Moving Forward with Saint Maximus

A word for today

*I began writing this hurriedly as a note, but I soon found it was large enough to be a post proper. I hope my readers will appreciate a post that is much shorter and has less citations than what I usually (between long periods of waiting) publish. I was moved to write this by the news surrounding the U.S. presidential inauguration, as well as the continued news and reminders of the state of Orthodoxy around the world*

Today is the feast of St. Maximus the Confessor in the Orthodox Church, whose commitment to the proclamation of truth in defiance of all authority, imperial or ecclesial, is perhaps unmatched in history. This monk’s righteous defiance caused Emperors and Patriarchs to shake, and their feeble condemnations could not stand against him for, in death, he was vindicated over them all.

It is difficult to choose an excerpt from his work for today as it is so varied and rich. He is one of the greatest minds the Church of East or West has ever seen and left his indelible stamp on Christian spirituality through the Philokalia. Today though, I would like to share his thoughts on the true nature of the Church.

“… the holy Church bears the representation and image of God because she possesses the same activity as his according to imitation and representation.

For as God made all things by his infinite power and brought them into existence… because he possesses full command of everything around him as their cause, beginning, and end, he makes the things that have been set apart from one another by nature to be the things that have converged with one another by the one power of their relationship with him as their beginning. And it is by this power that all things are led to an identity of movement and existence that is indistinguishable and without confusion.

It will be shown that the holy Church of God works the same things and in the same way as God does around us, as an image relates to its archetype. For, from among men, women, and children, nearly boundless in number, who are many in race and class and nation and language and occupation and age and persuasion and trade and manners and customs and pursuits, and again, those who are divided and most different from one another in expertise and worth and fortune and features and habits, those who are in the holy Church and are regenerated by her and are recreated by the Spirit—to all he gives equally and grants freely one divine form and designation, that is to be and to be called from Christ. And he gives according to faith the one simple, indivisible, and undivided relationship, which does not allow the many and unspeakable differences about each one —even if they exist—to be known on account of the universal reference and union of all the people in the Church.” - On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy[1]

The Church is Church insofar as it has the same activity as God, that is, the overcoming of all created divisions within humanity in its progressive divinization. As in St. Paul’s declaration that there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female in Christ (Gal 3:28), so to in St. Maximus’ words we find a complete condemnation of any identification with or yoking of the Church to nationalisms, ethnic superiorities or favoritisms, sexisms, or justifications of inequality. To those who appeal to cultural or traditional values or symbolic structures to justify such divisions and oppressions, whether based on real differences or social constructs, St. Maximus answers that the unity the Church proclaims as truly real makes all these things obsolete and “does not allow [them]… to be known.”

Is this nullification of differences as in any way dividing humanity or conditioning human life limited to the enclave of the specific ecclesial community alone? No, because the Church’s work is meant to be the very same work that God is doing in creation as a whole, which is the true nature of every created thing in its origin and end. The claim by many that in Christ, reduced to a specific community and propositional content, divisions are overcome (though these same people insist all the created divisions must continue and be sacralised within their communities), but that this has no bearing on their social and political views, is nonsense and ultimately a rejection of the activity by which the Church exists.

Is the Church today, specifically defined as the Orthodox or ecumenically defined as Christians in general, but especially the Apostolic, a reflection in its hierarchal and institutional reality of God’s activity? Is it a co-worker with God in deifying humanity and the cosmos, or has it become a group of factions selling personal and/or group salvation as a religion among religions, something defined by opposition and therefore constituting itself as a finite division? If any particular Church or Christianity at large has thus defined itself, doesn’t this mean it has become one of the many divisions the deifying activity must overcome?

It is incumbent upon tradition, insofar as it is a living thing and constituted by living persons, to move forward with the past and the fathers, bringing out of its treasury things new and old (Mtt 13:52). St. Maximus is a perfect example of this fact, as his defence of the Dyothelite (two-wills) doctrine was not based on a repetition of the past but rather a conscious creative unfolding of theological implications which, even if contradicting the words and ideas of previous tradition, were necessary to explicate and affirm. While the institution always attempts to veil its history in the myth of homogenous belief, this creative activity of synthesizing through repudiation and assimilation of the past in moving towards the future is intrinsic to all traditional “development” and is the sole criterion of its validity.[2] This being the case, in moving forward with the above ecclesiological vision of St. Maximus, alongside the many implications of affirming that deification necessitates the overcoming of created divisions (and yes, these implications are the ones you immediately think of), let me offer another implication of paradigmatic importance for today based on St. Maximus’ assimilating of the Church’s constitutive activity to that of God’s activity in all things.

If the compounding of historical accretions upon the Church has resulted in the Church becoming a religion among religions, then the Church has become a path among paths to God. Indeed, this was inevitable in the event of a delayed eschatological end, as a community in history becomes (and essentially always is) a perspective, a culture, a people among others. If a path claims it is the only path, then it has in fact cut itself off from the infinite, just as Orthodox theology teaches that no collection of concepts, dogmatic or otherwise, can define God. A path remains a path to the infinite insofar as it recognizes its finitude, that it is a sign pointing towards its own deification as self-transcendence in the divine that it signifies, or to use eschatological language, Orthodox tradition must recognize that it does not know what it will be, only that it will be like God when it sees Him as He is (1 Jn 2:2-3). Thus, exclusivist or chauvinist traditionalisms are contrary to their favored proof text, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (Jn 14:6).” The real meaning of this passage must be that of a tautology, just as Florovsky understood Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus as a tautology, or stated plainly, Christ is nothing other than the way, truth and life which are and lead to God, such that to love God is to love Christ.

The above is in no way a rejection of Christian faith or Orthodoxy, though it is a repudiation of a popular if not hegemonically prevalent understanding of that faith, but again that is “a” understanding. Indeed, the above necessarily follows from the classical and apophatic understanding of God, whereas religious exclusivism is inherently bound up with a reductive anthropomorphism and limiting cataphaticism. But to continue my argument, if we assimilate the Church’s activity to the divine activity of renewing creation which is inherent to creation, then the Church’s mission does not consist in assimilating the whole of creation to its specific historical/cultural expression.[3] Rather, the Church must find in its own specificity the means of expanding its own horizons to understand and contribute to the work of deification God is already accomplishing, and which work is the Church for it is Christ. It is by this path, I believe, that the Church may be built up into Christ’s body, and practically this means a critical acceptance and engagement with those social and political ideas/movements which contribute towards the ends of overcoming created division.

If one objects to this perspective, I will answer that it is only this perspective which accurately reflects the search for and defense of truth. If, as St. Maximus taught by word and example, the truth and its implications must not only be sought but also proclaimed despite contradicting previous tradition (defined as previous expressions, rulings, etc.) and present condemnation by authority, then the limits of current thought/practice or bare authority can never be sufficient or definitive for the knowledge or definition of truth. The only criterion of truth is truth itself, the only criterion of love is love itself, and the only way to access these things is by engaging in love and the search for truth.

St. Maximus, pray for us and for the Orthodox Church, that we may shine with the light of Christ the Logos, and contribute to the unification and deification of all through our work in history!

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[1] Maximus the Confessor, On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy. Trans, Jonathan J. Armstrong. (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019). Kindle edition.

[2] The single best book on this topic in my opinion is David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

[3] It is also simply historically illiterate to think of the Church as a closed cultural unit, or to deny that the Church has not grown as a tradition in large part through dialogue with other religious traditions whose specific religious and cultural integrity was intrinsic to the goods Christianity learned from them.