Book Review: On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ by St Maximus the Confessor

Discerning the worldview of a writer from centuries past can often times feel like wandering through an old abandoned house. The reader wades through unfamiliar ideas like dark rooms, trying only to make some sense of the place. Time has obscured their value, made them dusty or stale; the old ideas seem pale and out of place in the context of modernity.  In the case of the book On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ however, the ancient content manages to maintain its warmth and life. They are like hallways in a mansion whose interweaving doors fractal out into more glorious and brightly lit expanses of unrelenting grandeur. Considering that the scope of these short writings encompass Christ's redemption of the entirety of the cosmos, the grandeur must be absolute.

Presented in the collection of writings On the Cosmic Mystery of a Christ (SVS Press) is an introduction to the thought and theology of St Maximus the Confessor. It is difficult to overstate the influence of St Maximus on Orthodox Christianity. Whether considering his understanding of Christ as Logos, his emphasis on the ascetic life or his defense of the Chalcedonian creed, all permeat the Orthodox faith in both theology and praxis. This book introduces several of these doctrines using St Maximus's own writings and offers a well-rounded glimpse into some of his most significant contributions to the Church. While there is much that can be said about each of these, I will limit this review to three notable aspects of St Maximus's theology introduced in this book: cosmology, soteriology and biblical typology.

The first chapter of this book establishes the major theme of St Maximus's cosmology with Ambiguum 7, entitled On The Beginning and End of Rational Creatures. While writing against Origenism, he roots his argument in the context of both cosmological and teleological terms, exploring the dynamic between Christ, mankind and the created world; Christ the Logos has given the objects in creation their own logoi (reasons) so that the man imbued with grace can search for Christ in the created world and find Him there, uncovering the logos hidden in each created thing. From Christ comes the many "reasons" that exist in the world towards Whom the rational man moves, just as He is the beauty in the world for Whom mankind longs. There is therefore a natural link between the deification of man and the humanization of the world, for as Christ unites man to Himself by grace, so to does man unite the earth to himself by the grace received in him from Christ.  

This insight into the cosmology of St Maximus directly establishes another doctrine relating to soteriology: sin is always a movement toward irrationality and non-existence. Inherent in the soteriology of St Maximus is the movement either toward God, or away from Him; toward reason or irrational passions. If the Divine Logos is the ultimate truth and source of existence and reality itself, then the path of sin is the grasping onto mere fantasy, a desire from which fulfillment is an impossibility and whose end is a non-reality. In this expounded Dionysian dichotomy, man can either participate in Christ unto full union with Him- "being made God by God" (by grace, not by nature; see Ambig. 7, pg 36) or else his participation is in death which is nothingness (see Ad Thal 64, footnote 21). This directly imitates the first sin of Adam, where the fruit he ate in disobedience contained in itself no fulfillment in reality, and therefore led to death.  

This dynamic between following Adam unto death or Christ as the Second Adam unto life highlights another theme in the thought of St Maximus- his understanding of the redemptive work of Christ as something particular rather than something general. Christ's life has redeemed each aspect of humanity in Himself (Ad Thal. 21), entering into each individual corruption of mankind and purifying it perfectly. St Maximus explains, for example, that when Christ Christ weeps in the Garden of Gethsemane, He is Himself facing the very human fear of death and simultaneously conquering this fear through obedience to the will of the Father through His own divine will (Opus. 64). It is finally in Ad Thalassium 61 where St Maximus describes this kind of particular redemption in which Christ enters into the same activity of Adam, but accomplishes perfectly what Adam failed to do and by doing so unravels sin and corruption in every place it was established:

Indeed, just as Adam’s life of pleasure became the mother of death and corruption, so too our Lord’s death for Adam’s sake, being free of the pleasure inherited from Adam, became the father of eternal life. (Pg 91)

Lastly, this book introduces the anagogical hermeneutic St Maximus utilizes to understand the Holy Scriptures. In Ad Thalassium 64, St Maximus writes an explanation on the story of Jonah. It is here we see his understanding of the Scriptures as allowing a variety of interpretations in its similarities to various types. Jonah bears in himself mystically the figure of Adam, leaving the paradise of Joppa and "has descended, as though into a sea, into the misery of the present life, and been plunged into the chaotic and roaring waters of attachment to material objects." Jonah also mystically represents Christ, willingly submitting himself to the sea, as Christ "entered into the sea of life like ours" and went silent to death as Jonah did to the fish. Finally, Jonah represents the Jews who were embittered when the gentile church- the city of Nineveh- repented and bore in themselves the blessings of the Lord. It is this kind of manifold interpretation, allowing the Word of God to come alive in symbol and type, which reveals St Maximus's view of how the Holy Scriptures relate to world and the Person of Christ as the Divine Logos.

Notes on Translation:

A gift of this particular book is in the introduction and footnotes that firmly root the reader in the worldview of St Maximus. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken write a thorough introduction that orients the reader with the themes and ideas found throughout the book. The footnotes help explain what St Maximus means in particularly difficult passages or they will provide a summarized explanation his doctrine when it is referenced in the work. Included in the footnotes as well are references to papers and books which delve more deeply into the thought of St Maximus from the foremost experts on the topic, such as Louth, Staniloae and Blowers himself. Lastly, using the Greek transliteration for the terms Logos and logoi throughout the book was an excellent publishing decision given how St Maximus uses these terms in a specific way.

That being said, this book does not make for easy reading. While the translators managed to make it as accessible to the layman to some degree, it seems to be only to the extent in which nothing of the original ideas would be lost. The reader will also need to have some basic understanding of some Aristotelian/Platonic concepts and some larger theological themes. Lossky's Mystical Theology may be a helpful primer to understand some of the concepts discussed in this book.

Conclusion:

Many Orthodox Christians have wandered the halls of this mansion that is the Confessor's cosmology and found that the doors therein open into their own Christian experience, their understanding of Scripture and even into the tangible world outside their window. This is perhaps why many Christians have been returning to the writings of St Maximus for a comprehensive worldview that modernity has largely neglected. We have even seen fragments of these ideas gaining popularity outside the context of the church, such as in the work of Jonathan Pageua who has reinvigorated the concept of a world revealed in symbols. And yet, the postmodern world finds these concepts contemptible since beauty and meaning only slips through their grasp. They believe it to be a thing of children's stories and yet they envy the man who has seen the truth of the world himself and from it received life, purpose and joy. For this reason St Maximus's On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ is more relevant than ever, not only because of its remarkable theological strides and cohesive arguments, but because it helps explain the universe from a perspective that the modern world is wholly lacking- one that shines as intuitively true of our shared human experience of reality.