THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

These posts are portions of an, as yet, unpublished paper I did recently for a doctoral class on “spiritual practices.” This will the first of a multi-post installment. The project ventures drawing from the well of the cosmic theological vision of St. Maximus the Confessor as a vital resource for the articulation of a theological rationale undergirding the practice of Christian hospitality. I hope that it may also be a fruitful addition for the recent “retrieval” theme on TLOU in which figures like Bulgakov and Chesterton have been explored…

 St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality

Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible.

In this paper I want to show that for Maximus the Confessor the Cosmos (creation) is a creaturely mode of ecstatic love which participates in and reflects the Ecstatic Love that is the Life of the Triune God. I also want to show how, in this economy of ecstatic love, humankind is, for Maximus, what Lars Thunberg calls ‘microcosm and mediator.’[1] Humankind is a little cosmos who is a unity of body and soul as well as the one who is given the task of gathering in himself all the sensual and intelligible aspects of creation and, through the Logos, taking them and humanity itself toward its God-given telos of deification, which leads ultimately to a transfigured cosmos. Within the exploration of these two dimensions of Maximus’ vision I will show how his Doctrine of Christ is central to his theological symphony. Finally, throughout the process of this exploration I want to give a basic overview of some of the primary themes in the thought of Maximus Confessor. I will then connect the Maximus’ theology of deification with the Christian tradition of the practice of hospitality. In doing so I will show that there is a mutual enrichment which takes place. Maximus’ theology of deification is made more concrete by showing it as enacted by the welcoming of the other, while the tradition of hospitality is enriched by articulating it as a Maximian deifying practice which enables humans to participate in the very life of the Triune God.

I. Maximus’ Theological Ontology as the Mystery of Love[2]

At the heart of Maximus’ theological vision is his conception of love as both a cosmic or ontological reality and a theological virtue. This, in a nutshell, is the confessor’s crucial contribution to the present argument, which will be articulated in this essay. Maximus says as much as he begins his letter On Love to John the Cubicularius.

You, the God-protected ones, cleave through grace to holy love towards God as your neighbor and care about   appropriate ways of practicing it…For nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification. For it has gathered together in itself all good things that are recounted by the logos of truth in the form of virtue…[3]

In this letter Maximus briefly, but powerfully, delves into love, which is defined as the essence of the life of the Triune God and what the Confessor calls the logos or fundamental principle of the existence of creatures. According to Letter 2, when human beings live in harmony with love, and thus in accordance with the Trinity who is love and from whose love creation arises, they live virtuously. In other words, they participate in the divine life. In a way similar to Thomas Aquinas Maximus acknowledges love as both a theological virtue and the supreme theological virtue. The failure of human beings to live in accordance with love results in what Maximus calls tyranny (turannos). The introduction of this tyranny into the world sets in motion a history tied to oppressive power. For Maximus the exercise of this oppressive power of tyranny communicates phil-autia, or self-love, rather than the love of humankind, or phil-adelphia.[4] But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us explore further the rudiments of the theological ontology of love.

As alluded to in the quote above, Maximus’ Letter 2: On Love considers the all-encompassing or cosmic nature of the virtue of love. All things fall within its scope and exist within and in relationship to love. This is true whether creatures live in accordance with it or in resistance to it. Living in accordance with love means creatures live in an orientation of reception of the world and the things of the world as gift. To live in resistance to love leaves creatures in a place of self-love in which, rather than reception of creation as gift, all is seen within the horizon of self and thus possessed. To be rendered intelligible all else must be possessed.

In either case, all things still exist in relationship to love (in accordance with it or in perversion from it). In a Maximian vein, one might therefore say that love grants being to all that exists. It is the proton and eschaton of all things and as such is the ultimate principle of existence.[5]

Everything, every good, insofar as it is good is but an inflection of love. God is Love and love is in a real sense the goal of everything. “Love is the fulfillment of these, wholly embraced as the final and last desire…”[6] So love is divine in character. Because of this divinity it elevates to the level of divinity or divinizes (deifies) whatever orients itself in harmony with it. Love is, for Maximus and the other ancient Greek theologians, the very principle of theosis or divinization. Thus love’s very character is transforming or divinizing.[7]

It should begin to become clear now that love is part and parcel of the locus of Maximus’ thought. It is so central that it is not only the core of his understanding of God, and therefore the touchstone of that intimate contemplation of God that is theology (theologia), it is also the fundamental basis of his anthropology.  He conceives his inquiry into the human as “theandric.” This means that the human is one for whom being oriented toward and united to God is appropriate and fitting to it. This fittingness arises out of love. Love is what causes the reality of God and God’s creation to fruitfully converge. Like Gregory of Nyssa, this convergence does not do away with the simultaneous dissimilarity between the creature and Creator at the level of nature. For Maximus the distinction of Creator and creature is not a violent division of a purely extrinsic or parallel relationship of competition. Rather, the love rendered concretely in Christ Jesus brings the modalities of being of the Creator and creature into the most intimate possible union.[8]

 And he does human things in a way transcending the human, showing, in accordance with the closest union, the human energy united without change to the divine power, since the [human] nature, united without confusion to [the divine] nature, is completely interpenetrated, and in no way annulled, nor separated from the Godhead hypostatically united to it.[9]

It seems that for Maximus it is precisely the distinction between Creator and creature which love guarantees. The unity between God and creatures realized through the incarnation of God as a human is actualized precisely by bringing about the union that simultaneously draws creation and God evermore closer together while yet always maintaining the distinction between the two. A collapsing of the one into the other would no longer be a union, but rather an absorption, which would of course do away with union. The purpose of the union is to perfect humans as humans and the creation as creation. So the preservation of the enduring difference in union by the Trinity’s love is the modus operandi and heart of deification. This deification in love is rooted in the Incarnation of God in Christ. The love that is concretized in Christ, therefore, is the locus of creaturely identity, particularly human identity and this identity is such that when it is conceived theologically can only be comprehended properly in relationship to God.[10

At this point we may profitably ask, along with J. Kameron Carter, what sort of vision of human identity and divine identity is being articulated by the Confessor? Carter helpfully addresses this when he claims, for Maximus, it is an ecstatic understanding of identity. That is, love names a twofold ecstasy (ekstasis) for him. On the one hand, it names the "ecstatic" relationship that God as the Creator has with creation. The "ecstasy" within God or the"ecstasy" constitutive of both the Triune relations and the divine nature, which the relations enact though they are not reducible to it, produces an ecstasy beyond the divine nature.[11]

Put differently, the ecstasy of Love of the Triune relations produces the many, the difference which has contained within it the potential or possibility of all other differences. The primary ecstasy that is God gives rise to the secondary “ecstasy of creation, the ecstasy of the many.”[12]

On the other hand, the love concretized in Jesus Christ also names the ecstatic, transcendent relationship that creation reciprocally has with its Creator. This second understanding of ecstasy is an image of the first ecstasy. The Confessor claims that the unity of these two aspects of ecstasy occurs in Jesus Christ. In other words the loving ecstasy which is proper to God and that is causative of its imaging ecstasy, creation, occurs in the incarnate Logos. So, ecstasy is finally another way of talking about how incarnation is a phenomenon particularly specific to Jesus Christ and, for exactly this reason, is a phenomenon which is indicative of creation as such. Incarnation is not simply a foreign entry of either a distant or competitive deity (competitive with our creaturely existence, as if creatures and God both lived under a common category of Being), but is indicative of creation as such. It indeed communicates to us the destiny of humanity.[13]

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[1] Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1995).[2] The title of this section is an allusion to J. Kameron Carter’s lucid interpretation of Maximus’ theological vision in his groundbreaking work J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 346.[3] Maximus the Confessor, Letter 2: On Love, Traslated by Andrew Louth in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, (New York: Routledge), 1996. Henceforth Louth’s work will be sited as LMC. [4] Carter, 345.[5] Carter, 348.[6] Maximus the Confessor, Letter 2: On Love, in LMC, 86.[7] Carter, 349.[8] Carter, 349.[9] Maximus the Confessor, Difficulty 5, in LMC, 175.[10] Carter, 349.

[11] Carter, 349. Carter’s reading of Maximus here is crucial for appropriating the (broadly) poststructuralist notion of “the other” in contemporary theology. It is crucial in that Maximus, in the Christian theological tradition, offers an ontology or metaphysic which makes such language ultimate coherent. Often poststructural renditions of “otherness” seem to disavow metaphysics while assuming an unsaid metaphysics in which the “other” and the speaking subject are seen to be in a situation of irreducible violence, in which we can only be the least violent possible. But surely such a notion requires on to make overarching statements which look an awful lot like a universal metaphysic. For a Christian critique of postmodern “ontological violence” see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Both these works follow a similar line of argument (Hart relies upon Milbank’s earlier version of his aforementioned work), though perhaps Hart offers a more accurate reading of individual “postmodern” philosophers. For a work that seeks to not only critique but dialogue with and affirm aspects of contemporary philosophy and its nihilism see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). Maximus gives a Trinitarian ontology which allows for peaceful difference and sees violence in the midst of difference as ultimately the rejection of the gift of creation from the gifting Trinity.

[12] Cater, 350.

[13] Carter, 350.