the cursed one to be present with the holy, the unclean with the clean? [4] Therefore, since I feared the charge of rashness, I would not have attempted a response to your request had I not feared the danger of disobedience more. And so, caught between these two, I choose the charge of rashness as more bearable, fleeing as a

PS. DEN. AR., Coel. hier., VII.1.

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unpardonable the danger of disobedience, and by the mediation of the saints, and by the help of your prayers, with Christ our great God and Savior (Titus 2.13) enabling me to think piously and to speak appropriately, I will give an answer as concise as possible, since this discourse is for a teacher who is able to derive many things from a meager offering. I begin with God-minded Gregory, since he is closer to us in time.

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Ambiguum 1

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[1] From St. Gregory’s First Oration on the Son: “Because of this, the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad.”a And from St. Gregory’s Second Oration on Peace: “The monad is moved because of its abundance, the dyad is surpassed (for it is beyond matter and form, which determine bodies), and the triad is defined because of perfection.”b [2] If, having examined what appears to be disharmony, servant of God, you are confused with respect to the true harmony, understand that it is not possible to find it according to the simplest understanding of these words. It is, in fact, the same thing for “the dyad to be surpassed” as for it not to come to be dyad; and again, it is the same thing for the “triad to be defined” as for the movement of the monad “to come to stability as triad”. Indeed, we revere a “unified sovereignty”, which is not “without magnanimity”, as though it were restricted to one person. Likewise, it is not “without order”, as though it were “being poured out unto eternity”. Rather, we revere this unified sovereignty as “that which is constituted” by the Triad, which is by nature equal in honor, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. a b

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.2. GREG. NAZ., Or. 23.8.

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“Their wealth is sameness of nature and the one effulgence of radiance;a divinity is not diffused beyond them, lest we introduce a community of gods, nor is it limited to one of them, lest we be deemed worthy of condemnation because of the poverty of divinity.”b [3] This is not a causal explanation of the cause of beings, which is itself beyond being, but a demonstration of how one is piously to think about it. The Divinity is monad, but not dyad, and triad, but not plurality, since it is without beginning, without body, and without conflict. The monad is truly monad. It is not the principle of things that come after it in a sort of condensation deriving from its self-differentiation, as though, making its way to plurality, it were naturally poured out. Rather, it is the concretely existing essential reality of the consubstantial triad. And “the triad is truly a triad; it is not” composed of “individual numbers”.c It is not the synthesis of monads, that it should experience division; rather, it is the essential existence of the tri-hypostatic monad. The triad is truly monad, since thus it is, and the monad is truly triad, since thus is subsists. Indeed, the divinity is one, existing monadically, and subsisting triadically. [4] But if, having heard the word ‘movement’, you wonder how the divinity that is beyond eternity is moved, understand that the passivity belongs not to the divinity, but to us, who first are illumined with respect to the rational principle of its being, and thus are enlightened with respect to the mode of its subsistence, for it is obvious that being is observed before the manner of being. And so, movement of divinity, which comes about through the elucidation concerning its being and its manner of subsistence, is established, for those who are able to receive it, as knowledge.

GREG. NAZ., Or. 40.5. GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.8; id., Or. 45.4. c GREG. NAZ., Or. 23.10. a

b

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[1] Of the same (Gregory the Theologian), from the same First Oration (on the Son): “In sum, attribute the more exalted things to the divinity, to the nature which is superior to the passions and the body, and attribute the more lowly to the composite, to the self-emptying for your sake, to the incarnation, and – I won’t hesitate to say it – the becoming-man.”a [2] The Word of God exists as a full, complete essence (for he is God), and as an undiminished hypostasis (for he is Son). But, when he emptied himself, he became the seed of his own flesh, and when he was composed in an ineffable conception, he became the hypostasis of the very flesh that was assumed. Having truly become a whole human being, without change, in this new mystery, he was himself the hypostasis of two natures, of the uncreated and the created, of the impassible and the passible, receiving without fail all of the natural principles of which he was the hypostasis. [3] If he has truly received all the natural principles of which he was the hypostasis, the teacher very wisely ‘assigned’b the passions of his own flesh to him who became composite by the hypostatic assumption of the flesh, lest the flesh be thought to a b

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.18. GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.1.

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be stripped of its reality. Because the flesh exists from him, and he truly exists according to it, the teacher attributes the passions “to the God who is passible against sin”.a [4] The teacher is making a distinction when he says these things about the essence and the hypostasis. With respect to essence, although he became flesh, the Word remained simple; with respect to hypostasis, he became composite by the assumption of flesh. God operated as passible according to the economy of the incarnation, and Gregory says these things lest, by predicating things of the hypostasis out of ignorance of the nature, we should inadvertently worship a god who is passible by nature, as though we were Arians. [5] He adds, “I won’t hesitate to say it – the becoming-man”, not only in response to the Arians who replace the soul with divinity, or to the Apollinarians, who teach that Christ had a soul without intellect, and in this way cut off the Word from the fullness of our nature, and who even make him passible in the divine nature. Rather, beyond these concerns, he adds the phrase “the becoming-man” so that the “only-begotten God” might be shown as having truly become authentically human for us. For it is by means of the activity inherent to the nature of flesh, which is endowed with an intellectual and rational soul, that he effects our salvation. In accordance with the verse in everything, only without sin (Heb. 4.15) – since no principle of sin has been sown whatsoever in human nature – he truly became man, but not without the proper natural activity. The rational principle of the natural activity of something is the definition of its essence, for this rational principle characterizes the nature of anything in which it essentially occurs. That which is commonly and generically predicated of something is the definition of its essence, and to deprive something of this is to bring about the corruption of its nature, since no being that is deprived of what occurs naturally in its nature remains preserved as what it is. a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.1.

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10

[1] Of the same (Gregory), from the same (Oration on the Son): “It is, in fact, the case that this one who is disdained by you now was beyond you; now a man, he was incomposite. That which he was, he remained, and that which he was not, he assumed. In the beginning he was without cause (for who is the cause of God?), but later he came to be for the sake of a cause: that you, the arrogant one, should be saved, you who, because of this fact, despise the divinity, since he deigned to receive your thickness by consorting with the flesh through the mediation of the intellect. Moreover, in that he became man, he was God below, since ita was mixed with God, and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory, so that I might become god to the degree that he became man.”b [2] He says, “it is, in fact, the case that this one who is disdained by you now, was beyond you” – by which he means that he existed self-sufficiently beyond every age and nature, even if now he has willingly come to be subject to both because of you. “Now a man, he was incomposite”, that is, simple with respect to nature and hypostasis, inasmuch as “God is singular”, unfettered “by body and bodily things”.c Even if now, by the asa

I.e., “the flesh”, following Maximus’ interpretation in III.3. GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.19. c GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.13. b

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sumption of flesh which has an intelligent soul, he became “that which he was not”, that is, composite with respect to hypostasis, he “remained that which he was”, simple with respect to nature, so that he might save you, a man. For he had this as the sole cause of his fleshly birth – the salvation of human nature – and having become subject to its passibility, as to something thick, “he consorted with flesh by the mediation of the intellect, having become man, the God below. He became all things that we are – save sin – on behalf of all: he became body, soul, intellect, and death by means of these. He became man, the common subject of them all, but man beheld as God because of what is understood about him”.a [3] And so, the Word “has become one” in an authentic sense, in that he himself has been emptied out without change all the way to the passibility of our nature. Having become truly subject to natural perception by means of the incarnation, a visible God, also called, “God below”, he has made manifest the super-infinite power by means of flesh which is passible by nature, “since it” – and this unambiguously refers to the flesh – “was mixed with God, and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory”, for the deifying Word actually assumed flesh in a hypostatic identity. [4] The teacher says, “He has become one”; he did not say, “one thing”, showing that, even in the identity of the one hypostasis, the natural difference of those natures that are united remains unconfused, since the word ‘one’ is indicative of hypostasis, while the words “one thing” would indicate nature. [5] As for the statement, “So that I might become god to the degree that he became man”, this is not mine to say, I who have been befouled by sin, and have completely lost the desire for the life that truly is life. Rather, it is fitting for you, who, by the complete abandonment of nature, are distinguished by grace alone, and are destined to be shown forth by its power “to the degree that” the one who is God by nature became flesh and a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.21.

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shared in our weakness, for the deification of those who are saved by grace corresponds, as he himself knew, to the degree of his self-emptying. It is a statement fitting for the “wholly deiform”, and for those who will become “able to contain the whole and only God”, since those who believe that this promise will truly be fulfilled “hasten towards this perfection”.a

a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.6.

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Ambiguum 4 [1] Of the same (Gregory), from the second Oration on the Son: “…since the Word was neither obedient nor disobedient. For these concepts pertain to those who are under authority, to those who have a secondary status: the one (obedience) to those who have a more agreeable disposition, the other (disobedience) to those who are worthy of chastisement. And as the form of a slave (Phil. 2.7), he condescends to those who are his fellow slaves and his slaves, and he takes on a form foreign to himself, bearing my entirety in himself, along with the things that pertain to me, that he might consume the worse aspect in himself, as fire consumes wax, or as the sun the vapor of the earth, that even I might partake of what is his because of the blending. Because of this, he honors obedience with action, and he experiences it by suffering, for the disposition is not sufficient, just as it is not for us, unless we also proceed by means of deeds: action is the proof of disposition. We would probably not be far-off if we were to assume even this, that, by the art of his philanthropy, he considers our obedience, and evaluates all” of our actions “with reference to his own sufferings, so that he is able to understand our condition by means of his own sufferings, both how much is demanded of us, and how much we are granted, so that our weakness is reckoned along with our suffering”.a a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.6.

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[2] Since the Word is God by nature, Gregory says he is entirely free from obedience and disobedience. Since he is also by nature the giver of every commandment – where obedience constitutes the keeping of the commandment, and disobedience constitutes its transgression – he exists as Lord. For the notion of law as the fulfillment or transgression of commandments is characteristic of those who are changeable by nature, and not of the one who is by nature a stable existence. [3] “As the form of a slave”, that is, having become human by nature, “he condescends to those who are his fellow-slaves and his slaves, and he takes on a form foreign to himself ”. Together with our nature, he also takes on the passible element of our nature, for the penalty that belongs to the one who has sinned is alien to the one who is naturally without sin. This penalty is the condemnation of the passible element of the entirety of human nature because of transgression. [4] But if he emptied himself as “the form of a slave”, that is, as a human being, and if by his “condescension, he takes on a form foreign to himself ”, that is, he becomes a human being passible by nature, then we see in his self-emptying and condescension that he is both good and the lover of mankind. His self-emptying shows that he has truly become man, and his condescension that he truly exists as a man passible by nature. Therefore, the teacher says, “he bears my entirety in himself, along with the things that pertain to me” – that is, the complete human nature, including its “inculpable passions”a – by a hypostatic union. By virtue of these inculpable passions, having consumed our worse part, by means of which the passible element in our nature has usurped control (I am referring to the law of sin [Rom. 7.23] which is born of disobedience, whose strength lies in the disposition of our mental inclination set contrary to nature, and which produces an impassioned state fluctuating between relaxation and tension in the passible element of our nature), “he has not only saved those held down by a

See Janssens’ edition, p. 14, for the various possible sources of this phrase.

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sin”,a but also, having remitted our penalty in himself, he has imparted divine power which produces stability of soul and incorruption of body in an identity of inclination towards what is beautiful by nature in those who are zealous to honor grace with action. It is this, I think, that the saint teaches when he says, “that he might consume the worse in himself, as fire consumes wax, or as the sun the vapor of the earth, that even I might partake of what is his because of the blending”, becoming pure of passion, by grace of course, in a manner equal to him. [5] I also know a different explanation of the phrase, “he took on a form alien to himself ”, which I learned from a holy man who is wise in both word and life. When he was asked about it, he explained that obedience, like subordination, is alien to the nature of the Word. With respect to obedience, when he fulfilled the commandment on behalf of us who have transgressed, he accomplished the complete salvation (Ps. 73.12) of the race by making what is ours his own. [6] “Because of this, he honors obedience with action”, having become by nature the new Adam on behalf of the old, “and he experiences it by suffering”, in that he was willingly born along with us by the same passions, since, according to this truly great teacher, “he was weary, he was hungry, he was thirsty, he was in agony, and he wept according to the custom of the body”.b This is clearly a ‘proof ’ of an active ‘disposition’, and is a sure sign of the condescension to “his fellow slaves and his slaves”, for he remained master by nature, but he became a slave because of me who am a slave by nature, that he might make me master of the one who rules tyrannically by means of deceit. [7] Because of this, by performing the activities of a slave as a master would perform them, that is, fleshly activities in a divine way, he demonstrated the dispassionate power which naturally rules among fleshly things, making corruption disappear

a b

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.3. GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.15.

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through suffering, and fashioning indestructible life through death. Likewise, by doing the deeds of a master while comporting himself as a slave, that is, the divine deeds by means of the flesh, he showed forth an ineffable self-emptying, which does a divine work by means of passible flesh for the whole human race that had become earthen in corruption. For in the exchange of the divine and the fleshly he clearly confirmed the natures of which he himself was the hypostasis, along with their essential activities, i.e., their movements, of which he himself was the unconfused unity, a unity which admits of no division with respect to the two natures of which he was the hypostasis, since they naturally belong to him. This is because he acts monadically, that is, in a unified form, and by means of each of the things that are predicated of him, he shows forth the power of his own divinity and the activity of his flesh at one and the same time, without separation. [8] For he is one, and there is nothing more unified and nothing more unifying and able to save than him, or than what is proper to him. Because of this, even while suffering, he was truly God, and even while working wonders, the same one was truly man, since he was the true hypostasis of true natures according to an ineffable union. Acting in them both reciprocally and naturally, he was shown truly to preserve them, preserving them unconfused for himself, since he remained both dispassionate by nature and passible, immortal and mortal, visible and intelligible, the same one being both God and man by nature. [9] Thus, in my opinion, the one who is master by nature “honors obedience”, “and he experiences it by suffering”, not so that he might simply save, having cleansed the whole of human nature of its worse aspect by his own sufferings, but rather that he might also “consider our obedience”. The one who by nature encompasses all knowledge learns by the experience of our own circumstances the things that pertain to us: “both how much is demanded of us, and how much is granted us”. He does this for the sake of perfect submission, by means of which he is wont to

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lead to the Father those who are being saved, who have taken on his appearance by the power of grace. [10] How great and truly fearful is the mystery of our salvation. For that which pertains to us by nature – which Christ was himself – is “demanded of us”, but “we are granted” what pertains to us by union, that which Christ was but is beyond our nature, unless somehow the habit of a sin-loving inclination fashions the material for the working of evil from the weakness of its nature. This mighty teacher is clear, beginning from this conception, and confirming it in what follows. For he says, “If the light shining through a veil in the darkness – this life – (John 1.5) was pursued by another darkness (I mean the Evil One and Tempter), to what degree would a darkness that is weaker be pursued? And what is so amazing if that light shining in the darkness entirely escapes, but we are captured to some degree? For the simple fact of being pursued is more formidable for that light than our being captured, as those who consider these things rightly would say.”a

a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.6.

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On the epistle to Gaius the monk from St. Denys the Areopagite, bishop of Athens. [1] “‘How,’ you say, ‘has Jesus, who is beyond all things, come to be ranked in essence with all men?’ But he is not called man here as the cause of men, but rather, as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence.”a [2] Since it is the case that, according to the simple interpretation of Holy Scripture, God, as the cause of all, is signified by all of the names of those things which have come from him, the great Denys corrects the monk Gaius, who may have thought that God is called man after the incarnation only is this way, with these words, teaching that the God of all who became incarnate is not called man in a superficial way, “but rather, as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence”. The only true proof of this integral essence is its naturally constitutive power. Were one to call this a “natural activity”, one would not stray from the truth, since it is properly and primarily characteristic of the essence. It exists as the formconstituting movement that is most proper to it, and contains every property that naturally belongs to it, without which there is only non-existence, “since”, according to that great teacher, a

PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 4.

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only “that which has absolutely no being has neither movement nor existence”.a [3] Therefore, he teaches most clearly that God who was made flesh is to be denied nothing whatsoever of what is ours – except for sin, which does not belong to our nature – since he was distinctly shown forth, not as man in a superficial way, “but as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence”. Arguing from this in what follows that one who exists humanly is rightly called such, he says, “We do not limit Jesus to his humanity”,b since we do not teach that he is a mere man, thereby doing violence to the union that is beyond thought. When we confer the name ‘human’ upon him who is, according to us, the truly existing God by nature, we mean it in the essential sense, and not merely in the sense that he is the cause of human beings. “He is not only human”, since the very same one is also God, “and he is not only beyond being”, since the very same one is also human. He exists neither as a mere human being, nor as bare God, “but the one who is the preeminent lover of mankind is truly human”. [4] For with boundless yearning for mankind, he became by nature the very thing that he truly yearned for, “neither” changing “anything passively in his” own “essence by his unutterable self-emptying”,c nor changing anything from the human essence because of the ineffable assumption or diminishing the integrity of human nature. From this we see that the Word is appropriately established as the constitutive principle of human nature. “The one beyond being comes into being from the human essence, both in a way that transcends humanity” (since “he came into being divinely, without a man”d) “and in a way that accords with humanity” (for “he came into being in a hu-

PS. DEN. AR., Eccl. hier., 2. PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 4. Except where noted, the remaining quotations in Amb. 5 are from Denys’ Ep. 4. c Cf. GREG. NAZ., Ep. 243, PG 46, 1108A, 14-15 and PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.10. d GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.16. a

b

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man way, since it was by the law of conception”a). For he did not present to us in himself only a bare gesture in the form of flesh, “according to Manichean nonsense”,b neither did he bring down from heaven flesh coessential with himself, according to the myths of Apollinarius. On the contrary, he became “what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence” by the assumption of flesh intellectually endowed with soul, which was hypostatically united to him. [5] “But the one who eternally transcends being is no less overflowing with transcendence”, for although he became man he was not yoked under human nature. On the contrary, he raised human nature up to himself, having made it another mystery. He remained entirely incomprehensible, and showed his own incarnation to be more incomprehensible than every mystery, in that he came forth by means of a birth beyond being. To the degree that he became comprehensible on account of the incarnation, by so much more was he known as more incomprehensible through it. [6] For “he is hidden after the appearance”, says the teacher, “or, to speak more divinely, even in the appearance. For this mystery of Jesus has also been hidden, and it has been reached by no reason and no intellect, but even while being spoken of, it remains ineffable, and while being conceived, it remains unknown”.c What could be more demonstrative than this for the purposes of demonstrating the divine “transcendence of being”? It shows “what is hidden by means of an appearance”, and the speechless by “a word”. It shows “to the intellect” what is unknown because of its superiority, and, to affirm something even more radical, “that which is beyond being” by its entrance into being. [7] “By the completely unconstrained abundance of this transcendence of being, though he truly came into being, he yet remained beyond being even as he entered the realm of beGREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.16. GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.26. c PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 3. a

b

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ing.” In this he clearly instituted anew the laws of natural generation by becoming human in form even without the seed of a man. “And the virgin makes” him “manifest, conceiving in a manner beyond nature the Word who is beyond being”,a “who is formed”b as human “without a man”c “from her virginal blood, by a” strange “decree contrary to nature”.d [8] “He also did human things in a way that transcends humanity”, having dispassionately instituted anew the nature of the elements in their very foundations. “And he” clearly “shows unstable water, which is unable to bear the weight of material and earthly feet, as unyielding, but he does this by a power beyond the nature of the element which he shows to hold together undiffused”, since truly “with unwetted feet which have bodily bulk and the weight of matter, he traversed” with ease “the wet and unstable substance”,e walking upon the sea (Matt. 14.26; Mark 6.48-49; John 6.19) as upon dry land. By virtue of this traversal he manifests without separation the natural activity of his flesh together with the power of his own divinity, since the facility of movement belonged to the flesh by nature, but not to the divinity beyond infinity and being, which is hypostatically united to it. [9] “For the Word beyond being came into the realm of being”f as human once and for all, and possessed as his own undiminished property, along with the things characteristic of human being, the movement of being which properly characterizes him as human. This was formally constituted by everything that he did naturally as human, since indeed he truly became human: breathing, talking, walking, moving his hands, naturally making use of the senses for the apprehension of sensible realities, hungering, thirsting, eating, sleeping, growing weary, weeping, struggling, even existing as a self-subsistent a

PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.6. PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.9. c GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.16. d PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.9. e PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.9. f Cf. PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 4 and Div. nom., II.6. b

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power, and everything else by which he moved the nature which had been taken on. This is analogous to how the soul independently and naturally moves the body, which is co-natural with it. For, the human essence was truly his and was called his, or to speak with precision: having become, without change, that which human nature is in its activity, he himself fulfilled the economy on our behalf in an unimaginable manner. [10] And so, he did not destroy the constitutive energy of the essence that was taken on, just as he did not destroy the essence itself. As the teacher says, “he yet remained beyond being even as he entered the realm of being, and he did human things in a way that transcends humanity”. However, he demonstrated the newness of the modes that pertained to both natures, a newness which is preserved within the abiding stability of the natural rational principles, without which no being is what it is. [11] If we should say that the positing of the essence that was taken on and the removal of its constitutive activity is a superior denial, with what sort of argument shall we be able to demonstrate that it is the same act of positing that, though pertaining to both equally, signifies the existence of one and the complete destruction of the other? Or again, if indeed the nature which has been taken on is not self-moving, and is actually moved by the divinity which has been hypostatically united to it, that is, if we remove the constitutive movement from the assumed nature, we would not be admitting the essence itself. It would not, in this case, have appeared as self-subsistent, that is, according to itself, but would have taken existence in the very God-Word who truly entered the realm of being. We have equal cause of refusal for both of these propositions. Rather, let us admit the movement together with the nature, the movement without which nature does not exist, since we know that the rational principle of existence is one thing, and the mode of existence is another. The rational principle of existence is confirmed with respect to nature, while the mode of existence is confirmed with respect to the economy. The conjunction of

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these, by fashioning the great mystery of the “natural principle of Jesus who is beyond nature”,a demonstrates that the distinction of activities as well as the union is preserved in him, where distinction is seen in the natural rational principle of each of the natures that have been united inseparably, and union is understood in the singular mode of those things which exist in an unconfused manner. [12] Indeed, what on earth, and in what manner, would a nature be if it were bereft of its constitutive power? “For that which has no power at all neither exists, nor exists as a certain thing, nor is there any proposition pertaining to it at all”, says that great teacher.b If the correct teaching is contained in none of these propositions, then it is necessary piously to confess both the natures of Christ, of which he himself was the hypostasis, and the natural activities of each nature, of which he himself was the true union, since he worked in himself naturally and monadically – that is to say, in a uniform way – and by means of all the things which manifest, inseparably with the divine power, the activity of his own flesh. For how will the same one be both God and man by nature if he fails to have what naturally pertains to each nature? Will what and who he is, which indeed has not changed, be understood, if he is not confirmed by the things he does naturally? How will he be confirmed, if one of those from which, in which, and which he is remains immobile and inactive? [13] And so, “he yet remained beyond being even as he entered the realm of being”, having fashioned a different beginning of generation (Wisd. 7.5) and of birth in human nature. He was conceived, the seed of his own flesh, and when he was born, he became the seal of virginity in the one who bore him, and showed this contradiction that pertained to her to be true together with those things that remained unmixed. For, the same one is both virgin and mother. She institutes nature anew

a b

PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.9. PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., VIII.5.

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by the conjunction of opposites, since virginity and birth are from opposite realities, and there is no agreement of these to be observed from nature. Therefore, the virgin is truly Mother of God, conceiving and bearing “the Word beyond being” like a seed in a manner beyond being. Because he was sown and conceived, the bearer is rightfully a mother. [14] “He also did human things in a way that transcends humanity”, demonstrating in an exalted union that the human activity is assimilated to the divine power without being changed. Since human nature was united to divine nature without confusion, it has penetrated through the whole. It has absolutely nothing loose and separated from the divinity, which has been united to it hypostatically. For truly “beyond” us, “the Word beyond being entered into” our “being”, and he joined to an affirmation of our nature the affirmation of its natural qualities according to a superior denial. And he has become man: he possesses the mode of being beyond human nature conjoined to the principle of being of human nature, that he might confirm the nature in the newness of modes, while not admitting alteration in rational principle, and that he might demonstrate the beyond-infinite power, which is understood in the same way, even in the generation of opposites. [15] By having produced the passions of nature as works of the will,a and not as the results of natural necessity like we do – on the contrary, he is above us – he made his way through the passible element of our nature with unconstrained authority. He demonstrated with authority that the moveable element in his own will is the naturally motivating element of our will. To clarify this point, the teacher says the following, “Why would anyone make one’s way through the rest of the very numerous beings, by means of which the one who sees divinely will know beyond intellect that even the things affirmed concerning the philanthropy of Jesus have the power of a superior denial?” For “the Word beyond being” having put on everything belonging a

Γνώμης ἔργα: see the commentary for a discussion of the term γνώμη.

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to human nature, together with human nature itself, in his ineffable conception, possessed nothing which is humanly ‘affirmed’ by natural reason, which was not also divine, and denied in a manner beyond nature. The knowledge of this exists beyond intellect, since it is indemonstrable, and only the faith of those who genuinely revere the mystery of Christ can understand it. Concerning this point, as though giving a comprehensive statement, Denys says, “to put it concisely, he was not human”, since by nature he was free from natural necessity, in that he was not brought under the law of generation which pertains to us. But, “he was not non-human”, since “he truly existed as human according to the integrity of the human essence”, bearing by nature what is naturally ours. He says, “But as from men”, since he was consubstantial with us, that which we are, being human according to nature. But he adds, “transcending humanity”, because he brings our human nature to completion in a newness of modes, which we ourselves have not accomplished. Finally, he says, “and while yet remaining beyond human he truly became human”, since he possessed both the modes of being that go beyond nature and the rational principles that inhere in nature connected without damage to one another, the coincidence of which was impossible. He for whom nothing is impossible, truly became the union himself, and was the hypostasis in neither of them exclusively – as though working in one, separately from the other – but rather, he confirms the one through the other, since he is truly both. [16] On the one hand, as God, he was the motivating principle of his own humanity; on the other, as man, he was the revelatory principle of his own divinity, divinely possessing suffering (for it was voluntary), if I may speak that way, since he was not mere man, and humanly possessing wonder-working (for it was through the flesh), since he did not exist as bare God. Indeed, the passions are wonderful, for they are renewed by the divine power of the one who suffers, and the wonders are passible, for they have been fulfilled by the natural passible power of the flesh of the one who works them. Knowing this,

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the teacher says, “and further, having accomplished the divine things not insofar as he was God”, since they were not wrought only divinely, and separated from the flesh (for “he was not only beyond being”), “neither did he accomplish the human things insofar as he was man”, since they were not wrought only in a human way, and separated from divinity (“for he was not only man”). “Rather, God having become man, he conducted his life for us according to a certain new theandric activity.” [17] For, by the assumption of flesh intellectually endowed with soul, the “preeminent lover of mankind truly” became “human”, and he fulfilled theandrically the economy on our behalf according to the divine activity that was made human by a natural conjunction of fleshly activity according to an ineffable union; that is to say, he fulfilled it “divinely and”a humanly. He accomplished both “the divine things” and “the human things”, or, to speak more clearly, “he conducted his life” by means of both a divine and a human ‘activity’ in the same act. [18] Accordingly, having made an affirmation of the union by the denial of the separation of the divine and human activities one from another, the wise one was not ignorant of the natural distinction between those things that have been united. For, although the union casts away the separation, it does no violence to the distinction. If the mode of union preserves the principle of distinction, then the saying of the saint – that “God having become man, he conducted his life for us according to a certain new theandric activity” – is a sort of circumlocution, by which he intimates the double activity with the corresponding naming of the double that pertains to the nature of Christ (since, according to no mode of the union has the essential principle of those which have been united been diminished in nature and quality). He does not do so, however, as some do, “by denial of the extremes”, where a certain middle ground “asserts itself ”. There is no middle term that pertains to Christ, or is affirmed “by the denial of the extremes”. a

GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.16.

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[19] He says, ‘new’, since the activity is characteristic of a new mystery, which is constituted by the ineffable mode of natural conjunction. Indeed, who knows how God becomes flesh, and remains God? How, remaining true God, is he true man, truly demonstrating in himself the natural existence of both natures, and each through the other, while being changed in reference to neither? Only faith by ‘honoring’ the Word with ‘silence’a is able to bear these things, for no rational principle of existing things has been implanted in the nature of the Word. He says, ‘theandric’, neither as something simple, nor yet as some synthetic thing. In the first case, the activity would either exist naturally from bare divinity alone or from mere humanity alone. In the second, it would find itself in a no-man’s-land, in a nature synthesized from the extremes. Rather, it exists “by God having become man”, that is, by perfectly becoming human with respect to what most naturally belongs to human nature. [20] Again, he does not say ‘one’, “since in that case ‘one’ would not be thought as a different concept than ‘new’; ‘one’ would be equivalent to ‘new’, as some think it to be.b Rather, newness belongs to the category of quality, not quantity. Otherwise, given that the rational principle of a nature’s essential activity is its definition, he would necessarily concoct in himself such a nature that even a story-teller who loves to win honor with tales of goat-stags would not utter it. How then, this being given, would one who naturally has one natural activity complete with this one activity both the wonders and the sufferings, which are distinguished from one another by their own proper rational principles of nature, without the total negation of one or the other nature accompanying the loss of the possibility of performing one or the other set of actions? For, no being is wont to accomplish opposite things by one and the same activity, and yet still remain within the bounds of the definition and rational principle of its nature. a b

PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., I.3. See Janssens’ edition, p. 31, for the allusions in this sentence.

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[21] Therefore, it is not permitted simply to attribute to Christ one, or a natural, activity of the divinity and the flesh, for divinity and flesh are not the same in natural quality, since the Triad would then become a four-fold with respect to nature. For that by which the Son is naturally the same as the Father and the Spirit because of the one essence, and that by which he has become the same as flesh because of the union, are not themselves the same reality, even if he has made the flesh, which is mortal by nature, life-giving by the union with himself. Otherwise, by having altered the essence of flesh into what it was not, and having made it the same as the divinity in nature after the union, he would be shown to exist from a changeable nature. [22] But let us consider the “theandric activity” as it has been given. “Having conducted his life for us” – not for himself – according to it, he renewed human nature by what is beyond human nature. For conduct of life is life led according to the law of nature. The Lord is double with respect to nature. Suitably he manifested the corresponding life, brought together without confusion in the same act by both the divine and human law, new and identical, not only in a way that was foreign to those upon the earth, both paradoxical and unknown to the nature of beings, but rather he lived out in a new way the characteristics of a new activity. The one who has conceived of the concord in this mystery has, perhaps, given this activity the name ‘theandric’ so that he might demonstrate that the mode of exchange in the ineffable union, in the interchange of the things added naturally to each part of Christ, has been achieved with respect to each nature without the change and co-mingling of each part with the other, in accordance with the rational principle in each nature. [23] For it is just as when a sword has been heated: what is able to cut becomes able to burn, and what is able to burn becomes able to cut (for just as fire was united to iron, thus also the burning of fire was united to the cutting of the iron). The iron has become able to burn by a union with the fire, and the

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fire becomes able to cut by a union with the iron. Neither thing has undergone a change with respect to mode in the exchange with the other in the union, but each has remained, in the identity of what was composed in the union, without falling from what belonged to it according to nature. Likewise, in the mystery of the divine incarnation, the divine and the human were united hypostatically, where neither of the natural activities was displaced because of the union, and neither was acquired after the union as something unrelated, as though it were divided both from what was composed and what was cohypostasized. [24] For the Word-made-flesh possessed inseparably from the complete active power of his own divinity the complete passible power of his own humanity, which was also inherent to him because of the union. Being God he did wonders humanly, wonders which were accomplished by means of flesh passible by nature. Being man he proceeded through the passions of human nature divinely, passions which were perfected according to the freedom of divine authority. Or rather, both were done theandrically, since he was God and man. By the wonders, he restores us by what is his own, to reveal what we are. By the passions, he grants us to become what he exhibited in himself. By means of each he confirmed both the truth of those natures from which, in which, and which he is, and what it is that he wants to be confessed by us, since he alone is true and faithful. [25] Since you possess this confession, which takes shape in your speech and life, sanctified ones, show patience, and when you have received the present writing, show yourselves to me as philanthropic judges of what is contained herein. Overcome with sympathy the failings of your child, receivea this writing alone as my payment of ready obedience, and become for me mediators of reconciliation before God. In this you will produce the peace which passes all understanding (Phil. 4.7), of which the savior himself is both the chief (Isa. 9.6) who frees a

Here I differ from the text established by Janssens, and follow the reading of ms. Za, which has ἐκδεχόμενοι.

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those who fear him (Ps. 24.14, etc.) from the disturbance of the passions by means of practical habit, and the Father of the age to come (Isa. 9.6), who engenders by the Spirit through love and knowledge “those who fill the world above”.a To Him be glory, majesty, and power, with the Father and the Holy Spirit unto the ages. Amen.

a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.2.

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To Master Thomas

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Prologue To the sanctified servant of God, spiritual father and teacher, Master Thomas; humble and sinful Maximus, unworthy servant and disciple: [1] They say that virtue is the real instantiation of wisdom, and that wisdom is the essence of virtue. Thus, the manner of life of those who practice contemplation is an unwavering demonstration of wisdom, and the principle of contemplation of those engaged in the practical life is the firmly established foundation of virtue. The most authentic mark of both of these is the unyielding attention directed towards that which truly is, which desire and fear confer, the first leading one on by beauty, the second overwhelming one with the greatness of the Creator. These are the source of the pure mixture of the worthy ones with God in union, making by adoption those who undergo it what by nature is called “the active principle”. [2] Therefore, sanctified one, since you, more than anyone else, have preferred these over all created beings, you have unwaveringly shown manifest wisdom by the manner of your

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deeds, and you have set up firmly established virtue by the principle of your intellectual activity. You have made the convergence with that which truly is mixed with desire and fear of the Creator the distinctive mark of both [wisdom and virtue], according to which the whole of yourself has been mixed with the spiritual state of the whole God. You walk by faith (2 Cor. 5.7) without deceit towards participation in the form of good things, the manifestation of which is deification, singling you out among those singular created things through which God is known. Hence, having exercised the singularly insatiable desire for deifying knowledge, you have as the satisfaction of your yearning for the Father an ever-moving desire, so that this satisfaction paradoxically increases your desire for participation. [3] For this reason, you the pearl yet again enquire of the mud; the one who is nourished with grain asks the one who embraces the dunghill (Lam. 4.5). The one who is pure and enlightened and who does not bear the mark of materiality asks the fleshly one who has experienced nothing that is greater than this constricted life. The one who revels in radiant and flaming intellectual activity asks the one whose only sign of life is the stench of the passions. My own heaviness would constrain me not to speak of your exalted God-like self-emptying, or again to undertake spiritual words, I who have neither yet received the baptism of John (Acts 19.3) itself through the practical life, nor heard through spiritual contemplation whether there is a Holy Spirit (Acts 19.2). [4] Nevertheless, I will try, even if the result be reckless (indeed, what is more reckless than for an unlearned person to teach?), to fulfill the commandment of my master and sanctified father. To this end, supported by your prayers, I will organize this discourse into chapters, beginning with the first of your questions.

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1

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[1] From St. Gregory’s First Oration on the Son: “Because of this, the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad.”a And again, of the same, from the Second Oration on Peace: “The monad is moved because of its abundance, the dyad is surpassed (for it is beyond matter and form, which determine bodies), and the triad is defined because of perfection.”b [2] Since you have urged that the divergent things said in these orations concerning the cause of the movement of the beyond-beginningless monad be harmonized for you in order to give rest to your intellect, which has grown weary from the difficulty attending them, I, master honored of God, I indeed who have obscured the vision of my soul because of the thickness of my mind, see one and the same cause as intended to be understood through both, which the teacher himself clearly and penetratingly establishes in an unriddling manner when he says in the Oration on the Son, “The unified sovereignty is something honored by us, and it is a unified sovereignty which is not restricted to one person (for it is possible that ‘the one’ in conflict with itself could become many), but which the equal honor of nature, and agreement of will, and identity of movement, and [the convergence] towards ‘the one’ [of the things that are from it]…”c [one folio missing in the manuscript] [3] …I say this is [the cause?] of movement [for?] both, the human knowledge concerning the manner in which the monad is triad, knowledge which is unable to see at one and the same time both the rational principle of being and the mode of di-

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.2. GREG. NAZ., Or. 23.8. c GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.2. a

b

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vine subsistence, though they are made manifest at one and the same time. [4] And so, “The monad is moved because of its abundance”, lest the divinity be impoverished, contracted in the circumscription of one person after the manner of Jewish thought. “The dyad is surpassed”, lest the Divine be thought to be a body and visible in its bulk, form, appearance, and shape. “And the triad is defined because of perfection”, lest the Divine be in conflict with itself, mythologized in plurality after the manner of the Greeks. For the Divine is, by nature, perfectly most unified, unconstructed and unscattered. Existing as a monadic reality in hypostasis, a dyadic reality according to matter, and a pluralistic reality with respect to essence are equally far from it. I said this in the book which was sent to you, and I laid it out there in summary form: “It is, in fact, the same thing for ‘the dyad to be surpassed’ as for it not to come to be dyad; and again, it is the same thing for the ‘triad to be defined’ as for the movement of the monad ‘to come to stability as triad’. Indeed, we revere a ‘unified sovereignty, which is not ‘without magnanimity’, as though it were restricted to one person. Likewise, it is not ‘without order,’ as though it were ‘being poured out unto eternity’. Rather, we revere this unified sovereignty as ‘that which is constituted’ by the Triad by nature equal in honor, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”;a and again, “The Divinity is monad, but not dyad, and triad, but not plurality, since it is without beginning, without body, and without conflict.”b [5] And so, sanctified father, when I treated these passages, I did not obscure the difficulties by employing a more mystical discourse for stronger ears (for who is more able to contain or proclaim divine things than you?), but I have spoken everything according to my power, even if my discourse, because of my poverty, has not expanded as it should have what was put forth already.

a b

Amb. Thom. 1.2. Amb. Thom. 1.3.

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[1] Of the same (Gregory), from the same (Oration on the Son): “…by consorting with the flesh through the mediation of the intellect. Moreover, in that he became man, he was God below, since ita was mixed with God and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory”.b [2] I did not, sanctified father, hasten over this, leaving it uninvestigated, but I made the necessary inquiry of this according to the power existing in me and the capacity of my mind in the document I sent to you, where I said, “And so, the Word ‘has become one’ in an authentic sense, in that he himself has been emptied out without change in relation to the passible part in our nature. Having become truly subject to natural perception by means of the incarnation, a visible God, also called, ‘God below’, he has made manifest the super-infinite power by means of a flesh passible by nature, ‘since it’ – and this unambiguously refers to the flesh – ‘was mixed with God, and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory,’ for the deifying Word actually assumed flesh in a hypostatic identity.”c [3] And so, how was it possible for me, servant of God, who am beggarly both in word and in thought, to approach this differently and make a clearer discourse about it? For I said that flesh “was mixed with God, and he has become one … In this, the better part achieved the victory”. And in this discourse again, I indicated how great an extent to which the victory has become manifest, saying “the deifying Word actually assumed flesh in a hypostatic identity”, so that I might show clearly that by the rational principle of a hypostatic identity the Word who became flesh has wrought the victory. I say “how great an extent”, since that which was ‘actually’ assumed hypostatically was assumed to the point of deification. For if “the Word has

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I.e., “the flesh”, following Maximus’ interpretation in Amb. Thom. 3.3. GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.19. c Amb. Thom. 3.3. a

b

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become the seed of his own flesh”,a by having ineffably emptied himself out without change, the flesh actually assumed had a hypostasis, the hypostasis clearly being the Word. The flesh did not differ in relation to the Word in its rational principle (I mean in the rational principle of the hypostasis). And if, according to the hypostasis, in relation to the Word... [one folio missing in the manuscript] [4] ...believing that the Lord had received the experience of human realities according to our likeness, only without sin (Heb. 4.15).

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[5] According to another way of thinking and essentially characterizing the assumed nature, the victory came about – to speak in a dangerous way, as though ignorant of the distinction in the natural quality of intellectually ensouled flesh after the union – as though the assumed nature were vanquished by the greater nature, leaving no distinctive mark of its own proper existence. Thinking this, Severus, the impious Apollinarius’ even more impious disciple, taught that Christ had one composite nature and one activity, with the result that both his Father and his mother clearly become alien to him in both nature and activity. For if Christ, as Severus says, is a composite nature, then surely Christ is also composite by nature. And if Christ is composite by nature, Christ is indeed also Christ by nature. And if Christ is Christ by nature, as Severus says, he is consubstantial neither with his Father nor his mother, since the Father is not Christ by nature, nor is the mother Christ by nature, and Christ would have as his nature a sort of no-man’s-land, which would have the correspondent activity that essentially characterizes it, and this is impossible. “For even those who come up with such things as ‘goat-stags’ would not conceive of a certain” nature “intermediate between these” – obviously between God and creation – “which either partakes of neither, or is composed of both”.b a b

Amb. Thom. 2.2. GREG. NAZ., Or. 31.6.

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[6] Therefore, let us not be ignorant of the union, lest the Nestorian faction carve out a place for itself by becoming a foreign fashioner of idolatry amongst us; neither let us fail to establish the distinction, lest the reckless confusion of Apollinarius find a way in, thereby generating a new nature among us. Rather, let us piously maintain the knowledge of the union, in the identity of the one hypostasis, of those things that are essentially distinct. Likewise, in the otherness of those things which are united hypostatically, let us confess the distinction of natural property, neither undermining, nor slyly stealing, nor doing violence to any natural aspect of otherness, lest by dishonoring the rational principle of being or nature in some aspect, we should leave behind the whole (for there is no such thing as a rational principle of an incomplete nature), and be condemned to obtain only a portion of an incomplete salvation, or entirely to fall away from the whole because of our negligence or ignorance, either suffering or actively accomplishing our own estrangement from salvation. [7] For he is God by nature, and he truly became man by nature: he is truly God in every way, and he is truly man in every way. Everything is comprehended naturally through these, since he possesses each aspect of these natures, lacking nothing except sin, which the mind discovered when it was moved contrary to nature, for sin truly belongs to neither nature. Indeed, he is confirmed to possess what pertains to each nature, leaving nothing out. If he is properly both, since everything is naturally considered through these, possessing each of these and leaving nothing out, let us understand the victory to have taken place as it was given, believing that the one who is truly maker of all, while his divinity remained unchanged when he was conceived in a virgin mother as he willed, made for himself the nature which was assumed, having ineffably become its hypostasis from the moment of conception itself. According to this (I mean the nature) the same one who had been born of the Father before every age was born of a mother. He was man, maintaining himself as such without omitting anything that

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pertains to human nature, and he was God in the same respect. If by nature the same one possessed the natural properties of each nature, omitting nothing (for he was complete according to both) it is clear that with the natures of which he was the hypostasis, he also had their essential movements of which he himself was the union, since they were his natural properties, naturally united to one another in a unified mode without confusion. Apart from these properties, neither what he is, nor who, nor how he is known, even if Apollinarius and Severus leave them out when they make omissions from the natural properties of his intellectually ensouled flesh. In so doing, by bestowing upon God only the bare gesture in the shape of flesh – a Manichean mode of thought, to give it its more appropriate name – they show him to be deprived of the truth of the reality.

3

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[1] From the interpretation of the epistle of St. Denys to Gaius: “and everything else, by which he moved the nature which had been taken on. This is analogous to how the soul independently and naturally moves the body, which is co-natural with it. For, the human essence was truly his and was called his, or to speak with precision: having become, without change, that which human nature is in its activity, he himself fulfilled the economy on our behalf in an unimaginable manner”.a [2] I am in awe of your wisdom, truly beloved, and I will never cease to be astounded by its firmness. For you teach by enquiring, and you impart wisdom by desiring to learn; you exalt by coming low and you rectify contraries through what is contrary, faithfully imitating the saving and philanthropic selfemptying of the Lord in all and for all. Having received the spirit of gentleness (1 Cor. 4.21; Gal. 6.1), which is precise teacha

Amb. Thom. 5.9.

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ing, from Him, you have also asked this question, saying, “Do we say simply that the whole movement which pertains to Christ is one and divine, or even here is the movement preserved, with ‘the soul mediating’a between the God-Word and the flesh, so that it is to this movement that the passions of the flesh are naturally referred, according to the definition of the divinely speaking Gregory?” By means of a few syllables, you have initiated everyone into the knowledge of piety, and have shown that nothing is more unassailable than the real truth, since truth flees the verbal pandering to the mob that is typical of those who love victory. Truth seeks to free from the sea of the passions those who are like loaves of unleavened bread because of their poverty of spirit. Truth seeks to liberate from temptations, just as from billowing waves, those who are seasoned fishermen, and those who abide and produce nothing pharisaical, who consort with the fire of knowledge, and because of this believe the gospel. Because you have the same disposition, you have been sought out along with these, sanctified one, and have been found and entrusted with the ministry of the word (Acts 6.4). You have not obtained a foreign honor added on to this by human consideration, but having received a God-chosen grace corresponding to the purity of your life, you expound as an apostle the teaching concerning the incarnation of the Lord, that he was both united to the flesh “through the mediating intellectual soul”b and, by extending himself to the uttermost, that he moved the flesh towards what is proper to it. And with respect to the words of the excellent Gregory, you establish the definition of piety, that we might learn that the assumed nature is preserved in the observation of its constitutive essential movement, without which the true design of the economy is not able to be at all, since it would not have the confirmation of our nature in Christ established through its essential movement. The denial of this essential movement is the destruction of the essence to which it belongs. a b

GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.13. GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.13.

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[3] It is obvious that this is clearly the chorus of those maniacs, I mean Simon, Valentinus, and Mani, Arius and Apollinarius, Eutyches, Dioscorus, Timothy and Severus, which has despicably defiled the name of ‘Christian’ unto the ruin of many by bringing in, by the destruction of the assumed nature, the denial of its movement. Because of this, they say the Lord is merely the empty, spectral image of flesh, rather than the nature of intellectually ensouled flesh, truly endowed with being without change, so that having taught that there is one nature and one activity of Christ, and that divine, they would show the divine essence as either playing in appearance, illusorily feigning what belongs to us, or as being subject to what pertains to our mode of existence, thereby treading contrary to its nature. According to their position, there is truly one nature and movement of Christ; the divinity plays at fleshly things in appearance and is subject to the things of the flesh contrary to nature. According to their demonstration, Christ exhibits one and the same activity of contrary things, by, on the one hand, the possession of power, which naturally brings forth wonders, and on the other, by the deprivation contrary to nature of this same power, since he is subject to the passions. Their definition is this: that the same Christ, according to one and the same nature and power, is both free from, and subject to, the passions. Nothing is more expected to lead from confused faith. From whom the casting aside of Christ... [end of manuscript Cantabrigiensis] [4] ...we have heard from the great David who says that the beginning of the words of God is the truth (Ps. 118.160), and we have clearly learned from Ezra that of all things, the truth itself is that which most readily conquers, since it alone has strength (I Esdr. 3.12, 4.35). For coming into being pertains to beings, and it has been established upon them as the unbreakable foundation of the more divine rational principles of being, since it is able unwaveringly to make a manifestation of every rational principle and activity in the things which come forth.

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[6] If the discourse has even traced the truth, as much as is possible for me, then it is well, for nothing is more necessary than the truth. With respect to everything, then, if something is actually true, then surely it is also necessary. Thus, if we believe that Christ is actually true God in essence and nature, and that he is actually true man in essence and nature, then nothing is more necessary than to think and to say that he is both. The confirmation is made, on the one hand, through showing the numerical quantity of the only essential distinction of those from which, in which, and which he always is. On the other, it is made most firmly by adding the correct principle of reason and proportion, when it is necessary that this confirmation be brought together in truth and that the disposition surrounding it be made manifest, that we may not only be justified by piously believing in the heart, but that we may also be saved, altogether confessing with the mouth (Rom. 10.10) correctly in all things... [7] ...I pray you, my dear Abba, inasmuch as I have been brought low by the slackening of my virtue, and have transfixed the intellectual power of my soul by the corruption of the passions, be for me now, even more than before, a most philanthropic judge of what has been written, so that, by encompassing the bulk of my evil, which so readily besets me, with the greatness of your virtue, you might encourage me, who have become like a wineskin in the frost (Ps. 118.83) – for I have been parched in the icy cold of sin, and have been constricted by the memory of the eternal chastisements – and that you might make me new by the putting off of the old, and able to contain only the more mystical teaching about Christ, by which “the seething of the Spirit”a has been secretly united to you. How it arouses and warms the soul to the single-minded love of the Creator, to whom be glory and power unto the ages, Amen.

a

GREG. NAZ., Or. 17, PG 35, 965B.

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Prologue Maximus’ opening salutation gives an indication of the proper focus of the contents of the whole of the Ambigua ad Thomam. He writes, You have established a renowned wealth of goodness, lavishly demonstrating in yourself, by means of a comely mixture of opposites, God embodied in virtues, to whose self-emptying you have achieved a certain symmetry by an exalted imitation, and have not disdained to descend even unto me, seeking those things of which you already have experiential knowledge. (Prol. 1)

Thomas is in himself the very embodiment of God, a recapitulation of the incarnation of Christ. He has united opposites “by interweaving the intellect with sense perception through the Spirit”, and has truly made manifest “the image of God”. He demonstrates the fusion of knowledge and practice, the ascetical ideal, which Maximus will elaborate later in the Ambigua. He is also an image of God in his ‘self-emptying’ (κένωσις) toward Maximus. He is willing, as Maximus says in the Epistula secunda, to be a pearl who seeks to learn from the mud (Prol. 3). Thomas’ being and way of life, his union with God and incarnate manifestation of the divine, are the practical goal of Maximus’ Christological reflections in the Ambigua.

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The doctrine of deification that is established as a reality in Christ is confirmed in Thomas.1

Ambiguum 1 In Ambiguum 1, Maximus treats two similar passages from Gregory the Theologian: “Because of this, the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad (μέχρι τριάδος ἔστη).”2 And from St. Gregory’s Second Oration on Peace: “The monad is moved because of its abundance, the dyad is surpassed (for it is beyond matter and form, which determine bodies), and the triad is defined because of perfection.”3

The point at issue here is the notion of change (κίνησις), or movement, within God, something inapplicable to God in his transcendence.4 Throughout this short interpretation, Maximus makes two key points: 1.) the distinction between being/essence (εἶναι, οὐσία, and derivatives) and existence/subsistence (ὑφίστηναι, ὑπόστασις, and derivatives) – along with the related distinction between the rational principle (λόγος) of being and the mode (τρόπος) of subsistence, and 2.) the location of the movement from monad to triad as occurring not in God, but in the one contemplating God. Before addressing these issues, however, Maximus explains what appears to be a terminological ‘disharmony’ between the two quoted passages with respect to the progression from monad to triad. He begins by explaining why it is that the dyad is

1 See THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 325-330, where the author links this notion to the acquisition of γνῶσις. 2 GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.2. 3 GREG. NAZ., Or. 23.8. 4 Cf. Maximus, Ambiguum 23, where he treats the same passage from Gregory: “‘How, then,’ someone might ask, ‘does this miraculous teacher introduce a moving divinity in the passage just quoted?’” (PG 91, 1260A). We shall also observe the particularly Evagrian connotations of movement further on in this commentary.

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‘surpassed’: “it is the same thing for ‘the dyad to be surpassed’ as for it not to come to stability as dyad (μὴ στῆναι μέχρι δυάδος); and again, it is the same thing for the ‘triad to be defined’ as for the movement of the monad ‘to come to stability as triad (μέχρι τριάδος ἔστη)’” (1.2). Here Maximus aligns Gregory’s terminology so that the ‘surpassing’ of the dyad and the ‘definition’ of the triad come under the general concept of στῆναι, στάσις, which forms the root of ὑπόστασις, a concretely realized existence. With this basic alignment, Maximus brings the two quotations into harmony with each other. He then goes on to explain the proper way to understand them. To do this, Maximus fills in the context from the first quotation he cites from Gregory’s Third Theological Oration (The First on the Son). In the second paragraph of the Oration, from which the first quotation comes, Gregory seeks to establish the “unified sovereignty” (μοναρχία) of God without evacuating divinity of its richness, while at the same time, in asserting the abundance that characterizes divinity, not introducing polytheism. Maximus, continuing the quotation above, weaves strands from Gregory’s Oration on the Son, as well as from his orations On Baptism (Or. 40) and On Theophany (Or. 38) in with his own clarifications: we revere a “unified sovereignty”, which is not “without magnanimity”, as though it were restricted to one person. Likewise, it is not “without order”, as though it were “being poured out unto eternity”. Rather, we revere this unified sovereignty as “that which is constituted” by the Triad, which is by nature equal in honor, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Their wealth is sameness of nature and the one effulgence of radiance;5 divinity is not diffused beyond them, lest we introduce a community of gods, nor is it limited to one of them, lest we be deemed worthy of condemnation because of the poverty of divinity.”6 (1.2)

Following Gregory’s language very closely, Maximus asserts the primacy of μοναρχία, the “unified sovereignty” of God. This 5 6

GREG. NAZ., Or. 40.5. GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.8; id., Or. 45.4.

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is not, however, to be understood as a limitation or impoverishment of the divine nature. Neither is it a limitation of divinity to one hypostasis. The μοναρχία is established by the Triad – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Gregory makes clear throughout his works, but perhaps most pointedly in this very oration On Theophany cited by Maximus, the Father is not contemplated without the Son and Spirit, as though the Father is ever without the Son and Spirit. In the line immediately preceding the one quoted here by Maximus, Gregory writes, “Whenever I say ‘God,’ I mean Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit” (Or. 38.8). The abundance of divinity is realized in the connatural and unified radiance of the Triad, but it is precisely in connaturality and unity that the μοναρχία is preserved. This is not, however, an explanation of the inner workings of the Trinity: “This is not a causal explanation of the cause of beings, which is itself beyond being, but a demonstration of how one is piously to think about it” (1.3). Maximus does not speculate about that which has not been made manifest, that is, the inner life of the Trinity: the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. As we shall see below, the ‘how’ (πῶς) pertains to subsistence (existence), whereas the ‘that’ pertains to essence, and these, subsistence and essence, while inseparably linked, are nevertheless unconfused here. To inquire after a notion of causality within God is to attempt to go beyond what has been shown (ἀποδειχθῆναι). Causal explanations do not pertain to God. As Maximus will go on to quote Gregory at the beginning of Ambiguum 3 with reference to the Son, “Who is the cause of God?” Maximus continues to explain the monadic and triadic realities of God in a way that, again, following Gregory, seeks to distinguish orthodox teaching from Pagan Neo-Platonic philosophy: The Divinity is monad, but not dyad, and triad, but not plurality, since it is without beginning, without body, and without conflict. The monad is truly monad. It is not the principle of things that come after it in a sort of condensation deriving from its self-dif-

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ferentiation (κατὰ διαστολῆς συστολὴν), as though, making its way to plurality, it were naturally poured out. (1.3)

The pairing of διαστολή-συστολή (generally translated as ‘expansion’ and ‘contraction’) is used by Maximus within the context of his parallel and complementary understandings of Christ and the world. On the level of the world, all created things are differentiated and diversified (διαστολή), but are also brought back together to form a whole (συστολή). With respect to Christ, the terms are used by Maximus to describe God’s condescension in the incarnation (διαστολή) and simultaneous exaltation of human nature in deification (συστολή).7 When speaking about the Trinity, however, these concepts are inapplicable, and Maximus’ denial of their use in this context affirms the radical distinction between God the Creator and the created order. Within the same passage from Gregory’s twenty-ninth Oration, which we have been considering, Gregory makes a reference to Plotinus’ ‘overflowing’ One, a sort of involuntary fecundity that Gregory sharply refuses to a Christian contemplation of the Divine.8 Maximus follows Gregory’s rebuttal, and in a dense compression of language, puts forth the tightest possible expression of the orthodox doctrine of God that asserts unity without poverty, and richness without plurality: The monad is truly monad …it is the concretely existing essential reality of the consubstantial Triad. And “the triad is truly triad; it is not” composed “of individual numbers”. It is not the synthesis of monads, that it should experience division; rather it is the essential existence of the tri-hypostatic monad. (1.3) 7

THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 60-61, 77-79. “We shall not be over-bold and call it an outpouring of goodness – like a vessel ‘overflowing’ (ὑπερρύη) – as one of the pagan philosophers so audaciously called it”; GREGORY NAZIANZEN, Or. 29.2. Compare PLOTINUS, Enneads 5.2.1: “Such is the first act of begetting (γέννησις): the One, perfect in that it seeks nothing, possesses nothing, and is in need of nothing, overflows (ὑπερερρύη), as it were, and its superabundance produces something other [than itself ]”, translation modified from ARMSTRONG, Plotinus V. For a discussion of Gregory’s allusion, see NORRIS, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning, p. 134-135. 8

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Maximus renders the teaching with perfect balance: ἐνυπόστατος ὀντότης ὁμοουσίου τριάδος … ἐνούσιος ὕπαρξις τρισυποστάτου μονάδος.

The “essential reality” (ὀντότης) of the monad is hypostatized as the divine triad that is consubstantial (ὁμοούσιος) in its divinity, for it is a “tri-hypostatic monad” whose existence (ὕπαρξις) is inseparable from the divine οὐσία (ἐνούσιος). In this way, Maximus holds together, while yet distinguishing, essence/being and subsistence in God. God’s being subsists triadically, and his tri-hypostatic existence in the triad flows from the essence of the monad. Monad is truly monad, but so also is triad: “The triad is truly monad, since thus it is (ὅτι οὕτως ἐστίν).” Likewise, the triad is truly triad, but the monad is also triad: “and the monad is truly triad, since thus it subsists (ὅτι οὕτως ὑφέστηκεν)”. Maximus concludes the thought: “The divinity is one, existing monadically, and subsisting triadically.” In this way he seeks to keep to the middle-way between the extremes of a non-Triadic, and thus impoverished, Monarchialism on the one side, and an idolatrous plurality of gods on the other, a middle-way that Gregory calls the “Holy of Holies” of the “single Lordship and single Divinity” (Or. 38.8). All of this reflection serves to clarify Gregory’s words themselves, and allows Maximus to clarify the distinction between essence/being and subsistence, so that the meaning of God’s unity is plain. However, the last section, which expresses the second of the two key insights, is just as significant for what Maximus seeks to convey. He writes: But if, having heard the word ‘movement,’ you wonder how the divinity that is beyond eternity is moved, understand that the passivity (πάθος) belongs not to the divinity, but to us, who first are illumined with respect to the rational principle (λόγος) of its being, and thus are enlightened with respect to the mode (τρόπος) of its subsistence, since surely being is observed before the manner of being. And so, movement of divinity, which comes about through the elucidation concerning its being and its manner of subsis-

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tence, is established (καθέστηκε), for those who are able to receive it, as knowledge (γνῶσις). (1.4)

As we noted above, the notion of κίνησις in relation to the divine nature is the second aporetical element in the quotation from Gregory. Gregory’s language seems to envision a kind of internal modification that would seem to be impossible for the eternal and unchanging God. The solution for Maximus is that movement, and the corresponding affect (πάθος) with respect to the monad and triad of the divine, take place in the one contemplating, and not in that which is contemplated. What is more, it is precisely by means of this πάθος that we are illumined with respect to the being of God (that God is one, monadic) and enlightened with respect to the subsistence of God (that God subsists triadically). Coming to knowledge of the distinction between the two is also an aspect of this motion of knowledge. κίνησις itself, then, as Maximus concludes, constitutes γνῶσις since it is in this intellectual movement that the Trinity is revealed to the intellect. Maximus offers a clarification of this explanation in the Epistula secunda, where he attributes the motion of the human mind in its relation to God to the fact that human knowledge is “unable to see at one and the same time both the rational principle of being and the mode of divine subsistence, though they are made manifest at one and the same time” (Ep. sec. 1.3). The unity of God is revealed together with the three hypostases, but the limitations inherent to human knowledge make the intellect unable to discern the fullness of this revelation without moving from one to the other. It is worthwhile at this point to quote a passage from Ambiguum 23, in which Maximus interprets the same quotation from Gregory – “Because of this, the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad”, – in more detail. He writes, The God-revealing and great Areopagite, Saint Denys, took up this question, and having made an enquiry into these matters he

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asks, “Why is it that theologians9 sometimes call the divine ‘love’ (ἔρωτα), and sometimes ‘delight’ (ἀγάπην), but at other times they call it ‘the beloved’ (ἐραστόν) and ‘the delightful’ (ἀγαπητόν)?’”10 He decides the matter in this way: “Because he is both moved by it and by it he produces motion” (‘ʹὍτιπερ τῷ μὲν κινεῖται, τῷ δὲ κινεῖ).11 To express it more clearly, since the divine exists as love and delight, it is moved; since it exists as beloved and as delightful, it moves everything capable of receiving love and delight towards itself. Let me put it more distinctly still: The divine is moved in that it produces an innate habit (σχέσιν ἐνδιάθετον) of love and delight in those capable of receiving them, and it produces motion since it attracts by nature the desire of those who are moved to it. Again, it produces motion and is moved: it thirsts to be thirsted after, it loves to be loved, it delights to be delighted in.12 It is in this mode that the God-minded Gregory speaks when he says, “the monad is moved from the beginning to dyad, until it comes to stability as triad”. For the divine is moved in the intellect – whether angelic or human – that is capable of receiving it, and by means of it and in it the mind makes enquiries concerning it. To put it more clearly, the divine, in its initial approach, teaches the mind the inner principle concerning the Monad (τὸν περὶ μονάδος λόγον) in such a way that the unity of the divine is not sundered, lest a division be introduced into the first cause. It pushes the mind on to receive its divine and unspeakable vitality, speaking mystically and secretly to it that it is necessary to understand that this good is never without the fruit of reason (λόγου) and wisdom, or of holy power – these being consubstantial and existing hypostatically – lest the divine be understood to be a composite of these, as though they were accidental qualities, and lest, as though these things were not ever-existing (if this were indeed the case), the divine be believed to undergo change (κινεῖσθαι). 9

I.e. the writers of Scripture. PS. DEN. AR., De divinis nominibus, IV.14: SUCHLA, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De divinis nominibus, 160.1-3. 11 Ibid, 160.3-4. 12 Maximus here makes use of, and transforms, Aristotle’s argument in Metaphysics XII.7 (1072a19 ff.), where the unmoved mover produces motion by being the object of thought and desire. Maximus expands on Aristotle by affirming that the divine not only moves, but is moved in that it produces the habit of love in those who can receive it. Similarly, it is not only the object of love, but itself actively loves. 10

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Therefore, the divinity is referred to as the cause of the enquiry according to its mode of existence. For without illumination, it is impossible to approach the divine. It is also said to be moved because of the partial manifestation of the more perfect understanding concerning it, which, according to holy Scripture, leads on those who are taught to confess – beginning from the Father and continuing to the Son, confessing him together with the Father, and then receiving the Holy Spirit together with the Father and the Son – to worship the perfect Triad together with the perfect Monad, that is to say, the one essence, divinity, power, and activity in three hypostases.13

This passage from Ambiguum 23 reveals in more detail the thought underlying Ambiguum 1. It is under the consideration of the relation between the divine and the created realm that we are able to speak of change (or love or delight) with respect to God, and this as it pertains to the illumination of the created mind with the knowledge of God. As we shall see below, Maximus will focus the notion of the accommodation of the Divine to the human in his explanation of the incarnation of the Word through the course of the ad Thomam. Here, we see that change/movement with respect to God constitutes the progressive initiation of the mind into γνῶσις and theology, which is both confession and praise.14 Maximus gives another treatment of the second of the occasioning difficulties, “The monad is moved because of its abundance, the dyad is surpassed (for it is beyond matter and form, which determine bodies), and the triad is defined because of perfection”, in Quaestiones et dubia 105.15 Maximus includes the next phrase in the quotation from Gregory, “For the primary surpasses the composition that is inherent to the dyad”. He writes: 13

PG 91, 1260BC-1261A. REDOVICS, Gregory of Nazianzus (Or. 29.2) in Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua, gives a brief summary of Maximus’ different interpretations of the phrase διὰ τοῦτο μονὰς ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς εἰς δυάδα κινηθεῖσα μέχρι τριάδος ἔστη, in which he points to the differences of approach between Ambiguum 1 and Ambiguum 23. He emphasizes the mutuality of divine-human interaction in Maximus’ treatment of this Gregorian phrase, especially in Ambiguum 23. 15 DECLERCK, Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones et dubia, p. 79-80. 14

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He does not here set forth the cause of the being of the divine and blessed Trinity, of what is beyond cause and rational principle, but rather the cause of our induction into the truest reverence for the Holy Trinity. For just as we draw conceptions of the creator from the essence of beings, thus also are we mystically instructed as to the mode of existence of the beyond-ineffable divinity from certain symbols pertaining to beings. It is clear that the Holy Divinity itself moves us towards the knowledge of itself and grants pious resources for the boldness to scrutinize the mode of its supernatural existence. Thus, it is said to be moved either because we are moved towards it or because it is the cause of our movement towards the knowledge of it. Therefore, it moves itself in us so that we might know what is the cause of the whole. This is the explanation of the phrase, “the monad is moved”. It has been said that “the dyad is surpassed”, because the divine nature is defined without reference to composition. It is said that “the triad is defined because of perfection” because that which possesses being in itself is not deprived of wisdom and life. Having understood this, we define the Wisdom and Word of God as the Son, and the Life of God as the Holy Spirit, since our soul also, created according to the image of God [Gen. 1.26], is observed in these three, namely in the intellect, the reason, and the spirit.

Here again we see Maximus’ focus on the possibility of knowledge for the one who comes to know God in his consideration of the Trinity. It is, indeed, the Divine itself that is at work in the mind of the one who contemplates it, so that the created intellect comes to participate in divine life through its divinely-enabled contemplation of God.

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Ambiguum 2 In Ambiguum 2, Maximus begins with another quotation from Gregory’s first Oration on the Son: In sum, attribute the more exalted things to the divinity, to the nature which is superior to the passions and the body, and attribute the more lowly to the composite, to the self-emptying for your sake, to the incarnation, and – I won’t hesitate to say it – the becoming-man.16

Having secured an element in the dynamics of the contemplation of the Trinity in Ambiguum 1, Maximus now turns to a consideration of Christ, specifically the mode of the predication of two natures to him. He begins by making use of the distinction he made in Ambiguum 1 between essence/being and subsistence and applies it to the Son and his incarnation: The Word of God exists as a full, complete essence (for he is God), and as an undiminished hypostasis (for he is Son). But, when he emptied himself, he became the seed of his own flesh, and when he was composed in an ineffable conception, he became the hypostasis of the very flesh that was assumed. Having truly become a whole human being, without change, in this new mystery, he was himself the hypostasis of two natures, of the uncreated and the created, of the impassible and the passible, receiving without fail all of the natural principles of which he was the hypostasis. (2.2)

Because there is a distinction between essence and subsistence, the subsisting Son who is God in essence, is able to become the hypostasis of another nature without any change to what he essentially is. However, Gregory’s quotation would seem to keep God separate from suffering in a way that would contradict the later Cyrillian interpretation of Chalcedon, which confirmed that one of the Holy Trinity was crucified in the flesh. It would also seem to be in tension with Gregory’s 16

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.18.

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own insistence, earlier in the same passage, that the one who was tired, hungry, and so on, is “true God”. Maximus finds the solution to this apparent tension at the beginning of Gregory’s next Theological Oration (Or. 30.1), where Gregory explains that the outcome of the partitive predication according to divine and human natures is that God is “passible against sin”: If he has truly received all the natural principles of which he was the hypostasis, the teacher very wisely ‘assigned’17 the passions of his own flesh to him who became composite by the hypostatic assumption of the flesh, lest the flesh be thought to be stripped of its reality. Because the flesh exists from him, and he truly exists according to it, the teacher attributes the passions “to the God who is passible against sin”.18 (2.3)

Maximus explains this further when he goes on once again to make use of the distinction between essence and subsistence to demonstrate how God is rightly to be understood as passible: The teacher is making a distinction (δεικνὺς τὴν διαφοράν) when he says these things about the essence and the hypostasis. With respect to essence, although he became flesh, the Word remained simple; with respect to hypostasis, he became composite by the assumption of flesh. God operated as passible according to the economy of the incarnation, and Gregory says these things lest, by predicating things of the hypostasis out of ignorance of the nature, we should inadvertently worship a god who is passible by nature, as though we were Arians. (2.4)

Here we see the importance of applying the distinction between essence and subsistence to Christ. The failure to understand the economic nature of Christ’s divine passibility leads ultimately to the worship of a false god. Learning this distinction, according to Gregory, is a central aspect of spiritual and theological development. At the end of the chapter from his

17 18

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.1. GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.1.

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Oration 29 which we have been discussing, following immediately upon the passage cited by Maximus, Gregory writes: [Christ was exalted], that you, having dismissed the fleshly and earth-bound element of your teachings, should learn to be more exalted yourself, and to ascend together with the divinity, and that you would not remain among visible things, but should rise up together with the intelligible, and that you should know what is the principle of nature (τίς μὲν φύσεως λόγος), and what is the principle of the economy (τίς δὲ λόγος οἰκονομίας).19

The dynamics of the activity of contemplation here are similar to those we observed above with respect to the mind’s movement from monad to triad. Here, the seemingly mechanical process of partitive predication according to divine and human natures serves to exalt the theologian as the intellect follows the exaltation of the emptied Word from earth back to heaven.20 The ostensible focus of Maximus’ comments have to do with the fullness of the Word’s incarnation, but as the context from Gregory shows, and as Maximus’ wider reflections indicate, the overarching concern is with the salvation, understood as the exaltation and deification, of man. In the final section of Ambiguum 2, Maximus introduces a central argument in the question of the natures of Christ, that of the relationship between nature and activity. Maximus asserts that it is precisely “by means of the activity in the nature of flesh, which is endowed with an intellectual and rational soul, that he effects our salvation” (2.5). Within the history of dogma, the important point is, of course, that Christ, who possessed both Divine and human natures, also possessed the activities proper to each nature. As he concludes Ambiguum 2: 19

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.18. This resonates with the basic movement of Origen’s understanding of Christ: “Whenever those who have been restored by the Spirit, are bearing fruit in him, and are in love with heavenly wisdom have been found, it is necessary to impart to them the Word who has ascended from being made flesh to what he was in the beginning with God [Jn. 1.2]”, Commentarii in Iohannem I.43: BLANC, Commentaire sur Saint John-Tome I, p. 82. 20

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That which is commonly and generically predicated (κοινῶς τὲ καὶ γενικῶς κατηγορούμενον) of something is the definition of its essence, and to deprive something of this is to bring about the corruption of its nature, since no being that is deprived of what occurs naturally in its nature remains preserved as what it is. (2.5)

The basic analytic point is that each nature has its proper ἐνέργεια, so that if Christ “truly became man”, it was “not without the proper natural activity”, since, “the rational principle of the natural activity of something is the definition of its essence, for this rational principle characterizes the nature of anything in which it essentially occurs” (2.5). The logical consequence of Chalcedon, then, is that Christ has two activities, both Divine and human. However, we should also attend to the practical, or ascetical, consequences of this affirmation. Maximus has affirmed that it is “by means of the activity in the nature of flesh…that he effects our salvation”. By nature, flesh is without sin: “no principle of sin has been sown (ἐνέσπαρται) whatsoever in human nature” (2.5). Rather, as he began Ambiguum 2, it is the Word Himself who “has become the seed (σπορά) of his own flesh”. By taking on flesh, and exercising its proper activity, the Word reveals not only his divinity in the accomplishment of salvation, but also the true nature and activity of flesh. By ‘flesh’, Maximus means flesh “endowed with an intellectual and rational soul”, so that when Gregory affirms the ‘incarnation’, the ‘becoming-flesh’, he also says, “the becoming-man”. This becoming man is a becoming man in the most authentic sense, since Christ reveals flesh freed from what is unnatural to it, and thus provides the foundation for the ascetical purification of the flesh – purification precisely as the removal of foreign material – to which Maximus, and the ascetical tradition in general, was devoted.21 21 See LARCHET, La Divinisation de l’homme selon Saint Maxime le Confesseur, p. 249 ff. for an extended discussion of this theme. For a slightly different emphasis on the relationship between Christ and the struggle with the passions – focused on the cross – see VÖLKER, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens, p. 188-190.

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Ambiguum 3 Ambiguum 3 begins with the beginning of the next section of Gregory’s Oration 29: It is, in fact, the case that this one who is disdained by you now was beyond you; now a man, he was incomposite. That which he was, he remained, and that which he was not, he assumed. In the beginning he was without cause (for who is the cause of God?), but later he came to be for the sake of a cause: that you, the arrogant one, should be saved, you who, because of this fact, despise the divinity, since he deigned to receive your thickness by consorting with the flesh through the mediation of the intellect. Moreover, in that he became man, he was God below, since it22 was mixed with God, and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory, so that I might become god to the degree that he became man.23

Ambigua 1 and 2 have led us to this consideration of the deification of man. Ambiguum 1 gave both the conceptual distinction between essence and subsistence, and the contemplative structure of the revelation of the Trinity to the mind. These two elements prepared the way for the consideration of the divinity of Christ in the flesh. First, understanding the difference between the Word’s divine nature and his economic activity in passible flesh guards against the worship of a false god who, like the gods of Greek mythology, would be passible by nature. Second, the location of the place of “divine change” in the mind of the one contemplating God prepares for a similar location of the ascent of the Word-made-man to the heaven of divinity. The theologian who follows the ascent is likewise exalted and brought to the intellectual realm of contemplation. Finally, the emphasis on the deification of man by means of the flesh prepares for what we shall observe now. Maximus begins with a recapitulation of what he has demonstrated so far: 22 23

I.e., “the flesh”, following Maximus’ interpretation in III.3. GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.19.

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[Gregory] says, “it is, in fact, the case that this one who is disdained by you now, was beyond you” – by which he means that he existed self-sufficiently beyond every age and nature, even if now he has willingly come to be subject to both because of you. “Now a man, he was incomposite”, that is, simple with respect to nature and hypostasis, inasmuch as “God is singular”, unfettered “by body and bodily things”.24 Even if now, by the assumption of flesh which has an intelligent soul, he became “that which he was not”, that is, composite with respect to hypostasis, he “remained that which he was”, simple with respect to nature, so that he might save you, a man. (3.2)

The integrity of the natures is preserved and the principle of the composition is the divine hypostasis of the Word for the sake of the salvation of human nature. He continues with an exposition of the thoroughgoing nature of salvation: For he had this as the sole cause of his fleshly birth – the salvation of human nature – and having become subject to its passibility, as to something thick, “he consorted with flesh by the mediation of the intellect, having become man, the God below. He became all things that we are – save sin – on behalf of all: he became body, soul, intellect, and death by means of these. He became man, the common subject of them all, but man beheld as God because of what is understood about him (θεὸς ὁρώμενος διὰ τὸ νοούμενον)”.25 (3.2)

Human nature itself is the object of salvation. From the long quotation from Gregory’s Fourth Theological Oration (30.21), Maximus takes up the theme of the manifestation of God in the flesh. The “God below” is man, the one who is “seen as God”. He continues: And so, the Word “has become one” in an authentic sense, in that he himself has been emptied out without change all the way to the passibility of our nature. Having become truly subject to natural perception by means of the incarnation, a visible God, also called, “God below”, he has made manifest the super-infinite power by means of flesh which is passible by nature, “since it” – and this 24 25

GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.13. GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.21.

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unambiguously refers to the flesh – “was mixed with God, and he has become one. In this, the better part achieved the victory”, for the deifying Word actually assumed flesh in a hypostatic identity. (3.3)

The emptying of the Word is his entrance into the realm of perception. As the image of the invisible God (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, [Col. 1.15]), the Word in flesh is properly called “the visible God” (θεὸς ὁρατός). The perception of the Word in the flesh, then, is the perception of God. This appearance of God is made in no other way than by means of “flesh passible by nature”, continuing the theme we traced above. There, it was by means of the activity of the flesh that salvation is achieved. Here, it is by means of the flesh that God is made manifest. This isomorphism is by no means incidental to Maximus’ thought. As we have seen, the movement of γνῶσις leads the mind from the divine monad to the divine triad, on the one hand, and from earth to heaven, on the other. The mind is taught to see the monad as triad, and the triad as monad. It is taught to see the one who has come in the flesh as God, seeing precisely by means of this flesh. It is this “seeing as” that constitutes the contemplative labor of theological thought as Maximus presents it here. He concludes the Ambiguum with a reflection upon the end of the quotation from Gregory: “So that I might become God to the degree that he became man.” After refusing to apply the saying to himself, Maximus coordinates the phrase “to the degree that” to the self-emptying of God in the incarnation. The statement by Gregory pertains to those who, by the complete abandonment of nature, are distinguished by grace alone, and are destined to be shown forth by its power “to the degree that” the one who is God by nature became flesh and shared in our weakness, for the deification of those who are saved by grace corresponds, as he himself knew, to the degree of his self-emptying. It is a statement fitting for the “wholly deiform”, and for those who will become “able to contain the whole and only God”. (3.5)

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Maximus is referring here to Thomas, and perhaps the ascetics of his community, who are the concrete realization of what Maximus is describing in these very Ambigua, here recalling what he said of Thomas in the Prologue.

Ambiguum 4 In Ambiguum 4, Maximus continues this ascetical reflection, which is centered on the Christ, commenting on a passage from Gregory’s Second Oration on the Son, in which Gregory writes: “The Word was neither obedient nor disobedient. For these concepts pertain to those who are under authority, to those who have a secondary status: the one (obedience) to those who have a more agreeable disposition, the other (disobedience) to those who are worthy of chastisement. And as the form of a slave (Phil. 2.7), he condescends to those who are his fellow slaves and his slaves, and he takes on a form foreign to himself, bearing my entirety in himself, along with the things that pertain to me, that he might consume the worse aspect in himself, as fire consumes wax, or as the sun the vapor of the earth, that even I might partake of what is his because of the blending. Because of this, he honors obedience with action, and he experiences it by suffering, for the disposition is not sufficient, just as it is not for us, unless we also proceed by means of deeds: action is the proof of disposition. We would probably not be far-off if we were to assume even this, that, by the art of his philanthropy, he considers our obedience, and evaluates all” of our actions “with reference to his own sufferings, so that he is able to understand our condition by means of his own sufferings, both how much is demanded of us, and how much we are granted, so that our weakness is reckoned along with our suffering.”26

Maximus begins his interpretation thus: Since the Word is God by nature, Gregory says he is entirely free from obedience and disobedience. Since he is also by nature the 26

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.6.

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giver of every commandment – where obedience constitutes the keeping of the commandment, and disobedience its transgression – he exists as Lord. For the notion of law as the fulfillment or transgression of commandments is characteristic of those who are changeable by nature (τῶν φύσει κινουμένων), and not of the one who is by nature a stable existence (φύσει τὸ εἶναι στάσις ἐστίν). (4.2)

Maximus returns here to a theme he raised in Ambiguum 1, the distinction between change and stability. In Ambiguum 1, κίνησις was shown to be γνῶσις for the one to whom the mystery of the Trinity is revealed in contemplation. Here, κίνησις is the condition of the possibility for obedience to the commandments. The Word, however, since he is the giver of the commandments and ‘stable’ by nature, is not subject to obedience; there is no one to whom he is subordinate. He is not, by nature, “second in command”. Moving on to the phrase “the form of a slave”, which he refers to human nature, Maximus writes: “he condescends to those who are his fellow-slaves and his slaves, and he takes on a form foreign to himself ”. Together with the nature, he also takes on the passible element of our nature, for the penalty that belongs to the one who has sinned is alien to the one who is naturally without sin. This penalty is the condemnation of the passible element of the entirety of human nature because of transgression. (4.3)

The descent of the Word is not only in terms of external form (μορφή). The Word has taken on human nature, which entails taking on passibility, a passibility that has come under condemnation. It is in this way that the Word takes upon himself the penalty, which does not apply to him in his sinlessness. Maximus then goes on to explain why Gregory uses both the phrase “form of a slave”, and the phrase “he took on an alien form”, with the corresponding activities of self-emptying and condescension: But if he emptied himself as “the form of a slave”, that is, as a human being, and if by his “condescension, he takes on a form for-

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eign to himself ”, that is, he becomes a human being passible by nature, then we see in his self-emptying and condescension that he is both good and the lover of mankind. His self-emptying shows that he has truly become man, and his condescension that he truly exists as a man passible by nature. (4.4)

The self-emptying of the Word shows his true humanity, whereas the condescension shows the passibility of this humanity. This, according to Maximus, is what Gregory means by “he bears my entirety in himself, along with the things that pertain to me”. This includes “inculpable passions”, according to Maximus, which is how the Word can be said to have taken on passibility. As we saw above, “the passible element” in our nature has come under judgment because of sin, but it is not culpable by nature. Rather, by means of “our worse part” (τὸ χεῖρον), “the passible element in our nature has usurped control” (τῇ φύσει τὸ παθητὸν ἐπεισεκρίθη). Maximus explains that he is referring to “the law of sin [Rom. 7.23] which is born of disobedience, whose strength lies in the disposition of our mental inclination (γνώμης διάθεσις) set contrary to nature”. The law of sin, which operates by virtue of the fact that human understanding is in a state contrary to nature, “produces an impassioned state fluctuating between relaxation and tension in the passible element of our nature”. The law of sin, and its power at work in the human mind, are contrary to nature. Thus, the “salvation of human nature”, as we saw in Ambiguum 3, is accomplished because the Son “ ‘has not only saved those held down by sin’,27 but also, having remitted our penalty in himself, he has imparted divine power which produces stability of soul and incorruption of body in an identity of inclination towards what is beautiful by nature (ἐν τῇ περὶ τὸ φύσει καλὸν τῆς γνώμης ταυτότητι) in those who are zealous to honor grace with action”. (4.4) The Son has taken on passible human nature, and thus the penalty that pertains to the passible element in nature. Since, as we saw above in Ambiguum 2, the Word became the ‘seed’ of 27

GREG. NAZ., Or. 30.3.

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his own flesh, in whose nature there is no naturally occurring sin, that nature has been restored to its proper status, which, in this context, consists of ‘stability’ and “incorruption of body in an identity of inclination towards what is beautiful by nature”. This “identity of inclination (γνώμη)” is the intellectual element of the restoration of nature. Whereas the soul is given its proper stability, and the body its proper incorruption, the γνώμη – the inclination, or intellectual will – is given its proper perception and understanding of nature, that understanding which comports with God’s own. The question of γνώμη in Christ would later become a controversial topic, and I shall address it below in my comments on Amb. 5.15. Maximus continues with an explanation of the phrases, “Because of this, he honors obedience with action”, and “he experiences it by suffering”. These phrases again refer to the two-fold movement Maximus has been following throughout the Ambiguum, that of the Word’s truly becoming man, and of his truly becoming a man passible by nature. With respect to the first, he became “by nature the new Adam on behalf of the old” (4.6). As such, he comes into the realm of obedience, since it is only by virtue of his human nature that obedience to the law pertains to him. With respect to the second, he “was willingly born along with us by the same passions, since…‘he was weary, he was hungry, he was thirsty, he was in agony, and he wept by the law of the body.’”28 These actions are a ‘proof ’ of an active (ἐνεργοῦς) ‘disposition’, and therefore the proof of the integrity of the human nature of the Word. Again, the purpose of this ‘condescension’ by the natural master to the level of those who are slaves by nature is “that he might make me master of the one who rules tyrannically by means of deceit” (4.6), recalling the notion in 4.4 that the passible element has supplanted that to which it should have been subordinate, the “dispassionate power” (4.7). The next section will elaborate the dynamics of this transformation. 28

GREG. NAZ., Or. 38.15.

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Maximus begins: by performing the activities of a slave as a master would perform them (τὰ δουλικὰ δεσποτικῶς ἐνεργῶν), that is, fleshly activities in a divine way, he demonstrated the dispassionate power which naturally rules among fleshly things, making corruption disappear through suffering, and fashioning indestructible life through death. (4.7)

The Son remains what he is, and therefore, when he does things in the flesh, he does them as God. This is not, however, described as a form of fleshly existence that violates the nature of flesh. On the contrary, the “dispassionate power” which was shown in these fleshly activities is precisely the ‘natural’ ruler of the flesh. That is to say, it is natural for passible flesh to be ruled by dispassion. This prepares the way, then, for the expression of the paradoxical logic of the Passion: He makes “corruption disappear through suffering, and fashions indestructible life through death”. We see here that the work of the cross is the paradigmatic activity of Christ and is the fundamental meaning of Maximus’ technical dogmatic teaching of two complete natures united in the one hypostasis of the Son. From the other side, Maximus writes, by doing the deeds of a master while comporting himself as a slave, that is, the divine deeds by means of the flesh, he showed forth an ineffable self-emptying, which does a divine work by means of passible flesh for the whole human race that had become earthen in corruption. (4.7)

We see here the symmetry of Maximus’ language. He does “fleshly things” in a divine manner, and “divine things” in a fleshly manner. He demonstrates “dispassionate power”, and he shows forth “ineffable self-emptying”. Power works incorruption and life, and self-emptying does a divine work for the whole corrupt human race. Maximus also restates a theme we saw above in Ambiguum 2: it is precisely be means of passible flesh – as passible flesh – that the divine work is accomplished. From symmetry, Maximus moves to unity:

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For in the exchange of the divine and the fleshly he clearly confirmed the natures of which he himself was the hypostasis, along with their essential activities, i.e., their movements, of which he himself was the unconfused unity, a unity which admits of no division with respect to the two natures of which he was the hypostasis, since they naturally belong to him. This is because he acts monadically, that is, in a unified form, and by means of each of the things that are predicated of him, he shows forth the power of his own divinity and the activity of his flesh at one and the same time, without separation. (4.7) For he is one, and there is nothing more unified and there is nothing more unifying and able to save than him, or than what is proper to him. Because of this, even while suffering, he was truly God, and even while working wonders, the same one was truly man, since he was the true hypostasis of true natures according to an ineffable union. Acting in them both reciprocally and naturally, he was shown truly to preserve them, preserving them unconfused for himself, since he remained both dispassionate by nature and passible, immortal and mortal, visible and intelligible, the same one being both God and man by nature. (4.8)

It is the Word Himself who is the unity of the natures, and this because the natures are joined hypostatically. He acts as one subject (μοναδικῶς), and thus reveals the divine and the human in every action. We have a refinement here of the discussion in Ambiguum 2, where the proper grammar for “partitive predication” was defined. On the one hand, the natures are clearly preserved in their own proper dignity. In the incarnate Word, however, they are not considered apart from each other. Human nature in Christ is always the human nature of the Divine Word, and the Divine Word, in its visible activity, is always the Word in passible flesh. Divine and fleshly activities are “shown together” in each predication, whether they are properly fleshly or divine. Maximus continues, then, with the following: Thus, in my opinion, the one who is master by nature “honors obedience”, “and he experiences it by suffering”, not so that he might simply save, having cleansed the whole of human nature of its worse aspect by his own sufferings, but rather that he might also “consider our obedience”. The one who by nature encompasses

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all knowledge learns by the experience of our own circumstances the things that pertain to us: “both how much is demanded of us, and how much is granted us”. He does this for the sake of perfect submission, by means of which he is wont to lead to the Father those who are being saved, who have taken on his appearance by the power of grace. (4.9)

Maximus turns here, characteristically, from consideration of Christ’s experiences to the experiences of the disciple. This is, for Maximus, not really a turn, but a sharpening of focus, a clarification as to the scope of reflection upon the incarnate Word.29 The conclusion of Christ’s activity and suffering is not simply salvation by a one-off cleansing of human nature. Rather, the all-knowing Word paradoxically ‘learns’ how to guide us to perfect submission, since he himself underwent this movement in the same arena in which we must undergo it. According to what is revealed in Christ, everything that is expected of humanity in its relation to God is made clear. As Maximus continues, “that which pertains to us by nature – which Christ was himself – is ‘demanded of us,’ but ‘we are granted’ what pertains to us by union, that which Christ was but is beyond our nature”. Truly to “take on his appearance” can only be achieved “by the power of grace”, by a gift, since that which appears in Christ is more than we are. Becoming deiform, as we saw above, is only possible because the Word has taken on our form, the form of a slave, and has acted in that form in a divine manner.

Ambiguum 5 Thus far we have seen Maximus make the distinction between essence/being and subsistence. He has shown the contemplative dynamics of theological reflection upon the Trinity and upon the incarnate Word, and he has expounded the deification of human nature in Christ, along with its ascetical implica29

See note 1 to the Prologue above.

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tions. With all of this in mind, we turn now to Ambiguum 5, where reflection on the activities of Christ, which have been introduced, but not fully expounded, will come to the fore.30 Ambiguum 5 is devoted to a contemplation of God’s entrance into the realm of being, which he naturally transcends. In the first nine chapters of the Capita theologica et oeconomica, a text from roughly the same period as the Ambigua ad Thomam, Maximus shows in the strongest terms that God is radically beyond the realm of being and becoming, where notions of potency, actuality, and change hold sway: God, as far as we are able to understand, is in Himself neither origin, nor intermediary state, nor fulfillment, nor anything else at all of those things which are seen to pertain naturally to what comes after Him. For he is undetermined, immovable, and boundless, since he boundlessly transcends all being, potency, and actuality.31

God is neither a being, nor a potentiality, nor an actuality in any way,32 so the basic mode of conceiving and speaking about beings is wholly inapplicable to the divine as it is in itself. The principle of the intelligibility of beings is the apprehension of their origins (τὰς ἀρχάς), but God has no origin, nor that which follows ontologically from the origin – change and actualization. God is thus unintelligible.33 How, then, are we to come to a knowledge of God? Within the context of the Capita theologica, Maximus defines knowledge as faith (πίστις γὰρ ἐστι γνῶσις ἀληθής), since it is faith that 30

Bellini has given a reading of Ambiguum 5 and evaluation of Maximus as an interpreter of Denys, in which he regards the Christology of Ambiguum 5 as a positive development of what lies inchoate in the thought of Denys itself: BELLINI, Maxime interprète de Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite. Analyse de l’Ambiguum ad Thomam 5. De Andia has more recently pointed to differences between Maximus and Denys with respect to ontology (particularly in relation to negative theology), Christology, the relationship between affirmative (kataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology, and mystical theology: DE ANDIA,Transfiguration et théologie negative chez Maxime le Confesseur et Denys l’Aréopagite. 31 Cap. theol., I.2, PG 90, 1084A. 32 Cap. theol., I.4, PG 90, 1084B-C. 33 Cap. theol., I.8, PG 90, 1085C.

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demonstrates “the reality of what lies beyond intellect and reason”.34 As we shall now see in our discussion of Ambiguum 5 (and as Maximus goes on to show in other ways in the Capita theologica), it is in the Incarnate Word that God becomes knowable. Ambiguum 5, though it sets the opening line of Denys’ fourth epistle as the occasioning difficulty, actually treats the entire letter. The whole of the demonstration revolves around the question of the conjunction of the human and the divine – of being and what transcends being – in Jesus. The opening line of Denys’ letter, with which Maximus begins, is: “How”, you say, “has Jesus, who is beyond all things, come to be ranked in essence with all men?” But he is not called man here as the cause of men, but rather, as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence.

In his treatise De divinis nominibus, Denys teaches that God, as cause of all things, is appropriately given the names of all that exists by means of him, even though he transcends every name.35 Here, however, he is careful to make the distinction between that kind of naming and the teaching that Jesus is truly human, not merely as cause, but essentially. After making this point, Maximus continues with what will form the core of the logical side of his argument: The only true proof of this integral essence is its naturally constitutive power (συστατικὴ δύναμις). Were one to call this a “natural activity”, one would not stray from the truth, since it is properly and primarily characteristic of the essence. It exists as the formconstituting movement that is most proper to it, and contains every property that naturally belongs to it, without which there is only non-existence, “since”, according to that great teacher, only “that which has absolutely no being has neither movement nor existence”.36 (5.2) 34

Cap. theol., I.9, PG 90, 1085D. PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., I.7: SUCHLA, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De divinis nominibus, p. 119-120. 36 PS. DEN. AR., Eccl. hier., 2 35

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Much of what follows in Ambiguum 5 is devoted to the contemplation of this “natural activity” of the human being of Christ. Maximus continues, “God who was made flesh is to be denied nothing whatsoever of what is ours – except for sin, which does not belong to our nature – since he was distinctly shown forth, not as man in a superficial way, ‘but as what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence’” (5.3). Again, we observe here the emphasis upon “showing forth”, or manifestation. The definition of Jesus must be based on how he presents himself. In this case, he is shown forth as fully human. However, “We do not limit Jesus to his humanity (οὐκ ἀνθρωπικῶς ἀφορίζομεν)”,37 since we do not teach that he is a mere man, thereby doing violence to the union that is beyond thought. When we confer the name ‘human’ upon him who is, according to us, the truly existing God by nature we mean it in the essential sense, and not merely in the sense that he is the cause of human beings. (5.3)

The very one who is God is called a human being. Therefore, “‘he is not only human’, since the very same one is also God, ‘and he is not only beyond-being’, since the very same one is also human. He exists neither as a mere human being, nor as bare God, ‘but the one who is the preeminent lover of mankind is truly human’”. (5.3) This, then, is the beginning of an answer to the question posed by Gaius the monk in Denys’ letter. Gaius’ mistake has been to suppose that Jesus is somehow only beyond-being by nature, and not also human by nature. This co-incidence of natures does violence to neither of them. The ‘downward’ movement of κένωσις and the ‘upward’ movement of assumption (πρόσληψις) entail no essential change or modification in the essences: 37

PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 4. Except where noted, the remaining quotations embedded in the quoted texts of Amb. 5 are from Denys’ Ep. 4.

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For he did not present to us in himself only a bare gesture in the form of flesh, “according to Manichean nonsense”,38 neither did he bring down from heaven flesh co-essential with himself, according to the myths of the Apollinarians. On the contrary, he became “what truly exists as man according to the integrity of the human essence” by the assumption of flesh intellectually endowed with soul, which was hypostatically united to him. (5.4)

On the human side, then, Jesus’ humanity is not a mere semblance, or a reality fundamentally different from our own flesh. On the divine side, and perhaps more paradoxically, the very one who comes into the realm of being remains ‘beyondbeing’: For although he became man he was not yoked under human nature. On the contrary, he raised human nature up to himself, having made it another mystery. He remained entirely incomprehensible, and showed his own incarnation to be more incomprehensible than every mystery, in that he came forth by means of a birth beyond being. To the degree that he became comprehensible on account of the incarnation, by so much more was he known as more incomprehensible through it. (5.5)

The revelation of God in the flesh is at once a granting of knowledge and of ignorance. It is a manifestation and a veiling. As Maximus goes on to quote Denys’ Epistula 3: For “he is hidden after the appearance”, says the teacher, “or, to speak more divinely, even in the appearance. For this mystery of Jesus has also been hidden, and it has been reached by no reason and no intellect, but even while being spoken of, it remains ineffable, and while being conceived, it remains unknown”. (5.6)

This act of revelation by hiddenness, of hiddenness as revelation, is, for Maximus, the most appropriate performance of revelation: What could be more demonstrative than this for the purposes of demonstrating the divine “transcendence of being”? It shows

38

GREG. NAZ., Ep. 101.26.

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“what is hidden by means of an appearance”, and the speechless by “a word”. It shows “to the intellect” what is unknown because of its superiority, and, to affirm something even more radical, “that which is beyond being” by its entrance into being. (5.6)

It is precisely by coming into being, into the realm of manifestation, that the Word is shown to be beyond being. As we’ve seen, the economy of salvation is inseparable from God’s revelation of himself. However, an authentic revelation of what is beyond-being can only be the revelation of unknowability, and therefore a covering-up in the very act of uncovering. It is within this context of the Word-beyond-being coming into the realm of being that Maximus reintroduces a central theme in his thinking, that of ‘instituting’ nature ‘anew’ (5.7).39 To demonstrate this, Maximus makes reference to Christ’s virgin birth and to his walking on water, both of which demonstrate both the transcendence and the humanity of the Lord in the same act. In both cases (though he only overtly applies it to the walking on the water), “he manifests without separation the natural activity of his flesh together with the power of his own divinity” (5.8). The Word manifests a new activity, and renewed natures, without changing the natures. He was conceived “in a manner beyond human nature”, yet he was still conceived and “formed as a human being”, though without a man. Likewise, in walking upon the water, He manifests without separation the natural activity of his flesh together with the power of his own divinity, since the facility of movement belonged to the flesh by nature, but not to the divinity beyond infinity and being, which is hypostatically united to it. (5.8)

39 A reference to Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 39 On the Lights: “Natures are instituted anew, and God becomes man” (καινοτομοῦνται φύσεις, καὶ θεὸς ἄνθρωπος γίνεται, Or. 39.13): MORESCHINI, Discours 38-41, p. 176. Maximus treats this passage in Ambiguum 41 (PG 91, 1304D), and treats similar themes in Ambiguum 31 (PG 91, 1273D), on the quotation from Gregory’s Oration 38 On the Nativity, “The laws of nature are dissolved. It is necessary that the world above be filled. Christ orders it. Let us not resist” (Or. 38.2).

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Walking is proper to flesh, but not walking on water. Being unconstrained by “bodily bulk” is proper to divinity, but walking is not. Therefore, walking in a manner that is unconstrained by bodily bulk manifests a renewing of natures in that each, while maintaining its own properties, is expressed in a single act that goes beyond it. Because Denys’ Epistula 4 is particularly concerned with the status of Christ’s humanity, Maximus goes on to attend carefully to the fullness of its reality. In particular, he emphasizes the actuality of the “movement of being” (τὴν τῆς οὐσίας κίνησιν) that has been taken on: “For the Word beyond being came into the realm of being”40 as human once and for all, and possessed as his own undiminished property, along with the things characteristic of human being, the movement of being which properly characterizes him as human. This was formally constituted by everything that he did naturally as human, since indeed he truly became human: breathing, talking, walking, etc. (5.9)

All of these specifically human acts are properly attributed to the Word himself. The walking is the Word’s walking, and therefore a divine walking, but a walking nonetheless, and therefore human. This taking on of nature, in which human properties become properties of the Word, is the fulfillment of the economy for Maximus: “having become, without change, that which human nature is in its activity, he himself fulfilled the economy on our behalf in an unimaginable manner” (5.9). It is the deification of human nature made manifest through the human activities of the divine Word that constitutes the economy of salvation.41 The next few sections continue with variations on the themes Maximus has laid out thus far, expounding the implications of Denys’ statement, “he yet remained beyond being even 40

Cf. PS. DEN. AR., Ep. 4 and Div. nom., II.6. COOPER, ‘Suffering wonders’ and ‘wonderful sufferings’: Maximus the Confessor and his fifth Ambiguum, gives a reading of Ambiguum 5 in light of this theme. 41

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as he entered the realm of being, and he did human things in a way that transcends humanity”. (5.10). To begin, he makes a distinction between “the rational principle of existence (ὁ τοῦ εἶναι λόγος)” and “the mode of existence (ὁ τοῦ πῶς εἶναι τρόπος)”. Having dismissed the possibility of affirming an essence without its constitutive energy, and a nature without its constitutive movement, Maximus writes: Let us admit the movement together with the nature, the movement without which nature does not exist, since we know that the rational principle of existence is one thing, and the mode of existence is another. The rational principle of existence is confirmed with respect to nature, while the mode of existence is confirmed with respect to the economy. The conjunction of these, by fashioning the great mystery of the “natural principle of Jesus who is beyond nature”,42 demonstrates that the distinction of activities as well as the union is preserved in him, where distinction is seen in the natural rational principle of each of the natures that have been united inseparably, and union is understood in the singular mode of those things which exist in an unconfused manner. (5.11)

The rational principle of existence pertains to nature, whereas movement pertains to economy. It is the ‘conjunction’ of these that constitutes the mystery of Jesus in whom “the manner of being beyond human nature [is] conjoined to the principle of being of human nature”. We should note that Maximus is arguing that there is no nature conceivable apart from its proper movement, and no essence conceivable without its activity. Likewise, according to his reasoning, there would be no knowledge of the divine nature conceivable without economy. This is the principle underlying his earlier reflection with respect to the activities in the realm of being which both disclose and obscure the revelation of God. Nature is only known through economy, but it is known as a mystery. The fact of its being a mystery is part of the revelation, just as the fact that Jesus’ human actions are the divine economy of salvation is itself an aspect of the revelation accomplished by those very actions. 42

PS. DEN. AR., Div. nom., II.9.

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This, then, is the significance of Denys’ words, that “he did human things in a way that transcends humanity”: [He] demonstrat[es] in an exalted union that the human activity is assimilated to the divine power without being changed. Since human nature was united to divine nature without confusion, it has penetrated (περικεχώρηκεν) through the whole. It has absolutely nothing loose and separated from the divinity, which has been united to it hypostatically. (5.14)

There is no human action of Jesus that can be conceived apart from “the divine power”. This is the interpenetration of the transcendent and the immanent, the conjunction of καταφάσις and ἀποφάσις, the coming-into-being of the Word beyond-being, the becoming-man of God. It is telling to compare Maximus on this point with Denys’ earlier interpreter, John of Scythopolis. Maximus follows John in certain aspects of his interpretation of Denys, including his assertion that the term θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια implies both the divine and the human activities in their integrity,43 and his use of Gregory the Theologian’s First Epistle to Cledonius to explain how the two natures and titles (God and man) come together in Christ.44 However, when John comes to the phrase “new theandric activity”, he writes, “[Denys] only calls the mixed activity (τὴν μικτὴν ἐνέργειαν) ‘theandric.’ [Christ] acted as God alone (ὡς θεὸς μόνον) when he healed the child of the centurion from afar, but he acted as man alone (ὡς ἄνθρωπος μόνον) – even though he was God – when he ate and felt pain. He acted as both (μικτῶς) when he performed the miracles both of fashioning eyes for the blind by smearing [mud], and of stemming the flow of hemorrhage with a touch.”45 43

Maximus: Amb. Thom. 5.18; see also Opusculum 7, PG 91, 84D-85A. JOHN Scholia in corpus Areopagiticum: PG 4, 533C. 44“Just as the natures are blended, so also are the titles, and they are mutually transferable by the principle of their natural conjunction”, Ep. 101.31: GALLAY, Lettres théologiques, 48. Maximus: Amb. Thom. 5.14, 18; JOHN OF SCYTHOPOLIS, Scholia: PG 4, 533C. 45 PG 4, 536A. OF SCYTHOPOLIS,

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John seeks to preserve the clear integrity of the divine and human natures by assigning the exalted things to the divine nature and the lowlier things to the human nature in a manner reminiscent of the passage from Gregory that was interpreted in Ambiguum 2. He restricts the notion of “theandric activity” to those acts that manifest both natures: healing (divine) by means of bodily contact (human), being born (human) of a virgin (divine), or walking (human) on water (divine). While he affirms that Denys’ statement that Jesus did not do divine things “insofar as he was God” and human things “insofar as he was man” “signifies the supernatural and ineffable union of the Lord”, and even refers to the theandric activity as “an activity woven together from God and man” (θεοῦ καὶ ἀνδρὸς συμπεπλεγμένην ἐνέργειαν), he qualifies it in a way that Maximus does not.46 As we saw above, Christ, for Maximus, “acts monadically, that is, in a unified form, and by means of each of the things that are predicated of him, he shows forth the power of his own divinity and the activity of his flesh at one and the same time, without separation” (4.7). As we shall see below, Maximus explains how the distinction between divine and human is preserved. Nevertheless, because of his notion of the hypostatic union of natures in Christ, he does not speak like John of Scythopolis when he makes the distinction. Maximus proceeds to demonstrate the way in which the incarnate Word related to the passivity inherent to human nature. He argues that “the passions of nature” (τὰ πάθη τῆς φύσεως) are produced by Christ as “works of the will (γνώμης ἔργα), and not as the results of natural necessity” (5.15). He is, therefore, free in his passivity, and as we saw in Amb. 4.7, he does “the activities of a slave as a master would perform them”, that is, “with authority”. He continues, He demonstrated with authority that the moveable element in his own will (ἐξουσίᾳ, γνώμῃ κινητὸν δείξας ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ) is the naturally 46 This, for Grillmeier, is further evidence that this scholion is properly attributed to John and not Maximus; GRILLMEIER, Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche 2/3, p. 349 n. 187.

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motivating element of our will (τὸ πεφυκὸς ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν εἶναι γνώμης κινητικόν).

Maximus takes as clarification of this admittedly difficult passage the following quotation from Denys, “the one who sees divinely [by means of the numerous existing things] will know beyond intellect that even the things affirmed concerning the philanthropy of Jesus have the power of a superior denial.”

Maximus then explains, “the Word beyond being”, having put on everything belonging to human nature, together with human nature itself, in his ineffable conception, possessed nothing which is humanly ‘affirmed’ by natural reason, which was not also divine, and denied in a manner beyond nature.

Maximus is attempting to clarify here the renewal of human nature by its union to the Word, and in particular, the healing of human passivity through its assimilation to the divine. Christ takes human passivity upon himself and renders it active through his free and unconstrained experience of the passions. Because of this, “the moveable element in his own will”, i.e. the passivity of his human will, becomes “the naturally motivating element of our will”, i.e. that which allows our will actively to choose the good. Given his use of the quotation from Denys we’ve just cited, Maximus seems to understand this reversal, wherein Christ’s freely chosen passivity grants power to human nature, as an expression of the ‘affirmative’ and ‘negative’ dynamics of Denys’ understanding of theology. There is an affirmation of Christ’s changeability and passivity, the denial of which is constituted by its transformation into power and activity in human nature, so that those who attain union with God become “by adoption … what by nature is called ‘the active principle (τὸ ποιοῦν)” (Ep. sec. prol. 1). Indeed, “the knowledge of this exists beyond intellect, since it is indemonstrable, and only the faith of those who genuinely revere the mystery of Christ can understand it”. This is not ob-

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scurantism on the part of Maximus. Rather, the understanding of the reality of Christ’s human nature is open only by means of the appropriation of that nature and what it grants to human nature generally. Denys can say both, “he was not human”, and “he was not non-human”, since, on the one hand, according to Maximus, “by nature he was free from natural necessity, in that he was not brought under the law of generation which pertains to us”, but on the other, “‘he truly existed as human according to the integrity of the human essence’, bearing by nature what is naturally ours”. Christ is both “consubstantial with us”, and transcendent of us, “because he brings our human nature to completion in a newness of modes, which we ourselves have not accomplished”. In this way, by building on themes he has introduced earlier in the ad Thomam (particularly Amb. 4), Maximus explains the salvific nature of Christ’s passivity, and indicates that it is ultimately only a faithful reverence for this mystery that allows one to understand it. As we noted above, the concept of γνώμη with respect to Christ would later become controversial in the debates concerning the status of Christ’s human will.47 Maximus would go on to clarify a distinction between natural and gnomic wills and, while affirming two natural wills – divine and human – in Christ, would deny the presence of an independent gnomic will in Christ that differed from the will of God, for “it was only this difference in gnomic wills (τὴν τῶν γνωμικῶν θελημάτων διαφοράν) that introduced into our lives sin and our separation from God. For evil consists in nothing else than this difference of our gnomic will from the divine will”.48 “Gnomic will” is often rendered as “deliberative will”, to capture the intellectual element at play. The point is that, in Christ, there is not the possibility of departure from the divine will by means of human ‘deliberation’ or ‘inclination’. 47

See SHERWOOD, St. Maximus the Confessor: The Ascetical Life, The Four Centuries on Charity, p. 58-63, and THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 213218, for discussion of Maximus’ varied use of the term. 48 Opuscule 3, PG 90, 56B; trans. LOUTH, Maximus the Confessor.

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What then to make of Maximus’ attribution of γνώμη to Christ here in Ambiguum 5? It is clear that his use of the term as applied to Christ in Ambiguum 5 does not have the same resonance as it does in the later Opusculum 3, where he denies a gnomic will to Christ. Here in Ambiguum 5, his use comports more with Gregory Nazianzen’s use of the term in Oration 29, which, of course, Maximus has cited extensively here in the ad Thomam. There, Gregory describes the Trinity as “a unity of mind (γνώμης συμπνοία) and identity of motion”.49 The word γνώμη in this context means generally ‘will’ or ‘purpose’, and does not connote the indecisiveness and deliberation that Maximus later gives the term. I would argue that this is the basic meaning governing Maximus’ use of the term and its application to Christ here in the ad Thomam. He takes γνώμη to be an essential element of human nature as such, and, as he explains in Amb. 4.4, its natural state, when taken as ‘understanding’, ‘inclination’, or ‘way of perception’, is to be at one with God. The attainment of this disposition is, for Maximus, what Gregory means by “partaking of what is [Christ’s] because of the blending” (4.4). In Maximus’ own words, one becomes, “by grace, pure of passion in a manner equal to him” (4.4). It is at this point that Maximus comes to the much disputed question, that of the “new theandric activity”. He concluded the previous section by affirming that the Word “became the union (of the divine and human natures) himself, and was the hypostasis in neither of them exclusively – as though working in one, separately from the other – but rather, he confirms the one through the other, since he is truly both” (5.15). In order to explain how “he confirms the one through the other”, Maximus argues that “as God, he was the motivating principle of his own humanity (τῆς ἰδίας ἦν κινητικὸς ἀνθρωπότητος)…as man, he was the revelatory principle of his own divinity (τῆς οἰκείας ἐκφαντικὸς ὑπῆρχε θεότητος)”. (5.16)

49

GREG. NAZ., Or. 29.2. Maximus quotes this passage in Epistula secunda 2.

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Maximus reiterates here a notion he employed in 5.9, where he compared the Word’s human actions to the movement of the body by the soul that moves it independently but naturally, since it is ‘connatural’ with the body. In this context Maximus shows that this mode of union confers divinity upon human passivity: Christ “divinely possesses suffering (θεϊκῶς τὸ πάσχειν ἔχων) (for it was voluntary)”. It is in this free, unconstrained way that Christ, “as God”, is “the motivating principle of his own humanity”. Likewise, it is precisely the humanity of Christ that reveals his divinity, is its “revelatory principle”: Christ “humanly possesses wonder-working (ἀνθρωπικῶς δὲ τὸ θαυματουργεῖν) (for it was by means of the flesh)”. Flesh here is contrasted with the freedom of the divine, but in Christ, the divine freedom that produces miracles in a manner that is unencumbered by any constraint produces them precisely “by the natural passible power of the flesh of the one who works them (τῇ κατὰ φύσιν τοῦ αὐτοῦ θαυματουργοῦντος παθητικῇ δυνάμει… τῆς σαρκός)”. Thus, passible flesh becomes the means by which the divine nature is revealed. As we saw above in 5.6, this revelation is at one and the same time an obscuration, since it is ultimately the transcendence of God that is revealed in the flesh of Christ, and this must be the revelation of God’s final unknowability. The consequence of this fleshly economy of revelation is that Christ “‘accomplished the divine things not insofar as he was God’, since they were not wrought only divinely, and separated from the flesh (for ‘he was not only beyond being’), ‘neither did he accomplish the human things insofar as he was man’, since they were not wrought only in a human way, and separated from divinity (‘for he was not only man’). ‘Rather, God having become man, he conducted his life for us according to a certain new theandric activity’ ”. (5.16) The summary of this passage is that “‘he conducted his life’ by means of both a divine and a human ‘activity’ in the same act” (5.17). We recall that, according to the quotation of Gregory in Ambiguum 2, the exalted acts were to be attributed to the

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divine nature, and the lowly acts were to be understood of the incarnation. We noted both the potential separation between the divine and human in Christ that this might entail, and the resolution Maximus finds in God’s “passibility against sin”. The culmination of this intuition is found here in the affirmation of the theandric activity. Passibility becomes productive and active, and divine power is realized through passible flesh against the sin that renders it condemned. Having radically affirmed the inseparable union of the divine and human in Christ, Maximus introduces another key element in his thought, the difference between division/separation (διαίρεσις) and distinction (διαφορά).50 As he writes in Epistula 12, Distinction (διαφορά) is not the same thing as division (διαίρεσις). For, on the one hand, a distinction is the principle (λόγος) by which substances (τὰ ὑποκείμενα) are distinguished from one another, the means by which they are made manifest, for example, that which constitutes the being of flesh in its nature and essence, and again, that which constitutes the being of the Divine Word in its nature and essence. Division, on the other hand, cuts right through, severing substances at the heart of their unity, placing by turns properties and self-subsisting things as separated from each other.51

The Divine Word and flesh are distinct in nature and essence, but they are not separate in Christ, who is the union of the two. Conversely, to assert an inseparability of natures is not to deny their distinction. It is not as though Christ is a kind of middle term between the divine and the human that results from “the denial of the extremes” (5.18). In fact, Denys’ term ‘theandric’, is to be understood as “a circumlocution (περίφρασις)”, which actually implies the two activities and not a concocted middle term. The Christ is not, as Maximus will go

50 See THUNBERG, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 51-57, for a discussion of the terms in Maximus and in the antecedent tradition. 51 PG 91, 469A-B.

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on to say, a hybrid, like the mythical ‘goat-stag’, which, as a mixture, is truly neither of the component parts (5.20). With respect to the word ‘new’, Maximus teaches that it pertains to the “new mystery” of God becoming flesh and yet remaining God without change. This is to be distinguished from ‘one’, since ‘new’ pertains to quality, whereas ‘one’ pertains to quantity. Severus of Antioch, our earliest source referring to Denys, takes the phrase “a certain new theandric activity” in precisely this sense, as implying one composite activity, as well as one nature and hypostasis: We understood and continue to understand [by the phrase “a certain new theandric activity”] one composite activity. It is not possible for us to understand it otherwise, since it is the complete rejection of all duality, and we confess that the God who became man conducted this one incarnate nature of God the Word in a new way. For the principle of the economy having instituted anew the natures also instituted anew their titles (ὁ γὰρ τῆς οἰκονομίας λόγος καινοτομήσας τὰς φύσεις συνεκαινοτόμησεν αὐταῖς καὶ τὰς προσηγορίας).52

Later we find actual citations of the Dionysian phrase that insert the word ‘one’ directly into the quotation.53 To argue against the monenergist interpretation, Maximus asks, How then, this being given, would one who naturally has one natural activity complete with this one activity both the wonders and the sufferings, which are distinguished from one another by their own proper rational principles of nature, without the total negation of one or the other nature accompanying the loss of the possibility of performing one or the other set of actions? For, no 52

Epistula ad Iohannem abbatem: DIEKAMP, Doctrina patrum de incarnatione Verbi, 309.20-310.2. Note Severus’ use of the phrase “For the principle of the economy having instituted anew the natures also instituted anew their titles” (καινοτομήσας τὰς φύσεις συνεκαινοτόμησεν αὐταῖς καὶ τὰς προσηγορίας). 53 For example, in the Satisfactio facta inter Cyrum et eos qui erant ex parte Theodosianorum from the council of CYRUS OF ALEXANDRIA in 633: καὶ τὸν αὐτὸν ἕνα Χριστὸν καὶ υἱὸν ἐνεργούντα τὰ θεοπρεπῆ καὶ ἀνθρώπινα μιᾷ θεανδρικῇ ἐνεργείᾳ κατὰ τὸν ἐν ἁγίοις Διονύσιον: RIEDINGER, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum II.2, 598.21; see WINKELMANN, Der monenergetisch-monotheletische Streit, p. 66-67; FREND, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, p. 350.

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being is wont to accomplish opposite things by one and the same activity, and yet still remain within the bounds of the definition and rational principle of its nature. (5.20)

Rather, the “theandric activity ... has been given [as] the renew[al of ] human nature by what is beyond human nature” (5.22), not as the confusion of divine and human energies in a violation of the boundaries of their corresponding natures. ‘Theandric’ expresses “the mode of exchange in the ineffable union”, just as in the case of a heated sword, in which “what is able to cut becomes able to burn, and what is able to burn becomes able to cut” (5.23). Therefore, the grammar of speaking about Christ must be written thus: Being God he did wonders humanly, wonders which were accomplished by means of flesh passible by nature. Being man he proceeded through the passions of human nature divinely, passions which were perfected according to divine authority. Or rather, both were done theandrically, since he was God and man. By the wonders, he restores (ἀποδιδοὺς) us by what is his own, to reveal what we are. By the passions, he grants (διδοὺς) us to become what he exhibited in himself. By means of each he confirmed both the truth of those natures from which, in which, and which he is, and what it is that he wants to be confessed by us, since he alone is true and faithful. (5.24)

This is the culmination of the thought contained in the Ambigua ad Thomam. The interpenetration of the transcendent and the immanent, the uncreated and the created, accomplishes the restoration of human nature by means of the sufferings of Christ, and grants to human nature “what he exhibited in himself ”, the theandric mode of life. The theandric activity of Christ “reveals what we are” and restores us to that life of union with God. Authentically human life is divine and the divine is made known through the passible flesh of humanity.

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INDICES

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INDEX OF SCRIPTURAL REFERENCES

Genesis 1.26 1.27 Psalms 24.14 59 73.12 105.2 118.83 118.160 Isaiah 9.6 35.6 Lamentations 4.5

Mark 6.48-49 7.32

100 47 74 17 59 48 87 86 73, 74 48 78

Wisdom of Solomon 7.5 67 1 Esdras 3.12 4.35 Matthew 14.26 16.15

86 86 65 24

133

65 48

John 1.2 1.5 6.19 14.22 16.33

103 n. 20 61 65 48 48

Acts 6.4 17.34 19.2 19.3

85 21 78 78

Romans 7.23 10.10

58, 110 87

1 Corinthians 4.21 12.3

84 48

2 Corinthians 5.7

78

Galatians 6.1

84

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INDEX OF SCRIPTURAL REFERENCES

Ephesians 3.11

Titus 2.13

48

Philippians 2.7 4.7

57, 108 73

Colossians 1.15

107

Hebrews 4.15

134

49 53, 82

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INDEX OF NON-BIBLICAL SOURCES

ALEXANDER OF ALEXANDRIA Epistula ad Aeglonem (CPG 2015) [PG 91, 280D]

27

APOLLINARIUS OF LAODICEA Ad Iovianum (CPG 3665) 1

22 n. 38

ARISTOTLE Metaphysica I.1.980a III.1.995a24-b2 XII.7.1072a19

19 n. 29 19 98 n. 12

BASIL OF CAESAREA Epistula 236 (CPG 2900)

26 n. 51

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA Apologia xii capitulorum contra orientales (CPG 5221) 65.29-30 CYRUS OF ALEXANDRIA Satisfactio facta inter Cyrum et eos qui erant ex parte Theodosianorum (CPG 7613) DENYS THE AREOPAGITE (PS.) De coelesti hierarchia (CPG 6600) VII.1

22

129 n. 53

48

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INDEX OF NON-BIBLICAL SOURCES

De divinis nominibus (CPG 6602) I.3 I.4 I.7 II.6 II.9 II.10 IV.14 VIII.5

71 22 116 65, 120 n. 40 65, 67, 121 63 98 67

De ecclesiastica hierarchia (CPG 6601) 2 Epistulae 3 (CPG 6606) 4 (CPG 6607)

63, 116 64, 118 26, 62-72, 117, 120

EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS Kephalaia gnostica (CPG 2432) I.49 I.51 I.86 III.61 VI.19

30 30 12 31 n. 61 30

Selecta in Psalmos (CPG 2455) [PG 12, 1208C]

25

GREGORY NAZIANZEN Epistulae (CPG 3032) 101.13 101.16 101.26 101.31 243[, PG 46, 1108A]

54, 106 63, 64, 65, 70 64, 118 122 n. 44 63

Oratio 17 (Ad cives Nazianzenos) (CPG 3010 [17]) [PG 35, 965B] Oratio 23 (De pace II [III]) (CPG 3010 [23]) 23.8 23.10 Oratio 29 (De filio I) (CPG 3010 [29]) 29.2 29.18 29.19

136

87 50, 79, 92 51 50, 79, 92, 95, 126 52, 101, 103 54, 81, 105

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INDEX OF NON-BIBLICAL SOURCES

Oratio 30 (De filio II) (CPG 3010 [30]) 30.1 30.3 30.6 30.21 Oratio 31 (De spiritu sancto) (CPG 3010 [31]) 31.6 Oratio 38 (In nativitatem) (CPG 3010 [38]) 38.2 38.8 38.13 38.15 Oratio 39 (In sancta lumina) (CPG 3010 [39]) 39.13

52, 53, 102 59, 110 56, 57, 61, 108 55, 106 82 74, 119 n. 39 51, 93, 94, 96 85 59, 111 119 n. 39

Oratio 40 (In sanctum baptisma) (CPG 3010 [40]) 40.5

51, 93

Oratio 45 (In sanctum Pascha II) (CPG 3010 [45]) 45.4

51, 93

GREGORY OF NYSSA Ad Petrum fratrem de differentia essentiae et hypostaseos (=BASIL, Epistula 38) (CPG 3196) JOHN OF SCYTHOPOLIS Scholia in corpus Areopagiticum (CPG 6852) [PG 4, 533C] [PG 4, 536A] MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR Ambigua ad Iohannem (CPG 7705 [2]) 7[, PG 91, 1072B] 23[, PG 91, 1260A] 23[, PG 91, 1260B-1261A] 31[, PG 91, 1273D] 41[, PG 91, 1304D] Capita de caritate (CPG 7693)

26 n. 51

122 n. 43, n. 44 122

30 92 n. 4 97-99 119 n. 39 119 n. 39 12, 17

Capita theologica et oeconomica (CPG 7694) I.2[, PG 90, 1084A] I.4[, PG 90, 1084B-C]

137

115 115

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INDEX OF NON-BIBLICAL SOURCES

I.8[, PG 90, 1085C] I.9[, PG 90, 1085D]

115 116

Epistulae (CPG 7699) 2[, PG 91, 392D-408B] 4[, PG 91, 413A-420C] 6[, PG 91, 424C-433A] 12[, PG 91, 469A-B] 40[, PG 91, 636A]

17 n. 20 17 n. 20 17 n. 20 128 24

Expositio in Psalmum LIX (CPG 7690)

17

Liber asceticus (CPG 7692)

17

Mystagogia (CPG 7704)

17

Opuscula theologica et polemica (CPG 7697) 1[, PG 91, 33A] 3[, PG 90, 56B] 7[, PG 91, 84D-85A] 27[, PG 91, 280B-285B] Orationis Dominicae expositio (CPG 7691) Quaestiones ad Thalassium (CPG 7688) Quaestiones et dubia (CPG 7689) 105

23 n. 42 125 122 n. 43 27-28 17 11 n. 4, 17, 20 17 100

MICHAEL PSELLUS Opuscula theologica 19

21 n. 33

ORIGEN Commentarii in Iohannem (CPG 1453) I.43 PLATO Meno 84c

103 n. 20

18

PLOTINUS Enneads 5.2.1

95 n. 8

SEVERUS OF ANTIOCH Epistula ad Iohannem abbatem (CPG 7071 [28])

129

138

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SUBJECT INDEX

Activity (actuality, energy) (ἐνέργεια), 25-28, 31, 33-35, 67, 71, 104, 115, 121, 130 divine, 60, 67, 70, 72, 99, 121 human, 33, 60, 62, 66-68, 70, 104, 116, 121 of flesh, 34, 35, 53, 65, 67, 70, 72, 104 Affirmation (κατάφασις), 70, 122, 124 Aporia (ἀπορία), 18-19 Appearance (manifestation) (ἔκφανσις), 64, 106-107, 117-119 Asceticism, 11, 13, 16, 91, 104, 108, 114

Christ activities/energies of, 13, 20, 22, 23-24, 26-27, 82, 86, 103, 113- 114, 119-120, 129-130 natures of, 22, 26, 83, 86-87, 101, 103, 108-112, 125, 130 theandric activity (θεανδρικὴ ἐνέργεια) of, 25-29, 33-35, 7073, 122-123, 126-130 unity of, 22, 24, 35, 60, 63, 67, 69-73, 81-84, 113, 117, 120-122, 126, 128 wills of, 12, 13, 23-24, 125 Condescension (συγκατάβασις), 57-59, 95, 108-110

Becoming (generation) (γένεσις), 30, 67, 69 Being, see Essence Beyond being (ὑπερούσιος), 51, 63-65, 67-68, 94, 118-120, 124 Blending (mixture) (σύγκρασις), 54-55, 57, 59, 77, 81, 105, 107108, 122, 126 Body (σῶμα), 50, 54, 59, 66, 80, 84, 101, 106, 127 incorruption (ἀφθαρσία) of, 59, 110-111

Deification (θέωσις), 55-56, 78, 81, 92, 95, 103, 105, 107, 114, 120 Denial (ἀπόφασις), 66, 68-70, 122, 124 Difference (distinction) (διαφορά), 70, 82, 83, 87, 101-102, 121, 125, 128 Dispassion (ἀπάθεια), 33, 59-60, 65, 111, 112 Disposition (διάθεσις), 57-59, 108, 110-111 Divinity (θεότης), 51-52, 54, 60, 65, 67-69, 72, 80, 93, 100, 105, 119-120, 122

Change, see Motion

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SUBJECT INDEX

47, 51, 79, 91, 97-100, 107, 109, 114, 116, 118, 121, 125

Division (separation) (διαίρεσις), 60, 70, 113, 119, 128 Dyothelitism, 14

Manifestation, see Appearance Mental inclination, see Will Mixture, see Blending Mode (τρόπος), 29, 38, 51, 66-69, 79, 92, 96, 121, 125 Monenergism, 13, 24, 129 Monophysitism, 21-22 Monothelitism, 13 Motion (movement, change) (κίνησις), 25-35, 51, 60, 62, 63, 65-66, 68, 79, 84-85, 92, 9698, 109, 113-114, 116-117, 120121, 124, 126

Economy (οἰκονομία), 26, 53, 66, 70, 84, 102-103, 119-121, 127, 129 Emptying (self-) (κένωσις), 32-34, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 78, 81-82, 84, 91, 101, 103, 106-107, 110, 112, 117 Energy, see Activity Erotapokriseis (Questions and Responses), 17-20 Essence (being) (οὐσία), 25, 28, 85, 104, 105, 114, 115, 121 divine, 26, 51-53, 63, 72, 80, 87, 92, 96, 99, 101-102 human, 33, 62-64, 66, 69, 84, 87, 116-118, 125

Nature, 25, 53-55, 65-67, 71, 103104, 121, 130 divine, 24-26, 29, 37 n. 62, 5253, 58, 60, 68, 82, 87, 94, 96, 101-103, 119-123, 127 human, 22, 24-27, 29, 34, 37 n. 62, 53, 55, 58, 60, 63-64, 66-69, 71-72, 81-82, 84, 87, 95, 101-103, 106, 109, 115, 119-120, 122-124, 130

Flesh, 26-29, 32-35, 37 n. 66, 5255, 60, 63-65, 67, 70-73, 81-82, 84-85, 101-107, 111-112, 118, 120, 123, 127, 129 Generation, see Becoming Hypostasis (ὑπόστασις), 26, 114 of the Trinity, 51, 80, 92, 94 of the Word, 52-54, 60, 67, 82, 101-102, 106, 113, 126 union, 55, 58, 69, 84, 102, 106, 113, 126 Incarnation, 26, 52-53, 55, 62-64, 71, 73, 81, 85, 91, 95, 99, 101, 103-104, 106-107, 116, 118, 128 Intellect (νοῦς), 47, 54-55, 64, 69, 81, 91, 98, 100, 103-106, 116, 118, 124

Passions (passibility, suffering) (πάθος), 26-29, 32, 51-53, 55, 5759, 68-69, 71, 73, 81, 85-86, 96-97, 101-102, 106-114, 123125, 127-128, 130 Philosophy, 13, 15-16, 20, 21 n. 33, 25 Power (potency) (δύναμις), 25, 28, 31, 67, 115, 121 divine, 26, 32-34, 55, 59-60, 65, 68, 73, 99, 106, 110, 119, 128 human, 62, 69, 73, 116

Knowledge (γνῶσις), 27-31, 34,

Rational principle (λόγος), 29, 38,

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SUBJECT INDEX

51-53, 63, 66-69, 71-72, 79, 8283, 92, 96, 121, 130 Relaxation (ἄνεσις), 58, 110

Theology, 26 Unified sovereignty (μοναρχία), 50, 79-80, 93-94

Scripture interpretation of, 12, 17, 19, 37 n. 65, 62 Sense perception (αἴσθησις), 26, 47, 55, 65, 91, 106-107 Stability (στάσις), 30-31, 93 Suffering, see Passions Tension (ἐπίτασις), 58, 110

Virtue (ἀρετή), 31, 48, 77, 91 Will (mental inclination) (γνώμη), 58-59, 61, 68, 79, 110-111, 123, 125-126 Wisdom, 47-48, 77, 84

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Pagina 142

INDEX OF PERSONAL AND PLACE NAMES

Chrysopolis, 13, 24 Combefis, F., 24 n. 46 Constantinople, 12-16 Cooper, A., 120 n. 41 Courtonne, Y., 26 n. 51 Cyril of Alexandria, 12, 22, 24, 101 Cyrus of Alexandria, 129 n. 53 Cynopolis, 27

Aeglon of Cynopolis, 27 Alexander of Alexandria, 27 Allen, P., 11 n. 5, 13 n. 10, n. 11; 14 n. 15, 15 n. 16 Anastasius (disciple of Maximus), 14 Anastasius the Librarian (Anastasius Bibliothecarius), 11 Apollinarius of Laodicea, Apollinarians, 22 n. 38, 37 n. 66, 53, 64, 82, 83, 84, 86, 118 Aristotle, 18-19, 36, 98 n. 12 Arius, Arians, 27, 53, 86, 102 Armstrong, A. H., 95 n. 8 Athanasius of Alexandria, 22 n. 38 Athens, 62

Daley, B., 18 n. 25, 21 n. 33 De Andia, Y., 115 n. 30 Declerck, J. H., 12 n. 6, 99 n. 15 Demosthenes, 21 n. 33 Denys the Areopagite (Ps.), 12, 12 n. 5, 20-23, 25-27, 33, 37 n. 65, 47, 48, 62, 97, 115 n. 30, 120, 122, 124, 125 Diekamp, F., 129 n. 52 Dioscorus of Alexandria, 86 Dörrie, H., 18 n. 25 Dörries, H., 18 n. 25

Bardy, G., 20 n. 30 Basil of Caesarea, 26 n. 51, 28 Bellini, E., 115 n. 30 Blanc, C., 103 n. 20 Boudignon, C., 16, 17 n. 23 Bracke, R., 23 n. 42 Brock, S., 13 n. 9, 14 n. 13 Burnet, J., 18 n. 26

Eunomius, Eunomians, 32 Eutyches (heresiarch), 86 Evagrius of Pontus, 12, 16, 25, 3031

Canart, P., 35 Ceresa-Gastaldo, A., 12 n. 7 Chalcedon, 21-24, 101, 104 Chariton, St. (Monastery of ), 14 n. 13 Cherniss, H., 18 n. 25

Frend, W. H. C., 22 n. 39, 129 n. 53 Gaius (monk), 37 n. 65, 62, 84, 117

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Pagina 143

INDEX OF PERSONAL AND PLACE NAMES

Galavaris, G., 21 n. 34 Gale, T., 35 Gallay, P., 21 n. 32, 122 n. 44 Garrigues, J.-M., 36 Gautier, P., 21 n. 33 Geerard, M., 27 n. 52 Géhin, P., 12 n. 8 George of Resh‘aina, 14 Gersh, S., 25 n. 49, 30 n. 59 Gregory Nazianzen, 12, 20-21, 2526, 29, 32, 34, 36, 47-50, 52, 54, 57-58, 85, 92-110, 119 n. 39, 122, 126 Gregory of Nyssa, 26 n. 51, 27 Grillmeier, A., 123 n. 46 Guillaumont, A., 30 n. 58, n. 60

Moreschini, C., 21 n. 35, 35-36, 38, 119 n. 39 Neil, B., 11 n. 5, 13 n. 10, n. 11; 14 n. 15, 15 n. 16 Nestorius, Nestorian, 14, 15, 83 Nicodemus the Hagiorite, 11 Norris, F. W., 95 n. 8 Öhler, F., 35 Öhler, K., 18 n. 25 Origen, 12, 14-16, 30-31, 103 n. 20 Pantoleon (abbot of Palaia Lavra), 14 Philippicus (Monastery of ), 24 Philokalia, 11 Plato, 18 n. 26, 21 n. 33 Plotinus, 95 Plutarch, 18 n. 25 Ponsoye, E., 35-37 Porphyry, 18 n. 25 Prado, J. J., 30 n. 58 Pusey, P., 22 n. 38

Heidegger, M., 18 n. 27 Heraclius (emperor), 13, 14 Hippo Diarrhytus, 15 Ica˘, I. I., 35 Janssens, B., 23 n. 40, n. 42; 24, 36, 58 n. a, 71 n. b Jeauneau, E., 11 n. 4 John the Cubicularius (John the Chamberlain), 16 John of Scythopolis, 22, 122-123 John Scot Eriugena, 11, 23 n. 40 John the Evangelist, 21 Justinian (emperor), 22

Redovics, A., 99 n. 14 Renczes, P. G., 28 n. 56 Riedinger, R., 129 n. 53 Rome, 15 Roosen, B., 13 n. 10 Rorem, P., 22 n. 37 Ross, W. D., 19 n. 28 Sakales, I., 35 Schwartz, E., 22 n. 38 Severus of Antioch, 21, 82, 84, 86, 129 Sherwood, P., 23, 27 n. 52, 30 n. 59, 125 n. 47 Sicily, 15 Siegmund, A., 12 n. 5 Simon (Magus) (heretic), 86 Socrates, 18 Sodano, A., 18 n. 25

Lackner, W., 15 n. 16 Laga, C., 11 n. 4 Lamoreaux, J. C., 22 n. 37 Larchet, J.-C., 36, 104 n. 21 Lietzmann, H., 22 n. 38 Louth, A., 23 n. 44, 35-37, 125 n. 48 Macarius of Corinth, 11 Mani, Manichean, 64, 84, 86, 118 Martin I (Roman pontiff ), 15 Michael Psellus, 21 n. 33

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Pagina 144

INDEX OF PERSONAL AND PLACE NAMES

Sophronius of Jerusalem, 14 Sta˘niloae, D., 35 Stead, J., 36 Steel, C., 11 n. 4 Stephanus (monk and abbot of Philippicus monastery), 24 Suchla, B., 22 n. 39, 98 n. 10, 116 n. 35 Symeon the New Theologian, 21

92 n. 1, 95 n. 7, 125 n. 47, 128 n. 50 Timothy (Apollinarian), 86 Tredennick, H., 19 n. 28 Valentinus (heresiarch), 86 Van Deun, P., 11 n. 1; 17 n. 22, n. 24 Völker, W., 21 n. 36, 104 n. 21 Von Balthasar, H. U., 11 n. 2, 24 n. 45, 30 n. 59

Thalassius (addressee of Maximus), 11 n. 4, 17, 20, 24 n. 46 Theodore the Studite, 15 Thunberg, L., 22 n. 38, 24 n. 48,

Winkelmann, F., 129 n. 53

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