Reflections on required reading pt. i

Χριστος ανεστη!

[Note: This was written in January and was a large part of my returning to the Orthodox Church a month later. In a world mired by New Age influence and crypto-unitarian theology there was a voice crying out in the wilderness: St. Maximus the Confessor. I hope you enjoy this series and get as much out of it as I did, if not I implore you to read the book that inspired these posts. It is worth the read. It is, so far, the only book I have read that had me underlining every sentence.

Also, this is sort of a follow-up to the Freedom and Illusion series, so be sure to check that out, too: 2, 3, 4, 5. Enjoy!]

Sometimes you read something and think, ‘Wow, I am not smart enough to comprehend what is happening with these squiggly lines on this page in this, whatchamacallit? Book?

And then there are other times where you read something and go, Wait, a minute, this sounds like something else I’ve read and was not smart enough for, but now it’s making sense… sorta.

Well, that’s how it’s been reading St. Maximus’ “On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ”, it is essentially a compilation of essays written by St. Maximus on Christology and what stuck out was this, an esteemed Father of the Church, held in such high regard in the East, using what can only be described as Aristotelian metaphysics to present the cosmic scale and narrative of God’s love for Man.

It reminded me immediately of Aristotle’s Four Causes as well as the Western esoteric tradition model of Divinity, taken from the Jewish Kabbalah, “Indeed the beginning and the end are one” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 59).

Regardless, an important notion offered in St. Maximus’ Ambiguum 7 reveals not only Man’s teleological end in Man’s ontological beginning, but that this end is inherently divinizing in nature. 

What we can establish from this Church Father, as far as the true practice of Christianity goes, is that being Christian means becoming like God, “being made God by God” (Ibid.). 

If we consider the Eternal Logos as the generative force behind all things, moving all things, then we see that life is movement. The nature of our being is movement, coming to be and becoming, a stability of movement toward our end goal, Who is the beginning. Therefore, all things that are generated by the Logos are moving toward Him from their origin, or rather this is their natural course when unimpeded by stagnation and or thwarted by principles of non-being.

All that there is comes from the Logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all things that have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being, “recapitulates all things in himself” (Ibid. 55). 

The Logos’ goodness is revealed and multiplied through Creation and because He is the generative force behind all things, what Aristotle might refer to as energeia, is being and gives us being. And to take it further, St. Maximus explains that this generative force of the Logos prefigures that which has its origin in Him, to put it differently the energeia of oneself pre-exists its current condition. 

That is, the image of God is a pre-existing principle: unrealized, uncreated potential. This potentiality of being manifests in actuality through our created being. St. Maximus uses the term logoi in relation with the Logos Who “held together in himself the logoi before they came to, by his gracious will he created all things visible and invisible out of non-being” (Ibid.).

So, we see that we are of God ontologically-speaking and by extension God dwells in the soul. 

God, Who is our beginning and our end, is within us. 

Before continuing, however, it is important to recognize that according to St. Maximus and the Church Fathers the logoi is the totality of our being, unrealized in its pre-existing, uncreated state.

The body and the soul are one, “If the body and the soul are parts of man, as we have seen, it must be granted that as parts each necessarily bears a relationship to something other than itself. It is only as they are related to each other that they have the whole predicated of them” (Ibid. 72).

Man is a triune creature, made in His Image, so where there is mind, there also is body, and where there is body, there also is soul–they do not form separate from one another, but as one. 

Furthermore, this is the way in which we are members of the Body of Christ: it is our whole being that participates in the divine nature, not one part lest we assume that we can do one thing with our bodies and another with our souls and yet another with our mind, this is instability.

It is our whole composite being that becomes members of God and as such it is our whole composite being that becomes a receptacle for the divine life found in our being’s beginning and end. This lays foundation for the importance of the Holy Sacrament of Baptism and points to the Apostle’s words,  

“With all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit” Ephesians 1:8-14).  

To gather all things in him… 

We are destined according to the purpose of Him which is to return to Him, and it is our own fallen nature that has us moving away from Him. The nature of the logoi, having its origins in Him, is to move in accordance with Him and His will, and this is why to practice the virtues is to practice godliness, “There can be no doubt that the Word of God is the substance of virtue in each person” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 58); to practice the virtues is to energize the Image, or portion, of God, within our souls.

When we act in accordance with God by practicing the virtues then we are acting in accordance with the pre-existing logoi that has as its origin, God. This practice precedes and is the process of divinization, because God deifies that which is from Him through participation in Him. 

Additionally, this Man comes to know himself through the process of divinization, because living virtuously acts in accordance with the pre-existing logoi of the created being which, again, has as its ontological beginning, God Himself.  

To know God via participation is to know oneself. Humanity is realized in conjunction with the realization of Man’s divinity.

This is why “both philosophy and theology should start neither with God nor with man, but rather with the God-man. The basic and original phenomenon of religious life is the meeting and mutual interaction between God and man, the movement of God towards man and of man towards God” (Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit 189). 

God loves Man and to love God is to love oneself, not the identifying qualities and trademarks of living in this world–this fallen world and corporate wasteland–but to cleave to God is to keep from defiling the logoi of our being. That is, to not darken and confuse the soul through unruly passions and fleeting desires.

A glass, darkly. 

Defiling the logoi through following base desire and being held captive (logismoi) by the passions is to redirect the pre-existing logoi from its natural telos. The soul knows where it wants to go, because its inner wisdom has its origin in God, Who is Wisdom, just the same as the logoi. We created beings have free will in relation to this teleological direction that is a natural component of the Image of God within us, but that we confuse through our own voluntary action moving us toward non-being.

“Whoever abandons his own beginning and is irrationally swept along toward non-being… does not move toward his own beginning and cause according to which and for which and through which he came to be. He enters a condition of unstable gyrations and fearful disorder of soul and body” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 61). St. Maximus states that where we have a choice to direct the soul unswervingly toward God the picture above represents one who voluntarily defects from their beginning and end, exchanging their true being for non-being (Ibid.). 

Human beings that act in accordance with God’s will, participating in Him by living virtuously (which have their root in Christ), can thus echo the words of St. Peter,

“His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and excellence. Thus he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust and may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3-4). 

St. Maximus calls these souls instruments of the divine nature, where “the fullness of God permeates them wholly as the soul permeates the body, and they become, so to speak, limbs of a body… God becomes to the soul what the soul is to the body, so that the soul receives changelessness and the body immortality; hence the whole man, as the object of divine action, is divinized by being made God by the grace of God who became man” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 63)

1. Note the contrast between the condition of the one who defects from their ontological beginning and telos with the one who cleaves to God, both of these being voluntary choices of the created being.

2. Note, as well, the whole man being an object of divine action.

Frankly, the last sentence about Man being the object of divine action, being divinized by God, Who became man… This touches something I find more important than having (the most elementary) understanding about Aristotelian metaphysics (so that your ego can feel puffed up at parties while boring everyone (we’re here to do Jager bombs, not talk about Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean. We all know that with the introduction of Aristotle’s ethics justice became an equitable term where persons were judged based on circumstances rather than black-and-white legality that rose to prominence in Babylon under Hammurabi. While on one hand, equity in terms of societal justice is a proper way to approach reason, as in inductive, it could be argued that this doctrine paved the way for solipsistic idealism which, given its natural epistemological qualities gave rise to Nihilism, now shut up and drink this. Yes, it’s sugar free)): this treatise by St. Maximus is pointing directly at the love God has for Man. 

This is what sticks out more than anything, and it is because of this telos that we have imbued within our being through the logoi that it seems unquestionable as to whether God loves Man, because He does—more than anything and in relation to the mystery of His will we know, “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). 

When we return we’ll dive deeper into God’s love, the nature of Fall, and reincarnation. May your weeks be blessed.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ